in his shorter
life
the father
accepts
a remembered
total
of two
persons:

the dry humper of the drowned.  

the maker
of astronaut
oars.

its mother
has it
born
the day after
it stops
talking

it is the animal
gods
miss

tragedy
to an angel
is

the ghost
of an alien

there’s something about holding the stick and there’s something about throwing it.  two things I can walk to while thinking of how my grandmother lost her first husband and only son to water.  two things I can cough into my mother’s blindfold as my father soberly misses as many trees as he doesn’t.  two silent bodies of dog named after what came.  my son after what came back.

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.

lists* (iii)

with what there is
of my tongue
I think
to reach
the back
of my head

-

televised

offsite, a cat
bathes
its softened
image

lists (iv)

a bruise
on any
visible
child
is

the father’s
jump
on winter


lists (v)

the rare
the black
the eyes
come in threes

the three point line
is the madman
spots
a cigarette

the identity
of the kid
didn’t
beat us up
is

the schoolyard
our church
of arson

as sure as death
does its job
to keep one
from further
dying

I carry

my boy
to bed
where I remove
his remaining
shoe
and am seen
doing so
by my wife
who thinks of me
as one
who acts

in theory
on a thought
to ****
some spider

we both know
we’ve lost

my babysitter’s best friend pins me to the floor with her knees and makes me say the word *** to my *** brother who’s still facing the corner he was put in for kissing a mirror.  in heaven, you don’t have a mouth.  the man who said he’d hurt before letting pain get stuck with a woman

is dying.

between my mother
and her paper
cup
I’ve heard tell
that even sorrow
has a life.

father yells
at dogs, at the necessary

born, at me
in the mirror
to turn

around
get someone
can clean
this up.  father calls

light
the unspilled
blood
of the god
we're in.  he suffers on his path

the suppressed
amnesia
of faghood.  being gay

has long been
being open
to the possibility
he’s not.

accepted
an illustration
for her father’s
book
of madness
called

a shortage
of recent

absence

outside the room you believe god to be trapped in, cry

or don’t.

father smokes to make something disappear.  he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected.  when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil.  mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears.  terrify no one your childhood knows.

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.

at her back
the boy
is thinking
of a letter
and not
of the ghost
his finger’s
from.  the mother’s guess

is early
but correct.  always

this sobbing
at the base
of things.

i.

when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees

ii.

homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to

iii.

eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire

I pull them on
as the pair of gloves
I haven’t worn
around a baby.

I hear
behind me

(in the voice of someone
imaginably
younger
than those
who make
short work
of god)

a stone
being named
repeatedly.

*** is both
the girl
and where
she was bitten.

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.

we draw god’s attention away from what we’re having by showing a short film shot by your youth in which a godlike figure creates the world’s first womanizer.  we kiss and our kiss goes from being medically fragile to being medically nuanced.  instead of paying our water bill, we fill the tub with sugar and wait open-mouthed for what can dig its own grave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3qVTWRwxw

I am trying to lure my brother from the woods with a semi-flat basketball and a fallen wasp nest.  at home, the neighbor girl he has a crush on is using our water.  the first time he disappeared like this, she wore my mother’s bathrobe and called his name all the way to junior until her voice went.  her note is the oddest thing I’ve not reread.  

there is smoke coming out of your father.

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.

the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew.  her insomnia

has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill.  her milky eyed

-

husband
revs a tow truck
to death

in a heavy fog.  it is possible, humanly

-

possible

-

there’s nothing
to see here.  that her god

-

is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s

spirit

-

animal.

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.  

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail.  told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born.  I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good.  had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.

notes from my brother include moments of outage.  typo, testament.  I’ve never experienced anything so awful as talking.  during *** I pretend I am a surge protector.  my death is over.  I slip into god and it’s painful bad.  sorry, I took the ******* my phone had in it and made him write this.  back to god I feel I’m praying him through the first break-up he remembers.  headlines rip me the **** outta mom.

sisters,

I am standing in my dream house with a fork from my real.  my best friend is overseas shooting lame the animals of those who eat his religion.  on the lam from white flight, my brother is holed up in an apartment blocking for a staged photograph of a fake baby that shrieks as if it’s on location.

