Stone Soup Croutons, 11-29-23: The Background Characters Speak

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.

Dan Provost was a great feature on Wednesday. Support him by donating to donating to his PayPal (danprdn@aol.com) or buying his new book from Alien Buddha Press. Or this one from Roadside Press. It was a fun open mic that stood in contrast to the tone of Dan's work. With this week's piece, I tried extra hard to go with a Bukowski tone to go with Dan's style.

For Bukowski poems, I think you have to be miserable to start writing it, in a much better mood to edit them, and you have to be brave enough to use the pronoun "I." 

I got one out of three. It was too much fun to do.

Thanks for reading.

 

The Background Characters Speak

And the last 

shall be first

when?

We're not here

because we

like the food.

 

We're the

protagonists

in shitty stories.

 

Too boring to

read pages of

us bleeding out.

 

The hell's our
God machine

out of nowhere?

We can't throw

baron robbers

from our cabs.

They die out
in the cold, we

lose our income.

No one to

believe in us,

cue hero moment,

 

help us knock

gun away from

indigenous waif. 

By the time

we believe what

we're seeing,

it's way too late,

already told we

saw nothing. 

Please leave us

to end up on our
ghost settings

 

that a thousand

multiverses can't

renew to life. 

 

Not even a 

devil hiding in

the dumpster fire.

 

Sometimes the 

fire just goes

out.

I counted Bil Lewis twice somehow.

Special thanks to Nancy Dodson, Jan Rowe, Jon Wesick, Bryan Franco, BTheresa Rose Jertson, Bil Lewis, Carol Weston, Mark Lipman, James Van Looy and special feature Dan Provost.