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.
A nice open mic before the holidays kick me while I'm down. It's hard to write happy poems when noted members of Stone Soup's alum (Jan Rowe and James Van Looy) talk about the homeless crisis (Pity Bil Lewis missed this week). I'm glad I could turn this into more of a poem and less of a rant with an ending line I thought about before I even finished the first draft. Didn't turn out the way I envisioned it, but that's writing for you.
Thanks for reading. Happy holidays to all who can muster it, a quiet Christmas to those who can't.
Holiday Limbo
to escape damnation
like Saul whatshisname.
Winter's an ombudsman's
best friend, whiting out
tiny presents morticians
scoop up in their bags
before parents wake.
Christmas warriors armed
with snakes camouflaged
as silver tinsel
throw stockings of grenades
in ocean to teach others
how to catch fish.
They cry for Death,
who has heard same pleas
from suicide bombers,
ex-presidents belching names
into recorders they plant
on each other,
narcissists shouting own
names before flying
into buildings.
Their hearts cold enough
to believe homeless freeze
to death for photo-ops,
loud enough to bomb jazz
clinics, where blues croon
mercifully in background.
Safe for now, you can
stay, drink to the fallen,
last ones left who won't argue.
 |
| Ethan Mackler was too sick to read. |
Special thanks to Angelo D'Amato, Nancy Dodson, David Miller, Jan Rowe, Robert Fleming, Patricia Carragon, Julianne Powers, C.C. Arshagra and James Van Looy.
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