Friday, January 24, 2025

Stone Soup Croutons, 1-22-25: Rewriting Survival Guides


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.

The first Stone Soup all-open mic after the mini-apocalypse happened on Wednesday. It's a good video to rewatch if you can get over that I show up too much on speaker mode at some points when I wasn't reading. Sorry. 

My attitude is dour, but I am still writing. I hope you do the same. Offline, on paper. That's where it's going to matter years from now.
 
Thanks for reading.

Rewriting Survival Guides

Go through puberty between 
TV channels on knob. Get 
lost. Follow platitudes like
animal tracks. Baby bee
leaves hive, triggers alarm
shoplifting beans, looks for
dead angels in snow, dying
and reselling their feathers. 
Meet your first heartache
who dresses as Mr. Robinson
to trump your mad scientist
cosplay. Oligarchy is a cancer
we both need to catch, she says.
Now start climb up ladder 
as window washer. That's 
where the bodies first appear
before they're buried beside
stumps, under staircases, 
behind thrones. Outsides self,
David Lynch films your life. 
Bee versus Spider. Guess who
wins. WiFi doomsaying takes 
rest of your hair. Walking in
forest in winter night, you 
grab last light you know from
snowfall. Eternal virgin, your
queen crab  is, in Shakespeare's
words, a total Katherine. One
night on TV, the Great White
Hunter is making a comeback,
and his own homeland is the 
new wild frontier. Your last 
few treasures bound for nearest
museum. Empty beggar's bowl
worth more than you ever were.
 

Special thanks to Rich Boucher, Erik Nelson, Nike Truth, Richard Spisak, Ari Whipple, Bil Lewis, Jeff Taylor, Mary Ann Honaker, Robert Fleming, Jon Wesick and James Van Looy.

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