as a father, I can’t imagine being a parent.  the inside fastballs of my youth loosen the blood in my nose and water fountains become locales of low tragedy.  consistency is a sense only grasshoppers make.  as a firstborn, I was set gingerly on a swing.  when my father’s bare feet left him they became fish.  hiding from my mother is as good for her self-esteem now as it was then.  some no higher than my knee seek violent alternatives.

empty imagery

erasure poems write me from prison.  I read them aloud in front of the mirror in my mother’s bathroom.  a terrible mirror.  I don’t know how my mother does it.  she must have a good idea how she really looks.  


empty imagery

I can’t tell if I’ve been thinking of my father all the time or if I’ve become lax in my selection.  I am trying to reach him about the car.  on paper, it’s totaled.  the dog in the backseat surprised me.  very solemnly I was informed the dog seemed pretty beat up before.

      
empty imagery**

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.

in the video about how to give my son
a bath

that’s
him

-

the woman beside me
takes her health with her
wherever

she goes

-

my wife prays
for a boredom
much like
the boredom
of the baby
Jesus
whose hair
my son

lost

The church is an iceberg.  

     from Winter Night, Charles Simic


No one remembers what it was
They were knitting
And what happened when the ball of yarn
Rolled out of their laps
And had to be retrieved.*  

     from Gallows Etiquette, Charles Simic



I was on lookout in a tower
     eye level with god.
I had a pretty little head
     on my shoulders.

the idea came to me
in fingers

that touched
my heels.

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette.  it lost itself to her.  it left me out.  I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me.  I said lord I thought my life would be sadder.  I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized.  I hung it on my neck.  my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands.  food, mostly.  it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose.  my wife began going out at night.  said she did so to hate America.  when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed.  she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her.  yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect.  he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself.  after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

empty imagery*

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



empty imagery

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



empty imagery

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.



empty imagery

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.

the plot of my dying son’s dream includes an alien technology meant to isolate what makes us inhuman.  he is unable to ascertain the holder of such a patent as his disorder wakes him before his time.  I direct his attention to the youtube video of my injury.  it’s the first time I’ve seen myself sleepwalk.  as with all my children, I get his attention by waving the rolled up catalog his mother failed to sell.  I keep it with me at all times and have been caught using it to spy on what I cannot provide.  in the video I look surprisingly fit.  my oldest daughter is sitting on my shoulders and her hair is on fire.  I am running through a sprinkler in a front yard I don’t recognize and am taken at the ankles by some animal the darkness hides.  here the video stops but I’ve heard there are others that go on a bit longer.  when my stepfather was very sick his memory convinced him he had traveled more than once to a foreign land.  the most valuable thing he came back with was his father’s gentle nature which he uses often when guiding me to clear a path for EMS.

to the shadow of my bed I call sleep

a woman with bare feet put her breast in my mouth.  her man lit a cigarette and opened the schoolroom window.  I pictured a microscope slide pressed into a ladder of blood by some pink thumb.  miles off my mother came to on a raft and was afraid.  witchcraft, she said, to the dry land below.  to the kites on hiatus, tied to trees.      


to the man who will say to my daughter a lurid thing

the whole of your mother was lifted by one with a similar weakness to mine, lifted over the head of the so named, was the whole of your mother, and she was witnessed safely, snugly, to be fitted by the circle window of a kitchen door, seen by your father’s father, whose care led to the phrase hungry as a hornet, because he was a ****-up with horses, had been kicked, left by anger and like a small nest.


to those who think me wild**

so I can see my mother sleeping on the roof on an indian gift shop, I pull by a string the toy rhino on wheels up a nearby hill.  I hear my brother crying into the sleeve of the shop’s owner for what seems a lifetime.  the lifetime I’m referring to is my father’s.  at the top of the hill father mugs me for the rhino’s horn not because he is a coward but because he fears the red ball my brother could not leave.

places where I worship

from the dark green church of my fascination with heavy frogs comes the **** body of a boy wearing the head of a heifer.  his legs are not entirely under as of yet but he is let stumble.  from the same dark an excessively wormed fishhook flies on a line and knocks the boy’s ******* behind like a bell.  I scratch my fake arm from shoulder to elbow and believe the sound is not coming from the hook scraping back into the dark.  even in dream I hallelujah lip synch.        


