Tony Mancus and CL Bledsoe
Collaborative Poems #5
I’ve been drinking ashes all day, but my breath
still smells like colonialism. Nothing can pull out
the stains. I’ve tried. Everything is part
of the problem because everything is dying.
The worst part of late-stage Capitalism
is the complaining of those who have mouths.
And the complaining of those who don’t we don’t
bother with – just sell their shapes and organ songs.
I’ve been drinking the sung gospel and Tropicana punch
all night, but my mouth is a quiet trash compactor, the fur
it grows while I sleep is another compromise between
what’s been burned and whatever smoke leaps back
from the fire. This, too, I will sell. This is the time of day
I like best, when the light hits the pollution just right
as though the sky were fire, coming to consume us all.
Another promise just to get my vote. The cattle prod
doesn’t make anyone move quicker, at least
from where we’re standing and I’m not worried
enough about the herd to question where it’s going.
When it’s time, I pull the lever and maybe bring
the short post down to stamp between our wide
set eyes and yeses.
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks. He lives with his wife Shannon and three yappy cats in Colorado and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse.
CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection King of Loneliness (lulu.com, 2017) and the novel The Funny Thing About… (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2018).He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at How to Even… on Medium (with Michael Gushue).
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