sons
gather facts
for loss
and sons
gather facts
for loss

reading
in the extra
room
that which
you wrote
to stay

I could be
a scarecrow
with a pack
of condoms, a nose

breather
with a broken
jaw, a poor

even
for poverty

****

mixed-up
in a case
of correct
identity, all three

perhaps
praying
in a cave
over a can
of paint

I, you, born

inside
a baby

knowing
obsession
would starve

a person
playing dumb
on land
for tree
my feet
were lost
in prayer

small things, tadpole

my mother puts down a grape

could be a fish

be

the blindfold
of the man
who pulled
my father’s

teeth

bat
bringing bird
some shade

the denied
sainthood
of both
imagination
and curiosity

the baby
you can’t explain

and the cuts

alien
to spoonfed
angel

three teeth
if that
into ceremony / how early

one must be
to not
exist

I was wrong
about the crow
and crow
forgave, still

no s
in psalm

I had the longest dream

you were there and mom
was in your head

our pets had all gone blind

dad was bathing
a baby jesus
in the basket
of a bike

I began to forget
things, the toy

that ate
its young

no name
for what
I name
I’m
the news
I get

–

she couldn’t
bring herself
in life
to talk
to the kids
she had

–

wounded in the whiteness of god,

his brother was a helicopter
they called
tornado

–

a sack
of kittens
the swimmer’s
gold

I had a doll
kept me
from believing
in sunburn, ideas

for the same
church

there is a god
but you’ve more
than one
birthplace

in the not
dream
of deserving
birth

three
beakless
creatures

open
the mother’s
mouth

more
are coming
just

to observe

sister
breathing
on my food
in the church
of the plastic
bag

if the clothes
don’t fit
you’re under
a microscope

his brother’s
dreams
are made
of wax

I held the puppet down
father
he cut
a deeper
ear, hunger

ours
was going

bald

I take every other footprint
to mom’s bedroom
she is there
pointing
a pack of cigarettes
at the television
I am still the age
of our year
together
I’ve yet
save
for the one
son
he sent
to see
god
mom says
there are others
for example
my dad’s
lonely
assailant
there is not a painting
mom
likes more
than beware
of dog
and the healthy
they were cured
to believe
in nothing

last day, 30% off all print books on Lulu with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

/

some poems:

/

[her impressions of the experiment]

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean. the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple. I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

~

[estimations]

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

~

[upheaval]

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree. a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar. mom slips in and out of pregnancy. it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself. you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

~

[no after]

and what would you have me imagine? a change of tense in a tale of abuse. a baby licking the palm of a doll. a spoon. a robot’s broken arm. a chalk outline of a worm. hunger’s tacklebox. our allergic sister’s suicide note. a calf eating its first canary.

it’s trash day in ghost town. mock scar, prop mirror. mom wants to make a footstep. dad a mouse. dad a flower. sister a hand with two tied behind her back. me a sound. brother is on his stomach trying to catch something from a snake. from god. the private life of recognition.

as happiness
abuses
the brain
of a dollhouse
plumber

think
of Ohio
as a bed
above
a restaurant

then
of a man
and a woman
each
trying separately
to have
the baby
god
won’t recognize

that in sleep
can play
pretend

I have a dog waiting for me
when I get off the bus
and a brother
if I put
my trombone
down.

there are ways to be sober
ways
a pace car driver
can save
for a hearse.

the rapture, the afterlife
are both ripe
for reenactment.

dad ain’t said, but will

no person
truly ****
would disguise
blessing. thunder

has done its homework.

dear halloween
I’ve been talking
in Ohio
to gas stations

the first thing it feels
is not again

~

/ and, a note:  30% off all print books on Lulu thru October 10th with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

my most recent is there, titled **depictions of reentry

carrying bread
to thirst
in the small home
of my drugged
companion, swearing

on the length
of ah

that scarecrow
not skeleton
be anatomy’s

mistress

mother talks him down
the shy
shepherd
whose dove
is deaf

father
remembers
food

the devoured
bury
the bored
stone

the rest
is easy

friendless, born

speech, the blank
drawn
in paradise…

the parrot, the bone
left
for madness

/ the baby whose worship returns to put hair on your doll’s chest

/ the time your twin broke stick with a woman at the end of her rope

/ the ring-bearer of silence

we know he’s sick. ya body, ya body.

an angel of nonsense, this dying…

god’s
inability
to memorize…

/ I will say to the maker of doors

your mother
gave birth
standing up

an orange cat
touches
the earth, this

my dad’s
dream…

and this, the nail’s:

a palm print
on the hoarder’s
window

20% off all print books, there, thru October 3rd with coupon code of SAVETODAY

my latest self-published (on demand) Lulu books, as such:

[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from]
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

~

[MOON tattoo]
9.00
114 pages
published March 2016

~

[shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)]
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016

~

[FOUR]
12.00
340 pages
published June 2016

~ this is a combined publication of these four collections: earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from / MOON tattoo / infant cinema / shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems] ~

~

[depictions of reentry]
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016

~

speaking of books, and of talking to myself, I said some things about two recent, and excellent, books of poetry:

Nothing Good Ever Happens After Midnight, Sarah Marcus, GTK Press

thief

I can live knowing it goes missing. but, it being here, toppled from its rightful place…I can’t live knowing there are two. that it has no plural. that I have to say it twice. that I am asked on my deathbed about deathbeds in general.

