rec'd a message today from a person known by another person. another person whose poem I commented on. was told the poem in question was about a real brutality of which the person messaging was at the receiving end of, with the poet being the one giving. person asked me if I would want my wife and kids to know what I support. to all: my existence here is meta, pseudo, simile, and metaphor. any writing I read is done knowing that an avatar is the first lie. I am sorry for all bad things, once removed. but if you need my apology, I can only hope you will one day not be so sad.

a fist camouflaged as a bird, a very baby, bird
is born in a pile of bricks.

I open a door for a woman
because online a photo
has taught me
I stand
as all stand
for ******.

     home for good
with papers
she’s convinced
tell her what she’s like
in the workplace
my mother, my mother
like an artifact
of her own
paranoia

     survives.  

(I am a response to a world I’ve yet to receive)

a skinny boy with long hair
mid
koan

leaves me
his imagination.

     my mother
     shaving her head
     with a lollipop.

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.

the stones
die
and turn
ghost.

I ask them
to mention
my throwing
arm.

traditionally, one sings
when around
water.

     I walked early-

two to four weeks
before my mother
began

her lifelong
affair / with baseball.

a memo on the origin of coming full circle
     reaches only half the population.  

our name for what is not here, is Michael.  
Michael hears himself buried.  
my boys make myth to call him Murmur.

my boys keep a ghost farm as more than a hobby.

it is fairly safe
in this town
to walk
without concealing
the spray can
found
in father’s
toolshed

-

our love
for the spray can
while not
well documented
runs wrist
and wrist
with celebrity
worry

-

a cement wall
scraped
in passing
by one
with a stick
is the love
we have
for father

-

for mother
we scale back
on pillows
and lie
face down
on blank sheets
of paper
or watch

television

-

most times
we pop
the keys
of a ribbonless
typewriter

i.

two boys
skipped school
to fight
in a field.

we who stayed
took sides.

I somehow became a leader

      which mattered only
when the boys
returned.

their original quarrel
ended
in that field
     where a scarecrow

interested
both-

ii.

     boys
whose names
imprison me.

i.

an aerial view

of parked
white

vans

parked
impossibly

close

ii.

a hinterland
boy

packs snow
into his mother’s mouth
to keep it
open

iii.

only a snake
uses
the jawbone
of a snake

soon
after heaven
took
so much
we stood
in the padded
room
where once
our mother
stood-

shreds of gowns
still unsettled
teased our hair
grey-

nothing
between us
we hugged
as two
late arriving
wraiths-

you bent
for the head
of a black
pushpin
but thought
better
to leave it

     whether eye or mouth
     we’d have to see
the doll

winter

when the snow
weeps
on a warm
arm

and red dogs     deepen

and cats
all colors
are redeemed
at a town’s

vanishment

     there will be a church
     thieved

of its folding chairs
and a man
standing

for heaven     at a time

when its crime rate
lowered

I am looking
to be sad
whispers
who else
but the blind man
in the poem
previous

the condition of false
remembrance
in regards to
experiencing
another’s

déjà vu-

     once mine,

had I planned
for the past

I swear
my guts
darken
dad

as I am in
your spot
looking
at the sea-

mother
insisted
again
on heels

     but has changed
     in other ways-

you must’ve walked
to get to those places
you stood
but it’s the standing
I recall

and the quiet-

the length
of my life
is abnormal

     but goes
     undiscovered

i.

no more can you see
into another
than at your age
have a stroke
to mirror
my father’s.

ii.

     deep into the assignment of my youth
I was said to be bowing
when in fact
I was dipping
into the thigh
of Jesus

     repeatedly
with a brush.

iii.

we haven’t always been godless.

     how this persists as comfort
is a vision a fox
has

of illness.

iv.

     to fox I apply a certain wakefulness.  

v.

my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends to the earth a cornstalk and lets fly.
he confides of everything he is the most guilty of hate getting him places.

