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.

the whole town was in the parade.  the newer babies had a float to themselves.  at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father.  I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory.  somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire.  I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness.  my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart.  she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

from the bottom of the stairs he looks like that girl we saw at the park sitting on her hands at the top of the slide.  I’ll be the pudgy policeman and you can be her doting father from a white man’s perspective.  he doesn’t remember what he did after lifting the baby from its crib.  god doesn’t speak language but I take it to mean if you’ve seen one flower you haven’t seen them all.  when he was himself a baby his father held him upside down above puddles to develop his form.  absent a similar explanation, I’ll share that sometime before lunch his female boss used her broken wrist to push open a door he’d always thought would lead to a broom closet and not to a bare bright hallway with carpeted ceiling.  as long as I’ve been here, said his boss, none have made the far wall.  memory is a man dying in the ocean and becoming a ghost there.

perhaps there is or isn’t
a thing lonelier
than a naked man
looking
at his privates
while kneeling
beside
a globe
at the tail end
of a spin
but I don’t
care

a *****
cradled
like a baby’s
broken
arm
and expertly
wrapped
in crime scene
tape…

hell why not
give privacy
to a salt
lick

a stillborn
is lit
by the three
teeth
since knocked
from its mother
as a life form
hangs itself
in the closet
of a nondescript
sister
spacecraft  
after imperceptibly
meditating
on the adventures
not had
by a golem

because I wanted to see something other than my mother blowing out the tip of her finger, I paid two drunk brothers the same amount to turn and stare at each other.  after a couple gay jokes and while I abused myself with body language, one of the men became blacker than seemed possible and the other man sang him a song.  every day of my life is yours to believe my ears.  

I love my mother but her sadness is that of an invisible woman with the power to shrink herself.  suicide doesn’t exist until it happens and by then it doesn’t matter.

for all I know it’s your father’s job to come home too sober to lift your mother’s fingers from the piano keys.  I fell asleep on a heater vent once and with my acne won a phantom game of tic tac toe.  when people ask me my name and I tell them they ask my whole and I tell them I have only a middle.  my own father was a figure others cut from their work.  my mother was made of money.  if being provided for is the same as being loved we’d all be christian.  by people I mean whole sections of the population.

I took to my red and brother to his blue.  we were far from any head in its right mind.  I didn’t know what he thought of while sharpening his stick but I thought of two sisters fighting over a glamour shot of their mom.  homelessness experiences one man at a time and violence ties his shoe.  it came to me on a moving bike.

i.

a river.  a sister born without eyes.  a sponge that is not your mother’s mouth.  

commonplace is a toddler’s map.  memory an unremarkable trauma.

I sign to sister how there’s no hot water in the house & count father’s burn money
where you can see it.      

ii.

the son most likely to catch a program on flamingos
thinks of himself on one leg  
and of a land
covered
in chairs.

iii.

a man is standing on a kitchen table gripping a broom.

his inbox will fill for three days
before the dogs
are his.

iv.

memory does not serve the woman
all out
of labor.

each nun my mother sees is shorter than the one after it.  this too shall pass?  she remains nonverbal.  I try to include my son.  my depression is a tractor beam that attracts newborns.  my thoughts are a thought below the whimsical race.  I take photos of escalators paralyzed by three dimensions.  I give them as gifts to my father lost at land and sitting on steps to hear the silence in his head.  a toy pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store.  you are made melancholy not by the pup but by its fallen battery pack belly.  I say to a pockmark what I say to immortality.

a baby appears onstage in a kick drum.  the more I think of time travel the more it can do.  when I ask about the fresh blood you say I should see the ear muffs.  you say they are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot and stared at to avoid the sight of your father the walking anthill.  my privates move in my sleep.  my privates are outside the governance of worship.  you can have me from the waist up.  my ******* are alone.  the devil shares a history with god.  in Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card.

