Like an Old Bowl of Soup - A Prose Poem in Three Steps

Roller coasters are boring. All you do is go round and round and round like an old bowl of soup.
- Rudy the cartoon mouse on Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

I. Gather Ingredients

Great googly-moogly, mouse. There are worse things than being caught in the downward spiral of day-old chicken noodle. A gazpacho carousel might be nice on a hot sunny day. Would that be a pool filled with blood, or are we talking metaphors? Mouse, aren’t you hungry? I’ll bet dollars to donuts (and wouldn’t you love some of those?), your second cousin, once removed, would have traded her first born to give birth in peace, rather than in pieces, gray baby hanging out of her hindquarters when the local garbage man opened the door of the dumpster. Delivery might well be left a private matter don’t you think?

II. Empty Into Pot

Sometimes even refuse can serve as refuge, and even then, there is no safety in an empty garbage bin. Everything needs to be filled. A bowl of tomato was nothing until someone planted a seed, someone shook a vine, someone cut and diced, delivered the soup to the bowl. The empty woman. The filled virgin. The empty world. The masses filled, with something like soup, hearty, nourishing, the body of a savior, a filler. And then the empty tomb. There’s the mystery. Always the mystery.


III. Name Your Soup

After sixty gallons of funky fish water flooded our floors, we needed a man to deliver salvation to our home, one great rusting heap of nothing. Barren. A wretched womb waiting to be filled. The mouse was just trying to have a baby. Fulfill her obligation to society. And what is it that mice do, exactly? Ruin soup. Some wombs are meant to be filled. Take the dumpster, for instance. Scrape the remnants from someone else’s garbage and you might have soup for a swine. Reuse, recycle. It’s a rollercoaster. Round and round. Stir the soup.

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This poem has vexed me for days. It started out as a free verse poem. Then it stalled. Then, just this morning it begged for the prose poem form. And it grew. I just listened to the muse. Not sure if it works in this form. I'm pretty sure it needs editing. Comments/critique welcome!

PS: My 200th post! Wahoo!