the infant
would get
so angry
siblings
would blow
on its face
it would start
breathing
and a biblical
sigh

would usher
itself
into the nursery
of the infant’s
mind
where

vehicle
to a mother’s
heist
     a child
of present
fathers

would happily
****
on whoever

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

I project my stillness
onto babies.

a still baby creates an environment
that yawns
apart
a dog’s
inability
to reflect.

for each instance
of a father’s quietude
said father
gains a brother.

grandeur

had brought the well outta ground the muscled men and she came upon them when they had split into teams and were rolling it and had not yet become competitive. the hands of her gone infant came back to her to see these men heave back and forth a vanishing. of her many fathers one had said ‘the deep train went even deeper and I could not wake’. he had said it to excuse his one day feat of linking unadorned toilet paper rolls to stretch a rat’s mile. her stomach had yet to go down and she was comforted by such literal remnants as thinking of the last place you had it.

libel

two white boys come outta shack each with a wrist one left one right being ****** at the mouth. their laughing I wouldn’t say manic but still not righted. like certain bible stories seem to tumble outta that book it’s the same with their eyes and ears. their heads each one shrunk so as to be united. I want to say here at least a ****** knows what it’s mocking. I only know one of’em and only as far as this thing being passed and told that he ain’t a foster but he was born in a pan and taken from the offices of the parent company his father got laid from. you think that’s the joke but had I not said white you’d have thought they were anyway. here come two girls grisly with month and I never seen two boys so quick to put down the shack they come from.

prayer

I like it best when my girl is pregnant because I get the sympathies. on her hand, she likes me drunk. at any one time, I can remember seven of our eight kids. this means of course one gets left home but also that not a one gets left grocery. I’d tell you their names but then I’d have to split this saying into parts. but I can tell you seven are boys. now and again they’ll slip on sister’s dress to **** up my math. a good joke I start with is that they take after their mother and if they take after me it’s with sticks. I change the batteries in the alarms for fire and carbon monoxide every two weeks mostly outta fear that I’ll lose them all and have to recount them to some fireman I went to school with. I don’t know if batteries are cheap or not, I don’t know anything about them, but I know I spend a healthy chunk of my portion to have. wife and I are keeping the ninth at bay the ways we know how. she don’t ask me and I don’t her. one kid a week goes with her to church and it’s up to me to remember who in my charge caught a fish the week previous. but I’m not wrong with god; no book is the bible, I believe that. at cemetery by which I am lack whelmed: I wish I had his memory.

nativity

wonder they ever told him grown, that black foster, how he'd been at three years dropped manger while crying for the congregates. straw in everything. back a throat, bottom a shoe. pop said he just about caught himself afire at work, straw sticking out his pocket. pop unable to split work clothes from churched. some wanted to resurrect a fuss about color; don’t go resurrecting a fuss and waved his hand he did that pastor ingénue. heard then I the word negress and after its saying the sayers looked about as if she would appear. this was our town after god and many were still making their own. this answers how the black foster needn’t audition. the gold I brought was soft on my thumbs and the flakes stayed in my nails weeks after. pop could tell for that time what I’d been touching so I’d cover when I could. we were quite a pair in our fooleries what with his straw and my gold. he stopped going on about the blacks and I was able to skip school with your sister the ****** mary. the town was never up for nightmares or for dreaming so I kept your share to myself until now how you seen mary fingered by a man with seven. heard him saying it's okay baby, this one's asleep.

holy ghost!

I will cut myself, Horror Film. will fidget my nethers a last time. maybe make the snow an angel with a third leg. which means I have gone outside. maybe my father will happen by you and put his beers together. but I will be gone. into the woods dragging my feet so some will think it took two to take me. I will whip branches about me and generally scuffle so the some will better convince the left. my poverty will be confirmed by your presence on videocassette. my father will hold you aloft and your tongue will droop above the depths of his hair. my father will claim a vengeance he owes on and the some and the left will follow him over the states of my angel and into the woods. when they find me I will say I had an in body experience; that the two men nearby sleep and it’s what we’re walking in.

haptics

little he knows that in holding them hoppers until they spit and before they go wing he is making hitch the upcome carriage of his *****. his future nudes are backtracking and the gravity of this has been diagnosed as your emphysema. he is your, nothing more, son. he will rub your back and worry his thumbs orphan. oh thumb; toe six. the way you deeply stand arms folded he sometimes thinks you have been replaced by a statue of his mother. it is then he remembers the fence his father built and the collective plank his father carried under his arm. you want life to be good again; your son’s low hand and the pups it could feed.