–

bear

can we talk about bears. no, can you. that’s what I mean. I mean I want to listen. is there a bear I can learn about apart from the others?

–

panic

can we say muscle memory is the orphaned narrative of a bilingual body? that a house is so clean its rooms disappear? can we say home?

book, even?

the empty room released into the wilderness.

–

reader

this book by Sarah Marcus. while you still exist.

“Find a midwife whose name sounds like a spell.” – from Do-It-Yourself

“…Water
finds a way out. When I enter a
room, I locate water.” – from I Didn’t Know

“I research how to remove a body: a strange erasure, an omen.” – from Fetching Water

“Her dismantled den. Her dismantled den.” – from Den of Thieves

~

marshland moon, Eleanor Gray, **** Press

“(it is nothing, is nothing

…and so, where fables began)” – from [Lady’s Slipper]

After reading:

if there is no card

the flowers
are
from loss.

I didn’t know how to end things. I threw a soft doll

at a bullet.

I was trying to be quiet
but silence

it has
a safe word.

The way swimming plays with my shadow. The prop

high-chair.

~

During:

The missing child learns a new word. Not from me. Not that I remember. Our favorite program? A previously ruined nostalgia.

“a nameless sensation which perpetually haunts the body” – from [and then, Monsters]

I have a look I want to give loss.

“I want to say goodbye, I want
time to say goodbye” – from [Skeletal, Furred]

In my dreams I am ugly. In my dreams I am not differently awake.

“and so, what then of
colossal sleep, “ – from [Zero Beauty]

~

Remnant and Root:

“there is no language that can articulate what it is I suffer by, or do not suffer by- like all the sufferings suffers I am…” – from [Inactive Currency]

“/ do I even know of longing / I know of being held / “ – from [Wormwood]

“how do I
…love the very gnat of self” – from [Plox]

“holy, holy the black asterisk of wound
for the child I never was” – from [Languid Limbo]

“ ‘murmur’  I had forgotten the word
ash without meaning, death without purpose”

“-I am
a song, an urn, a stairwell” – from [Susurrus]

~

This is a book. The title, to me, is very alone…and, intimacy, the most distant of permissions.

the insomniac’s apple tree and a pig paler than its own star

the pinky swearing ghost of my rib

the house knows I’ve been sleeping in my car. my son opens an empty fridge. no one in the book has turned on a light. I am dying. I never got to make a habit

of this. I love more

her adopted
clock.

an animal lost in a little church

a hallucinating buzzard

snow
that light
replaced

coming up
we are
with names
for time
machines

a bowl of soup bleeds to death
in the eatery
of my praying
hands

and what would you have me imagine?  a change of tense in a tale of abuse.  a baby licking the palm of a doll.  a spoon.  a robot’s broken arm.  a chalk outline of a worm.  hunger’s tacklebox.  our allergic sister’s suicide note.  a calf eating its first canary.

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree.  a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar.  mom slips in and out of pregnancy.  it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself.  you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

I burn
sticks
for dreaming
dogs

/ forgiveness

you empty
crow

mother, mine, in the footage god used to justify creation.

swallow the egg before it explodes.

I babysat for children whose mothers didn’t want to come downstairs. I was driven home by men so drunk they knew my house like a muscle. the children ate what I made. I taught boys how to fake an illness and girls how to ask for pets. I could change a diaper and smoke at the same time but then it got away.

seeing the cardboard box for which her blood became popcorn

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean.  the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple.  I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

brother Abel
the original
dogsitter.

metal plate
the mirror’s
pearl.

the treehouse and the crucifixion.

sister.

sister she’d overeat

and draw
all night
the adventures
of the subway
driving
egg.

a bird watches my brother eat a parrot

my new diet requires me to have
the same
dream

language is a broom

between the legs of a showered orphan
is a sponge

from the story of her stomach’s exile

***, make your face.

my father returned a clock
hair
fell from
a birthmark…

deaf as a housefire
my brother was *****
in two
tents, he pulled our mom

from a clown car
a tornado
died
in hell

noises the poor can’t make

and mugshots

my lord

a beetle in a sack of eyelashes

a dishwasher’s ice-cube

a costume party
for those
no longer
pregnant

a birdfeeder
weighed
by a church, a fingerprint

carried nowhere

by milk

following a dry spell of imagery

my decoy at the gates of heaven

she remembered
not
his suicide
but her brother’s
cough, how it ruined

not
the scarecrow’s
silence

but the etiquette
of the crucified

her handwriting
knew
it was being
watched

her hair
at night
is going
places

(a fish licks through the ocean)

this is my camera
the salter of dust

in a ******* on fire
the arsonist
fills
the mouth
he is trying
to leave

(it is not hunger that eats the horse)

I am past the age of what
in a former life
I died as, a spoon

is a fork

asleep in the hand of god

simpler, then

the seizure
that set
your father
to music

the baptized
bowl
of your mother’s
hair

the book I brought to burn
blank
as always

the pair deciding which hand
would come between us
which hand
would enter…

I caught the poor mask
sighing
on its own

I am ugly and you are not