Stone Soup Croutons, 11-2-22: Holiday Dinner Talk to Come

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked from Stone Soup Poetry's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015 here.

 

I also have a book collecting the best of my first year of poems. Click here to purchase it.

Halloween is over, but the dead and living still haunt us. We had a nice open mic on Wednesday. We have a live show next Wednesday. I'll be announcing that later today, I hope. 

The year-end is getting harder and harder as time passes. I'm usually too busy being goofy on camera to show it. Some days I don't want to face it, even if by doing so I help secure what will hopefully be a better year ahead. 

So yeah, this poem is about year-end dread. Can't be helped. Thanks for reading. 

Holiday Dinner Talk to Come

Here, no one's considered homeless

if they were ever in a phone book. 

Great someone's old racism salvaged 

from marsh. No one wrote obituary,

so it never died. The only thing we

created without money can't die now. 

Metaphorically, you stand at the bridge

where they will literally push you off.  

You have till they finish victory wine

to choose. Man or extinct mammoth, 

Be a disciple or an All Souls reject,

drool on chin the only dirge you'll get.

The ability to try really hard won't 

give you energy to transform you free. 

Realizing you had to get out of this 

place? Is that supposed to be genius?

To be your generation's best mind 

means you actually have to have one.

That's why when you inevitably flee 

the city, you're inheritance will be 

small enough to slide through a sewer

grate. Right to be born. All else a bonus.

They're the bears, you're salmon. All that 

effort just to feed a spoiled housecat.

You're the blue sky, they're the terrorists 

who struck first. You can die quickly or 

sit and slowly watch your friends dance 

off a cliff. Make money or love. No time 

for both. Paint your home's street with blood 

or paint a rainbow white. No time. No time.

Special thanks to Jan Rowe, Jon Wesick, Chris Fitzgerald, Julianne Powers, John Engstrom, Jeff Taylor, Bil Lewis, Ed Gault, Carol Weston, Kathleen Hulser, Ethan Mackler, C.C. Arshagra and James Van Loy.