verbal abuse*

she has brought with her a shoplifted teddy bear. on a good night her age is seventeen. two days ago the voices in her head moved to her mouth. she has seven teeth that remain quiet. she fears so much how this third day will go. she has been told, and she believes, I am only in her mind. but there she is, at the sitting rock where we met, the rock I told her I could see things in. unprepared for her faith, I am unclothed. I am glad she has the bear and glad for my part in her having it.

spiders

we got some kind of plague in our toilets mama.*  that’s my dad calling her mama, my mom. that’s him declaring another plague. week don’t stop until a plague has been pieced together by this man so named Paff Snull on the subscription stubs of any number of unread magazines mom uses to swat dramatically at imaginary flies and wasps and locusts depending on the week. this time though I’m ******* because when dad cracks his knees and ***** himself to fetch mama from silence, I look in the toilet up and it’s true and in the toilet down and it’s more. spiders grey and black and off white. with our low water pressure, spiders having a ball. mom and dad they get tents and tell me twice to get inside mine once it’s on the front lawn. I get told things twice because I was born thick and I haven’t the heart to tell them that after the first saying the saying of it is diminished. I mumble to myself in corners, sure, but it’s the same mumbling. our dog gets a separate tent and I sneak into it when dog allows. seven nights so far outta three weeks I haven’t. mom says it’s because of my acne dog don’t recognize me sometimes. ******* bit the meatsy of my right hand a month ago and my handwriting got so neat I was sent from school for cheating. it’s most of my summer and the house is still spidery. the dog has gone to the river to drink and seems okay with it. mom, dad, and I **** in the backyard in shifts. mom ain’t swatting anything, she doesn’t have to on account of the spiders. when right now I mess up my shift I find myself next to dad and he’s just some guy telling me them glass-full people got the joke on them because the water is contaminated. he’s so happy it makes me think I’m the devil to be grinning so big. long wasn’t the reign of Paff Snull.

repetition
is never
more
than one
poem.

there’s no future
in this pill.

my mother’s head
is full of heads.

I haven’t a volleyball
in a pond
to **** on.

in the words of my son
a sailor     is lost at me.

I go on correcting oddities
in the brain and in the muscle
of a jack
in the box

as a cyclist
champions
hunting mourners

to keep their numbers down.

the blank face of a blow up doll beneath a numberless clock.

a sleeping bag outside of a boy.

two brothers rumored to have nursed
at the wrists of their father
to reach the same
high note.

     gripping a rolling pin with both hands
my mother on the tin roof of a neighbor’s shed.  

a dove circling a church bell
to elude the crow
it was.

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly along with one finger he or she must choose.  the cutting of the fingers to equal size.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** a cobweb where I wait for something I’ll do nothing with.

my son says
he is as sick
as a whale
and I take him
at his word
but ask
anyway
has he swallowed
anything
he should not have
and my son says
he was told
to swallow a pill
by a small woman
who pointed
to a smaller man    
     who got to the pill
first

somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man takes the door from your father and there they go hand in hand to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurts were people keeping them apart.  your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet.  at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud.  amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade.  

in three days the man will come back;  your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.

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.

father offers, no, we are bodies trapped in people.

he was known to be monstrous when inside a vandalized church.

if gay, he’d ask
does anyone ask
if you
were born?

yesterday, she was identified by her dentist.
she was recalled as a hunger pain.

man is a rumor
started by god.

underling animals
in times
of quake-

slight
swellings

in brain
of maybe
one mole

bottled
now
for sea-

if on a baby
your hands
would be

so cute

but as
an adult

you glove them-

world as wheelchair
the wheelchair
from which

god rose-

as sporadic
surges

switch on
the sink’s
disposal

pull thorns
from the rabbits
you dream

at this point
means:

river deer
     like you’ve never seen.
a soup bowl; empty, aglow.
another’s head
     in my hands.
coordination.
energy.
receiving the word
a day late
  that energy
   has arrived.
marriage, or a single
parent
  torn.
perfectly mediocre terror.
a love of statues.
love of placards.
showing my son
the man I’ve chosen
  to remember him by.
art not reflective of, or art
     sideshow.
knowing the kids of others.
knowing just how many gifts
     god had.
that the word overcome
has always been
  past tense.
weight gain. weight loss.
detecting
no difference
  in weight.
telescope, or the long
thin hat
  of god.

mittens on the forepaws of a dead wolf.  

one must be serious
about art
but also
flirty.

I will raise you as my own.  

I will make two parts
of your mother’s
passing.

she will live in childbirth.