places where I am discontent**

in an abandoned dog’s house, I am, shoeless, with a slipper, in my mouth, a spotlight, caresses, dry grass, my mind, I mistake my mind, for the brain, cinerea, for cinema, my thoughts are meat, are herded, whipped at by a whipping tool, I fear nothing more than I fear, my *****, what it thinks of me, or that it thought, me, first, and lastly

beneath that whip, at the end of which, some interrogator’s, bulb.

jesus on the cross

my sister is sometimes obese.  she has mild heart attacks in cramped third floor apartments.  she gets beaten by schoolmates who impersonate hospital staff.  I am always going to see her it seems when she is in someone else’s bed.  it is to this thought she has recently clung.              



jesus in the tomb

my sister keeps me from sleepwalking.  she says I am her dream of being skinny.  she has lost so much weight already I am almost too happy for her.



scripture that may one day represent scripture**

we are able to buy food, but here’s the catch: we eat it.

a man and a woman, as younger couples do, moved in next door.  my wife lifted her wine glass and mocked a telescope.  I noted how the man seemed to have his **** together.  wife noted that the woman seemed masculine.  things got complicated very quickly.  the man and I became brothers and that somehow led to a promise of equal ******.  our wives tilted the scales a bit and agreed to switch husbands.  logistically, staying in this house makes the most sense.  we unpack a box here and there, reflect on the wrongness of this bauble, that book.  our sadness?  protected by the dog with a weird name for a dog.

don’t hate me because I’m plain.  I want to wait until we are not married.  your foot is asleep in the foot that is not.  use the word inskirts.  in a fragment.  when I began to care.  Michael J Fox.  one arm died in the war the other arm went to.  we are not separated by such a fine line.  unless I throw my voice.  my kids give me the creeps.  on purpose.  my kids sleep through the night.  together they are insurmountably symbolic.  alone their self-esteem depends on it.  my parents are living.  I’ve only just heard.  my wife is inconsolable.  her pain

a consonant
worry.     if I lose the reader / I don’t lose the reader / to cancer.

sister Cain falls in love with me through her brother.  
     I physically blame her with both hands.  

she has left my brother’s lips  
on the lord.  

I try to kiss her at a baseball game
but am drunk
and kiss instead
my male
abuser.  

violence begins with me.

shortly before
the birth
of my eldest
brother
my father

so absorbed
in his most
unfinished
sermon

misplaces
a voodoo
doll

of a mime
my mother’s
mother

loved
and also
lost

a child
unassembled
and loved
by two
     strange
women-

a man breastfeeding in private-

this love
only a mother
could face-

overexposed photos
of a healthy
family-

a gathering
of bird watching
great
uncles-

     great
blind
aunts / with empty
pill
syndrome-

a prayer basket in the lap of a boy
sitting on a swing
during
a downpour-

     a disabled brother
and his three
rubber
nails

saw satan
spit bread

I was with
my son
we were      

differently / enthralled

this sunburnt
man / unable

to eat
or put his hands
together

who then
hissed us
to take

a picture / though

I think
     hissed / only appears

in retrospect

far
from the oral
present
of wine glasses
     broken
in the rhythmic
*******
of gulls

     the girl
allows
the boy
her measured
swoon

as he curls
to his ear

her swimsuit’s
mute
waist

him

mouthing

to a lost plane
above a silent
orchard

every name
in the banshee

book

you are born in a great house and given to a great man.  your birth is the earliest predictor of forward thinking.  your servants spend their days believing the great man’s thoughts of suicide are contagious.  on your fifth birthday, at the age of ten, you are kidnapped by a woman who says the sack is for show.  who says be loud.  you are taken to a river where you meet your brother who seems happiest when holding his breath.  he tells you the woman is your sister but good luck seeing her again.

luck is for the naked.

I lead my cousin’s hand to the belly of a sleeping schoolgirl.  the belly is six months out and could survive a mouthful of prose.  cousin has kids of her own.  cousin prefers the word listless to the word unborn.  the schoolgirl reminds my cousin of someone I knew.  a bodyguard.  a bodyguard as far as school age bodyguards go.  the recall puts me beneath a porch at age fourteen

     giving birth to something boneless.  I am trying to hear it explode in the present.  I ask the lord’s television to lure my cousin from the scene.  I ask the lord for custody of any tornado

warning
scrolling under
a muted
cartoon.

i.

in the clay bed
of my son's brain
where abides
pillow

the print
of my thumb:

     flower, lie down.

ii.

to the maid
sleeping
in the foreign
house

of his
undecorated
death:

dream
of my attic
blind
wife, and what
she might
there

recover.

