from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

notes on the boy

his sickness is a hotel.  

his health
the failing eyesight
of his father
     the soon to be famous
window washer.

his dream
a documentary
on falling.

     some watch
the room they were in
from the room
they are.

I am told by the bulb of this reading light to fear my father.  to fear the midsize pig he holds to his chest.  I am scared enough to know the bulb is my father’s failing heart.  I am brave enough to be nothing but confused by the pig.  in real time my father is taping together the eaten film of a videocassette.  a film that yesterday had him jumping up and down.

the boy tugs your arm in public.  his panic so local his gut could be yours.  verbatim you confront the misquote children from abusive studio apartments inherit warehouse jobs from problem immigrants. a bruise of ***** darkens the front of your jeans.

after leaving
my mother’s
double
my father
came home
twice

once
with me
as an infant
and once
with a pair
of shoes

that my brother
on my mother’s
side
filled-

at the time
my brother    
was older
than me
than regret’s

bright future

the mother and the father enter the child’s room at different times while the child sleeps.  when awake the child sees each separately nondescript.  when fully clothed the child opens a special drawer in which a certain number of rubber ***** all the same size roll about.  the child is unaware that his or her reaction to this is universal and startles my youngest.

Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag.  I went in with Stephen once saying she’d called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough to soap her mouth in front of me,  loop a string around the least loose of her top teeth, tie the free end of the string to the **** of an open door and slam it.  because of this honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them.  the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised.  it didn’t make us any closer.  I knew this for sure when on the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up until I had to ****.  it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.  to my knowledge his parents called him Billy from then on.  to my dad’s they got money for both.

oh, here they are.  the interested persons we will find later.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus.  if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane.  if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch.  in memory alone I am alone.

the false
gods
of god
were simply  
evacuated

midday he filled his house with dogs and burned it.  he entered a nearby car he mistook for abandoned.  he sobbed so loudly my mother had only worry about being seen.  a few of the dogs made the baby pool, emerged, and leaned toward town.  he stopped sobbing for a moment to mock rev the engine and turn the wheel.  my mother banged her forehead twice on the floor of the car.  the man resumed sobbing.  my mother slept like a baby might sleep in a motel room with two televisions.  she thinks he was able to turn one of them off.

any bird
with no birds
around it
was a bird
father called
his good
his writing

hand.

you
are a better man
than you.

it is hard
for my father
to be seen
in public-

of my invisible
birthmark
he says
you know
there’s a tattoo
for that-

to half brother
a phrase like
intellectual shorthand
is redundant

though half brother
admittedly
is full
of himself

middle sister
she agrees

     left
for alive
middle can’t
recall
her sentience

not in front of
this memory
of an army
doll

being named
after mother
but before
father

I was healed twice
by a transient
woman

(once when I was a child
and once when I was
younger than
that child)

in the same life
the transient
doubled  
as a touched

man
who taught me
to be
brief

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span.  it was there he pummeled his pregnancy.  I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all.  I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of.  up until then, I was sad her whole life.

the boy takes a long look inside himself.  his girlfriend settles on a word she can spell.  they sit here on the kitchen floor because it is clean.  the dishwasher is old and runs loudly.  miles off an ambulance driver attempts to enter a silent film while holding a garage door opener.  now back to the boy.  as my dad would say.

the smallest body
I have
belongs
to my brother.

using a toddler
drawn
picture
of his heart
I trace
his heart.

after he passed
he was diagnosed
retroactively
with inattentional
blindness.

he had only just begun
to covet
my beliefs.

a plastic spider
in the cereal box
glows.

my foster parents
think
I’m asleep.

as asleep
as my legs.

son
face down
in an empty
bowl
of milk.  

his long hair
carried off
by his sister’s
head.

I have no word telling me if my father is good sick or bad sick.  I was put in this room to recover from being related to my son.  I am delivered women one at a time but only sporadically.  each stays just long enough for the pregnancy to take.  it is my guess the deliveries occur while I am sleeping.  the more I try to stay awake the sicker I see my father.  I am not asking for an exact location.  I am asking that you rescue my neighbor.  the fake life he is based on.

my friend approaches the microphone with a grocery bag on his head.  I don’t know how this will turn out.  not long ago he ran over a fourteen year old girl minutes after she vandalized a stop sign.  my friend has lived everyday since and everyday previous with the fact she survived.  I phoned his wife recently but she had already left him for what he calls a microcosm.  I am hopeful I can love what he’s done with his hair.  he sent me this flower for mine.

