Stone Soup Croutons, 3-29-23: Single Life

Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions selected 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.

On Wednesday, Frances Donovan closed out the month perfectly. They will be a hard act to follow. I hope you donate to their Venmo via @fdonovanpoet or their PayPal link  here. I hope you go back to hear their feature. 

This poem took a weird turn and became kind of a flashback poem, relating to a time that no longer exists for me. I credit the poetry of Frances for evoking things from a past life I hadn't considered for a long time. 

Once again, the poem feels completely detached from the reading, which I hope you watch if you weren't in the audience.

Interesting to get this out before the National Poetry Writing Month challenge. 

Thanks for reading.

Single Life

 

Pie on face long enough 

becomes face. You pray:

Someone brilliant please 

insert your salvation,

a trickster coyote god 

to help you slip 

into alleged place 

where love exists,

your deer-in-windshield gaze

actually appealing,

her sense of self stretching

to keep you out of rain.

But no. Your body, a Da Vinci

aircraft, does not work.

Again, night club closes 

to move-on bass music. 

You missed Thanksgiving

to still come home alone. 

tea-for-two for one 

in your useless kitchen.

New plan. Wait for hair 

to grow back, ladder length,

throw up new locks,

climb out of own hole.

Snow White, comatose,

turns her head from you.

Rent gets raised too high
to live alone at all. 

Bagging own waste in park

draws unwanted attention.

Ronald declined to read.

Special thanks to Jan Rowe, David Miller, Ari Whipple, Bil Lewis, Robert Fleming, Annette Tarpley, Carol Weston, Ed Gault, Ethan Mackler, James Van Looy and feature Frances Donovan.