House,
A light socket finds the first tooth of god.

Church, I am too old to imagine the waking hours.

Sleep,
Being in the water
when the song
is heard.

A neighbor points me in the direction of himself as an amputee. Information isn’t my strong suit. Excess of angels, tyranny of nostalgia. I dug into a tree a grave for a rabbit’s foot. Talked year after year in an echo that had my children tapping out of televised fight events. Violence is a language that rewards godlike pronunciation. Everyone knows where they were when nothing encrypted the pathway to racism in the shell of finding its mother. My drinking keeps changing the age I started drinking. Jesus gets crucified so many times that a one-of-one pop-up book of god using for a pillow a doll based on death doesn’t arrive in time for the book burning. I am late to my life and the television longs to be frostbitten. The toys have no memory. Even less when they explode.

Sleep’s house is a debt that denies three dawns. I changed my mind about ghosts. They are the tombstones of angels. My mind seduced a star that was alive. Sound can’t **** its brother if I am ******* on my cuts in a cornfield. Today I wrote a resignation letter in invisible blood and the wind ****-shamed touch. Sound has a shy daughter. Two sisters named Cain asked me to dream.

I don’t have an opening line.
The godless
Snow eaten
By a red
Dog was close.
Of the things my sadness
Notices,
Your suicide
Is second
To your second
Suicide.
My blue
Jokes
Deepen
Hair.
What I mean is
The undead
Lack
Sorrow.
Wait, ghost.
Wait, Sylvie Mix.
A guy I knew in high-school
Was shot
By his son. I don’t think
It’s great
That I know
He had a son.
Go, ghost. A cut
On a thousand
Bods.

As forever’s divine infant, god inherited permanence. Think about that for a second. I cross my legs in front of light bulbs. Our food catches up to us. Shape is just rain wanting a past. A room is a line break a film is a room. I can’t move. Bring the deer inside. The horse is so small that nothing but a moth fits in its mouth. The deer is washing the feet of a doll. Bring me the doll it is crying. Bring me the crying of the doll. Turn something on. Turn on toothaches in the wild. Start a car made of toothaches. I don’t know what poems look like. Don’t die in poems.

My uncle
Lost god
In a bet
Came home
Asking
Had we seen
A man
Or a woman
Taking
His clothes
Half of us
Said man
The other half
Started drinking
And got
Naked
Longer
Each time
This poem
Wrote itself
Death
Is a radio
What was it
Before

Dear Ethel Cain

Ants don’t cry or think about teeth. I got this star tattoo that cost a lot.

I worship too quickly.
My gods think they’re still alive.
Am I the world my children worry over.
Am I the worry.
My job is a soap fattened in hell.
I send my brothers songs sung by women
In the language of my voice.
I didn’t drink until I missed being sick.
I love my father in a way only my sons will understand.
I love my mother shhhhh.
Being quiet is the childhood of silence.
Hear underwater
Touch
Starve.
Or be
With sightseeing
The lord
Of your phone.
I’m sorry if that was your body.

TRY, RUIN

I put all my knowing in the hands of the known
thinking things wiser would **** me in peace
the roots of my going expanding alone
where drinking sings finer to pill popping beasts

you placed all the growing in a garden so burned
a leaving built into your still lover’s teeth
the pace of your smoking so slowly relearned
our drinking spilled into the pillcrusher’s feast

oh bombs made in heaven too perfect to drop
  I still think the angels are ******* with god
the mirror a creature that image resists
  unmoved by the seeing of its own basilisk

The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.

Dear Ethel Cain

My belly drew circles around me. A scarecrow with cancer made peace with paradise in a cornfield of melancholy. My parents fell asleep but neither one before the other. Some bad kids formed a church then left it so they could pour glue down a rabbit hole. A short period of drunkenness found a mistake in a star. I didn't know how many rabbits to pray for, so I just prayed for one.

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow

God thought I was a dream.
I’ll love you in heaven.
I didn’t read
All of your poems.
They didn’t change my life.
God told me in a dream
That angels
Throw eyeballs
At scarecrows.
I get weird
Born
And ******.
I am afraid of my children
And my children are afraid
Of their friends.
I wrote in my head a song
I wanted to hear.
Owl, whale, crow
Is the only
Order.
Writing about god doesn’t mean you’re smart.
Barton you can’t
Use
Like that
The animals.
Word choice
Is a hoax.
As far as last lines,

Roll that tiny spider
Into a cigarette
For years.

Dear Ethel Cain

I feel my death has passed away. That the golden comprehension of my shirtless youth has become touched out of its mind and into a code for unfinished nakedness. My god a scarecrow stuffed with snakeskin and my scarecrow a fetus trying to curl itself to life. I don’t think any of us are here. The pain of being is the pain of not having been. What a ******* thought. There are children who know the sky is a color made to scream at blue. And they die not because they are little.

The present is the language god uses to tell the future there’s no present.

To swim is to let John the Baptist draw on your body.

Touch is the hand’s trapdoor.

