the suicide of a mother’s
swimming

instructor. the browsing

history

of little
ghost.

choose
three
to deny
shooting

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

I leave the dream, I come back

this is how
it’s done
there is

a record

on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost

and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.

atavism

(god is someone’s calendar

-

valley

(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose

-

pulpit

(rooster ghosted by elevator  

-

subculture

(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down  

-

alpenglow

(the scalp will baby its grief

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth.  I say dog for both dog and puppy.  pray for things I know will happen.  a rooster through a windshield.  a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.  

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

god’s dream
of dying
first

[notes from life under bell]

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.                

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller.  the mosh pit is weak.  last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole.  onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch.  dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide    

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.  

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma.  genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea.  this open umbrella.  ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby.  a door was a door.  a ghost was a ghost and a door.  the house was possible.  its rooms were not.  baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub.  I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow.  said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.    

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.  

-

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key.  it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.      

-

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

-

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

-

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.

-

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

-

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

-

the disappearance surrounding said event.  a horse belly-up in water’s blood.  see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

-

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.  

-

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.

I told everyone at school that my parents were together when they died and everyone at work that my children were not.  I chewed my sister’s food because she feared the quiet.  ate in two languages.  I wanted my brother’s singing voice.  his newborn to be shaped in the shadow of a pipe that went from cocoon to cornstalk.  the sound of god hitting on a ghost.

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.  

-

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key.  it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.      

-

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

-

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

-

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.

-

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

-

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

-

the disappearance surrounding said event.  a horse belly-up in water’s blood.  see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

-

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.  

-

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

–

shade: the folder of my clothes

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller.  the mosh pit is weak.  last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole.  onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch.  dog’s been tased.

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

sleep, kid. give grief its carrot. I’ll be right beside you, awake, wearing one sock. I stepped on a man today. for context.

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

[notes from life under bell (i)]

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.



[notes from life under bell (ii)]

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.



[notes from life under bell (iii)]

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

if I
were me

age I’m at
I go
from bath
to funeral
to bath-

puppet
that made
a fist

its gaze
a eulogy
for distance
the animal
is mostly
pity

on a stage
in a beaten
field
a man
new to walking
is opening
with his hands
the belly
of a shark
that’s eaten
by word of mouth
a local
priest
whose fingernails
miss teeth
like an angel

[untitled]

a movie
to father
an extra
room  
where the more
are less
to feed

~

[thinning]

under the monster’s bed
a child
haunted
by normalcy
gags
on a goldfish
from the painter’s
darkroom

~

[bowl and psalm]

his inner monologue made of water.  

a pill
in a drop
of rain.  

a rabbit on a leash.  a dead bird
in a woman’s hat.    

wind.

my eye for my other
oh town
of Ark.

eat
as often
as a squirrel
mad
for the ghost
of a nesting
doll

after
the talking
animals
of body
horror

and before
acolytes
anonymous-

the wrong
dying
baby

0503-2017

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.      

0504-2017

his weight a cricket on a piano key

0508-2017

disability as competition, jesus.  and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled.  here we will coin transformative indifference.  a body is not a teachable moment.  as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut.  meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.

0513-2017

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

0515-2017

there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once.  echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf.  you breathe and say god gives out  no more than that which I can handle.  the next breath is mine.  god gave us god.    

0602-2017

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

0613-2017

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

0620-2017

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.  because I want to.  

0627-2017

magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

0627-2017

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

0706-2017

the disappearance surrounding said event.

a horse belly-up in water’s blood.

see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost

0719-2017

today was more your hand than the photograph it was cut from.  a family of five in the bed of the unremembered present.

[story]

on the shell of my brother’s first turtle

the inscription

campfire
at the end
of the world

~

[impact]

as for the tree’s supposed headache, I don’t want to give it teeth.

your twin has tried to leave a dream.

~

[his body a small sorrow]

the proofreader
of grief

~

[akin]

just born and his bones go south.  cigarette, first-aid, airport.  off-brand invisible ink: a memoir.  I want knowledge to be sadness.  cassettes went away because we stopped recording god.

~

[you were born the day your body came for you]  

photograph
what you cannot
lift

~

[white movie]

death’s dog wouldn’t **** a pony
says the man only men can hear.  

repeat after me
says the baby.  
nothing’s publicist.

[untitled]

I vandalize the outside of a church in a city designed by men with bad teeth and there I mistake a drop of blood for a penny and begin to last forever

~

[abuse errata]

this mannequin
that we now
deliver
to the oral
loneliness
of circles
died
left-handed

~

[the quiet that comes after a two car accident on a country road]

could strangle
an owl
cast
perhaps
as a mole
listening
to the belly
of a stopped
deer

~

[the men of left field]    

I think / in a past / life / my sense / of touch / was yours

-

mother / ain’t once / lost / while pregnant / a baseball / in the sun

-

thunder / is lightning’s / empty stomach

~

[I see in your newer work]

the propping up of rootless boys and the past changing only what was. your father the spinner of flea market globes. a bat in the barn with the head of a chicken. your mother returning to god the ghost you painted for death. your son wetting the bed. right of owl, left of crow.

