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.

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

The shape you left open so you could ***** on your walk with god.
Our uncle's blood that went back in time to skip us.
Horse twilight. Bombed omens.

I took a toy car from the fire and put it on my wrist.
The far ambulance

of your drinking...

Name in Ohio
no one. Arson

doxes
angels.

The angels let us drink for six days before telling us about god. Day seven, they give us each a son old enough to bite us on the arm. It’s a lot to process. This rabbit is all ribs. Eight is wasted on angels who miss their ghosts.

Dear Ethel Cain

I sleep in the sleep I’ll die in. My heartbeat says too soon, too soon. A hand on god’s eyelid. Nothing.

Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I **** myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.

They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.

**** nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you.

mothered by a silent
shape my
mouth

The body’s been to the body and back. Catching fish presses the eyelids of god. I look at my brothers to see if our *** dreams have overlapped. I look at my brothers with the unmilked violence of nostalgia. A church painter works backward through the bible. The painter says if the mother’s nose is bleeding, find a baby to put under it. Does not say that touch returns in an image cooked up by the face of pain. Meanwhile a book as quiet as a book turns blue in the space between belonging to the strangled unhoused and beheading the hand that starts a fire with a nail. Meanwhile, the past. You’re never far from the unborn.

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

Dear Ethel Cain by now abuse is nostalgia’s first job

I did not mean to pay attention to my life. For that, I am touchable and sorry. Not dying earlier is always the most cruel month. In school, in second grade, I wet myself two days in a row. I’ve never been able to scare the right people. During the assault, I spotted on the bathroom floor a pencil nearly sharpened out of existence. I thought of a star, a cigarette, and of a newborn being ****** back into its mother. I burned my face on a mask as something god could use when asked about my teeth.

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a ****** we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish.

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

Dear Ethel Cain

Despair is a food group. I had to read the line again that said my brother’s hand was eating out an angel. Cannibals surprise their mothers in Eden. Is skin still the longest dream? My fake sleep is not your fake sleep. I thumb my own eyes in the shepherd machine.

Existence a distress signal

mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god

Dear Ethel Cain

somehow for both Aria Aber and Franz Wright it’s hard to have good brothers I can’t go a week without drinking because the week is from 1983 touch resurrects itself how lonely sleep is named after sleep my eyes fight over two memories a line of ants carry a lightbulb to god I pray in a bullet to a melancholy bee don’t be afraid there in no nowlife

in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past

The poem says so little.

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth.

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once.

Dear Ethel Cain

I try to sing. I am not cold. Where deep designs of making hold.

I die and look for my mother.
I die and look for yours.

I die and my brothers don’t.
I die in Ohio to impress
with a bruise
an icicle. I die and my daughter

I die and my sons

I die
and which
of my sons

I die and god says
that is not
salt
that is movie
salt

Death gets over nobody, I die

there

I die on somebody’s birthday

I die bc pretty
Because I can

I die where
I die with a rich interior death

I die for rich poets who’ve time to be good parents

Love dies from god

I die and see an uncle trying to drink his eyes back
I die and you can’t
I die in a shadow from three thumbtacks

meant
for the savior
of a self
harming sister

I die in my father’s dead rabbits
all of them
die once

Dear Ethel Cain

The lie of my childhood became a lie. Let's compare suicide notes. Turtle, ashtray, ghost. Time is an angel knocked unconscious by a star. I had an idea for a resurrection story but the 3D glasses failed lol. I remember your fake mother on the set of a zombie movie telling *** jokes for the dead. Confession number one: I was born without a missing finger. Our bathroom door falls asleep before we do.

Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an ****** that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc.

Dear Ethel Cain

A microwave in a wellness center is left alone long enough to miss a bible. Fate does its work early. Babies make loss fun again. I try with my gut health to stop time. Angels, born on, turn off.

Dear Ethel Cain

The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.

Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.

Dear Ethel Cain

Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.

Dear Ethel Cain

Hell doesn’t have a language but everyone goes there to talk. Your ears are ears to my ears. I continue to want to die less than my children want to be killed. Yesterday was yesterday. I could afford a room in the aforedoom. The future is a rumor started twice by a violence we remember being able to stop. The poor play shape, touch, reentry. Find four hands.

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this anymore than I’m.

Dear Ethel Cain

I’m in the afterhood of childlessness. No one is dancing. I say things above my dying body that sound final. A cigarette is a flashlight with a toothache. Look for whiskey’s underwater church.

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

My mouth somewhere open in the unmarked church of naming, I cover my face when I go to sleep. Each night god believes in you a star loses its memory of being seen. We don’t always know how to feel attractive and worried. Angels tell our toothaches to imagine a fly living too long with a small part of the sun’s brain. Your breast dreams of the hole in my lung. Eyes are on the way.

No one
on the moon
gets dragged
by a train.

A star
milks
a split
baby. It’s noon

and you are choosing
******
for god.

The land is ours where we cry on stilts.

Touch has taken every handwriting class in hell. Eden is Eden because it’s the only place god doesn’t remember. Do not worry about where I am. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down. Jesus is futuristic trauma for those sleepwalking from the waist down.

I cut myself near a doll that wasn’t meant to look like me.

Nakedness,
find your nudes.

My son stops biting.
Our teeth
have no thoughts.

Mother with her paintbrush and me with my fever. There are no miracles. There are no miracles because of what miracle does to memory. When I fall on the ice, ache takes one of my hands as a shortcut. Never reach god.

~Notes for film 8, the last~

I notice the bathroom floor isn’t healing. There’s a roach in the house of the miracle-worker. Just one, just one. Age isn’t here, but it’s not a thing of the past. What I thought was guilt, was guilt. God’s god is touch. Worldview, worldvoid. The alarmist nostalgias of my faith. Seeing double is a sickness that disappears my children. My password made me look like this. Nonsense, angel. I am lifting with my arms

red weights on a white lawn while the leash of a blue dog tells my wrist a secret about my neck.

Mirror invents the ghost.

film 7

Angels cut themselves in invisible changing rooms. Ohio covers god’s tattoos with ice. I am watching on my phone a television lose blood in front of my son’s old breathing machine. Fire isn’t everywhere.

film 6

The face of god trapped in a scratch on a whale’s eye. A mother’s mouth shaped to shrink the cigarette’s brain. Ice that heals the *** lives of record collectors dying in Ohio. My unfollowed life of absolute distraction. A star above it that is a ghost branded by a moth. The spotlight that moves the abuse at last the spotlight

Soon is what everyone dies of

Acne is the only intimacy that god allows the lonely.

Face
is the star
nearest
to death.

Everyone is writing. There’s no sound in heaven and ghosts are the teeth of god. I can’t even read I’m so sick. I have been a boy not wanting to know about *** and I have also been a boy wanting to kiss a crow put to sleep by god’s footprint. I looked it up twice on my phone how to set oneself on fire. The body is a boring dream. I can’t enter a building without hearing a baby stop breathing in the uncrushed stomach of my inner child. Someone says oh look and it’s just something outside that should be there.

Be the false thing that god worships. Lead hyposexuals to the sleepwalker tired of finding your body. I am desperately dumb. America is ruined because the destroyed parts of America angel no creature to a stop. Imagery is a measure of detail's molasses loss. I can't go back, or I'd take that out.