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord.  political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness.  my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station.  do animals wait?  several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist.  I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear.  as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose.  any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

what can god read to make him feel more human?  then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing.  I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering.  then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs.  point wildly.  it’s not a shame beauty ******-up.  I look sometimes like a different baby.

boy, you will think smoking makes a pearl in your gut.  there will be three doctors like writing shacks constructed from memory.  to each you will deny the existence of a one-way baseball.  prognosis is a curse.  when you are curled by infancy I will toss objects through a tire swing.  by the way I am your father no one likes.  pain is not the last room the world has.  to be fair, pain is the last room

with a toothbrush.  knowledge is a sick woman.  she takes out her breast in a snowstorm.

some were spiking wrapped pieces of hard candy off a baby’s bare back.  some were burping dolls and making physical notes.  some were shoving their feet into small shoes right in front of a working conveyor belt.  some had aches in their bodies that sounded like the popping of corn.  some were fathers their fathers would’ve prevented.  some were mothers unwanted by pregnancy.  none were disabled.  none were coordinates.  a hash mark, an eyelash, she stood for the death of one man and finished the word she’d been pausing between.

my friend is a cemetery.  his broken fingers are testaments to the boredom of wind.  do you write to yourself in prison?  your kid cannot scribble.  he tries and it makes him fierce.  I make heads or tails of him no matter.  your mother came to me in a bowling ball.  whispered about the dryer opening and out came a burning in your sister’s ear.  things are tense.  your father still cleans the sounds you make.

the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.  

having a baby is a mouthful.  

-

think of yourself as a journal death keeps.

fat
with crocodile tears
for the alien
dead
your stomach
rings
a private
bell

bear with me, a man was going house to house.  a big handed hunch of a man.  he was wanting to know if anyone in the immediate area had seen the bird he was talking about.  his enthusiasm was off-putting and in the back of my mind downright scary.  the look on a face when a door is opened is often the look of one to whom the lord has reappeared.  I don’t think the man knew he was ruining the rareness of the day’s clarity.  the bird itself was not his fault and the bird sighting could’ve happened to another.  on a normal day a suspended woman sings above us.  there is a before and an after and a bit of mystery to the meal obsessed.

imagine being told you cannot walk through a hospital’s emergency room.  
imagine having to document an itch as if it’s where your body resides.

recommend 2013 titles in **** romance 2013.
attach a ****** to a person whose ****** gets maced for drug smuggling.

inside me, the baby
is eating
snow

-

the phone is on
in my turned
off
home

-

at the top of the hill
a boy means
to hop on the disc
with his dog

-

bring back
a memory?

I am too poor

as I come into someone else’s own, I agree to meet my brother at a clawfoot tub I hope is still there.  I fill a bucket with water and leave it with my wife for good luck.  I walk from the house in mild weather and become plain to you.  I pass the mud my father’s eye goes without.  I tire.  I come to in my brother’s arms and his badge has left a mark on my cheek.  sleep is like a slug I can’t overtake and then it is my tongue or in its privacy.  brother roughs me into the tub headfirst so I can hear the highway.  he preaches and they were followed by two sets of footprints until the footprints had to rest else they’d be too fat to die.  these parts you're money or hush money.

we have come because you’ve been associated with sadness.  try to pretend we’re here.  as a kidnapper mum about being pregnant, you will soon have something to say to the microphone in your bra.  I am the face of this operation.  my lips are whites only like certain water fountains.  thoughts on the whereabouts of the gun you own are superseded by images you dance to of babies born wearing mittens.  in your father’s abandoned car you will be asked to recall the location of the buttons on the dashboard your brother showed himself to press.  we love your brother.  he invented a game, what was it?, kick if you’ve been muzzled by god.

I picture my father
lighting a cigarette
in the baby dark
of his ******
awareness
while sitting
on a motorcycle
not yet surrounded
by snow

I listen for my mother
telling tales
of white owls
struggling
in outhouse
webs
and of the hole
with a bottom

I admire
the dollhouse
ghost
brushing its hair
in the lopsided
mirror
of my brother’s
loose
tooth

and I plan
to make a stick
figure
family
from no more
than eye-
lashes

father takes a shower because he feels half full.  in order to revere him in a detached way I have to run a hot bath and sit on the floor while holding a bar of soap with a plastic fork stuck in it and I have to be blind not to see it’s a sailboat.   mother has to be blind not to see it’s an iron.  I lift it to her unnoticed and there is only so long my hand can burn before it feels like a hand again.  father makes his hands into bunny hands at his bare chest and hops into my mother who squeals and covers her mouth and allows her face to look as one who’s given up the ex-con.  father removes his towel and she whips him with it and he goes naked laughing and swatting at hanging model planes the guns of which he reports to memory.  she fixes  him a plate of food knowing he’ll throw it from the roof and say he’d rather eat a bullet.  when she is outside for the plate my father controls her with a remote he claims doubles as a detonator.  she sees me kissing the ex-con and mouths goodbye like a paratrooper.

