i.

in the clay bed
of my son's brain
where abides
pillow

the print
of my thumb:

     flower, lie down.

ii.

to the maid
sleeping
in the foreign
house

of his
undecorated
death:

dream
of my attic
blind
wife, and what
she might
there

recover.

terrorism

trading
back and forth
the dead
before they are
and after


pilgrimage

one’s inbred
recovery
of a native
alienation


novitiate

I know my mother
by the back
of her hand


drone

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.

death is make-up for the interview.  when I get to my mother I plan to visit the city.  I hear a gang of young girls operates there trafficking middle aged men who act old.  I hear what I want when I delete emails.  I lost not touching my mother soon after she stopped being an actress.  she fled my father who at the time was known as her live-in stunt double.  I put my fist in the air and waited.  some told me I was being cinematic.  still some told me I was being cinematic.

in my father’s car, father driving, my fingers curled as if readying themselves for the wheel.  father small talking, his dark chatter, my hands like jaws left open, horrified before the heads god plans to put them in.  heads not to scale.  heads trial size.  

I worry the heat in my eyes is permanent.  my lids worry as well and retreat.  burn pain is its own person telling me I am long term its most bearable memory.  

the hospital seems a distant campfire lowered by the sleepy laughter of the still beautiful.  my daughter.  who as a girl melted the faces of two action figures with the bulb of a reading lamp not to upset her brothers but so the figures could kiss.  

I begin to make sense all by myself and nod to the dog shaped thing drowsing in the car’s murk just beyond my feet.  politely father asks if he can help and I okay him asking me anything.  he chooses the health of my sons.  one in particular.  I stick to the dog.  to the puppies it ran from no faster

had they been aflame.

my first job
was to cradle  
dogs
being put
to sleep.

mother had arthritis
her hands
heard thunder.

brother fell
hard
for a one legged
man.

father worried
his own leg
meant
the world.

at the most
three dogs
per wheelbarrow.

his two right-handed sons bite equally into the legfat of his ambidextrous third.  he photographs all three by closing one eye at a time.  his boys look so real they could be paintings.  his wife makes an odd announcement about dinner.  an announcement that includes

paper plates, her therapist being kind, and the recipe she’s repressed.  

     he thinks on those for a moment.  then on the terrible things he’s sure to reveal.  his palms.  the downward progression of his mother’s push mower.  the scissors he stole to replace the scissors no one used.  the girl on the school bus he’d punched in the back of the head so she wouldn’t see her house burning.  in the back.  of his.

I refuse it.  

this that says
it is the boredom
of boys
beats

a cow.

not even to death.

     will accept
on sight
the boredom
of girls
this that projects
a bovine
delirium.

will accept the exotic anxiety of my workaday father

as his cigarette falls
into the fibers
of a broom
made shovel.

after three days
in the church
of my father
     in the house
of my mother
in the arms
of my youngest
least evil
brother

     the neighbor girl
ran away home.

from my father
I gathered
that the poor
have many
kids.

from my mother
intuited
the poor
to be dying
at a rate     faster

than.

     took it upon myself
to kick my brothers
when they were
up.  

give them sugar
when down.

become
less evil.

the outhouse, and the woman in it, gone.

father’s
praying
place.

if beside it
I could see
the open empty toolbox

I knew to yank the dog homeward.
I was doing what anyway.    

in mother’s voice.  in brother’s
untucked
shirt.

messing around with our neighbor, the messiah.

(another slight edit)

leaving the theatre, he tapped, twice, the hood of a parked police car, lifted lipstick from a drunken woman's purse and squared himself in a store window before shooting himself with his hand.

his first film, completed, by the time he was eighteen.  roundly praised.  from there, a many colored thing.  russian women, guns under suits, and cameos of indians with indian names.  at twenty three, nostalgic for twenty one, his seminal 'my white father' wherein a mute albino would be upstaged by mimes.  further brilliance followed.  mostly in quotes, such as “babies are full of grief”.  women ate from his hand and their eating progressed.  one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.  the woman divorced him and took with her the man.  in the midst of attending to the list came the advent of black and white which added a much needed plot to his smoking.  his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  in 1973, his doctors, grey from vietnam, convinced him to go under.  his last film was silent, and many complained about the lighting.  he cried, in his mansion, for the windows he did not put in.  he would not often entertain tourists but when he did they asked about his mother, her ghost, and if the east wing was really haunted.  he would on those late nights produce a letter his mother had sent him only yesterday.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs set out for his father, he made walking his home.  every now and then a hotel of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss

     the death row scene, the little saw his mother used for the cake, the mysterious basket moved from bike to bike.