     I have to find the mouse that means

other mice.  

vi.

     (above this plain a woman’s privates thunder  / below it
      there are those
      whose tears
      are a newborn’s
      thumbs)    

vii.

a mare kneeling  in a bed of maroon straw

intuits doom     as a color     as optic

     Apocrypha  

viii.

subconsciously, I am holy and by holy
I can offer not being seen in the grocery
as my father squints into a handheld
calculator.  

ix.

to fox paw
this thorn

     from my mother’s
apnea

i.

chemo
makes
of each bone
a wind chime
which
in poetry
would be
some first
house
beauty
but  

in the body
of my father

    no

ii.

it is cruel to hang anything above a baby’s crib

iii.

I can only guess
I was happy
in the womb
with how
my mother
looked

the man
I’ve only
just met
sober

     but have
     arm in arm
     week one
     through week
     three
     been jolly
with

is

     for the sake of his mother

revising

his life
cycle
from

****, sadness, balloons

to

sadness, ****, balloons

---

     it is either my attention span or my nakedness
in concrete poetry
that keeps me
from god

     (when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue)

or bluish

     (like a sock in a blue
      coat’s
      pocket)
      
---

     by the
of a sudden
time
the man
is tolerable
he ha(s)
a number of

rethought

balloon

we are in the wooded areas
when the taken baby
returns
to the crib

our numbers decrease
unnoticeably  

     think
a stage curtain’s hook
or the many palms
that draw
a womb
to kick

     (of slow black dogs long with youth / of a shadow
beneath a snake
where even)

silence
trails off

her arms
gone thin-

her gait
these two
dark fish
chaperone
recalls me
to the delirium
of a prison

yard

cat-

her stomach
though
bulges
     is an upturned
bowl
of milk-

     it
that would
normally
disappear
before
my eyes

disappears
     after

to watch the fire I make my way to a hay bale.
a certain misshapen bale I first called

scarecrow’s womb
but now

jesus hill.

this is the kind of time I have.

-

my sister believes her left eye doesn’t exist.
that it is the shadow of her right.

because of her many beliefs,
my father has placed himself
inside
a pacing
man

where he curses like a censored linguist
made to collect
a tower’s
rubble.

-

in my dreams I am charged with a notch of black tape
and the sloth
agony
of a woman’s
******.

-

I pass a finished tree with some color left in its leaves
and recall my uncle swallowing his ribbons

from the heyday of flame
     at the height of what mother called

*intake

I put a make believe woman through hell.

I worship the devil.
I worship the devil because my dog drowns in a water bowl.

I pass the time writing holy, holy.  

I condemn my body
as I need  
proof.  

I say to a particular no one a boy after my own heart.

I’m not sure what makes mother power off the television.
she moans afterward as if it is the great work of her neck.  

I keep an appointment to be blinded by a window washer.

every other word of my father’s autobiography
    is not so strange.

if I hadn’t ****** myself in second grade, Hector might have.
his brothers would’ve beaten him.  his unborn sister
would’ve been premature
on purpose.

    I can count on your hand the Hectors we know.

it could be that mother worries we are wildlife.
she wrote once

    depression is a dog whistle.  I missed dinner sounding it out.

between me and you, you’re the private
sort
of person
women
like.

you sleep on your left side because of an iffy heart.  the man sleeping beside you, zippered into a dream life, represents poverty.  you dream only the overpass.  each stick on the fire is alone;  a single promise of a dog’s return.  in the early goings, it was a magic to put camp before fire.  in these later, poverty needs no introduction.  you want to say something to the child you did not become but are sick on the talk you were born with.  this nonfiction-  not what you’d imagined.  I slide the man from his bag.  my mad hen pecks upward.

three teeth fall from the mouth of my lover.
     I catch them in a dark rag.

my lover hops in place on the leg she calls ecstasy.
     she lifts her skirt and with it
pats her chin.