a short period of poorness is already underway when I enter to promise my dog and nod to my wife.  dumb in the mouth I announce I am thinking behind.  my shyness is a chair sent from a distant church.  the one man in the room tells me I have a purpose and confides that he too is a rental.  I’m just here for my unmarried wife who was recently overwhelmed by the human response of our dog.  being that the women are slow to evoke, I’ll have myself know your sons are on a flat surface having a nightmare nightmares notice.

film.  prayer.  kittens in a box.  serene nudes thrusting the skylight.  trinkets in a first floor gift shop lifted by a man dreaming beneath a decompression chamber.  a one use snowglobe.  ash.

hole in a rabbit.  a woman who talks once a year to firecrackers.

earth on earth.  a baby without toes applauded for having two heels.  a pregnant person who’s played on god

a simple hoax.

when reassigned, the man
oblivious to his current privacy  
calls on his few belongings
to become
the well trained animals
of his previous
transience
and is carried
sleeping
by them

to a place
far, not far

with two questions
for magic

light as an itch
in the body
of a god

whose assassin son
owns only
what he can store
as regret
in the animal
mind

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.

the mother beside him pulls disease like ivy from the wall.  he puts his glove where her breast should be.  with a finger of hers she traces the moustache drawn on his visor.  I like this scene because I have kids.

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

above me many characters frequent my father.  they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth.  I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times.  in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss.  in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun.  moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body.  when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me.  I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold.  I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there.  when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

I was male, 37 and some days.  had just dropped the kids at a house where kids can have cookies and god knows.  looking back, I shouldn’t have been driving alone.  in such a state I give women money when they approach me at gas pumps.  ten dollars is all I have.  two weeks is a plausible amount of time to be homeless.  the attendant he tells me she’s here everyday.  he’s the sucker.  I lie less when I have coin.  she’s in the process of an overseas adoption.  looking back, I was driving preoccupied with another’s woe.  woe adrift.  I rub my right eye and flip my eyelid and my car hits a kid not on a bike.  my car mourns but not in the driveway.  low, I look its way.  snow-covered.  snow-covered energy.  my wife sees me doing this then disappears so quickly into our room I think she has disappeared into her purse or into the book beneath it.  our children write about grief.  I complain it’s too short but can’t stop reading.

the boy keeps quiet about his room.  his toys gather for bully scenes.  his toys even have a graveyard.  when one goes missing, he believes in an angel.  his mother hides her applause from his father like a tracking device.  the three live together at different times in a pre-existing broken home with two chimneys.  forest the boy thinks is the forgotten back of a forest creature.  when in the room he is quiet about, the boy grooms each wall to be a window for one day and for when that one day comes.  my girlfriend grieves in public to tell me how his mother and father were not long ago so lovely and so accused.  he was the only boy who couldn’t see a crow without seeing through it.  could be he’s the blood in her voicebox.

it is on the path of the simpleton
one takes the scarecrow
as Jesus Christ.

it is just a scarecrow.
I drive to it in a minivan
and face it
and fall asleep.

in the dream I am trying to *****.
awake I am still trying.
a man is knocking my window
with a woman’s heel.

touching the earth is madness.

the baby is white guilt.  is walking early.
is outside picking stones to give to loved ones.

Jesus is a moment of peace
on a skateboard.

the fish are five thousand
isolated incidents.

vandalism is vandalism.

the numb hands of a child
go rolling after
crayons.

this is you, beside a flower, in front of a mountain.
your eyes are so big

and the bread
so quiet.

for my wife*


i.

it's old. this
what have I done, this
dark ship. the crates
steadfast
in their charge
of silence, the ice
bored
and breaking.
we move
in our cabin
bed

shift
our bellies
to stay
the compass
of hurt.

ii.

our new baby
we honor
like a bruise, a slack

blue
puppet
hangs itself

impossibly…

iii.

I say I’m sorry
in three stories
I envision
as three orphans
of wiser
men.

your shoulders remain small.

iv.

…too small
for what
reaches down
to shrug them

his mother sleeps with her mouth open.  I have seen him tip an empty beer can above it.  when he has a crush on a girl, he takes me by the shirt and gets in my face as if he could spit me into being.  summer, we get our bird legs (he says, he says) to tiptoe on the tongue of god.  

he writes stories under any tree on its way to lightning.  the stories come from a lake surrounded by gravestones.  if bored with the reader, their text disappears.

