to my most disabled boy-

the girl’s name
we couldn’t
decide on.

to the curled woman
smoking her last
in the photo
she’s brushed from-

baby yours, or baby mine, how important
it is
we focus.

the parents he doesn’t believe in tell him he is god.

I ask him
if it’s true.  

for your own good,
two people meet in person after person.

convinced of its shadow,
the heart
beats.  

I ask
before I ask
again.  the holiness

of my disrepair
belongs to a city
where none are killed
by my son

for being
possible.

I will be pumping gas into a make of car I call off-white when a passerby of guessable hostilities won’t know enough to ask if it’s my dog coming dazed for every one of its legs down the road at me like at a spot it senses I’ve disappeared near and I’ll have to agree with my mind it’s the **** dog for sure and it’s not far from where my boys are huddled in a borrowed blanket smelling smoke and I gather it won’t be long before the dog is nothing more than its best instinct so I let the lever and reach through the space where a passenger should be blowfishing on a window for my last gallon of milk to pour on the car like a rehabilitated pyro to give that dog something to see and something to lick.

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

I will have my own brand of insignificance.

-

to prepare for this character, I meant to gather household items I thought would together be helpful in making the sound of a strange woman saddled with an abundance of me time spanking the daughter of her distant but as yet unrevealed relative in a toy store but instead I was overcome by a pain much like the pain a man compares to childbirth and as such I slowed myself long enough to fashion from three sons a triangle with which I woke my wife.

-

you shoot yourself, it doesn’t matter where, but only if you see a homeless person, it doesn’t matter where.  

if you have a job, you’re issued a gun.

instead of the *** talk
I play for my boys
a song
that says
****
while they
bleep themselves
into the seeing
of a thing
thought to be
a fear
of apples
when in fact
it’s the worm
they’ve not
witnessed-

the worm
their strong
stomachs
are based
on-

the same worm
that turns
into a spider
spinning
cotton
for nightmare
the one
where father
leaves
for places
part
Palestine
to be closer

to a rock

we recorded, badly, birdsong.

we lit sparingly.

we scissored
cloth
for puppet
rain.

we asked
was having
a boy
the trap
we’d set
for the wonder
he’d come
without?

as always, we ate
from a basket.

our neighbors have gone underground.  I hear beneath me the beatings my son wants to answer.  there is no way to keep quiet but alas we are addicted to betterment.  bike lock and wheelchair.  the outsider’s visual aid device.  things invented by no one for the housebroken all.  my daughter puts words in my mouth and I use them.  my younger self is an alert.  think now of what you will say.  address the secret responsibility of having mice.  my wife goes next door often and comes back with the food she left with.  we eat for a week.  we blame each other for being so close.  our visitor has no ticket.  as the visitor explains, the ticket is god.  few pregnancies fit the bill.

as I am not haunted by the tormented shallow,
I am not afraid.  a jump scare
does nothing
for depression’s
heartbeat.  
memories of abuse
are not
abuse.  I recall you turned in
early
and the dream
wasn’t ready.  the blindfold
is patience
that may or may not
arrive.  the stick
a stick.

here is my son asking me if I love a piece of bread.

I understand it as his speechless inquiry
outside of the eating we do
and into
love.

you have heard, or are about to hear
of the boy who said nothing
for his first five years
because everything
to that point
was fine.

sometimes the boy is a girl
to whom god
also
speaks.

a man with a vacuum cleaner
meaning to knock
on a door
is possessed
perhaps
by the heat
of day
to instead
answer
the door
(while)
behind him
a girl
wearing
the hat
of a dead
witch
is carried
up the street
on the shoulders
of a boy
whose bald head
is empty
(above

it all)
a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark

the amount of thought
given to locating
the secret
mind.

I am on count eight
of ten-

ten, the future.

I call your hiding place
water.

-

of course you dream of falling-

those toys
are the toys
of god’s
children.

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor.

-

let there be
all

the light.

