being ours.  being her memory’s
unsent
reply.

warming his hands above a baby’s crib.

massaging the lame leg of a dog at rest.

accidentally crushing the pack of cigarettes in his right shoe.

I think of god
stopping by
the storage unit
the home
of his son’s
cross
and I try
to remember
for god
the four
digit
code
that he might
better
follow
a different
melancholy
thought-

for example,
how he
will not
in his
lifetime
see

in snow
his footprint

but alas
I am
as unable
to remember
something
I’ve never
known
as I am
unable
to be sick
like my son
is sick, yet

there are times
I pinch
myself
in front
of my kids
as if my body
has its own
family
I’m not allowed
to meet

in the midst of its most moving performance, the house courts a mother’s indifference to the make-believe called to blind its only son.  the old, so serenely full of chaos, are elsewhere.  a father communes with god.  together, they form a placebo of distance.  a room without a mirror attracts a room with.  my brother

(a suicide
watch  
on steroids)

wants his face to leave a mark.

the baby’s appetite for its birth is jaw-dropping.  in store for god, we have nothing in the house.

being born
puts the end
in sight.

within reason, I offer shelter
to bowls
of my father’s
cereal.

mother
she is pained
to the point
of philosophical
pain.

we are
to god
scare

tactics.  and to angels

we are post
war
angels.

we are not sad, yet
there is sadness
in how
we thrice
touch
a rebuked
abstraction.

my son is four
plus
hours
old.

his age in Ferguson, Missouri.

his age in Cleveland, Ohio.

his age
in the church
of a mother’s
palindrome.

-

in life, I obsessed over the volume of an alien language.  luckily,

film
had the presence
of mind
to speak
to my brother’s
body.

-

son

don’t pray.  make.

-

something
that could pass
for a gun.

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  he is so happy to have a listener, his microphone could be the ant I lost my voice telling.

the boy
relieving himself
in my front yard
thinks
he’s *******
into three
bowls
of soup.

his blackness
a hole
the earth
refuses.

my neighbor
is a white man
whose toy
phone
works.

what statement
can I make
that isn’t
a cup
of tea
gone
cold, the doll’s

version
of a surrounded
star?

my mother’s pregnancy comes to me in a dream.  the scarecrow that has me diagnose its doctor as having attention deficit disorder is the same scarecrow every time.  the soldier eats her camouflaged meal.

due to
a propensity
in each
to apply
face paint
while disoriented

my father
routinely
changes barbers.

because I believe
in the apocalypse
I swallow cologne
to silence
my blood.

it should be harder
to be happy.

I give you my sister

who has tried to flush
her prosthetic
nose.

the shopkeeper’s wife is named after the town she was taken from.  I work for no one.  when I tell her this, she gives me a gallon of milk she’s reported stolen.  three days pass in a house known for the loudness of its phone.  I meet a stranger in a park of suspects.  bread is the main concern.

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today.  above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having.  we do our jigsaw of darkness.  clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

my father
is like my father
on acid.

mother, she cleans
house
by hanging
a painting
of a floor
in the room
where the floor
exists.

the dog
is an outside
dog
dangerous
to some.

god’s alright
but escalates
quickly.

historically, I am the boy
my presence
requested, the great

stranger
who prolongs
the body
of my birth
and death.

this is Max.  the Max I know when I am escorting into the city nobody you’re close to.  Max is a replica of a doll I donated to a shelter for the baby robots that wandered in and out of a world I was young enough to change.  Max is here because here I can tend to the unrecognizable things that have assumed the forms their inventor failed.

a hobbyist
who impersonates
god

attempts
to make
from scratch

a parasite.

-

I fail
not her

her nakedness.

-

she is not sad, she is climate.

-

in a sense,

it doesn’t take long
for the lifeless
body
to latch
onto
the idea
death
had
of a baby

slowed
to a crawl.  

-

if you must, harm, harm only

the touch
she projects.

we came here
to create
the devil
the bogeyman
beat us
to.

despair.

despair is the wine
we age
imagery
with.

my boy
body
was at
the high
end
of the seesaw
when my brother
was shot.

as a date of death
might differ
from the date
pronounced

my mother
starred
in rumors.

in the valley
referred to
as the church
of aggressive
amnesiacs

a family
of pickpockets
gathers
for a group
picture

only to find
the single
use
camera

forgotten

and the boy
responsible

missing...

