a man might talk
briefly
for hours
on the utility
of having
a more pronounced
dip
than another man
in his palm

and he might
retire
backstage
to a woman
whose cheeks
are gauze
whose ache
is mouth
whose greatest
nostalgia
belongs
to the left hand
of a pediatrician
buried
by god

not for carrying
the scar
of purpose
but for being
stuck

in a scene
of brutality
beside itself
with audience

getting on
in years

his body
weaned
of its addiction
to being
vital

the artist
begins to realize
he is one
man.

catching up
seems impossible
without god.  father

or no,
his person
proves another.

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.

I worry
not
that your car
will slip
off the road

with you
in it

but that you
will think
it has

and arrive
on holidays
and at funerals
looking

more touched
than you are

i.

you can’t stop the man who’s tucked himself away.  like mine, your mother doesn’t lose her voice but disappears when quoted.  give the babies to jesus.  god wants us old.

ii.

I lasted in childhood as long as any who believed a scarecrow got its name for being scared.  though I’d go out like a light, my father never fell asleep on his feet.

it’s the medicine
makes mother
proclaim
that what sizzles
in the pan
is the soul’s
muted
telepathy.

it’s the memory
my son’s muscle
doesn’t have
makes life
the dream
our longing, preparing,
wastes.

when pain
experienced
a woman
so strong
that my mother
became dislodged
from the two
schools
of thought
founded
by my father’s
hunger, I was told

that before
he could be adopted
I had eaten
god

the man of the house says the devil sleeps backward.  says they share a barber.  two women walk into a joke and are asked to serve communion.  my father told so few stories that each retained its beginning.  I held my tongue like a meeting.  I conspired with my brothers to dim the lights so we could see the eggs leave the refrigerator and then see the eggs leap into our front yard.  we were saved from what the eggs became by a person who belonged to a group of people.  the lights did not return for so long the whole town feared they would.  my mother hung posters but could not have known this was the start of staying home.  I can’t speak for everyone but we were able to get online and order supplies and make a hobby of waiting for them to be delivered.  to this day, tomorrow is a new object and I’m what’s foreign.

I prayed for the wheelchair and then for the person in it.  I prayed for the water above which Jesus raced.  I knew full well that prayer was a starter’s gun.  that drowning was the silent education my grandfather on my mother’s side could afford and that his son frequented the left hemisphere of the brain by aligning himself with the right.  worse than prayer?  its dream of a retroactive birth defect.

sickness led my brother downstairs to a blanket.  outside my mother was asking our mailbox if the man in the helicopter was alright.  my father snored in my brother’s bed while I kept from laughing in the tent beside it.  my sister brought a tub of snow inside to dig a baby from.  something my uncle said was like ******* a seashell.  he shuffled cards beneath a golden brain.  our ears heard the same god punching the extra pillow.

I project my stillness
onto babies.

a still baby creates an environment
that yawns
apart
a dog’s
inability
to reflect.

for each instance
of a father’s quietude
said father
gains a brother.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

externally,  I believe in masks.  pull at my ******* when I have them.  pull old man.  you are my soul.  happiness is the impossibility of incidental sadness.  tell happiness to child one through child four.  too many tear too tamely at the face no goddess dies in.  a time honored receiver is disappointingly brilliantly a sponge

living off
your mother’s hand.

i.

god’s little narc
  
ii.

god’s little narc
tossing a rattle

iii.

god’s little narc
tossing a rattle
at a fish tank

a better pill would be a pill that could abuse you before they arrive.  instead, I threaten my mother with my father’s suicide.  it is not easy to avoid the vice versa at the end of this sentence.  it is not hard to be limited by the imagination.  by the verbal assault that dangles you below a dog whistle but above the tooth of a beast.  I impersonate those I love and those I love are impressed.  don’t think me untouched.

my sons
run out
of bread

-

their bodies
think once
is enough

-

are you barn
or missile

silo
sad?

-

I remotely
occur
to a word

as needless
as the plural

of needles

-

going forward, every birth
will be occasion
to *****

a lookout tower

-

my daughter is a cloth
cut from the vanquished
infant
once heard

not crying
in a wildcatter’s
abandoned
idea

of what constitutes
a baby

-

I read to escape the author

I had a thing for wizards and needed something to direct my toys.  I had a corrected overbite and a mold of my teeth.  many were tortured and some were swallowed.  I left my tools behind when I was born.  what passed through my parents came first through me.  if I was the word they loved, I was the context they opposed.

before it is a child
it is a ******* noise
in the muffled witchery
of a blanketed woman
who fakes sleep
beneath a pew
in a plain church.

being awake
is to be
what nothing
comes after.

I fake my mother.