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.

mother is too far gone to start small.  she is, as they say, pinpointing the outcome of a child blessed with field vision.  I am not my father.  my father is one of three men shortlisted for your sister’s pregnancy by the cult viewership of a propaganda film that showed my brother’s brain sticking out of a blanket.  my father brings my brother like a knife to a knife fight as heaven and hell receive different parts of the same bomb.  with another word for word, I have a woman on the inside who at mine will recover god from god’s plan and your daughter’s kite from a manhole.

immediately after I left my baby sister in good hands to deejay for my brother’s above average loneliness, she was struck in the head by a rock so small she thinks it is still looking for her brain.  my brother blames me for this as often as he doesn’t.  he knows it is common for my sister to get ahead of herself.  when she is not telling us about the people of heaven, she’s telling them about god.

for David Smith*

as I wait for what this painting reminds me of, a stickman with a short straw works my mother’s head injury into his teleplay of snowfall and crow.  asleep, you must be in the ambulance outside my father’s church.

it doesn’t take a genius but it does take my brother to see the frog’s been tortured.  he splits my friends into two groups, telling one he has a month to live and the other that I’m dying.  he pulls me aside and asks if I’m up to finishing what he’s currently calling The Mourner’s Guide to Interrogation which began *a month is a long time to the instantly bored.

I slash myself to recreate the map of shortcuts your mind blanks on.  under sky, some doctor induces the angel our mother became.  two boys, while still in our underwear, are witnessed putting their heads together without knowing it is okay to be so by any father whose madness works from home.  hell, the baby with its ears could be saying look at this ******* flower.

****, kid, your poems.  I took a page from your father’s thesaurus and played scrabble with god.  I came back knowing your name as code for omission.  your mother didn’t break a chair over my back because the chair didn’t break.  I worked it off in a building from the wrong twin city.  after that, my homeless jailer became your brother’s landlord.  your brother he played citizen’s parole to my arrest.  borrowed my hat on account it wasn’t full of money.  like most men, we were in love.  he had a note he’d written that would appear before a big fight it said don’t let my suicide beat you to death.

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.

and she was nice to her kids not because she loved them but because not a single one of them was predicted to reach an age high enough to become an only child.  and she held on to coat hangers and to memories of pressing outlet covers into place.  and she lynched dolls claiming they’d be lanterns for god when god got brave enough to move again.  and what went on without her went on to cheat death or her brother out of his massacre.

the man lost his voice threatening to smack my mouth off.  the woman unplugged the tv.  in its own way, the game was on.  it was the night jesus went from being indifferent to being abstract.  the night someone’s dog let the ear of another from its mouth .  as for the baby on our doorstep, the same someone brought it food.

my mother she applies a silence to her lips.  I don’t hear her go but can see that she is gone.  my brother falls asleep trying to remember the last time someone carried a tune.  the movie of his life is left by yours.

I am at the tail end of being but a child.  aloud, ghost sounds to me like guest.  the dog looks to be eating its paws with its hands and will do so until my hands are gone.  influenced by the simple living of trauma, mother’s handwriting emerges to document itself.  brother he is on the dreamy side of becoming the product of a his-and-hers overactive realism.  in his own words, father is moved by one thing and by what went on in it.  a shadow picking up litter, I love him both.

but for this letter, the word is silent.

you are not yet
my maker.

his observations
exhibit
decline.  hers

display
animals
that forgive.

everything buried
is buried
in god.

the brain
as it designs
a plotless
thing.

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist.  I am alone.  I am brief stay of bullet.  god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process.  when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside.  I miss mom.  gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.

I pocket the white root of my enemy’s fantasy and bribe my father with money for a lottery ticket.  I hear god say yes it will be the god of all.  it’s a good day and on such my mother swallows her brother’s morning cigarette and tries to get someone to kiss her neck.  on such my sister wonders deep down if her doll is wearing enough lotion.  I think to flee but know fleeing looks on paper too much like what it is.  the skull is the grave of the brain, the skull is the boat…  if other houses catch fire it’s because ours is done burning.

I have gone without god to see the hands of my hands.  

I tell you they were there.  

I tell you
I am the same
distance
from

my eyes.  

christ, kid.  

the present
alone
takes three
ghosts.

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect.  she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other.  both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen.  sister gags and it makes him think about gagging.  now no more, these were the heart of the note.

says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.

says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.

says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window.  sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.

as my face
will one day
correct
my body
I expose

the elements
to my
ugliness  

-

my son is my search

history

-

headlights
when headlights
emerge
emerge
from a period
of non
worship

-

(wave your arms
long enough
you’ll have sticks
for arms)

-

they don’t  
happen
in my
lifetime
the terrible
things
I’ve done