Tony Mancus and CL Bledsoe
Collaborative Poems #3
Forced to choose between bats and the passing satellites
and knowing how to spell, I chose to bury my last few dollars
in a claw machine. You know the kind. It can placate your desire
to play Kali by capturing a stuffed replica of your least favorite
video game’s secondary character – Luigi and that red haired Contra
gunman. The problem with outsourcing our happiness is it’s hard
to reach Nintendo customer service with complaints. But no one wants
to be the NPC with black socks and shorts. Unless that’s your kink.
If that’s the case, get those socks a running and don’t worry none
about the lag the kids will see trailing in your wake. There’s
a new start code just round the corner and someone might be
singing Creedence or No Diggity just waiting for you to join in.
You have a voice – don’t bury it in lime Airheads. Your princess
may be in another castle but ask yourself: should you be murdering
sentient flora to further patriarchal gender roles or perhaps using
your surprisingly hard cranium for something more profound?
And what’s wrong with just being a plumber?
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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