I wear a blindfold.  I look my age.  I push an empty wheelchair and with it map the way to your room.  I go without.  my children rebel.  my children rescue their behaviors for later use.  I tell my oldest she was my idea of a first thought.  I tell her in a dream.  I have a disorder in which I add to everything an ‘s’.  a second disorder in which I taste chalk when your father eats it.  my mother is a two-man show.  says for example by god I’m next to jesus.  I hold her hat.  she looks into it this time and the next longer than the last.  the rabbit doesn’t make it.  my boys enter a room that’s been moved.  my father keeps me young.

my birdcage was a stuffed bear and my bird was a moth.  oddly the bird protected my sister from knowing she was molested and oddly its cage promised my brother he would again be gay.  oddly only because it was planned.  I was more spelled than born and consented often to being sounded out.  I carried with me a grey blanket that I held like a curtain when asked.  my eyes were peepholes I had to avoid.

lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.

when I was a child, the children I was with did not turn on me.  like our parents after us, we took on faith that our present loneliness would go elsewhere.  if at any point I felt strong enough to lift a boulder onto my back, I became bored.  I was drawn to books having in them unreal prose dedicated to thunderstorms and I filled these books with joy.  I don’t mean it salaciously when I paint for you the few women cramming into an outside bath.  they had me surrounded.

the letter of our father’s suffering gets better with age.  in longhand he writes of a feast, of the fish made out of fish.  in childlike script of the child-actual, our father speaks to the gun he wants to own.  dear gun, he writes, but his arm locks itself in tic and fails to reset.  behind him, we perhaps foresee a pup pawing at a full length mirror.  as tonic, his mother suns herself nearby on a gravel driveway and her boy dips a small net into the back of her head.

my father winks and shares that his shadow has lately been in a dark place.  he means to throw a baseball but forgets.  he secretly hates any book that says simply how a man enters a woman.  when he shrugs his shoulders I imagine his arms are the knee socks my mother tugs then clips on the line.  this brings me to a painting my mother abandoned herself in because of thunder.  in the painting she is either swimming or for some other reason face down.  not in the painting she has her mother’s eyes with which she can see herself pregnant with her mother’s belly.  father winks again and says he speaks for my mother in telling me nothing I don’t already know.  a list of curse words I repeat underwater.

I cotton on
to the word
wordless

wanting
to respond
to the murmur

my mother swears
a certain crow
has carried

to a still
standing
cross

(the crow itself
not unreal
but akin
to the bygone
bicep
of our
jesus)

-

I cannot share
the dream
I have

but can
its populace

-

mom, when I meet god
for the first time
I will recognize
god.

mom, sickness has only one lover.  how sad.

     here are my slack
but bed-hopping
hands.

a ghost
sets itself
to dreaming
of a single
rubbed together
stone
and my bones
remain
in blank fire

a father and son argue outside a small town barbershop in windless ten degree weather.  inside the shop, which is closed, the barber’s wife is clipping away at a wig.  nearby, and quite by accident, an invisible man uncovers a fainting spell before which some will disrobe.  namely, women declaring that the eye is always naked.  who are these women?, ask my teeth, which are snow.

that I might long
to pine
as your mother does
for my father’s grief
I lament the loss
of my quiet desperation
by randomly marking
the pages
of a special
thesaurus.

they, as in they, say

     this is done so we might identify
     the defragmented run-on sentence
     that will keep your son
     from becoming a scientist.

perhaps a paper flower hides in the envelope it could’ve been.

invented for god, the topmost angel
definitely
proves

the angels below it.

the order of things
illustrates itself well
in the following:

     private / female / detective.

special to me.

after a spell is cast by one using a pseudonym

we start
somewhere.

by one such as you the lake is crossed, one side to the other, on the hoods of cars. commonplace it is heard that I am in love with my
behavior.  the real you looks for the real me but only after your violin lesson.  meanwhile I am sharply anger.  my undershirts rip oddly while I wear them.  if sunlight were my body, says who, I’d be a torso of nervous pentagrams.  the one collects piano keys and favors the white.  they are his dream of clean teeth.  the black the slugs pulled from the dog and from the deer favored by the lake.

in such times, it is constantly 2am.  a friend pulls carefully at your ear.  a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb.  you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential.  because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen.  your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked.  this is done in secret.  what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago.  when things were the same.

this
is a projection
of my mother
reading aloud
to herself

she is preoccupied
with the worry
that her gift
to my son
is too big

I want to tell her
it is just
a shirt

     and
about the crowd

you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.

I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.

you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.

up ahead, we work together.

I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.

our father?

he is made mostly of the words that display my words.