I fold the teeth into the rag and the rag becomes a rat.
I place the rat in a patch of sunlight and there we watch it die.
we agree
it’s dramatic.

     we know the rat will again be a rag.  that the teeth
having been something else
will reappear
as teeth.

the bunk
above mine
I call
deathbed

is

my brother’s-

he has
his own
way
of thinking

     showerhead
is spotlight

     he argues often
with sister
about
the staircase

two times
of three
she pushes
him

but today
she is tired
and agrees
by saying

silly
backward
staircase

     and I, as ever
unable
to break
the heart
of either

sleep
for both
as they watch
me

eat

boy
in a loose
diaper

standing
on a cement
block

the child
said to be
in all of us

how leaves it
the woman
become
pregnant

how returns it
to god
and is killed

so say
not poor
woman
but poor

god

( once
  so accidentally
  weird )

I put the shoebox to my ear and hear nothing. I give it a shake. in it, my stepfather curses and I breathe closer to my quota a sigh of relief. I place the box on a higher shelf where I plan to leave it for three years. five years pass and I mean that. I can no longer reach the shelf and need a footstool or something similar. I stirrup my hands and there they are suspended. I step back from them. a cat meows or my stepfather sobs. I am bogged down. I am under my mother’s heart. when I finally use my hands in the manner I’ve meant, my fingers break and I land on my back. the box falls and the corner of it finds the cup of my stunned and still suspended hands and the fingers hold for a moment and then they are weak and then they feather the box sideways to my chest. I lift my head and see my stepfather jolly to be on the set of a show he’s the star of. he is smoking a prop pipe and pretending to read a book I remember my mother being buried in. a few episodes into it I realize the show is missing something and so supply grief.

your illness
dreams
a kingdom
it cannot
people

     takes
to sky
and there
meets death.

tell me
they talk.

(for my daughter, Mary Ann, soon fourteen)

I was eleven years old when I first had something taken from me.  My parents were still married and my two younger brothers had not yet chosen to choose differently which one they’d live with.  My dog had not yet been made lame by a falling fat man who’d taken the gift of my father’s strange rage square on the nose.  And my older sister had yet to misjudge her jump from a moving train.  No, none of these things, whether they happened or not how I’ve remembered, had happened.

I was eleven years old and in love with an old red bike.  It had a license plate that obnoxiously read Go Now Mega which I’d scratched at with a fork and so became Gnome.  I would fail my whole life to accomplish a thing greater. Before school, I’d walk the bike carefully to the end of our short drive and then seat myself on it and be still.  I would often be so perfect in my stillness that I’d forego riding it and just listen for the bus and at the last possible moment walk the bike, still carefully, back into the garage and cringe at the sound the kickstand made when lowered.  If ever school didn’t go my way I’d think of the bike, alone, in the garage and be calmed.  When I did ride the bike, I did so slowly and deliberately that I could feel my soul get a bit ahead of me.  On the best mornings, I would have for company a bed sheet of fog which made me want to fake being asleep on the couch while my mother and father milled back and forth about who would carry me to bed.

The bike had come with the rental house we moved into just shy of my tenth birthday.  The house was a three bedroom one floor with one bathroom and what felt like two kitchens.  I was too close to my hands and feet to now recall any vision that might tell me how these rooms were mapped though I’ve always held aloft the word blueprint.  I should tell you that what I previously called a garage was actually our backyard and that our backyard was really the backyard of those living in the house behind ours.  I didn’t want you to know right away who took the bike.  Who’ve no imagination.

I call often on the disappearance of my sister.

she is the ghost in the town of my shadow’s envy.

     daily use, reading or writing: friendly fire. blind copy.

when her ball cap was given to my father he returned me this:
I think she can survive without it.

she went once from her window to the window of the neighbor boy
whose dream had him believing his parents dead
no matter what they did.

she knocked the following morning on our front door. and later
showed me the tree
which was not so high.

