the sleepwalker and the hangman jumping rope in the town of the sheepish tornado where the church of two birds admits the child of the expat exile into the afterlife of a stone…

as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.

with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.

I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.

all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.

girl death / has boy / acne

(I’m here for you
like I’m here
for cigarettes)

I sleep the wink
that’s yours.  angels

can’t have
ideas.

a woman places my hand in the stomach of god

as fire
the stickman’s
barber
betrays
my hair

a spider can take its home to heaven

-

it is my goal
to be sicker

than my son  

-

have the baby
trying
to be had

you need someone who will ask the serious questions.  a mother insisting on dinner.  a mother who doesn’t eat but smokes your father’s pipe as if the pipe itself has ended televised hunger.  you need an idea.  ballet shoes for jesus.  a brother who doesn’t have to shower.  that it be wholly mourned, you need to lose your mind.  you need a motivational speaker who talks to a pair of female cops as they stand over the tastefully exposed body of a teenage boy.  who tells them to go to a movie because it’s possible.  even if they’ve never seen an invisible movie.

three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find.  a bit of my mother

is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan

directions.  a drug dog

on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower

of lost
men.

author unknown / who hears a poem / unlike the poem you are reading

-

the unknown wife / a hidden talent / handstands / above a pair

of slippers

-

stupid babies / don’t worry

in a remote location

-

scissors / the hair / shrinks from

     then fingers / in a mother’s mouth

-  

if dead / only his ghost / would know

    he was my father / in many ways

-

a makeshift hood / on the same head / in a different body

of water

-

children / less widespread / than children

praying

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.

on a tour of heaven, this tower would be the spacecraft they died in.

to the child your father became, some gravestones look like thumbs.

     a trumpet on a country road.
     a soldier with a heavy pack.
     an ambitious raking, Saturday, of dry leaves.

severed hands forked into the sun.

dear witness, I’ve never seen a fly drop like a fly.

what can god read to make him feel more human?  then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing.  I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering.  then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs.  point wildly.  it’s not a shame beauty ******-up.  I look sometimes like a different baby.

blowtorch the little creature.

I yelp in an already
soundless
fire.

the poor are a substitute.

name one thing
I can replace.

my father stuffed me in his coat
and biked me
to a park.

he biked away when a lady approached us waving.
the teeth on the zipper of his coat made me hum to myself.
he said jesus I’ll bet she eats ice cream with two hands.

mother didn’t lower her voice because mother didn’t raise it.

flatness is a landmark.

the man of the house says the devil sleeps backward.  says they share a barber.  two women walk into a joke and are asked to serve communion.  my father told so few stories that each retained its beginning.  I held my tongue like a meeting.  I conspired with my brothers to dim the lights so we could see the eggs leave the refrigerator and then see the eggs leap into our front yard.  we were saved from what the eggs became by a person who belonged to a group of people.  the lights did not return for so long the whole town feared they would.  my mother hung posters but could not have known this was the start of staying home.  I can’t speak for everyone but we were able to get online and order supplies and make a hobby of waiting for them to be delivered.  to this day, tomorrow is a new object and I’m what’s foreign.

mommy I am stones.  I am in the blacktop river.  my veins have been used to unpiss cows.  like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are.  the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten.  they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move.  I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed.  I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing.  if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t.  there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped.  I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

you and I, we are kissing.  we are kissing in the bed of a pickup truck.  when we are not kissing, you are telling me about your father.  if he is sitting alone in a house, at a table, you don’t know.  we pass houses and I ask about the driver.  I don’t know why I care so much.  you have lost a button, I can see your breast, and you are closing my ears with your hands.  my head is a rock loosing the tread.  there are two poles without wire in the bed and I’m going to steal one of them.  you are looking for your button, you are praying it shows up.  I can tell you think this is going badly.  you are really looking now, it’s nobody’s business now, and I can see more of your breast.  the kissing is done with but I don’t operate like I know.  the houses are getting farther apart and soon there won’t be any.  I say this out loud and whatever you want to say about it dies with the driver as a car with three small bodies in it moves through him.  we are okay and I tell it.  you pat yourself all over, find your button had the whole time been nestled in the lip of your jeans.  I think of us when we were making out and how that button might’ve been cradled then not cradled by the hole in your belly.  you look at the button.  it’s like I’m not even there.