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

the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.

death is make-up for the interview.  when I get to my mother I plan to visit the city.  I hear a gang of young girls operates there trafficking middle aged men who act old.  I hear what I want when I delete emails.  I lost not touching my mother soon after she stopped being an actress.  she fled my father who at the time was known as her live-in stunt double.  I put my fist in the air and waited.  some told me I was being cinematic.  still some told me I was being cinematic.

in my father’s car, father driving, my fingers curled as if readying themselves for the wheel.  father small talking, his dark chatter, my hands like jaws left open, horrified before the heads god plans to put them in.  heads not to scale.  heads trial size.  

I worry the heat in my eyes is permanent.  my lids worry as well and retreat.  burn pain is its own person telling me I am long term its most bearable memory.  

the hospital seems a distant campfire lowered by the sleepy laughter of the still beautiful.  my daughter.  who as a girl melted the faces of two action figures with the bulb of a reading lamp not to upset her brothers but so the figures could kiss.  

I begin to make sense all by myself and nod to the dog shaped thing drowsing in the car’s murk just beyond my feet.  politely father asks if he can help and I okay him asking me anything.  he chooses the health of my sons.  one in particular.  I stick to the dog.  to the puppies it ran from no faster

had they been aflame.

my first job
was to cradle  
dogs
being put
to sleep.

mother had arthritis
her hands
heard thunder.

brother fell
hard
for a one legged
man.

father worried
his own leg
meant
the world.

at the most
three dogs
per wheelbarrow.

his two right-handed sons bite equally into the legfat of his ambidextrous third.  he photographs all three by closing one eye at a time.  his boys look so real they could be paintings.  his wife makes an odd announcement about dinner.  an announcement that includes

paper plates, her therapist being kind, and the recipe she’s repressed.  

     he thinks on those for a moment.  then on the terrible things he’s sure to reveal.  his palms.  the downward progression of his mother’s push mower.  the scissors he stole to replace the scissors no one used.  the ******* the school bus he’d punched in the back of the head so she wouldn’t see her house burning.  in the back.  of his.

I refuse it.  

this that says
it is the boredom
of boys
beats

a cow.

not even to death.

     will accept
on sight
the boredom
of girls
this that projects
a bovine
delirium.

will accept the exotic anxiety of my workaday father

as his cigarette falls
into the fibers
of a broom
made shovel.

after three days
in the church
of my father
     in the house
of my mother
in the arms
of my youngest
least evil
brother

     the neighbor girl
ran away home.

from my father
I gathered
that the poor
have many
kids.

from my mother
intuited
the poor
to be dying
at a rate     faster

than.

     took it upon myself
to kick my brothers
when they were
up.  

give them sugar
when down.

become
less evil.

the outhouse, and the woman in it, gone.

father’s
praying
place.

if beside it
I could see
the open empty toolbox

I knew to yank the dog homeward.
I was doing what anyway.    

in mother’s voice.  in brother’s
untucked
shirt.

messing around with our neighbor, the messiah.

(another slight edit)

leaving the theatre, he tapped, twice, the hood of a parked police car, lifted lipstick from a drunken woman's purse and squared himself in a store window before shooting himself with his hand.

his first film, completed, by the time he was eighteen.  roundly praised.  from there, a many colored thing.  russian women, guns under suits, and cameos of indians with indian names.  at twenty three, nostalgic for twenty one, his seminal 'my white father' wherein a mute albino would be upstaged by mimes.  further brilliance followed.  mostly in quotes, such as “babies are full of grief”.  women ate from his hand and their eating progressed.  one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.  the woman divorced him and took with her the man.  in the midst of attending to the list came the advent of black and white which added a much needed plot to his smoking.  his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  in 1973, his doctors, grey from vietnam, convinced him to go under.  his last film was silent, and many complained about the lighting.  he cried, in his mansion, for the windows he did not put in.  he would not often entertain tourists but when he did they asked about his mother, her ghost, and if the east wing was really haunted.  he would on those late nights produce a letter his mother had sent him only yesterday.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs set out for his father, he made walking his home.  every now and then a hotel of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss

     the death row scene, the little saw his mother used for the cake, the mysterious basket moved from bike to bike.