-

I’ve never seen

a dead body, a pair
of handcuffs-

but don’t ask
the wristcutter’s
ghost.

-

I have the words to tell you about my son.
I hate that he needs me
to take
nothing.

-

a member of my search party
is rumored to have left
the lucky gal

a one pet home.

not as common
is the dream
stuck
in the man.

not all wounds
report back.

I’d look for my father
if I knew where
to begin.

with my mother
it’s like my mother never happened.

I am the man whose missing woman
was bedridden
first.

I depend on my safety.
I worship a sleep that worships.

my brother feels no pain.  a characteristic
he blames
on my sister’s
begging
to be interrogated.

not on speaking terms with a former self,
the dream is god.

On having a secret mother

the boy is lacing up his right shoe
when he sees
the string
tied
to his middle
finger
and wonders
how asleep he was
when it happened-

(being forgotten
  is a lot like
  being forgotten
  by) harm, that purple balloon

lowered into
then surrounded
by

the inactive
construction site
of the world


On my father being gay

so you know
what it is
you have

(felt,
there is)

an emoticon

at the end
of this
book


On suicide

you are further than I
in your worship
of the slow
vehicle
that carries
praise
back and forth
from appearing
to reappearing

god (how else)
to bully

what would
wipe you
clean
of body

language…


On foreclosure

any chance, no,
of improving
upon
my impression
of god.

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat.

wheelbarrows, wagons.

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I am
rowing.

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

no cats
on cat
island.


On libido

the previous verse was a poor man’s bible.  like wildfire a fondness for appropriate discipline spreads.  one scarecrow means practice, two scarecrows mean parentage.  a third is your father’s failed garden of baby teeth.  is, by definition, is.  I are

motherless.  what mother doesn’t know doesn’t worry.  many spiders came on the wind and a few were swept into mouths briefly opened by age. what made woman did not make the disappearing girl.  flashing back to a scene that’s not there or forward to one dependent on space, pain arrives

in memoriam.


On memory*

for all the showing, one would think the only things born were eyes.

when lord
says
or lords
say

this is the body*

I tend  
in unison
to trail
behind
my voice

as if

I could make my own
remember the anesthesia
it underwent

to intervene.

the yellow sea will take you away and the yellow sea will bring you back.  in between the coming and the going, your father will speak to your mother about the tales her brother tells.  the one about your father being born to carry a ladder and later in the same your mother born as well and with her an extra shadow.  the two about her brother himself insisting to multitudes how on its mother’s command a tadpole swam into his ear.  the unfinished few about who I am.  the thrice changed account of the man with three hearts just like Jesus.  the one he hasn’t told you about the visitor that eats tongue but is never hungry which is also the one about how we know what it eats.  the story of two men hating the same woman over and over until they can close on nothing but frog-like delicacies.  your favorite where he becomes your father and becomes too sad to release your least.  the hated woman whose stomach is a black tire, the bits of which are found here in the meekest bull and there in a massive fish.

because I can cool his head with mine.  

-

he clucks, I cluck.  we are deep into our clucking.

-

from space.  the same way it comes to animals.

-

that other thing is between you and god.

-

item:  a nicotine patch, from father’s arm, in the event you find yourself playing with dolls.

-

item:  we don’t have that kind of time.

-

object sadness, not yet coined, is a peephole I can’t put my finger on.

-

colloquialism is more than extra love for the hatchet.

-

there’s nothing left to swallow the tip of his tongue.

upon hearing
that a man
has entered
the ocean
my first
impulse
is to be

off the top
of my head

as noiseless

as the suicidal
gender
scholar

whose tremorless
hands
had feelings
for other

hands…

my second impulse is to be as speechless as my third
and my fourth

combined…

     and my last
is my breath

get yourself hired
being sad
for my wife.

that you’ll report
to no one
is our
secret.

I’m horrible with nicknames.