I fall asleep
on my hand

my hand
reciprocates

-

a baby
there for me
to take

from that high
chair

floats into
a pig / enters

pig

-

a mother expects to be careful

but is crazed

     it is a very strong soap

she uses

this soap that squeals
against

the skin

-

inside a bubble I scour the bubble

-

[sic]  terrified
god has given me
gifts

as this poem

was being written

     written

     a word that stops

     long of being

     sufficient

another poem

was being read

and by its end

was about

my brother


-

if you need to contact me

I would be moderately happy
to know

-

the poem being read
predicted a lake
surrounded by death-

in fact
it is something
it still
predicts

-

result:  one in three brothers betrays the fourth

-

my son may never  walk
but when he kicks on his back
these are what we call

his bicycle legs

worried he is becoming one person
the boy with cloth scissors
escapes the watchful eye
of the puppeteer’s
child

and proceeds
unmolested
to the most
active

imagination

     his sister’s
before she was
expelled

my father knows a ******.  it’s not my fault.  the two of them share a cigarette outside of a house they’ve never been inside.  it’s winter.  I scroll across Ohio on a sled with makeshift sail.  I associate sorrow with the very short.  I associate my father with sentences that end abruptly.  I wear the mark he meant to leave on the world.  I understand.  it is forgivable.  there are harder things to get in the way of.  a mirror, perhaps.  a hand on a bible.  my own hand, which tells mother I’m adopted.

i.  therapy

please push this toy car.
it is going to the beach.

     in this activity, one makes a flower
from the parts
of a hand.  it is obvious:

people have time.

if I sob, it is so you know
to turn your head.

ii.  daydream  

if art, be sure to place the couple
carefully
on the donkey

     have them pass
a sunned whale

neither see.  

iii.  I can’t make myself cry without you

     I give instruction, I say sad things, I put my ear
to a belly of disparate

pregnancies.

iv.  a therapeutic image of your likeness

( foreign as
  one’s wonderment
  in coming across
  types
  of mitochondrial disorders
  
  or the oral
  beauty
  of reading ahead
       nicking oneself
  on chevrotain )

v.  terminology

mouse
inoculates
deer

he divvies sorrow.
     beats

son, daughter, son.

he takes a long look inside himself.

beats

son,                , son.

he settles on a word not because it is right but because his exhaustion has developed an independent streak and has abbreviated its calling to* terrain.  *I talk with him about the origin of praise and he imagines a woman swimming solo in a cirque.  he looks me over as if I too am held together by my clothes.  any sentence I come up with begins ‘the female form…’ and ends.  though painful, I rub my knees.

i.

in a letter to my son:

     there is only so much knowledge I can stand.

in his letter back:

     I was finally able to draw a mouth.  I drew first a box, then lied.

ii.

a gutted refrigerator rocks in a junkyard.

either the door has jammed, or she

is pregnant.


iii.

when silent prayer came into fashion
my daughter said her first word
and told me
what it was.

iv.

anecdotally,

they were Mr. and Mrs. Nothing

and eloped.

the anxiety of my body arrives
before the patience
of my mind

-

     my soul is a pop gun
or is
convinced  

-

          I Apologize

For The Eyes In My Head – Komunyakaa

-

for the aftermath
of witness

I wanted to help my father

finish the book-

     I could see he was thinking of a title

by the door light
of an appliance.

-

later

     my mother admitted it was not unusual to find a carton of milk in the dryer.

-
  
illness:

he began to speak of his favorite tree
which appeared only at night
when he spoke of it.

-  

also later:  he was reading, not writing, that book.

I may have already saddened

-

a sameness in the parrots we care for

-

our suicides
fight
for position

-

we twin the parable

this one:  she pushed the baby carriage and in her going made quite

the parabola     /     the baby bounced     but was dead     the baby

bobbed

-

habitually I displace:

     the ether / a god’s trenchancy

-

the academic scholar of woe whose grave I would visit

uninterrupted    

     whose stone now is a lonely letter *f

who would’ve partnered with me to abandon

my freighted usage
of lonely,

-

     of heart, of amateur eulogist

I am in your house
being you

when the boy
enters my house
with a sack of ash

to tell my wife
he has come
to avoid
a whole

personality

-

my wife is one to believe
she was carried
by child

-

listen,

a baby’s cry is the oral future of what touches the brain

I have faith I will one day have this memory of occurring to god.

presently, I exhibit expatriate tendencies
in the shadow
of my mother.

     I entered this museum for boys
hidden in a mirror
on a time delay.

I am not one to placate beggars of description and hardly know where I lived besides.  early on I picked up a stone and my friends passed it around after I threw it.  few went braless.  *** was something of a docile raccoon cub in a half globe of ice.  fathers all were barked down from the same tree by the same poets.  in the previous I will be refusing to enter the trailer home of my ninth grade love where for all I learn her hound might still be waiting for its ******* to fall.  I will inspect only what is already true.  if in the following you do not come upon a series of blank pages just when the getting is good than my publisher was chosen too quickly and my brilliance is of less remain.  as I am well versed in parental infighting I have little vote but to edit my mother and abridge my father and say they were kids looking at an ultrasound of an empty stomach other than my mother’s.