I walk with a cane I do not need.  the road I’m on is unnaturally level.  I have what one might call my feet on the ground as I pass a still life with strollers unattended.  ahead of me, two women are fumbling with the beginning stages of their assault on a crippled boy with a phantom brain.  the boy seems to be consoling his ears with the hidden roar of a tank.  old man that I’m not, I hear the babies being put behind me.

death is never early.  take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror.  chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head.  invent a sibling schoolmates blind.  know poverty, know moon.  shampoo the elderly from a distance.  baby no one.  they have looked like hell since before you were born.

the mouths
of two gods
at either end
of this alley,

open mouthed gods.

one breathes in, one out.

feels like mine
what they share.

and this dog
pulled into a store
by an owner
whose hand is asleep

is the dog
I once had
behind me

after closing
the shop
to shelve

what I had been shown
by the daughter
of the man
who hired me.

keep watch, he had said.
 
so I brought my dog
and kissed his daughter
on the back
of the knee

while she took
whatever pills
the stepstool allowed.

I repeat
I know why
the bizarre boy
stims.

to be alive is to be monitored by loss.

in this, your missing dad is like a father to me.

I possess my son to ask into his heart a milkman based on comprehension.  

I am father whose mind drifts for dear life.  

I have a bowl
for the parts of me
don’t work.  bowl gets full
I get a dog
for a day.

when day is done
day becomes a meditation
on dog’s
whereabouts.

I obsess to maturity my daughter who is the bliss
the brainless
hammer
finds.

busy as a blood trail
it is still my mother
passing only
the time

in violence
not sudden.

in hangman, how the head
is first.  in chess

how father.

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

to jump
the dream
of audience
that buried
my father’s
rib

I stand

on an operating table
in a circus
tent
and invite

my mother
to believe
all earthquakes
belong
to satan
and not

to the devil
my sister
was
when high
on the body, its boneless

forgetting

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.

mouth pain.

dreamboat.

screen door
as hyphen.

god
as no
contact

with the inside
world.

a jailer
talking through bars
to a ventriloquist.

     youth / spent trying to yank a doll
by the ear.

into the artless silence
of god
they come
as buzz words
from the life
of baby.

creation’s alibi
and man.

in the valley
referred to
as the church
of aggressive
amnesiacs

a family
of pickpockets
gathers
for a group
picture

only to find
the single
use
camera

forgotten

and the boy
responsible

missing...

I’ll dream
(when I
die)
of all
the sleep
I didn’t

outside
of mother

get

not a mark on her body was admissible.  on person, she had a child’s paintbrush, a still glistening breath mint, and three black & white photos of a woman’s *******.  first blush, we had her as someone’s muse.  

     my handwriting suffered.  my cursive began to match a popular suicide note.

dad loses a brother while drawing a straight line for a haunted circle

-

I tell
two jokes
well

in the shadow
I’m in

-

no one replaces my father like my father

a would be mother
with an english phrase book
boards a train
she thinks is a train

jesus meanwhile
on tiptoes
circles a tree

a motivational silence
within a nondescript
third person

propels both

though by
some miracle
only the hands of jesus
remain curled

the interiors
of helicopters
in the air

and men
who pace

I am the photo my visions take.

high
on memorization
the mother
has to believe
in god
for god
to have
a safe
word.

the boy is dirt and noise. is hindsight’s
gospel.

loneliness, meet maker.

a prison closes because another opens.

on a track, a train car is hit by a train.

     the central aesthetic of a father’s dream
remains a homeless shelter
with a skylight.

nourishment belongs to private property
where god     steps
on a stick.

in Ohio, a conductor’s widow wanders the wrong prison
with a piece of her mind.

I burn
sticks
for dreaming
dogs

/ forgiveness

you empty
crow

what started as a joke
became a sick baby
whose first sentence
put my writing
in writing.

-

no matter how widely
unknown
it was
that I could burn
bathwater

my wife
had to eat.

-

humility
is having to thank
god’s
sibling
for woodwork.

he wants to know what he collects.  he prays.  he is blindfolded by the parent he rarely sees.  he is taken on foot to an empty showroom only he can imagine.  he is hugged.  not asked, he goes into detail about his outfit.  parent flips through a notebook.  parent leaves to find a pencil.  outside in a miniature snowstorm another parent throws an egg through the tail end of melancholy.

as I come into someone else’s own, I agree to meet my brother at a clawfoot tub I hope is still there.  I fill a bucket with water and leave it with my wife for good luck.  I walk from the house in mild weather and become plain to you.  I pass the mud my father’s eye goes without.  I tire.  I come to in my brother’s arms and his badge has left a mark on my cheek.  sleep is like a slug I can’t overtake and then it is my tongue or in its privacy.  brother roughs me into the tub headfirst so I can hear the highway.  he preaches and they were followed by two sets of footprints until the footprints had to rest else they’d be too fat to die.  these parts you're money or hush money.