I’m horrible with a mammoth
white dog
not called

snow-fort.

send balled-up
paper
animals and planes
into a felled
by father

flooded
treehouse.

get yourself on video
being sad, or taking
a ball
from a ballplayer.

be my wife
in spirit, be

grief and the cloak
grief

is not.

get thee to silent
fireworks
above a tipped
canoe.

here she is after being kidnapped from her cage.

it doesn’t matter what you write to a soldier
overseas.  I can’t wait

to lose faith
in your arm.

my little ghost kept its baby.

I repeat
I know why
the bizarre boy
stims.

to be alive is to be monitored by loss.

in this, your missing dad is like a father to me.

on holiday, privately
asking
if autism
is a trend

a sister
can be seen
beside herself
as one

whose turn
it wasn’t
to feed

the water

as a first timer, or
a satan

in the moments
after
a different
pill’s
return

father gives himself
the once
over

to fraternize
as before
with the born
again

permanence is upon us.

one who paces.

predator
that I never took
for god.

-

on the inside
the predator
I attacked
personally

became the world
where the window
into the world
of hazing
opened.

-

in infancy
I possessed
a belonging.

in trying to be what to them she represents, she holds a pair of scissors while looking for her hair.  she is my mother and then she is my mother again in a car with my mother and my son.  the car in front of us goes left of center and said son speaks on the beating he’s getting from the driver of the drifting car.  I’m worried at the sanity of his intelligence but am also driving.  mother is taking his statement with lipstick and a wet notepad.  below me, a whole populace splits on the given permanence of surreal or ethereal when both are equally inexact.  if god needs to beat one body, I’d rather he be this down-to-earth not to use that of the son in my car.  I can’t lengthen my life with all the speaking and the writing and mother can taste it.  her silence introduces a third car as caveat and in it the belief I’m shortened by.

anomalies, brother.  we are not surprised.  I speak for myself when I say it is beyond me how this is déjà vu.  

-

my kid is a television show.  a sorcery no environmental issue you create

can create.  I am going to have

a brood.

-

forgiveness, forgiveness tracking.

father’s warning
was be
careful
them crows
is as smart
as a whip.

mine
was for my brother
said to have
a thing or two
left
to shrink-wrap
in the ****** bin.

mother’s was
twofold
and babied
itself
as forgotten.

the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.

in daylight, a removed light bulb is what I have on my shadow.  I draw attention to myself with god’s health.  he or she wouldn’t think twice about holding my own child over me.  having a disabled son puts one in the position of hearing of your sister dating an undercover cop who for two weeks spoke with a lisp.  it’s a leap but it can be argued that the right eye can touch the left.  the brain is a hymn unto itself.  I arrive quickly at the fact of my other.  there is another whose ear is exile.

I open out from another’s dream.  I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it.  my female wife- this much is the same.  I’ve been here before.  nothing happens.  she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news.  this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building.  the heat that gets to others is god.

the fragile boy shepherds his pulse
among bigger bodies and into
the bruise and into the bruise’s
unkissable bone, that grey
area where holstered
his invisible gun dispenses
with metaphor and metaphors from
a pep rally
held in theory
in a stranger’s garage
where his brother’s
accidental birth
expired in his brother
who himself
was part bruise
part cream
added to the bruise
by a father whose lightning
stormed
from the hip of god
during a dream
had by a full
gallon of milk
mother held steady
for hours, back to back,
above the form
of it unstirred

smoke-rings taunt the copycat spirit known as the ghost of my child’s mouth.  on top of that, the crib is giving me grief.  I click the remote at my wife’s body as she compares herself offline to nothing god can search.  the book of frenzied commonplace is stolen by the brother wearing the shoes I gave him to lift his mother at a later

from an earlier
time.  martyr starts before it ends.  a bald man with a comb tries hard to make it happen.  this cracks me so I have to speak on the pregnancy or bust atmosphere not in my house.

