the birthbone’s connected to the deathbone
I am setting a place for each person I love, so they will be comfortable when they set down and start to talk. The morning comes, the morning lates. The lake around which people gather claps its light applause.
The people who I love are growing infections. They florally reconstitute. I am wishing their stamens. I am unconscious. What lips these flowers will vaunt.
The content is set neutrally. We wonder how to marble each audible shift in tone. For instance, when addressing the child you were, I am a foreign stance; but when addressing the adult you were, I am dancing.
The lake stills. Going out to take pictures of these different versions of ourselves, we shade without corollary, we color and color without any line meaning less.
The things that feed us
the justice of the megaphone
in a tube or glass-like cylinder
beneath the want of a young century
or centaur, maybe, yes, this centaur
gloating over her half horsed future
with one cone of noise and another
cone of ice cream, nice ice cream
nice fantasy melting into toddle-dum and tweedle
the brick of the backbone
the slope of the normally seated office-drones
once they rise and stretch their morning coffee
breath a fog of spreadsheets and search engine
optimization cubed into the menu, no salt or
sanguinary attachments, the able-bodied
mongering their courses, their copses, their
closing-time fertility and all the dashes that
have been forgotten within their names
run together strings of letters – constant press
of vowels on the order of the day.
the abstract of the plinth
in the court of modern pining
with a toothsome sweetness in your
abalone jesus – how we form attachment
with the things that feed us, with the hands,
intestines, and the instruments, the steel and flour,
the bed of the bet with the bed and with honor to lay
down heavy each setting, each pace stepped back
toward repetition among seasons – they change me
from pallid to downy, they change you from
languid to delicate and each of our descriptions
pin us here to our fronted and shameful bodies
the lead of the forehead of the mechanical shoe
stuck out and we are all tongues and soles. empty
mouths to be shit out and tied shut.
________________________________________________
Tony Mancus is the author of four chapbooks – most recently Bye Sea from Tree Light Books and Again(st) Membering, out this fall from Horse Less Press. In 2008, he co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning. They make small chapbooks. He currently works as a technical writer and lives with his wife Shannon and two yappy cats in Arlington, VA.
{ 0 comments… add one now }