I am naked and wearing a football helmet.  in many ways, I am the memory my son has of taking a bath.  a picture doesn’t last any longer than it takes me to look at it.  when it’s my sister I can hear her pointing out

assaulted
places.  poor places, poor puppy.  I don’t know why I am a child.  my sister has no problem listening to herself.  her last blank book had only a title, a running joke she quoted from and called shower days.  to date, my son has had one seizure.  he shook the provided angel.  my body was at a press conference.

there is a god but don’t encourage him.  my father means it tenderly.  in his attic a painting of a park scene has in it a woman without feet sitting on a bench.  without feet because his young mind couldn’t settle on them bare.  in the end it seems the wild dog has licked them away.  attic that in a drought of weeping became a basement.  our poverty was given an oar.  my past has a past.

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-

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

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

the land very well of my tongue but I was asked to know the tongue of my land in the tongue of my land.  doc the veterinarian hired me anyway.  I was to myself in the dog cages and in their runs I would kneel and let the hose seize with water.  I was to myself in the sick and brick room fearful the slow cat would rent with its curl my stomach.  I was to myself when the parrot so parrot told me in so many words separated partially its upper bill on purpose.  was I dumped the dogs full asleep and half from a wheelbarrow into a pit and I in trouble doing it when we were busy.  was I would basket my arms upside down above three dogs a day at most while the needle made sometimes the back of my hand and somehow on that four dog day my chin such that it got me my funny talk and fired and I had to tell my home early dad.

the mime made to put it in my mouth.
but the wind picked up.
it was three blocks suspended before the backside
of a fan

pulled it from the street
and into
a pawn shop.

it dropped to the floor.
all very
  
dramatic
said some clown
to another.  said the other

to his white hand

always putting
it on.

he emerges from the driver’s side of his stalled minivan as if you’ve been given too much information.  he holds a hammer in the looseness of his stung left hand.  for a moment it seems he’ll attack windows.  instead, he cries.  his shoulders give him away.  not a car horn sounds.  this is a kindness.  someone has an egg timer.  I locate the itch thrown off course by my lover’s legs and imagine her happy.  across town a silent alarm is pressed by the anonymous smoker of wedding cigarettes.  the bomb squad arrives before the bomb squad knows it and you join

this bomb squad.

beauty is the beginning of beauty.  a man and a woman wait together for a stripper.  you know the man like an intimate thought.  like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door.  the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides.  the man is aware he’s the devil and this makes him god.  the woman is unaware she’s the devil and this makes it easy.  the stripper is watching a horror film and it makes her want to have a child.  she decorates her home then tries to remember moving a muscle.  the blood you don’t see is fake.

I am driving barefoot.  my brothers are crying.  
my mother’s wake

the wake of my mother’s powdered cheeks

is over.  we pass the house my shoes are in.  they run
to one side of the house which makes it lean.  

my brothers to keep from crumbling are sharing bread.
hansel dum and hansel dee.

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into
by lightning.  

when I was a boy I sat a whole week in plain view
with a diecast car behind my teeth.

if you are one to dislike ‘in the end’ and ‘when I was a boy’,
you can hate this all you want:

a nightmare is a dream the heart is having.

i.

when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees

ii.

homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to

iii.

eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self

i.

the inventor of ear muffs
slipping from his mother
to duck beneath the belly
of a carousel horse

his mother with her cotton candy
and his
pressed to her cheeks
calling

as he covers his ears

his name

ii.

the inventor
of the time machine
unbeknownst
to many
or

to all
save his best friend

the inventor
of real time

a murderous fellow
famously
early

dead owl

an oiled rag
spotted on a walk through
the morning after
a protest

-

     in a cell, a boy
hardly old enough
to be a boy

his body stuck to his clothes

his one bare foot
crisp     as starvation’s

mouse

-

          astray of a hawk

the river
leads my shoe

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.

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.

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.

there’s rain
and then
there is
outdoor
beauty pageant
rain.

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

her dog put to slumber.  thin as a puddle.  there at the end would whimper with any footfall on a gentleman’s coat.  

-

her pup a yip
in a backpack
when on occasion
she'd punch
a skateboard

less than
she can
chew

the breast
the mother
is able
to keep.

the healthcare.

the train
lazily
unassigned

to freight or passenger.

the repressed memory
I think I have
of my oversexed
split

personality.  that I verbally assault

with my better
puppet

hand.

she is
by the tail
easing
a mouse
from the bell
of her pant leg.

present tense
my love
I have broken
the teeth
of your purse.

he thinks
of a pill
and bottomless
rabbits.

as the sitting model
for a father

I am actual

sameness / groin

goes thumbtack

repetition is not doom
not to plant
not to animal
life

     whether gang sign or godspeak
it means my child

imagined

as my sister
inspects
her *******
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

A pregnant woman touching a window with a napkin
To stop
A black spider.

