when you trim your ***** and your mustache with the same pair of scissors
when you hand over your entire paycheck to the bartender of doom and glee
when you write a bounced check at the grocery store
when you sleep with a girl who isn’t clean
when you’re young, lost, broken and poor
when your childhood runs hard and your luck runs out
when your best friend is dead and your other friend is ******* your girl
when your dog sleeps in the afternoon and dreams of the neighborhood *****
when your nutrients gets replaced with Xanax bars over the one who just left
when your tired eyes meet the brick & mortar of strenuous labor
when the smile is so fake that it appears genuine
when you go all in on someone you weren’t 100% sure of
when you wait on bleeding knees for the unreliable god
when you bet on the boxer that crashed to the canvas
when the interest is high and the banks are closed and the creditors don’t care about grace periods
when you understand very little and you expel a whole lot
when the cord of anxiety strangles your very essence
when you turn out to be just as everyone expected

don’t worry

it’ll all turn around

and find you again

someway

somehow.

gesture 1

The white crow of lost memory warns the wrong past. A baseball shrugs into my brother’s ribs. I fear Jesus, and weep for Adam. Make my knee in the ghost gold sea.

A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry ******* forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time

No newborn can reach existence.
Sleep knows memory
cannot fix
an eggshell.

( into a field
  fled water
  from the spine
  of the lord )

Erections turn the stomach to salt.

gesture 3

Old poems, I’ve made my cry to the world. Puberty’s pop-gun. Gender’s low star. The short dream of touch meant to abridge the skin’s ceaseless letter to any angel that remembers blood. I’m not home. God’s teeth are very small.

gesture 4

Lakes laze through the last showing of the angel’s invisible shadow. Fire thinks itself unburned. Thunder hears a slow thing. I don’t want this to start. Lure the image out of god. A ripped-up squirrel at the end of the world.

In this church there is a toy phone on top of a toilet seat. I miss trapping god with nostalgia. I miss amnesia. A boy is a bell is punching into that fatherless space created by any shape born into a world of swimsuits. Oh fury, moon of hopelessness, the astronauts need nudes.

Are you willing to leave them alone on the earth for their last twenty years?

I doubt with presence my absolute hereness.

Amensia.

I believed inquiry would mean I had a
Question.

No one likes your gesture sequence of
Poems.

We left the water
To leave the water
Guessing.

Don’t get mad at babies.
Be nice to god.
Tender soldier, there are birds

That bury teethmarks.

The ground is too soft.
Your hand will die.