(from 2007, slight edit)

   the boy had screamed without wanting to.  had scared the ghost his mother would not believe he had seen.  the ghost which was not a ghost but to which he had called anyway with ghost, ghost.  his mother had a sentence, and she used it.  patted his head, sighed a cigarette from her bra, then went.  the boy waited all night.  once or twice thought he saw what might be a hand, white and waving; its broomstraw fingers sweeping the many floored dark.  

     his former scream stayed the morning.  his father, he saw him put down a razor then pick it up.  his mother was blowing balloons.  tying them and sucking her finger.  

     eleven years ago, for three minutes now, the boy was born sad.  but it’s not something to be sad about because he is not very bright.  when he speaks, it is only so his parents will also speak.  they will come from any room, out of any aisle, to speak second.  they will fall over each other somehow without touching.  when this happens, the boy must remember he is not bright.  

     there is a cake, a birthday hat, and a storm.  the boy is not sure which came first, but they are here, now, at the same time.  a candle  is lit, then another.  if he slits his eyes, it seems the same candle is being lit eleven times by his one handed mother.  his father steps in when all the candles don’t go out but he is too eager and his breath seems to have in it a crying baby.  the baby goes silent.  the boy sits in the dark.  a dark so heavily settled the boy forgets he is wearing a hat.  that when he slips under the table the hat in some final nod of a scarecrow goes unaccounted and the boy thinks he is being pulled by the hand of the ghost that is not a ghost backward into some happy and useless chore.        

     under the table, taskless, the boy is humming into the cone of his hat.  for so long it is the only sound.  it takes a single frog outside to mention its locale for the boy to know he has stopped.  he puts the hat down tent atop a toy truck he cannot see.  far off, an engine idles then turns off.  it is dumbly comforting to know that in the real world there are miles between hands doing hand-like things; turning  keys, toppling hats that shouldn’t be there.  hands that curse as puppets curse; by not.

     it is by this thought of hands the boy is stilled.  he has not spoken; his parents are waiting.  are duo and separately tread their aphotic mimicry.  he can feel his father’s thumb puddle the air above his head; his mother’s elbow cotton closer the black to his eye.  his wish:  to see a ghost after seeing a ghost- the boy wonders what he has done.  what had marked the world in all its heaving inaccuracy was an exhale; now, an exhale dismissed.  

he had once cut with his thumbnail the tip of a red crayon into an empty bra he’d never seen his mother put on.  when she later dressed it became a drop of blood and she screamed and went on to birth a stone that it not be the center of a dark balloon.

my brother enters an advanced state of vicarious living.  

I recognize him most when he is bare handing a baseball.  

     we both know I haven’t been myself.  

-

place matters little unless a deer’s eye brings the fog
down
with it.

in his prayer, my brother asks god for nothing.

     god prays back.

-

our resort cabin inhabits
each of us
differently.

it is either dark or darker.

     asleep, I touch my brother’s cheek
with a fly.

-

we both have reasons for not moving.    

I want to feel old.  to leave  

     knowing

he’s been here before.

a dog, plainly.  noses water bowl to mid-yard.  to the spot.  exact it will rain.  rain soonly.  a word the town uses.  (sit) one yells from a slowly passing go-cart.  someone's mother.  I often think for.

calls me by cupping his hands and hollering.  is convinced he needs delayed attention.  senses my immediacy and waves me off.  his hands go into remission.  his hair darkens.  darkens as grass dryly chosen by a nearby frisbee.  we are here to celebrate.  three years without driving.  three years backing over a bicycle his daughter could not abandon.  bookmarks and powder.  brain a busy insect.  seasons placed on torpor’s waiting list.  the recent wars have been a clarity.  people want what we have.

to find
it’s the other
way

around-

life
a metaphor
for sport.

to know
     without

sufficient
notice

we’ve been here
so long
that none
are from
the future.

to provide
the afterlife
to those
left, those

available.  

     to realize
the town
of our birth
awaits
the return  
of our most
male
follower.

to be kept alive by a disease loyal to another.

to scroll, down, and cross
our legs.

autism     to blame

for the white     in white

male

     (I blame)

sex

for shared     abstinence     (I blame)

my former     self     for my

former
transference     my baseline

jumper     on

poverty     the gnome

in your front yard     on tough

interior

art

a certain house, constructed, to be empty.  

a postponed
staring
contest.

a suicide bomber at the start of this sentence.

     hunger
controlled
by a select
many.
      
my mother’s biological decoy.

a raft     I did not build

-

a late entry
thunderstorm

-

a baby    
     waving around

another
baby’s
sock

-

the poverty I own

     the poverty
you

-

a man
on all fours

     a tinier
woman
rider

-

a kite’s shadow

on leave

-

expat nations

on the day they were born
I murdered my brothers
in reverse order
to teach them
about sticks

more specifically
about my love
for what can break
easily
on the knee

     for what gets smaller
the more
it is shared

- 

premonition?  the delayed seizure of our mother’s countenance.

she could recall the brokenness of a toy car but not the location of the shop it drove itself to.

she needed two people.  one to smooth the map before her.  and one to laugh when she’d blow

playfully    
from her palm
the ants     the car’s tires     had become.

- 

to remain
brothers

     brothers
keep silent
within
earshot.  

distance?

     the hole
god leaves
by not
existing.

     confession?

the seashell comfort of a woman’s hips.  

- 

in baseball
one could bloody
the pastor’s
nose

wipe the ball
on a white shirt

and transfer
worry
to the tick
heavy
dog

lazing
in the rabbit blackness
of its ongoing
joy

- 

     as an inner child searching for its twin

     the loneliness
of our sister
is twofold.