CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
You Have to Be Wealthy in Order to Be Great
I like to tell people it’s hard to get rich,
but it’s even harder to fill your body cavity
with golf balls and sell them to foreign
heads of state at exorbitant prices. It all
depends on the alignment of dimples, learning
to hold clubs in your mouth without
chewing. You don’t get wealthy by accident.
It’s takes a lot of grit to flatter someone
on Monday, and then on Tuesday, feed them
to the cylindrical grinding machine you keep
in your luxury penthouse suite. That’s how you
achieve greatness. First, you’re rich. Second,
you’re entirely coated in plutonium. Third,
you’ve accumulated quite a collection of slightly
used penny loafers which you sell for very
reasonable prices at the Penny Loafers
Emporium. Come on down! Off I-34 by
the Shoney’s. Your brother owns that Shoney’s.
He says kids under 5 eat free. Every Christmas
at Mother’s you try to tell him: no one eats free.
CL Bledsoe is the author of the poetry collection Trashcans in Love (Ghoti Fish Press, 2017) and the novel The Funny Thing About… (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2018). He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter, and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at @howtoeven.
Michael Gushue is the author of Pachinko Mouth (Plan B Press, 2013), Conrad (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2010), Gathering Down Women (Pudding House Press, 2007), and (in collaboration with CL Bledsoe) I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey (Editorial Pretzelcoatl, 2017). A resident of Washington, DC, Gushue is co-founder of Poetry Mutual Press, and co-curator of the reading series Poetry at the Watergate.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.