lifted the forepaws of dog asleep

one in my hand, one in dad’s hand

an open bible slid beneath them

pushed by my mother  

-

beside the broom, I see a toad-

though some suggest it is dust

-

to see her water break one might say

she swallowed a sponge

in fact

one does

this man jim calling himself jim repeatedly to his mouth until he is no one or no one but.  been thinking to **** his wife out of love and his thinking presently not different.  the church is empty and for its emptiness jim’s forehead is a blank check getting away from him.  to not **** his wife he’s been reading books but none of them halfway before he gets upset with how authors think they know towns.  all drab office and good deed and maybe a dog or a horse loved by some kid been felt up.  hell the history of a building starts when one enters.  jim of course can’t place his anger.  I can.

jim kills his wife because she is sleeping.  or, while.  you have to understand how some use sleep as rebellion.  afterward, he realizes he only thinks he has done it.  she opens her eyes, her name is dee, said once and enough.  he holds no pillow nor has one been dropped.  she says jim and down the road they have a daughter and she further down a fat kid

even at three and four and five a fat kid.

the doll and the dummy wore for god a wire.  she had a dog whistle and she a ****.  my fist grew faster than my mouth.  your dad was asking a ghost looking for its head how to hold a baby.  thunder what it remembered.  your mom the palmreader with a broken wrist was pumping milk…

when her mouth arrives, it arrives in pain.  what gets around to my brother is that after her fire was dipped in hell she tried to drown her trigger finger.  I make a mental list of the oddest things that stick to my body.  my hands come from two camps of how to count the devil’s teeth.  food is the voice of god but it goes right through me.

if you can hear
hear these:

the mid week a.m. church bell
accidentally knocked
by a man
naught better to do
than shoulder.

the street sweeping machine
lowering its brush
to send
pills, teeth
onward
to reservoir.

by noon
the brother
of an only child
splashing
nearby and in

the future.

lifted from the eyesight of a torn seagull

the beached outhouse of a father’s mermaid

the hostile witness
left her dorm room
to the daughter
I always wanted.

my son secretly existed
to burn live music.

the baby had nothing between its ears.

my wife saw the light
that was god
that to her
was bait.

when the white spots on the baby’s tongue mysteriously disappeared, I knew it had eaten the instructions it had come with and everyone rejoiced.

for jacob*


in dark
I’d make
the bedroom
door
     and there
     pause and bless
the toy driver
of the bus
for lighting
up-

but you
would stir
at my attendance
to an absence
not yours     and I would return

before trying my lead
again

     fourth brother

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.

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~
some recent poems:

[loneliness]

the only
animal
recognized
by the magician’s
one-trick
pony

/ touch
giving itself
a childhood

/ an alien’s
crucifix

~

[liftoff]

the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.

-

my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.

~

[the cross]

the haunted clock
in tornado’s
house

the weightlifter’s flower

the rabbit’s
bliss

~

[scare]

I know it is nothing

or a relative
of nothing

what mice
make
of a mouse
possessed

/ my distance from the unborn widens

~

[homage]

like some verbally abused parrot

the crow
the phone’s
god

~

[depictions of reentry (iv)]

/ the tadpole torching my stomach in the museum of the heartless alligator

/ the spider the star in suicide’s eye

/ the crow in the devil’s purse

~

[depictions of reentry (v)]

/ you can work here for nine months

/ it’s not like riding a bike
it’s more
like kneeling
in the center
of a stickman’s
nightmare

/ never you mind
the bloated
baby’s
yellow
tooth

/ at least the sick

they confuse
death

~

[depictions of reentry (vi)]

night terror, the handwriting
of imago’s
child…

/ resurrection, a memoir

~

[depictions of reentry (vii)]

/ the hands and the crushed mind they crawl from

/ god of the briefly ugly

/ the homeless child of nostalgia’s native

/ graveyard
our game
of telephone

~

[depictions of reentry (viii)]

we laugh about them now

scarecrows
the stepchildren
of apocalypse…

pregnancy as suicide prevention.

be wowed
by stuff
on earth.

~

[depictions of reentry (ix)]

before I got sick
there was a sound
my mother
could make
and a bird
perched
on the arm
of a snowman…

angels, yeah

some
grab their ears
when trapped

~

[depictions of reentry (x)]

the unlit candle

desertion’s birthday

-

the voice
is not god’s
that experiments
on children

but ask
away

-

the dog we buried
is sometimes
on fire

watched
we think
by our sister’s
cooking

Cain and Abel
argued
over what
came first.

the homophobe.