I hate myself.  I am not a train.  I’ve learned from god that no man was made to be a guest speaker.  I know a woman who was able to bring her favorite character to life onscreen until she got pregnant.  I am part of the problem and your brother is part of the solution that will work for those with birth certificates.  time is a ghost whose only sorrow is the body it couldn’t keep.  I hate nothing.  today my son forgot to clear his browsing history.  the darkest hour gives god time to prepare.  by **** women, I mean

and my son means
unharmed.

of the four children, three are spies.  their father was put on this earth to look for the fourth.  their mother is the amateur photographer I am a one-sided representation of.  harder lives like yours continue.  statistically and in person.

because you were alone more often than not, I thought you a church.  I attended you with others and they were to report back to me only if you looked up, away, from your book.  you did not.  these others were men and women whose children have found me.  I make it up as I go along.  my records are unreadable.

the woman buzzes in and out of her woman head like the thing her husband didn’t swallow and so became

fly
for the second time
in its short
fly
life.

but if I am back to the woman’s body I am in the kitchen eating portions so small the house misses itself only in passing and is able to deceive its ego with work being done on its ego by inhabitants of such stunted shrinkage they collar me as a child and threaten me with residence for as long as my skirt can avoid the breeze

and
or

cover the insect that holds my water for the blunt force trauma of self preservation.

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.

the tinted weakness of late day.  the sound of a mother being driven into the child by its legal father.  biology as paperweight.  as bird hopping on earth.  god as the oh well limbo in limbo.  are the many heavens of discarded appliances equaled in number by dolphins unimaginably safe?  does the thought, to be darkened, arrive?

the mother
is unclear
who it was
put it to her
this idea
that remembrance
is unreliable.

her son was so beaten
he gained the memory
of his father.

after surviving
a form
of angel
hazing
the boy’s
disability
presented itself
in full
five months
from its
inception
and chose
therapy
locations
owned
fifty-fifty
by the conceptual
folk
known as
bewildered church
and stray
field
and went on
to signal
the boy
with a bruise
here
and a bruise
there
on its way
to a survival
from which
it would not
recover

from the second level of a parking garage
we drop baseballs
in hopes of hitting
the discolored
mattress
we pulled
like a magician’s
tablecloth
out
from under
the sleeping
man
who by all accounts
is still asleep
abandoned fully
to ****
dreams
where one or two
of us
will find him
and spoon
his eyes
to ask them
what more
could they
meet
but for now
what metaphor
thinks we are
is game

why did Shia LaBeouf cross the road?  because he wasn’t a chicken, he was Shia LaBeouf.  I want to worry.  it is funny to me like Patton Oswalt and Lena Dunham being flabbergasted.  I wrote once how suicides fight for position.  suddenly everyone knows they were once Leroi Jones.  some of course were and I want to be sorry.  the original thought in my head was to be postdated in birth like a present.  because of where his home is, Lars Von Trier is homeless.  imagine I lived from the age of 18 to 23 and from the age of 24 to 29 I got paid to reenact those years previous.  I will waste my time with yours and there will be a whirlwind of poverties speeding by and seemingly one.  if the great performances of James Franco say again how the unknown soldier is the eater of fame I swear I’ll call you and your double out as Lynchian.

my brother apologizes for being beside himself with the worry of his split personality’s identical twin.  his hospital gown is missing a hospital.  he asks my children kindly if they are at all possible.  he maintains that pain is the best editor and unveils the knee closest to undergoing brain surgery.  my revelations pale in loneliness.  my brother says it’s because they were spanked.  he says visiting me has given him a case of racial motivation.  he lullabies what I have identified as my wife’s newest.  he wonders in his own withdrawn way if the newbie sleeps out of a fear that is homosexual in nature and ****** birth in spirit.  he sings to a bag of salt and knows it.  don’t be sick.  father is my only copy.

the money he’s made
is delusional.

he comes to me with an aluminum hat
and warns me of a remote
area
that will soon take
the wrong
shack.

he watches as my mother
caresses god
with the cyclops myth
of touch.  

how many times has she washed
the defaced coin
of my stubborn look?  

though I value
over dialogue
the useless baby,

in what month is your soul?

you arrive early to the unpopulated town hoping you might rehearse without interruption the part you plan to audition for.  you spend most of your time in a high school locker room looking for a ball.  your one skill was recently revealed at the forefront of an evacuation spearheaded by your brother after which you were able to convince both the man in the attic and the man in the basement that they were together hallucinations seen by a mirror.  to the lord you don’t seem a day over yesterday.

