Stone Soup Croutons, 4-5-23: You Call it Bachelor Life for Dignity's Sake

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.

 

Karen Friedland featured on Wednesday. It was a unique experience. You don't think of setting much with Zoom, but due to an accident preventing my girlfriend and I from getting home, we at at The Real Deal at in Jamaica Plain before walking over to JP Licks.

Whoever thought an ice cream shop/café would get rowdy after dark? That's why the video of the event gets garbled with background noise whenever I speak. I appreciate everyone's patience. I am grateful to Robert Fleming for introducing Karen, and I am doubly grateful to Karen for living up to everyone's high expectations.

This week's poem appears to be a sequel to the more-than-slightly autobiographical poem from last week. Maybe it's because I was smack dab in the middle of Jamaica Plain Centre Street, the setting for some of my most difficult and rewarding years (also related to cancer, having lost my father, grandfather not longer after I moved there). I appreciate Karen's work for giving me the perspective to end the poem properly.

Thanks for reading.

 

You Call it Bachelor Life for Dignity's Sake

 

Another midday morning

when you deduce the value

of your life by taking the age

of your antique one bedroom

and divide it by the weight

of your midnight clarity 

and guilt, become your own

ball and chain that comes 

with you into cafés, reminds

you there's nowhere to go 

but home. Would you be 

better off waiting for a head

shot in a school hallway

than sitting here hoping for

a person to not repel back

to sidewalk? At least the geese

get along with you outside. 

Must be mutual Canadian 

roots. April is here, god help

your chartreuse colored soul.

You need to find a friend or

family member with a dog that

would call you uncle if it could

speak. Search for someone 

allowed post-life to tread

the same roads they were sad

to see go once the chemo hit.

Their spectral retread a reward

for learning how to be grateful

again. Find them so they can

slap you, tell you to get with it.

Grease stained sheet. Forgot Carol Weston's name!

Special thanks to David Miller, Annette Tarpley, Nancy Dodson, karen Lee Ramos, Ed Gault, Jan Rowe, Bil Lewis, Robert Fleming, Carol Weston, James Van Looy and feature Karen Friedland.