Dear Ethel Cain

Maybe I will come up with a song about my dying body that everyone except my brothers will sing to the same American bomb. Maybe then my mother will maybe then my father into the image designed by the non-working eye of god. And I won’t be touched in a bathroom and my cousins will outlive heaven in a patiently violent world of surrendering angels who surrender to themselves because their mirrors saw a sheep under an icicle and joined the suicide cult of sameness that went on to become the alcoholic white space that created heaven from nothing more than a nothing that added itself to a hell built on any toddler’s belief in offing oneself to get a nap. Gaze is a sec away from Gaza.

sacrifice 8

Gaze
Is a lost
Film
Filmed
In the seen
Abyss
As memorized
By a mother’s
Basilisk
Star
I don’t
Say after
Life
Around rabbits
Cigarettes
Give the dead
Roots
Made of smoke
Gaze is the unnamed
Limb of sight
Time a pause
God takes
In the post
Angel
Tantrum
Of a carpenter
Ghosting the ghost
Garden yield
Of his father’s
Pawprint moon
Loss
Has bones
All of them
Found
Fact
After sobbing
Fact

Dear Ethel Cain

I heard a song just now and my stomach wept weeping still. I started a band but we all had pianos. Frogs showed their throats to owls stuck looking away. You told me your opposite loved god for making jesus attracted to nothing. After is a place in the wristcutter’s belly.

sacrifice 7

I want all hounds to sleep through their death. I hate grief, but not for the reason you think. I am less weird.

Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.

sacrifice 6

we look all the time at dying and call it stargazing then while whale watching someone says you know alcohol disrupts your sleep

sacrifice 5

I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.

Before death dies does it see every lived thing

I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first

It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.

Any last silence

sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.

sacrifice 3

God
a mere
flare
Creation’s
signal
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing

sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.

Dear Ethel Cain

I might be dying. It is rude to care for oneself when your kids make from children bombs that bomb. It’s not hard to be drunk. My blue mother lives on motherhood while worshiping in miniature the sleep of the lonely bear bought by our most eccentric celebrity. I’m not okay. I have to drive to work when at home my son is sick and my other sons aren’t. If I die, people will stop looking at me right away. My brothers aren’t on their knees with this. Dear star my abusers used puppies to touch my blood in black and white. You can’t deport a witch. A miracle. My nakedness shrinks death with a folk song about angels protesting permanence. The lie reached heaven and that dude set himself on fire to burn god with Palestine. Jesus rose but the rest kept their graves on earth. The minotaur fell out of love with a horse. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder.

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. *** sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.

Dear Ethel Cain

Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.

If there is
no god
I hope
there’s not

One is born
with one’s
own language

The turtle dreams of strangulation in a green emptiness

A star is the graverobber of god

I texted the writers not all of them

Writing is sometimes being drunk while putting a mouse back together in a mountain

We can kiss here
is an eyepatch
for your moon
tattoo

I don’t know why anyone would want to see anything

What if his son
stayed put

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong ****** put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh

you will never
know
what this
is about
but sing
**** all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

Shape is the shape I must become to receive the world. There is no bomb called grief. No bomb child. The bells were rung I held my son. You can love your brothers forever. Thunder misgenders echo no more than once. Oh no Ohio forgiveness forgave forgiveness. What if you can’t stop writing this poem. My mother and father have the same password. Sometimes when I’m touching you I’m not. Touch tombstone for the mourning cosmos.

It hurt
Being made fun of
In the bathroom
That way
I got myself
Back to class
A whale
Shrinking the ocean
With sleep

Last night I told my wife
There were little hands
Tugging
On my jeans

Small enough to die
Please
Pleaser

A squirrel in the guest
blood
of god apes
history’s unthinkable fetus.

A brother and a sister
forget
at a funeral
who they look like.

My son’s
hot ear
smells
like the cigarette
gave Jesus
away.

I love you.
Terrible
that we’ve met

Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.

I am
when I drink
a birthmark
removal
expert
or an angel
privately sad
who prolongs
with a rabbit
held together
by grief
a whale’s
insomnia…

Boredom is a mirror’s god.

Pianos
in the winter
are cruel.

god
wants
nothing

The mouth is the only wound denied entry into paradise. Each eye beats birthmark to the body. The angels find us, forget. A tooth like a ghost growing in a fog bathes itself in a window. Bombs, miss. Meat into dust, that ****** hoax. All but a pair of creatures know the truth. God taken by two kids who can’t move.

to the goodbye
that created
distance

God is being tortured to tell us where we are

I don’t mean to be hopeless.

I mean to be
hopeless.

each letter
of this word
is silent

On a bicycle I was a priest. A girl who liked me told her father that her mother was dead. She gave me orange peels and said they were from a book she couldn’t read. I put them down my brother’s shirt then hopped on my bike. My brother said it burns it burns but not enough to put a wasp inside of god. I rode until my friends had daughters who shot them near cemeteries that were never used. There were days when I could string together days that I was well enough to drink. I don’t know that my sleep ever touched yours. If you can get the skin off that rock you can throw it.

Dear Ethel Cain

They pronounced my name correctly then killed my children. A shredded angel brought to god the blue arms of Ohio lightning. For too long, an infant heard itself think. God outlasted imagery. And gender, god.

The angel of the zeitgeist thinks death is a lover of short films.



It was a game I played with my sons. Like this: It was cold, and my brother was dead. My brother was dead, and the music said drink. The music said drink, and I sang god down. I sang god down, and god bent himself to a moment in Palestine. God bent himself to a moment in Palestine, and he was othered by his own brain. He was othered by his own brain.



Time uses god to tell time.
I drink myself to life.
Nothing outside of Ohio

is there.

Dear Ethel Cain

They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.

I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.