amnesia occurs as often as god.  we speak as one to one who puts a value on value.  we assign an indirect loneliness to pregnancy and present ourselves to prison populations as a way to avoid hitting the pregnant.  like you, I become my own pillow when back in the school days of my tornado.  yes I place myself in a song and you place the song.  reading remains a new form of plagiarism.  I am super psyched about the babies.  I don’t want to mess up their traumatic bonding.  hypervigilance is a thing.  like you, I know I’m close to what I’m ghost of.

return won't have me

I don’t have any last words that aren’t interrupted by one parroting my father’s belief that god was a temp.  had it been hell and not hell abandoned when it began to grow in our minds.  as created, satan couldn’t live with himself.  without piecing together how it fell into his lap, we found his umbrella, it wouldn’t open, and we did our rain dance on the earth.

a distraction that doesn’t explode.  I’d say children but nostalgia is still a child.  head, I need a volunteer.  god’s reply in the form of a sext.  a brick taken for a sponge by a bout of sleepwalking in someone I can shower.

:church

entering the body after a stroke


:milk

my shadow made of grass


:cow

dumbly regarding another’s art


-


:radio

grandpa cursing outside then inside the barn


:distance

two babies on their backs, one a boy and one a boy, their mother
says bingo


:pyramid scheme

I am sleeping
on you, on your
insomnia


:protest

a man without sin and his two ******* birds


:unison

proving
your half
is also

unicorn


:crow

we don’t use the crow


-


:infatuation

what a knee has for its other


:owl

pillow for which the night has long been looking


:yawn

moaning
into mother
my father’s

     swimmer’s
ear


:high-dive

or a very private room


-


:***

two
as if they fear
a third


:body language

writing about yourself with others


:the future

every now and then
one is given
now and then


:suicide

might I record
this moment?


-


:abortion

beneath the highest pop fly on record


:divination

found myself alone in a ******* *******


:epitaph

easier if I imagine you are clothed


:angels

any mystique
surrounding
  a small town
   search party


:blood

this ******* from the reader of my palm


-


:terrorism

trading
back and forth
the dead
before they are
and after


:pilgrimage

one’s ****** recovery of a native alienation


:novitiate

I know my mother by the back of her hand


:drone

I don’t believe
in being
attacked


-


:chthonic

a prayer asking god to brush your teeth

for sale by owner.  rooms the rooms where nothing happened.  outside had been for so long a black boy shot.  a certain, rote by now, blood draw.  during which was brought the inability to dream.  having come so far, drop of rain.  heart in a mirror.  father talking but not until my bare heels touch the pool’s bottom.  the first pass of a delivery drone over a likeness of mother.  to the church of the secret church.  nightly upkeep of cross.  torture **** as paper cut.  in conversation, my medical supplier.  no one enters a burning house to retrieve the word of god and she’s not poor enough to have a baby.  to self-healing.  the gaming profile a ghost logs into.  a syringe plucked from a lucky raccoon.

it is not my detail to bedevil that she had on her person three library books when she vanished.  this word vanished like a **** toy most kids get for not shutting up.  then again I can’t even pronounce half the people in Mosul.

pulling on its teeth even though it’s not a baby anymore.

a sheep-dog
and its troubled
sleep.

my father
in his father
marooned.

white fish / yellow when / I shower
in salt.

their little nets are nets.

father the writer couldn’t write a character wasn’t naked.  when asked by none other than himself the writer he’d say he hadn’t time to describe the clothes being worn.  he’s like this drunk that’s been toilet-papered in a small ohio town on a former friend’s front step okay being called by boys a dumb mummy and by girls a bad bride.  son in a toppled but long since safe train car is putting bite marks on the inside of each wrist then smelling them because he doesn’t understand politics and because he wants to be found.  mother is homely and what’s left of a surgery is keeping her asleep under the newly navigated hands of ghost who’d come to fix the reception and stayed.  I am in a better place but from a room where I saw a reddened ear move high across a white wall and stop midway to become a magnet, mine, shaped like an ear.  we are currently enchanted by the rise and fall of a kite some sister flies to realize the forehead of god.