(from 2007, slight edit)

   the boy had screamed without wanting to.  had scared the ghost his mother would not believe he had seen.  the ghost which was not a ghost but to which he had called anyway with ghost, ghost.  his mother had a sentence, and she used it.  patted his head, sighed a cigarette from her bra, then went.  the boy waited all night.  once or twice thought he saw what might be a hand, white and waving; its broomstraw fingers sweeping the many floored dark.  

     his former scream stayed the morning.  his father, he saw him put down a razor then pick it up.  his mother was blowing balloons.  tying them and ******* her finger.  

     eleven years ago, for three minutes now, the boy was born sad.  but it’s not something to be sad about because he is not very bright.  when he speaks, it is only so his parents will also speak.  they will come from any room, out of any aisle, to speak second.  they will fall over each other somehow without touching.  when this happens, the boy must remember he is not bright.  

     there is a cake, a birthday hat, and a storm.  the boy is not sure which came first, but they are here, now, at the same time.  a candle  is lit, then another.  if he slits his eyes, it seems the same candle is being lit eleven times by his one handed mother.  his father steps in when all the candles don’t go out but he is too eager and his breath seems to have in it a crying baby.  the baby goes silent.  the boy sits in the dark.  a dark so heavily settled the boy forgets he is wearing a hat.  that when he slips under the table the hat in some final nod of a scarecrow goes unaccounted and the boy thinks he is being pulled by the hand of the ghost that is not a ghost backward into some happy and useless chore.        

     under the table, taskless, the boy is humming into the cone of his hat.  for so long it is the only sound.  it takes a single frog outside to mention its locale for the boy to know he has stopped.  he puts the hat down tent atop a toy truck he cannot see.  far off, an engine idles then turns off.  it is dumbly comforting to know that in the real world there are miles between hands doing hand-like things; turning  keys, toppling hats that shouldn’t be there.  hands that curse as puppets curse; by not.

     it is by this thought of hands the boy is stilled.  he has not spoken; his parents are waiting.  are duo and separately tread their aphotic mimicry.  he can feel his father’s thumb puddle the air above his head; his mother’s elbow cotton closer the black to his eye.  his wish:  to see a ghost after seeing a ghost- the boy wonders what he has done.  what had marked the world in all its heaving inaccuracy was an exhale; now, an exhale dismissed.  

he had once cut with his thumbnail the tip of a red crayon into an empty bra he’d never seen his mother put on.  when she later dressed it became a drop of blood and she screamed and went on to birth a stone that it not be the center of a dark balloon.

my brother enters an advanced state of vicarious living.  

I recognize him most when he is bare handing a baseball.  

     we both know I haven’t been myself.  

-

place matters little unless a deer’s eye brings the fog
down
with it.

in his prayer, my brother asks god for nothing.

     god prays back.

-

our resort cabin inhabits
each of us
differently.

it is either dark or darker.

     asleep, I touch my brother’s cheek
with a fly.

-

we both have reasons for not moving.    

I want to feel old.  to leave  

     knowing

he’s been here before.

a dog, plainly.  noses water bowl to mid-yard.  to the spot.  exact it will rain.  rain soonly.  a word the town uses.  (sit) one yells from a slowly passing go-cart.  someone's mother.  I often think for.

calls me by cupping his hands and hollering.  is convinced he needs delayed attention.  senses my immediacy and waves me off.  his hands go into remission.  his hair darkens.  darkens as grass dryly chosen by a nearby frisbee.  we are here to celebrate.  three years without driving.  three years backing over a bicycle his daughter could not abandon.  bookmarks and powder.  brain a busy insect.  seasons placed on torpor’s waiting list.  the recent wars have been a clarity.  people want what we have.

to find
it’s the other
way

around-

life
a metaphor
for sport.

to know
     without

sufficient
notice

we’ve been here
so long
that none
are from
the future.

to provide
the afterlife
to those
left, those

available.  

     to realize
the town
of our birth
awaits
the return  
of our most
male
follower.

to be kept alive by a disease loyal to another.

to scroll, down, and cross
our legs.

autism     to blame

for the white     in white

male

     (I blame)

***

for shared     abstinence     (I blame)

my former     self     for my

former
transference     my baseline

jumper     on

poverty     the gnome

in your front yard     on tough

interior

art

a certain house, constructed, to be empty.  

a postponed
staring
contest.

a suicide bomber at the start of this sentence.

     hunger
controlled
by a select
many.
      
my mother’s biological decoy.

