the roof over his father’s head.

the rain.

the guardian angel
and the imaginary
friend
loving
over the loss
of toy.

his brothers on the roof
playing possum
with a possum.

her.

her and her mother
separated
by a grocery
aisle.

by litany.

his father sleep *******
on a secretly
fed
dog.

crop circles.  eyeglasses.  his monsters
led away
by a group of mimes

the genital
mimes.

he is to have
his inner monologue
removed.

his surgeon
so publicly
sad
is not
captured.

sometimes pillow
sometimes x-ray
his boy’s
seashell
ear
foretells
the housing
crisis
in a place

of worship.

it was easier
to tell
man
he was missing
a rib
than to confront
the inquiry
her body
would pose
had it been here
with her
however
long.

dogs
were wild
then.

illness is
as illness
narrates.

I self-pierce.  medicate
like a missing man
at a party
for baby.

take this balloon
from me.

baby suffers
from heavy
elbow

and wilderness.

I panic.

a woman with a spotted neck
asks me for a drag
as if I’m hoarding
flashbacks.

is my son still sick?

would amnesia know
it’s outnumbered?

in country
I knelt
openly.

an ant carried an ant
from the shadow
of a mushroom
like luggage.

the day the crows
flew into

youtube

the thing
each crow
stood for
stopped
advancing
as did

god’s future
but the men
and women
of god
kept eating

animals
and kept
praying

for individuality
to come from
being
the first

to gut
a mirror
and god

himself
began to write
a poem
with nothing

behind it

mother scrubs
her brain
scrubbing
hands
as dishes
prepare

wherever they are
they are washing
soap

mouth pain.

dreamboat.

screen door
as hyphen.

god
as no
contact

with the inside
world.

you were born asleep
and your mind
reached a place
where you had
no hands-

your first memory
is of being aware
that someone
beat you to them.

when given
an alphabet
to recite
you count
as predicted
by your father’s
future.

I have known men
to kick babies
with no more thought
than setting them
to stun.

invent nothing.

words end
but end
on a word.

name the baby
and then
name
what it has.

an optimistic father
who calls
its insomnia

a god
with a god

complex.

I was listening
to my father
tell a story
about two men
with one
outfit
between them
when I noticed
my brother
had been touched
by sleep
and my father
saw him too
and began
a second
story
about the face
of a ghost
that had seen
a woman
undress
and both
stories
made me miss
my mom
for you

(second in a series of shorts for my kids)


Zen was a boy of nine years whose sister of fifteen beat him nightly.  When she would do this, it would be during bouts of sleepwalking that began when she too was nine.  Her name was Beam, and he loved her and she loved him when both were awake.  When both were awake, they would count the bruises on his body and see if their numbers were the highest they’d ever been.  Zen did not tell Beam she was his abuser and Beam promised to find out.  This presented a problem as Beam, no matter how hard she tried, could not stay awake long enough to catch the person she didn’t know she was.  Beam wanted to ask their parents to keep watch, but Zen would not let her, saying he was worried that if the person was identified he or she may start beating someone else.  So they counted bruises, and loved.  Zen is now a boy of fifteen and Beam went missing three years ago.  Every morning Zen looks over his spotless body and prays he too will be kidnapped by gentle aliens who cannot hurt their own but want to.

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

for Aidan, Noah, Mary Ann*

The boy lived in a town by himself.  Because he didn’t know his own name, he did not name the town.  The town had one street that circled the town and there were no houses or buildings.  The boy was never hungry, and if he was, he’d never been hungry enough to know it.  He was thirsty often and because he’d had a dream about his body being full of water he’d spit in his hand and open his hand to the sun when the sun was out and then drink the warm spit.  He was not afraid to leave the town but still he did not leave it.  Perhaps he was its bravery.

a father’s brain activity
charts its course.

piano hands
thrum
on the hood
of a junkyard
car.

I am hard to look at
because I thought my head
a burn box.

the sound of a microwave
has a short time
to spend
with the blue
puppy’s
whine.

the theatrics
need a mother.

a mother needs
to populate
or to paint
a factory.

we are less and less particular
about the nowhere we come out of.

mother, factory.

god’s
untouchable
childhood.

it’s a nice enough baby with an inability to emit.  the adult world worries but no more than than it does for the television’s volume during bouts of ceasefire.  parents divorce or parents agree on the same support group.  siblings form a circle around a one trick pony.  some believe the jack-in-the-box is broken while others believe it’s patient.