Her other hand, of course
Keeping towel.

The spider, then freed, under the door.
The scared leg it leaves

This woman of chore.

Her audience wider
I’ve asked her to cross-

But I’ve looked from my longhand’s impossible loss.

as a boy
I am not sad
to be sledding
alone-

the count
of my uphill
steps

coveted
by counts
lost

he is to have
his inner monologue
removed.

his surgeon
so publicly
sad
is not
captured.

sometimes pillow
sometimes x-ray
his boy’s
seashell
ear
foretells
the housing
crisis
in a place

of worship.

the home’s weekend janitor placing ball caps on the elderly.
something is said, and he is fired.
his kids recall the egg he’d make of his hand.  the delicate knock
of his joke.  their hair, or something in it, weeping.

my first hands with arrowhead made pentagram under hood of daddy’s truck.  then in dirt.  then tree.  he was in tree when I got there and stayed there for what I carved.  not looking up I stayed there too until the next thing which was mom bullhorning me out the window of the truck.  I could see myself running to the truck and to my mom but it was just a vision.  instead I moved to make the tree to where daddy was but I took my eyes off of him and he went.  my mom’s way of seeing had her finding me in no time and she coaxed me with the arrowhead I’d dropped.  she took me home to my brother and put our three spoons in oven.  three the count of times she’d heard me say ****.  I didn’t then and told myself I’d never curse a fourth.  when the pan was taken from oven by brother he took one for himself and winked and for the other two mom pled her milk.

you will not come across the alien I was molested by.

I replaced myself
like the nothing
that happened.

in a country bereft of curfew
part two
of a skit
assembled
by orphans
trades attendance
for the applause
of angels
and skips
the clothesmaker’s
best scene
for another-

a secret favorite
that has Moses
leaving behind
an orange
soccer ball
to be with God
in the sobbing blackness
of an oven.

during service
a slight girl
with a weight problem
somersaults
down
the church’s
main.  

in choir, her boyfriend
longs
for a dart-gun
so he can stop
slicking
birds.

the school’s
second janitor
crushes a beetle
in the pages
of a hymnal     but the beetle
survives.

it’s heard tell
that this
second
janitor
hit puberty
without ever
getting
an *******
because his blood
became sidetracked
by the smallness
of his fingers.

it occurs to me the only place
the janitor
can hold an egg
would need to resemble
a dark
weekday
church
and that
if god

gave beauty
the world     he gave

fragility
my first
unborn
son
perfecting     an attraction
to nothing.

I mouth mother’s lullaby
to a skateboard.

my brother moans
into what he believes
was kept
from my sister.

we underdose
in a gutted place.

we take our foreheads
to women
like fevers
to god’s washcloth.

if he is not made of them wholly, branches, he will be soon. they are everywhere, and he steps on them, and they are arms from hell. he wears a child’s football jersey, torn at his size and his sorrow. he reaches into it and pulls out his heart, a red balloon given the what for, inside of which he blows his nose. he returns the heart.

a yellow adherent hangs from both nostrils, as two ropes being cut at and then loosed from his brain. the first keeps an arm from heaven; the second he catches and loops twice to put on his neck. one is never out of the woods here, and he knows it, knows here is Baltimore, Ohio. he has watched the people, some of them, leave; their happiness would be better called remission.

he is giddy when he comes upon a man wearing only a barrel and he tips it with joy and makes better his headway home. the rolled over branches shriek and wake the man who nakedly bails. the branches up their shrieking.

his mother he has no dementia of his time in her womb. why for **** the despondent are given captions like ‘blank look’ he can’t say for in his mama naught but canvassing eyes. she’s what he calls ‘at grocery’, shaking a coffee can she’ll buy because a done melon can’t hold pennies. she often at the neck is saddled with two toddlers but in his projection now there is just one making miracle of not kicking the coffee can into another’s back.

any girl that occurs lets him take her with his tongue only as she seems to know he was circumcised and after that much paddled.

he starts thinking on dad and dad’s laughing when mother’d say boys be home before dog because that’s how it sounded from seizures and of course rock candy in the summer. the barrel splinters beneath him to be forgotten and his legs go to bleeding stilts.

his last things by his face are insufficient; rock candy, barrel, and twin. I talk on the barrel, I don’t need it, not anymore.

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.

I give the rat my dollhouse at night.  our basement has a disease.  my brother brings a flashlight to dinner.  mother says poor devil to the poor devil she can’t stop eating.  I have my own language that in hindsight is an age gap.  I am so heavy.  I jump and water gets out of my way.  between you and me, sister sees me coming and throws herself on the trapdoor we’ve made a game of rolling eggs over.  father shares a hat with god like there’ll be something in it.