I’ll dream
(when I
die)
of all
the sleep
I didn’t

outside
of mother

get

as an adolescent, he toyed with the idea that he was a vision of god’s and set himself on a path to befriend the less conversational bodies of fractured families but found it was too much like giving candy to the poor.  his disenchantment carried him into my early twenties where I became his father for an amount of time shorter than the left to right the eyes employ to take note of the baby often placed at the beginnings of horror movies.  his mother lost the use of her elbows trying to swing him away from the mouth his sorrow came with.  her plainness landed him on his first victim’s radar.  when we love him at the same time, our love reaches the society of secret special effects.

I can’t speak
to how
the form
my father’s
form
mimics

is able
to take
from lightning

a licking
while whaling
on the snout
of what
was born
muzzled
then sewn
for safekeeping
into the belly
of a punching

bag…

(I am not
the one
my meditation

needs)  violence

is my brother’s
music

the dog returned and the doll I’d accused of eating it was wiped down by my father who then gave it to my mother to give to me once I’d stopped being the baby I cried like while the new doll was disappeared until it could be properly hidden from the sister conceived in its absence

history is a timeline of appetite.  I have rubber bands at the ready for when my mother yawns.  I cover my baby brother like a grenade.  he was born without the potential for further muscle tone.  father calls what I do context.  I appear like a bruise into a delayed game of hot potato.  my sister’s hands are an oven mitt’s dream.  I know you’re a hitchhiker and your girlfriend a cannibal but here we **** our thumbs.

she drinks to the image I have of myself as a naked man on roller skates who continues to have the fistfight he’s late for.  she drinks to toast the pain she says she stole from a pregnant unicorn during a longer than usual drought of immersion.  people keep us together because they are bored.  when sober, she returns to them the delirious boy who on his bedsore back carried a pair of skis throughout the only entire summer of his youth.  from her father’s memory she eats for the both of us without touching her food because her mother was the bulimic god could taste.

the room is no secret.  my native tongue is the blade of a found knife.  in the tackle-box my father left me are all the parts I need for a dove.  I am trying to make blood.  my father had a robotic arm nothing could land on.  I have for an apron an infant.  some of the room is getting on my face.  some of my face on my hands.

the boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar.  his mother is somewhere a girl set to play the moon in her school’s version of talent night.  his sister is giving birth so calmly her midwife is a male blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold I wore to fish.  his brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke.

even now
I am not
convinced
that I
have formerly
tried

to cultivate
an addiction
to loss

death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.  upstairs, your mother puts a hole in her hair hoping the lord of the attic will take her for a tea kettle.  outside, a boy paces on his father’s land to mock the dark with what it cannot do.  trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud.  in your recollection they are the horns of an empty beast.

me, reading from my self-published collection 'Choice Echo'.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuqCv_ey1-0

sample poem from collection:

fantasy

the cyclops dies having never heard you recite the last two letters of the alphabet. it’s 1983 and you’re all of seven. hearing beautifully gets you slapped for hearing things. you kick your frog legs on a swing going nowhere and try to touch your mind with your forehead. from a stolen bicycle you quote future passages written by a lover half your age. your pity has the lifespan of a voodoo doll. sound is the word of man god disobeys.

he beats the mother and calls it practice.  the washer breaks and he throws the clothes into a full tub and stomps on them while smoking a cigarette.  he provokes my image to send him back to his rightful nose.  my thick skull is high on my spit.

this my lonely tower with no one in it.  this the soup as it burns the tongue of a man on stilts.  this my boy’s breath in a cup of snow.  this the thorn of a mother’s depth.  this my patch of artificial grass.  this the melancholy itch of a traveling hand.  this my lowest number of dead.  this the high brother who cries in a satellite named for his *****.  this my drug use.  this the videocassette from god’s garage.  this my cloud of discontinued muscle.  this the pink hammer with matching nail.  this my mouth on a snake-bitten snake.  this the quote.  hell is a fire sale.

the zero courage
it takes
to be
in pain.  or to be

for that matter

born.  it has devoured

by now
my son’s
vow
of silence.  but he had

didn’t he

a moment
while the animal

ate.

they share an abyss.  gum is rare.  gum is the gum in god’s mouth.  they smoke in two places a stroller can be pushed toward.  they ask without question what is in me for it.  one hand is for writing on the other.  this is the hoot molestation can be and these the shapes the clouds obscure.