I marked the day she became my younger by sleeping.

     if I love women, it’s something I should’ve done
a long time ago.

a man
whose face
seems
newly
paroled

switching
a pebble
one hand
to another

beside
a telephone pole
beneath

a pair
of sneakers
strung
on a wire-

     parked cars
they have him

surrounded

the man began by pointing at the spots on the baby’s head and then he looked to us as if we were to answer for each.  he turned the baby’s head carefully- it might’ve been an old globe to him.  he apologized more than once for his age pocked hands.  his apologies were unsettling, each one moreso than the last.  his assistant minded none of this and sat reading an upside down newspaper while curling and uncurling her bare toes at no discernible prompt.  when the baby squealed the man went pale and dropped it and his coat opened and we saw his naked wrinkled middle turn to ash and we saw the baby scooped up by the feet of his assistant and then saw the baby fit in her mouth.  she never moved from her chair to do the scooping or the placing and we were horrified as she righted the paper and silently admonished the man for being momentarily vacant as to the whereabouts of her shoes.  he went to his fours and nosed the shoes to her feet and we said amen to the tail of his coat.  the assistant then stood and as she did so the man made swallowing noises and because we’d said amen together we were able to form a search party from which we periodically broke to *******.

fang
in the dull
tooth
of my womb

this sadness

I did not
inherit, that I

cannot
pass on,
does not

make me
human

but some

     third, fourth

     incurious
beast

loitering
in the belly

     of a ruined, or half built

ark

the brother was my age and not a looker. my parents were nervous about displaying him and slicked his hair back lovingly. their hands were careful and if they touched they did so without independence.

I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen. 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 his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed it. because of our 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 without having 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.

     I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood. I explored shyly but with faith and was heartened when I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d been born with.

will have you know, brother
I’ve endeared myself
to vandalism.

when undercover, and in danger
I lift from one of your letters
the phrase

     I deeply miss deer.

my sickness has returned from its pilgrimage
to the year 1985
and has
unfortunately

been documented
     as an acquired taste.

when there is a god
or a nesting
doll

I hushedly petition
that it entertain
the tenets of our sister
     the startled
futurist-

your heart
becomes good-

     the older three
notice

the note is from your mother and tells you your father is coming to town and plans to bring you to the circus. the money is for your mother from the last time he visited. the poster has never been unrolled and was given to you by a friend of your father’s you had no doubt was the strongest man in the world. the spoon is for those times you have no heat. the dictionary is fairly new and belonged to your brother. he circled the word phantom twice, ****** once, and underlined strife. presumably before he died. if you happen upon my half sister you can give her the picture you’re going to use to recognize her. I’m looking at it now. it’s definitely her.

under the boy’s pillow
she slipped
an empty pack
of cigarettes-

the kind
her teddy bear
smoked

shortly after 5pm
an amiably
grey
spider
pauses
on a piece
of copy paper
in the lap drawer
of a man
behind
on sadness

we are not here
to enshroud
the myth
of the woman
who swims
naked-

we are here
might our sons
mourn
the stickman’s
belief
     that his wife
went to pieces

for Alex*

a man holds a good book
as if his hands are cuffed

turns each page
if only to relieve
this, that, wrist

when late
he may
set the book down
to light, or drop
a match

his whole life, planned out
the lit and the dropped

he may pause
here and there
to smoke
to belabor

the end of his life
where he sees himself
slipping from the cuffs
which undoubtedly
fall, then disappear

into some
nightly sound
that wakes his wife

who disoriented
is thankful
she will be on time

     her first date
with a man
not yet
apprehended

tied a string to a stick and called the stick dog.

for this, the boy received a beating
half of which
he shared with the dog

     so he could eat
in peace.