the fore-
cross
becomes head
with blank
look
the smallest
blank
look
trying to swim
from a face-

my tongue is heavy
in the dream
like a burden-

the crosses
flanking
become shoulders
of man
afraid
that I
entirely
fear-

but there is a tunnel
dreamt into
mother
hillside
that is not
finished
that from
I emerge
where from
I went
to confess
myself
attached.

to encourage
the unionization
of stereotypes
in YA
fiction,

join my father.

for money, add punctuation
to a vandal’s
prose.

women are not soft, but
I think
anyway
it’s true.

on paper,
proofread god.

we share
an evacuation
process.

there is nothing in this
or that
world.

I am what’s left to say
to the saying.

it’s as close
to fight
heaven.

a mother

as if
merely
on leave
from that place
she never
once a mother
was

begins to write
stories

populated
by illiterate
men
and men
meeting
to her knowledge
in a misplaced
fog
that god
recalls
having
on hand
might his people
blame
randomly
his wife
on a childhood
disappearance
which exists

as a recollection
of sorrow
at birth
in a town
of vandals
and caricatures
with no need
for immediate
representation

could be
it’s the baptism
of the fussiest
unrecorded
drifter.

could be two trees
one threatens
to separate.

could be microwave
or box
of resurrection.

could be
it’s mine
the shoe
before I went
to prison.

could be
an austerity measure
this disabled
son of god.

could be god
had no part.

the past doesn’t know what hearing is.  it sounds in sick animals we won’t eat.  father, at the hill’s bottom, waits for a marble.  impossible, but we’ve somehow stopped the spread of presence.  a boy is a moment.  not any but the one before he finds his mother’s **** stash.  alarmist.  satan has one ear weighs nothing.  on eggshells, the future joins the scarecrow’s timid young.  grandfather had a pipe he smoked and a dog he couldn’t beat.  grandfather has a pipe he can’t reach and a black man he means to set upon a woman in a prison yard.  god is a tent for the wounded but ain’t no one come by.

she responded to her critics by word of mouth.


never utter anything more
than you can burn.


she carried baby dead to baby dead yet.
she had questions.


never be pretty when you’re sad
nor repeatedly
document.


things have been pretty killed
up in this *****.


let there be god said the heat
the baby
lost.


never is a lamp
unto the world
enough lamp.


beaten silly
this it
becomes god.

my quote is a missing person.  I was taken from my home by two hoods I presumed were men and they walked me to a place new to them, old to me.  there they argued over the god I had told tell no one.  I strolled home as one does when stalking the unmanned spotlight of one’s own death.  I thought at first this would be its story as without it I am nowhere’s only sponsor.

Adam had no memory of his first wife.  as created, he would look at Eve all day and feel nothing.

-

the vacation house was found to be owned by another family.  in it, my mother resisted arrest.      

-

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left.  he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

-

God created the world because he couldn’t do it on his own.  ah, note to self, *******.  person is place.  I might’ve killed a man had I not been poking holes in a poem by Barton Smock.  

-

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  he says he feels horrible in the back of his head and wants me to take a look.  he says I don’t know what darkness is.  before I can play doctor he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  the outline of the story is off site.  in the opening scene brother recalls that a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.

-

the head itself was an afterthought.  had god not allowed the soul to come up for air, beauty would have been spared our invention.

-

a single mother is a twofold mirage.  please argue above her quietly.  her legs collapse.  her child comes first.

-

your sister is the only person I’ve recorded to have been born without a gift.  I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal the size of which escapes me.

-

I am aware a sparrow exists.  not in a spiritual vacuum.  people are another hell.  

-

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here.  at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet.  to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

rainfall as heard
on
or in
the house
of the child
sinner.

crying of lord.

the deep child.

her friends
are like rooms
actual
rooms  
with friends

in them.

as in
the discipline
of trees
a hand
goes untouched
and changes
color.