I am looking for the man whose life flashed before my eyes.  I am writing as my father.  we don’t love god.  we cure him.  after brushing away the bubbles of a bath so perfect I am horrified at the baldness of your baby brother.  it’s everywhere.  you shrug and keep at your ear of corn as if it’s about to set itself on fire.  you are the same way with *****.  these are your words.  when I’m angry I can feel my hair growing.  when I’m angry I cut it.  I write for women.  it is like the glittering peacefulness of a snowglobe you drained as a boy to water a toy soldier’s horse.  this quiet doesn’t need a white male, but it helps.

if none notice, pretend you are waging a campaign of unawareness.  this goes for suicide.  hold the scarecrow like a protest sign.  look kid, your eyes have to eat.  what is low hanging fruit to the man on his back?  you can lose someone to illness even if that someone survives.

your father says pets are for decoration.  my father says pets are for storage.  your father has a boat.  my father has a boat called the buddhist window.  our fathers go boating.  our mothers have in common the land of two left feet.  your brother doesn’t speak when he’s writing ace dialogue.  my brother doesn’t speak because of a brain disorder.  our doctor has good news and bad news.  you have a top bunk, I have a bottom.  our god is not real.  you say he has a sense of wonder.  I say he healed too quickly.  your legs give me sea legs.  our mothers balloon

and dot the horizon.

confirmation that Joe is and has been born.  confirmation of the received body.  confirmation of a previous perception we held of the few actively trying to be prophetic.  confirmation the killed have consented to patience and will furthermore die.  confirmation of past with asterisk pending.  future confirmation that in adopting the plainspoken one will reiterate qualifiers designating poverty as a chosen residence.  have visual on verbal capital.  have verbal on holocaust.

you don’t want to buy a bunny but you’ve already told your ex-wife you’re doing fine and now she’s requested a photo of something you love.  pet stores make you claustrophobic and you wonder if this is the same everywhere.  you decide to borrow your neighbor’s good camera but when you get to his door you hear him mowing your lawn.  a car going too fast makes to turn around in his driveway but blows a tire on the curb, backs up, and continues on its much sadder way.  you’ve seen your neighbor’s adult daughter without a shirt but at the time your dad was in the hospital and it was the beginning of not being turned on.  you don’t remember who but some odd duck sent him a snowglobe instead of flowers.

to be somewhere without a book on my person.  hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief.  to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel.  to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside.  to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to.  to die well.  die punctuated.  by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

you tell yourself
the smaller they are…

you see a cloud, a hospital
for a bird…

but then you’re six
and your sister’s boyfriend
is ripping out your hair
in clumps.

your brother is the storm before the storm.

your father doesn’t have cancer
your father is ******
during a longer period
of being
left alone.

pain is your mother in labor.
a time machine that only goes to the present.

most days your son can’t move a muscle.
looks bored to life.

the long married man and woman nightly swallow string from the same ball of yarn.  the man is pleased to have recently weaned himself from flashing the public by way of privately showing his tongue to the aquarium pets left alive.  the woman is pleased to exist as god’s only means of communication with her husband.  the two keep to themselves until everyone in the world is crying and then share a moment with their talented baby.

sad prom music** (i)

the boy is wearing heels because he doesn’t live with his mother.  his right ankle pops and he breaks his nose on a puddle of evil.  a machine with a baseball in it shudders.  we throw cigarette butts at a girl jumping rope.  the boy stops what his eyes continue.


sad prom music (ii)

movie on with no one in it.  you scratch your son’s arm.  he is made of train sounds you make yourself.  the movie is terrible but is surely just as terrible far away.  you are not waiting to hear anything god hasn’t said better to doctors young and old.  you’re not drunk but your eyes are.  a nightlight in every outlet.

death is never early.  take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror.  chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head.  invent a sibling schoolmates blind.  know poverty, know moon.  shampoo the elderly from a distance.  baby no one.  they have looked like hell since before you were born.

on behalf
of the soul
which entered

you, father
then you, mother

I report
my disappearance
and applaud
the cameo

memory
of the countless, sounding

born

holding a baby
as if she’d
had it thrown at her
my mother
came out of the museum-

it had stopped raining
it had also
stopped
snowing

and people
were giving me
money

wheels

the night before his surgery, my boy’s body is a dark suggestion I inspect with a cell phone’s light.  his brain is tucked away.  his brain a self-assessing god that, created, has ceased to exist.  I hate that I have as all do a floating rib.  it would put me in a better place

referring to it as satan’s disabled life raft.  I have no advice for those on the operating table.  for those above-

say thumbprints.  start missing.

