SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.

I dream in longhand. Watch slasher movies to control death. No I will not be doing anything for my mental health. God was the first weapon meant to heal time. We don’t all live here. Blood reads but not with all this blood. Be last, be small. Hide your stomach from emptiness. Check your children for bones. Hairdryer for pills.

DEATH AND A DEATH PLACE

The eyes have only
their childhood

SON IS SHORT FOR LONELINESS

Try
in a coffin
to roll
a cigarette

God’s stomach is a cigarette trying to eat on the moon. I am asleep in my homage to sleep. In hell you have to give birth to everyone you’ve killed. You can’t have your kids.

SECOND MACHINE

I watch movies naked and lightning tattoos god into becoming an addict.  

BELONGING MACHINE

God
up late
with silent
babies

God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.

No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.