~

[annotations for son]

a small creature was shot
stumbled
and became
my handwriting.

two of my legs
need god.

~

[sculptural]

a moth attacking the ear of a white horse

[on a family farm
littered
with oar-beaten
scarecrows]

-

baby talk
in a suicide note  

-

sign language, mosh pit, 1991

[untitled]

today I was outside
holding my son
and hummed
into his neck
a man
resurrected
to faint

-

childhood
animals
deeply
unhurt

-

this machine can detect silence

this stick
if stones
are gay

~

[tenderness]

it is there
in the way
my father
refolds
a single
grocery bag
for a cyclops
that never
arrives

~

[having a disabled child]

means:

there is a tent
being studied
by dream.  

missing
more than snow
the ashes
of snow.

footwear.  and checking
our food
for holes.

means keeping
dry
a diver’s
eyelash.  and leaving

to finish
absence.

~

[jesus]

an unhurried ****** whose character development was orphaned by ghosts

~

[high-dive. dusk.]

as if any father
could heal
a cigarette
or remove
for a grey-eyed
newborn
the stitches
from a dream
    
~

[mother praying for two]

tooth fairy gone to salt

shell of a bee in an empty lamb

~

[/ yyyy]

doll burns its tongue on a teacup breast

at your abuser’s
costume party

~

[later meaning]

my eyes meet in a tunnel beneath the museum of things that belong. sister moons the moon. mother she buries the ironing board of a crucified dentist. childhood starts at the top. the painter of stomachs eats from a footprint. egghead shreds a pillow in the madhouse of snake.

~

[eremite]

the frog in the hood of my coat
has I’m sure
a later meaning.

my brother is on his back in a field he calls helicopter.

I know my father’s mouth
by its embrace
of doom’s
unconnected
dot. there are sounds

I can’t make. like that of a boy

squealing
as he rubs
a toy tank
under a blanket
for a god
whose mother
a face

could love.

~

[highs]

eardrum the airbag stomach of a lonely doll

brain
a blue
parachute

~

[handheld]

somewhere between satellites and baptisms

grief
the daydreaming
thumb

~

[days of bread]

the image
crucified
for its lack
of focus.

the loud music
over which
you hear
make
your blood.

the weakest
electric chair
this side
of moth.

father’s grip on a rolled-up magazine.

crow laundry.

an out-of-shape
coat hanger. & (and)

the news
that my nakedness
has died.

~

[possessions]

i.

chew toy
abandoned
at the throne
of old man
scissorlegs

ii.

a claw
from the lottery
of hands

~

[promising]

the girl wearing a scuba mask is not on a skateboard. this, after all, is church. I see what you see- the writing suffer. I’ll wash, later, a pair of black socks from the minefields of the one we call birdbeak and you can be the puppet with a needle in its arm.

~

[last names]

he cracks the motel room door from inside and ****** from wasp to spider to spared cricket.  he can smell the baby’s back as it begins to burn a hole in the pocket of a bag-headed hitchhiker.  the earth is 42 years old.  a car in the lot below moves over a body and stops.  the woman in the car is ******* a tooth through a cigarette.  whatever god put in her cake is almost gone.  

~

[for Eric]

I’ve held dogs as they die. vet’s office, 1993. a bad dream is a nightmare and a good dream is nothing. is a dog’s rib. I get an idea, here and there. design the same bathtub.

~

[lost grass]

eat loudly, mouse, for still I have my baby blood. loudly else you become a fish. else I jaw ear

from the character actor’s god.

~

[clarion]

heaven is art and hell the artist. regret matters only to the creator of regret. brother hops around like a drugged rabbit. headcount is the nickname given by sisters to the outhouse built on a sandbox. an ambulance from dogcatcher’s dream puts the hurt on a flickering cornfield. our cellar is a mirror where thunder goes deaf.

~

[for daughter]

in a wordless dream I’m nowhere near anyone I can’t be.  my dad’s mirror passes out.

~

[untitled]

snake
is the best thing
for snake.

I know you’re sad.
like a yard, a vandal, a roof.

seeing the future
takes time.

~

[laity]

the unmarried wind will comb its hair in heaven
but for now
in the Ohio
of the weightlifter, that odd
follower
of stillness
who built
on roadkill
tornado’s
church

I have for appetite a pair of scissors and for despair a silent vase. I have a louse like a flower and a crush on a doll. I take my meals with a three-shouldered angel. the head of my abstract dog is highchair real. food is a ghost. I rake the hair.

far be it from me
to stir
the madness
of fish.

age allows that we are younger for god.

sleep
is a shadow’s
bookmark.

it is always a neighbor of ours tries to schedule amnesia and gets put down for suicide. it is always me on a farm machine hasn’t moved in years writing a poem for mom. it is never a mediocre ventriloquist marries a better.

[a memory]

I roll from my mother
my father
sketching
the ghost
of a stone

~

[unrisen]

this oven
this chapel
of the television’s
right
to privacy…

which paw
for mom’s
mosquito
bread

~

[straying]

mom takes photos of things we are near.

a piece of gum that won’t bleed.
a plastic bag from the head of a carousel horse.
the circle’s dark past.

awake and watching his bird feeder