Drinking in the First World, The

as the idea
is without lord
it will outlive
god
and be nothing.

artwork is clarity enough
I suppose
but the drugged

they alienate
the unthinkable.

in an art
spooked
by loneliness

you did this
to yourself

sacrifice
has its own
unbeatable
consciousness

but not a ditch
in sight

I appear to your helplessness

what started as a joke
became a sick baby
whose first sentence
put my writing
in writing.

-

no matter how widely
unknown
it was
that I could burn
bathwater

my wife
had to eat.

-

humility
is having to thank
god’s
sibling
for woodwork.

I soften
eternity
with hands
on loan.

acquaint myself
with death
by being here
the whole time.

I marry.
I father.

keep my body
equidistant
from kite
and ****.

hide the boy from settled places.

think of the child
the adult
Jesus
how both
could not

imagine.

my father howled my sister down until she became a voice in my head.  I go to where she might’ve been so I can be looked at as one asking before her.  men have for me two syllables that form a coma.  women stand in final stages of nakedness holding jugs of water but leave me to flower and to mull on them as incantations of the tin man’s great calling.  if I am romantic I am romantic in the increments my mother measures to dream herself to sleep.  beauty is the prop scale I rule from.  none are the mourners of gain.

I lift baby onto my back.  baby is twenty nine years of outsider atmosphere.  baby swallows and my stomach becomes the pecking in my stomach.  baby is distracted by the attention eternity demands.  baby drops and my mind enters a snowball disappearing centermost of a dark summer pond.  baby’s mother rafts workaholic to where work suffers to invent for the harmless

today this trap door
for an unfinished
fly.

the question
of where
evil
resides

has not been
knowingly
posed
to the man
locked in a room
with nothing more
than a small rock.

in an open field
of no aberrations
a woman
goes into labor
for god.

most men will throw the rock
before using it
for pleasure.

age is a factor
to age
groups.

to the garden I cannot see-

pain as my witness
I go.

as I hope to one day hear
the heartbeat of hell
I’ve sent my son
to save a land
of giants

I mouth mother’s lullaby
to a skateboard.

my brother moans
into what he believes
was kept
from my sister.

we underdose
in a gutted place.

we take our foreheads
to women
like fevers
to god’s washcloth.

with their whimsy, their lifetime
of human
limb
syndrome, their pseudo

humble
origins
in the mind
which knows
first

of their want
to flee-

hands
are enough
trouble.

kid with dog, I know, not what you’re thinking of my midwestern peace ****.  for lightning burn a stick above advancing plastic army.  make zeroed the black kid with red dog.  this I can follow.  my loyalty to shame and to the poorness of my spirit’s ghost.  god drawing himself in god’s raffle.  a woman with cigarette on a zoo outing.  bold I make her in images mine.  I stalk, don’t worry, I tell her myself.  it’ll pass being tired of god.

Cain and Abel
argued
over what
came first.

the homophobe.

repetition
is never
more
than one
poem.

there’s no future
in this pill.

my mother’s head
is full of heads.

I haven’t a volleyball
in a pond
to **** on.

in the words of my son
a sailor     is lost at me.

I go on correcting oddities
in the brain and in the muscle
of a jack
in the box

as a cyclist
champions
hunting mourners

to keep their numbers down.

I was raised by wolves on nothing but stork worship.

on the day of the shooting
I was sent from school
for wearing a blindfold.

you were born
brained
from afar.

the disabled inherit
all but
private moments, former
selves.

god is looking at your dead body right now
sad you are somewhere
moving.

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.  

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

brother is convinced his ear muffs will any minute play music.  mother like a bible is made of books.  I am not in a movie and I am not in the movie based on this beating.  I am tall for my church.  when I look jesus in the eye he thinks I am his cross.  father packs gospel snow in a gospel plant.  father sends his love in a spraycan he lifts with his mind.  mother’s breast, I forget which, is still to me an untouched baseball.  when an actual baseball presents itself I avoid my fingers.  sister is the tactile learner of the bunch.  I stitch her drug dolls.