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!

The Hospital Diaries - Verse 2

News From the Home Front

How about this for exciting? You’re sharing your intensive care with a drug runner. Imagine, if you will, you are not lying in state, an eighty-year-old man who elected to have a nasty aneurysm repaired, but a twenty-five-year old man, shot in the back while fleeing border patrol agents on an ATV. Now, I know you have walked the straight and narrow. But, drug running is lucrative. Meet a guy in a parked car, a gin joint, maybe on a park bench. Hold the newspaper in front of your face while slipping into your pocket the directions to the abandoned barn where the drugs are bound and packed for shipping. You won’t be walking into the bar guns slinging. You won’t be sitting in a beige surgeon’s office discussing renal failure, nursing homes, living wills, survival rates. You’ll be free-wheeling across farmer’s fields, three hockey duffle bags strapped to the back of your machine, counting up in your head the ways you’ll spend your booty. Pirate. Mule. Bandito. Beats counting sheep. Counting the days, how many is it now? Where am I? Untie my hands. There’s one thing you have in common. You and the fleeing drug suspect. Caught by surgeon’s hands. Wrists bound in soft white wraps. Hey! How about this for exciting? The nurse just untied your restraints. John Wayne, can you hear me?

NaPoWriMo #19 - Keep the Prose Poems Coming!

Thirteen Frames, and We’re Not Bowling

There is a wall of me in the house I grew up in. Thirteen frames from birth to death. Well, from three to high school, but what, really, is the difference? There’s the day I posed for the slick young photographer who got his jollies arranging the leotarded legs of preschool tap-dancers. There’s the smart-ass not-quite-teenager who just had sex last summer. There’s the white jade frog my half-brother gave me for Christmas. He bought it from a traveling Catholic school kid selling trinkets out of a cardboard suitcase. Lucky we have that one on film. The middle school girl-bully threatened my cat and my mother if I didn’t let her wear that for her seventh grade school picture. Wait. That’s her necklace. I never owned a frog in my life. I did, however, lie still on the twin bed at the lake one summer, counting frog croaks and mourning the passing of my twelve-year-old youth. The summer before the fall I turned teenager. Thank god for family photographs. Everyone should have a wall of me.

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This was inspired by Christine at This Is All Your Fault. She has a great prose poem with framed things. Go. Read it. You'll be glad you did.

NaPoWriMo #15 - A Prose Poem

Mourning Glory Days

They say you can't go home again. Someone tell my brain, fledgling memory, all wet wings and flutter. Flashback. Each time I sail down the highway, winging curves like a fortune teller tracing love lines with a crooked finger, here come the boyfriends, flying back. Seasonal flightline. A whole flock roosting, making nests. Delivering writhing worms and stiff beetles to feed my starving memory. Once, I covered pine cones in peanut butter, rolled them in seed. Hung them by thick red strands of yarn from an overgrown lilac tree. Lover's string. Lovesick breakfast. The birds never came. It is never like that with the boys from home.