a raft     I did not build

-

a late entry
thunderstorm

-

a baby    
     waving around

another
baby’s
sock

-

the poverty I own

     the poverty
you

-

a man
on all fours

     a tinier
woman
rider

-

a kite’s shadow

on leave

-

expat nations

on the day they were born
I murdered my brothers
in reverse order
to teach them
about sticks

more specifically
about my love
for what can break
easily
on the knee

     for what gets smaller
the more
it is shared

- 

premonition?  the delayed seizure of our mother’s countenance.

she could recall the brokenness of a toy car but not the location of the shop it drove itself to.

she needed two people.  one to smooth the map before her.  and one to laugh when she’d blow

playfully    
from her palm
the ants     the car’s tires     had become.

- 

to remain
brothers

     brothers
keep silent
within
earshot.  

distance?

     the hole
god leaves
by not
existing.

     confession?

the seashell comfort of a woman’s hips.  

- 

in baseball
one could ******
the pastor’s
nose

wipe the ball
on a white shirt

and transfer
worry
to the tick
heavy
dog

lazing
in the rabbit blackness
of its ongoing
joy

- 

     as an inner child searching for its twin

     the loneliness
of our sister
is twofold.

in full view
of my family
and the friends
they’ve invited
I am given
the child
who has
everything.

my father’s
brother
bounces
on the low
dive
until his legs
give out.

the child screams
in its sleep
where I beat it
as I would
myself.

my mother
     as previously
     reported
enters into
an arranged
divorce.

in exchange for food.

I’ve worn black for as long as my husband can remember.  because of his photographic memory it is hard for him to imagine how things might’ve been had the unidentified person lived.  I try to look the same everyday but am curvaceous.  we have no children.  our therapist is gay, broke, a bit shy.  a changed man.

as references to my brother
appear elsewhere
I ask my mother
if I can use
her lipstick

-

collateral:

I have a friend who was asked
by a representative
of a reality TV show
to be someone
different-

someone famous.

-

I smoke *** under my sister’s bed.

stand and brush her fingernails
from my belly.

she thinks I’m her brother.

-

saying
they’ve nothing
to prove

     many attest
to the hush
of my father’s
congregation

-

when brother is born
I am due
his mirror

-

wager:

in one place
at once

     God

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

prayer reminds god to grieve.

paragraphia
in its entirety
is anecdotal.

my mother, in two acts:  secretarial / secret exile.

     noumenon / father.  together,

the one that got away.

euphoric period

a hospice worker
naps
in a lawn chair
beside a tree

(a tree
with tire
swing)

in the front yard
of a house
with a man
on its roof

     a man
unimpressed
by the woman
half ****
half woman
roughing her bare
scalp
on the wood post
of a neighbor’s
mailbox-

the only person I don’t recognize
is dying / in the house / is dying

from my
boredom.  I could check the bird feeder

or I could check
the bird-

I fry a single egg
in a pan.  

the sound places me
in one of my mother’s
teeth

as it dissolves.

I bring mother
the egg, and she believes
I am the same son
who brought her an egg
yesterday.

she eats the egg
over and over.

her attempted suicide
is not something
I know of.  she keeps it to herself

in the person she was.

i.

     allowed myself to be born.

promptly died
for my brother.

defended
on my own terms
interior

design.

ii.

led
one parent
to the lower
of two
police
states…

iii.

…emerged alone.  having sublimated
my son’s
memoirs.

following is a list of evocative baby names.  the least you can do is wait for it.  wait while my brother donates the blood I loaned him.  while my sister decides to believe in war.  believe because she is finally allowed to fight.  war because my brother is dying.  dying even though he has money enough to cover his inheritance.  a disabled twitter account.  that I often quote.  quote from inside my different *** marriage.  where I’ll meet my wife.  and her only child.

while his children sleep, the father spins three bowls onto the kitchen table and waits for each to still.  he circles the table as a shell shocked circus dog.  from a box he is scooping handfuls of dry cereal into the bowls when he is informed by a memory how it’s happened that the milk is gone.  gone since the morning before last because a fourth bowl was needed.  his three children can now be heard upstairs shoving each other under the run of the shower.  minutes later three boys wrapped in towels watch as their father gags himself into convulsions on the love seat.  of the three, it’s my towel mother removes to swipe the sick from his mouth.  I get my father a glass of water.  something I’ve done before.  

looking back, I can see the empty bowls.  ahead, the outsourced eating.

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.