I say things above my son when he is underwater.  I say things in a rage.  I pretend I am nearby the brother I am closest to.  he would forgive me.  my body has always been outdated.  my son’s body is plinked.  not unlike a piano beside which siblings hug.  there is a sorrow I’ve forgotten.  not unlike the recording equipment one leaves in a dream.  it is a stretch, the tornado siren momentarily belonging to a church bell.  more of one that my son is a cracked bullhorn.  ghost town debris.

because no one in the hotel knew it was being evacuated, it took a week for it to empty.  the employees were told it was on fire.  some have saved their voicemails to play at sparsely attended parties held in country houses forgotten by the rich.  a boy in the corner of the hotel’s elevator goes up and down wearing a dunce cap.  please think of him when your mother is assaulted for monies the poor already have.  when your father is opened up and dictated to an irreverent surgeon as having the insides of a radio reassembled by a ghost.

old Kerouac
looking for something
in my mother’s
dark
bangs his knee
on a sharp object
he calls
my father’s
nose
and retreats
to the warm glow
of the wind-up
mouse
which lights
my mother’s
lap
where slept
a desolate
thought

to a baby’s swing
or to a fine horse
with one
good
ear
or to the weary
haymakers
that are now
my mother’s
unkissable
arms

my father
his head full
of hot soup
but not a minnow
burned
recites
the toy
gospel

as I begin
to take
my intelligence
personally
here among

the floored laundry, the raised unawareness

of the powerless mad

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay.  I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child.  eat snow, understanding.  

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

I see single.

a girl not hop-
scotching
behind a man
who could be my
but is her

father
dropping
what is
half smoked
for her
then right
then left
bare

shoe

(a shoe is and can be bare)

they seem okay

a flood rescue
helicopter
tracks above
a submerged
limo.

a shepherd leaves his field
while quoting
his dead wife-

one anxiety
under storm…

you
keep secretive
as a soup kitchen
the third act
apparitions
that are
your children.

a horse has nerves of horse.

grief is a manger.
I set it down.

he need the good book in his lap. he can turn a light off. he is that bright and he is that extinct. it is his word on the kid. his word fighting. his word going down for a patch of nothing. it is our house scrapes the knee of god. our house chosen for its elbow room. anything unplugged is able to remain a secret. freezer, fire. the only thing in our meat is meat.

cannot go.  I am covered in ghost.  it is not lamb dust but it does not keep me from being a thought beside the poor lamb.  yesterday will have a party I won’t miss.  your mother your mother.  echolocate.  a book of poems will open to a flat match like what attracts you on its belly.  melancholy heads will roll from the ocean.  my thumbs have each a valley.  I believe this instead of believing I can be identified as lesbian because they are shovels.  I thought my head would ruin the cruel.  ruin then yawn.  ah, I was not long for my mind.  though I say to them unbury my feet my thumbs have each a valley.

he is the father of a child stuck in traffic.  he is my father finding this out in the middle of trying to be successfully beside himself.  he is all muscle.  he is every man kissing a trash bag swollen with stork blood.  do the lifting.  his friends languish in the availability of their art.  who are these people, they are sermons, they are the dogvision greys of a bluesy priest.  I am yellow in my mother.  his mother is his endeavor.  he hits a wall he slaps it.  endeavors to magnetize his mother’s ******.  it pains him.  there is a man who writes to himself.  people say it is ****.  he takes the terrible writing and turns it into a pity none can feel.

jesus frost.

dog attack.

sold bible
to bible
salesman.

made me sick
did the weakness
of mass
mailbox.

would be
bloodbrothers
instead I witness
them take
separate
*******
photos.

I am not smart about it.
it lives alone.

or dies maybe
surrounded by
those who
were not there
the man’s
men.

I want to capitalize
***, capitalize
on your two
ruined
entries.

jehovabeast & throng-
ophile.

want go
unheralded
as misanthrope’s
diary
of winter.

**** if
both sides
of the nose
don’t marry
while the mouth
is on
location.

lose a hand
swatting the neck
to get the swatting
done with.

then it’s church
the hotel
for church
goers.

some dads
get they
insides
bit
to bite down
on god.

I’ve been outside
and I’ve been outside
women.

don’t have a clue, army.