I am at the beginning of my rope.  my son has run out of nostalgia.  in photos, I look most like one who’s forgotten everything.  my son disagrees and says I look like I’ve seen a ghost.  I think this is our first fight.  we take it outside where none of our punches land.  it isn’t long before we are throwing rocks into a darkness that’s just arrived.  such rocks come back to us in birds, or as.

when brushing them, she asks god
for help
her teeth
are puking.

later, when caught
smoking,
she says
she can’t
keep
from wanting
the cigarettes
to be
shy.

because of who she isn’t
I’ve had to baptize
many
dolls.

the woman wore goggles and held a fork.  

I was pushed
up a hill
in a stroller
by a lover
of snow.

in her books of bookish loss
her knees

are a nightmare
had
by the fork.

her man
shovels
his madhouse
meal.

blow-up dolls, those

using drugs
to dream.

anyone
on stilts
but leave
the stilts
for god.  on that

note, any child

earmarked
for stilt
removal.  

a twin.

the pregnant
and the men
in the dark.

I am in danger of not becoming a statistic.  my heaven is a long line of people standing beside each other and stepping forward in succession to say let there be light.  touch is my sense of touch applying for a transfer.  I have lost my wife to the smallest darkness.  it tells her to surround a baby’s bottle.  my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.  a water fountain from a ghost town.

in plainclothes my uncle claims he’s a disappearing clown.  says he’d take me to the park but boy god borrowed my pigeons.  we’re eating in a stalled car the grapes he’s pulled from behind the ear I didn’t get from my mom.  when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.  grief is the herd my sadness trails.

the clock in my brother’s room
has a visitor
in the form
of a tattoo
artist
who believes
sleep
is a brand
of insomnia.

my brother is here
because he swallowed
an ant
with his heart.

he wants a doctor
with snow
on her knees.

mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth.  I was in her purse when she was taken.  I don’t know how it is I know things.  bones in the stomach of god.

they met after years of sleeping in the same bed

like two peeping toms
in a haunted
time machine

not played
it is having
a vision
you cannot
see

-

someone knows the someone

who says aloud

piano

-

into poverty’s
overthought
ear

god
puts death

-

I am
than pity
sooner

to my son

-

in every gravestone
a dog
of stone

lazes
loyally

as word
choice

skips

-

rope

-

in one

window, a shopworn
stroller
with a more
cerebral
destination
than decay

exemplifies
the seller’s
push

to mirror…

when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent.  for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut.  I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood.  instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company.  mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach.  apocalypse came and came.  the act was the act’s debut.

the mechanics of the beheading begin in isolation.

exiled from what it bumps into, a form
aches
for scarecrow.  

     my mother’s dream doesn’t burn.

is it okay
to rename
a lost
dog?

above
a ramshackle
transmitter

is my father’s
bright
mind.  

the angel’s mouth is a mouth to feed.

a man
packs a baby
in snow.

he is born without stones in his hands.  she waits with him outside the mother.  the mother is their belief her history supports.  speech is a passing back and forth of names dogs don’t have.  before they desired stones, they’d egg the front of my jeans.  the pair

I wore.

I go into the garage
just before bed
and overturn
what is my version
of a rowboat.

by morning
the man on top of me
is made of dirt.

her mask is not god
but godlike
in that it has
no ears.

it is behind us, now,

the telling

that had
god
being sentenced
to heaven
for tracking
his own
paranoia.  

it is with her, now,

the little
bundle

blessing
of nerves.

up ahead
the women
are bathing
the stray
that bathed
a bullet.

it is lost, now,

the black egg
once rolled
by an unattended
populace  
to the front

of a parade
where
as a boy
I dressed as a bird, tore off

my beak
to smoke.

after the standoff, god calls me a rookie.

the injured
disperse
to form
a language
I don’t
speak.

belief
becomes a remark
I make
to a mirror.  my hymn

critiques
the immortal’s
wardrobe.  

I am alone.  my son
is from the future
his illness
promotes.