Tony Mancus

 

from start charging

 

 

There’s a setting for heat and for whispers

This is not it

 

 

 

Drug legs trembling

the map cautions against too much drink, but the water encroaches regardless
of what we tell it
reshaping every surface I want
to kiss its lines and edges

Red and rest

Some wind/some sway

 

 

 

 

 

A cradle coast forest
fires and cradles me
to tell its time

 

Across the continent, smoke in the satellite loops

 

hungry for how
to take things
from where they are inside
other things

 

like the idea of bones structured into their fuel
fluid eventually
then burned

How much current you strain against

 

 

 

 

 

I train my limbs
to let go

This is no
competition

as we are
the same lack
in a neverbad dream
riverbed always

 

 

 

 

 

return to the bed
where we walk
away from each other
but wake up
in the same room

our breath like the story
of everything we ate
and shadowed
in our frames

 

 

 

 

 

I could be a dram
a dream in the spill pit
and swallow

so many verbs between our dross bodies
and all
the air
in the whistle

A marvelous pressure
you’ve got to breathe

how we say what we’ve lost
so many times

They say all or nothing / they say plant the forest
before you can burn the trees

they say gods ankles are weak
grabbed dead in every trapping
just like us and they hand us
back the broken tooth it took
to chew our way out of the ground
again and now back down
dead in every trapping

The bees in their burden – I guess
They say

 

 

 

 

This is where we speak again
having burned all of the forests we planted
having burned all of the down
having burned the flight patterns and leather and grasses
until we were sore with fire

 

 

                                        ◊