this home
where sane brother
and ****** sister
ate sliced apples
played pool
and swam only
at night

a home so inadequately haunted
we invented a previous family
mother, father, a lame child
all three suicides

it was the lame child
we dwelled on
so much so
our real mother
sent our most current father
to the backyard
with a shovel

brother went mad to see it
and sister began to throw up
in the mornings
then disappeared
and left two notes

one confessed pregnancy
and one bulimia

I lied, too
but am not poor
and will not say
a brother
went mad
overseas

start with your mother’s handwriting

I love my own because when her children
were naked
saying so
was a sin

instead, she called them

rare

this home
where sane brother
and ****** sister
ate sliced apples
played pool
and swam only
at night

a home so inadequately haunted
we invented a previous family
mother, father, a lame child
all three suicides

it was the lame child
we dwelled on
so much so
our real mother
sent our most current father
to the backyard
with a shovel

brother went mad to see it
and sister began to throw up
in the mornings
then disappeared
and left two notes

one confessed pregnancy
and one bulimia

I lied, too
but am not poor
and will not say
a brother
went mad
overseas

start with your mother’s handwriting

I love my own because when her children
were naked
saying so
was a sin

instead, she called them

rare

as the mornings darken, I imagine the paperboy’s mother will soon be joining him. if my wife can stand her, she doesn’t say. what she cannot stand is living here. the paperboy’s ******* mother- what a dilemma. I’ve seen that boy with his fingers in his mouth as if something is there to explain the purple chore of his being. I’ve seen his black teeth. I’ve seen dogs bite his elbow once then leave him alone. I’ve watched his elbow heal a day at a time not once adorned with bandage. seen him crack a dive bird to ground with the rolled up paper of my neighbor. who prayed over the bird and raked it to gutter. whose cat brought the bird to my step, yawned, and dropped it. seen that boy look dumbly at a mosquito on his arm and I’ve seen him let it finish and remain fixed on the spot minutes after. hours even.

I have a friend whose father, though imaginary, was able to get work driving a cab in the country parts of Ohio. if I close my eyes I can see my own father lost in some wooded area naked and wearing a cape. the cape is deep red and my friend is female. when my mother reads me a book without pictures I can tell when she’s rewording the phrases she finds plain. how she reads ahead while reading aloud is something I hope to one day mimic. I do worry about the books I claim to know as perhaps there is a sadness in them that remains untouched. plain things are often sad things. I would ask which causes which but for the unlimited amount of time we have left.

the brother was my age, not a looker.  my parents were nervous and slicked his hair back lovingly.  their hands touched.  I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen.  Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found out 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 his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed 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.  the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up without having 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.    

I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood.  but the brother pulled me to him anyway and I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d spent mourning the loss of Stephen.

after a certain film
a boy walked outside
worked the knots
from the yard hose
put the pistol grip
nozzle
in his mouth.

during the film
his mother aproned
a wet baseball.

before the film
his father attended
the occasional
but forbidden
house fire.

triumvirate

the fulsome    
curse word
that deformed my tongue-

the teeth
in glaze
of remnant
soap-

and the shadow
my mother’s finger
left
inside my cheek
which I coaxed
into cigarette

and scrubbed with.


divine instance*

regarded by a daylight raccoon
a man tries to think of nothing.

the raccoon’s eyeful of hunger
a far off religion
the dead of which
orphaned only
a few.

the bent pipe of its back
the gnomic antique
of a raided circus.

its claws
the common salvage
of row fire.

    so fully raccoon
it might’ve been
earlier
what now
it would fight.

if my brother was too long in the bathroom I would begin to think I was handsome. fairly early on, I was able to square myself in the mirror and land a couple good ones. at the height of my endeavor I lost a tooth that had been loose for three days but I gave it to my pride nonetheless. from there, I hadn’t much hope. my brother was less and less able to stand himself and the bathroom became more and more mine. when my arm muscles began to bulge I was afraid I’d hurt myself and so I let them slacken and went so far as to draw on paper the plans for a homemade stall to restrict my movements. my brother had always been the artist and so I entered without knocking and found him face down in the tub. I shouldn’t have been able to lift him. my parents were good people and worried gently about what I had seen. I thought they must’ve known I was ugly.