Stone Soup Croutons, 6-18-25: Staying Home

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.

Thank you, Marvin Louis Dorsey. We enjoyed your feature. The rest of you can watch it and forgive my face for somehow getting in the way of Mark State's poem. I enjoyed his poetic librettos and tried to create an appropriately tight poem. Well, tight for a crouton poem at any rate.

 

I hope to see Marvin, and the rest of you, as you join me next week for Nina LaNegra's feature.  

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Staying Home

Your presence in 

the cubicle keeps

building's rent low. 

That's a relief.

 

To be a child,

only needing walls 

of earth to be safe 

from icy hands. 

 

Before you knew

diet lacked status,

needed elevation

and a new name.  

 

Accept peace comes

with a single boot

across half your back

or be already dead.

 

 Just another zombie

shuffling as fast as

shuffling does, caught

in earth's undertow. 

 

Something tells you

to write this all down

in case any zombie

actually...survives? 

 

Fools gold is all they

will offer you to stay

one voice says run.

Other says stay down.

 

You're dead already.

Best see what happens

when you try walking,

put worst foot forward. 

 

Special thanks to Mark States, Jan Rowe, Bil Lewis, Don Kingfisher Campbell, Nike Truth, Chris Vannoy, Edward S. Gault, Karen Prince Gonzalez, Richard Spisak, Jon Wesick, Robert Fleming, James Van Looy and special feature Marvin Louis Dorsey.