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  thoughts on the whereabouts of the gun you own are superseded by images you dance to of babies born wearing mittens.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.

the wind overturned our trampoline which pinned the wild white pup named Fossil.  the storm passed and was our father.  our mother dragged a broom behind a small brain.  two things that are both cognitive dissonance took root in the dead twin that once bit my arm before going back to eating crayons.  one of the children I wasn’t was thought to be unlovable but later succumbed to an adorable Holocaust survivor.  are we trash?  as the pup relays itself

to god’s headache.

I broke the boy on my knee because I needed a switch.  we ran around an empty crib.  I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel.  we tiptoed in a manner of mocking past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied.  he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined.  I swatted him to let him know I was dying.  his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown.  I swatted him again to let him know I would live.  the tea was gone.  the rest is sadness.

ten men beginning to show outward signs of starvation are standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the small window my son is looking through while balancing himself on an exercise ball in a room I am convinced expands.  I am not allowed to have this dream.  when my wife whispers, I whisper back and god continues to be here by choice.  repeating myself means I’m here when I wake up.  son, ball, room, window.  ten ******* minimalists.  I am not supposed to admire the travel writing career taken on by my son your surgeon.  I am saddest knowing my wife’s dream is not the same.  ten women and the chance I haven’t done it.  were it the first year of my probable eleven, god is the lie I’d pick to get out of the room.

as a ****** on finger becomes a borrowed cigarette,

what we don’t talk about
when we do
pools into mother’s
fat shadow
and / or

pregnancy
glow.

xmas 19--

my profanity withers her tongue.

his deserters
bayonet
the alien
grape.

wolf, pig, childhood.

a bit
of brother
on

the creative
side.

all in my father’s
imagination
were other
poverties

(where mother
assaulted
no one)  

(but faced)
with a poverty
of disguise
the dog
ate homework
I couldn’t
finish.

though younger
than a father’s
nostalgia
you are
my boy
of 10 years
this day
which has
always been
a reflection
of how I miss you
on the others

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

the moment he thinks surely he’s the man about to read something beautiful he’s tied loosely to a chair by his father who calls him time.  his mother measures again the kitchen and again it is small but no other room can set a trap for a cage.  the meek speaking of a fork is a radio in the thenar space of his right hand.

young for a mother she takes daily photos of gravestones she will not develop.  her aside that they are better than children is locally famous.  I begin to want her in a way I can put my finger on.  my brother dies and I wait.  the funeral is boys only.  I rip off the arms of an old monkey.

in separating the health of a child
from the child itself
it is an uncommon
godsend

to be given one
to practice on

he’s not even as special as his mother’s comb.

I am a piece of me.
I am the posterity hell avoids.

when possessed his muscles tighten.
not in english
he smallens.

I am the tiniest knot in the braid of suffering.
I am my brain.

she wore a swimsuit.
he kissed her leg.
his pain rattled
in the strangest
acorn.

my son will never walk.

it is not unbearable
but it is also
not
still.

he rolls from one display to the next.

the beatnik Lucifer
using a fork  
to make a ripple
in the second
bathroom’s
mirror.

the spider’s immaculate web in the open mouth of the baby Jesus.

Gatsby’s gay lover working a hook from a woman’s lip

a day before going blind?

if I am not near them, I do not long for music by them.  at my lowest, they are hardly men and women on all fours eating garbage.  you seem to know they’re naked.  what they cannot eat they pause above.  a baby’s black crib beneath a dream.  the dream a charred tree bent over a rabbit turned inside out.  the ark was Noah’s belly.  the gods and the devils

simpletons dumbly yearning for a more personable abandonment.  

I am not alone but am its aphrodisiac.

male or no, the infant is not making eyes.  before you had hands I had two desperate weeks the books of god were between.  violence is a fattened slum bumping around in the dark.  there are two ways out of you.  one is a comedian.  one is a witness.  both wear reading glasses that rest on post nose-job acne.  I am in the bathtub thinking my son will live because we are skin to skin.  my belief is a chariot flickering beside a dim horse.  a second horse is a mechanical bull with a mind of its own.  if, then I am also a flare.  vacate the young.

his earache
the scorched
zen
of a scarecrow
the man
stands
on one leg
with cigarette
in mouth
and refuses
to lean
on the child
heavy
minivan
seemingly dropped
by god
into this field
to remind him
perhaps
of the lapsed
dental work
that gave
to his famously
unhealthy
son
that terrified
look
which said
I am here
to eat
only that
which was cut
from the cookie
sheet
of hell

like failed
bookshelves
or crushed
steps

the hill houses
of poorer
classmates

worry me like weather
and put in me
visions
of large
men
called away
to feed

at a trough
maintained

by a family
of flat chested
asthmatics
who sell
magnets

one can later
dot with glue
and give
to the mother
who has
everything

quote unquote

crucifix

she lives alone.  from this, one can gather the things she owns.  1970s ****.  she is pregnant.  a week ago she went into town to pick up some new phrases.  while there, she slipped into a house and beat a sleeping child.  our deeds are weary not of a dog barking or of a cat hissing but of the overfed fish.  my belly button is how the marksmen touch me.  she thinks the child’s father followed her home.  she’s about to watch the videotape.