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

the mother is first a toppled statue
and then a runaway
with a pillow
whose father
died
out of context
on the stone steps
of a large library
hours before
it opened
all because
her cotton ball
stopped
beating

I’m sorry.  I don’t know what’s gone out of me.  I look around and for every person I see with a first name I am charged to produce a method.  I bore the devil.  I do the opposite of shooting anything that moves.  I need an arm like I need a distant memory.  most of my blessings can’t afford a disguise.  on a scale from one to ten I cry.

on the off chance
one of the buried
has a shovel
we dig
with our hands
while telling
these stories
of men
with headaches
whose women
would gain weight
to absorb
the souvenir warmth
of wanted
pregnancies
which made
some of the women
smoke
so as to be
in a constant state
of unveiling
bruises
seemingly given
by demon
toddlers
yet to be
crossed
by hunger
hobbled
creatures
being that the bruises
recall to us
the botched
renderings
of paw prints
and then we’re on
to the women
who don’t smoke
who are puppets
with frostbite
and believe
the lord’s stomach
is sometimes
bowl
sometimes
plate

in the child’s work reverie, man with chainsaw
we intuit a certain progress
has been made
in regards to the child’s
reaction to seeing

for the last time
a chainsaw.
  
we declare
man

to be an angel
given everything
but the memory
of its death, and suspect

ourselves incredulous
at being returned
to the earth
on this
our first
visit.

if death is merely
the end of the message
why live
only to improve
its narration?

no one loves the sound of my voice
but you.

god is a recording.
talk, suicide.

we stomp the child monster.  my blood goes so far as to break its promise to leave my body.  a dog with a broken jaw whimpers beside the unthawed baby of the odd seamstress whose love of bubble wrap is genuine.  god says in the same voice step away from the vehicle as a boy close to his attacker touches himself under his breath.  The Jesus

can’t hear in the dark.  the last thing I see is making this up.

in a war
over the facts
of a previous
war

an immune system
competes
for the silence
of god
as food

runs out
of children...

I read to my son

he tries to fork
the fireworks
in the back
of his head

he is a weak signal circled by two strictly circumstantial dogs.  the dogs have this hunger I can explain in my sleep.  once there I am suffering on found footage.  he doesn’t see my dogs and continues his optimism such that his hands are often in the early stages of being hands.  such that his heart is in a job looking for a job.  such that his muscles twitch with god and are not the muscles of Adam the only man with nothing to plagiarize.

the Ethiopian woman
shunned
for pulling rope
from between
her legs
in a manner
suggesting
the rope
has a beginning…

whose dead newborn
has the attention span
of the sadness
we register
as patience
in the guerrilla museums
of health
we are apt
to attend
on the backs
of men
who smoke
during
so they can chat

after
the cesarean.

madness took my mother’s purse.  I can’t find anything in it that isn’t the information which led the student of history nowhere.  one eye is a double agent and the other

a suicide pill.  availability repeats itself.  angels marry.  I am directed to stand-in for what the future is a shadow of.  

his women are made of sand
but wash prematurely
ashore

carrying broken babies that stomach the glass ocean.  we share a friendship

charm, an *****, and a bleak outlook

for the featureless face.

waiting for nostalgia
to download
these portals
to the same
world
are lovers
born
feet-first

first

he arrived from work at a normal hour and made a sound.  she called the cops by mistake.  she put the spout of the tea kettle in her mouth.  he watched her cry and went to bed.  the sound he’d made was so weak that when the time came she assumed he’d come home late.  she kept it to herself and stepped on a scale.  he joined the army and watched a soldier toss and turn.  she gained weight in her sleep while he commented sensibly on the loss of his uniform.  apart from the occasional mourner, no one went outside to ***.

as a woman
she was a boy
after her own
heart.

as a girl
she had an overdeveloped
process addiction
to program cessation
programs.

as a poem
she knew
suicide
like the back
of her hand
and with
two palms
took a bird
to its bones.

her knees remained
the earphones
of god
and god
an unmanned
analogy.

from the many scattershot piles of junk, my father is able to make a two-headed shovel.  his laugh wants my mother to worry for no reason.  in the space between us, things die in pairs.  in motion, my father is adamant.  of the one camera hanging from his neck, he gives me the one that works.  he has me shoot him standing on a chair with his arms desperate to keep his hands.  he has me cut them off so our memory will later deceive our outside trappings and believe he changed a light bulb.  now it’s me laughing, the boy god, the hope.  hurry, america.  hurry, chuckles.  if the **** looks the same for three days, it becomes a ruin.

I step inside myself
to address
the thinning
army.

age is the only distance my body can record.

my thoughts go unsettled.
they are held
either
in an ant, or in the sewing needle
the ant
climbs.

I scratch nothing’s mark.
I kiss what’s left
of my father.

god’s nose breaks on the ankle of a peasant.
remains mother
a meditation
on the heaviness
of stars.

she scrubs at a dinner plate with a clump of hair and tells her boy she is not balding.  the most harmful part of her satisfactory conclusion is the offhand detail of how her brain no longer needs a straw.  the boy squeezes himself shut.  his father is a phrase he can recount.  in my coffin I am a withered leg.  he envisions a christmas tree no bigger than a toddler’s crutch and a cow nudging a deer awake with its nose.  sleeping deer, I would eat the babies but fear I’ll have nothing to eat.  either god is distant or has an increasing phobia of the next moment.  three people

are one
hearing two

sob.