Dear Ethel Cain

The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.

the farming out
of absence.  the broken

hand
of the android’s
pianist.  the silo

that invented
sickness.  

the brains of operation cemetery.

the lizard’s
tail
that returned
with a fingernail.

the demon
with a head
for ice.

-accident-

because
when mine
stopped
your sadness
was still
moving

-


I will be posting on a youtube channel weekly, give or take, of myself reading poems of mine and perhaps others I admire. This is the first video. It is small and unkempt and precursor to more of the same. I don’t give shaving tips. I don’t modify. Link as such is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiqLUwP68oA

the ****** boy is waiting for it to dry, it

being
the puppet’s
toothbrush.  his lover

a practitioner
of moral sadness

knows the body as a representation
of surgeries none perform
and the future
as historically
inaccurate.  where we’ve met before

I’ve narrowed down
to isolation.  was there I last lost mother

with her hacksaw and chair
dreamily approaching
a tire swing  
as if the human voice

on any land
letting go
of god

could raise
a tree.

the film
halfway through
had this idea
gave mother
heartburn

-

the baby

-

the baby is a monster with a broken foot

-

it comes out of my mouth this thing that feeds a brother

it learns to read but only has time

for phantom

-

cosmonauts

-

mother she loses father to headaches anonymous
mother she likes the film

it’s one
of one

it reminds her of raccoons
refusing
to eat

-

profane chauffeur, grief

we’re here to ****** the head of the boy who put a clown’s red nose on the girl playing jesus for stopped traffic.  if I spoke your language, I would tell you.

blindfolds
and salt
remain
irresistible.                  

the male, the white, the young.

I am sorry
three times.

I square my hands
as you     swim.

     I pixelate    

bibles.

art avoids me.

my father snaps his shovel stealing snow from our travel-addicted neighbor.  his mute sister’s last confession is a first.  his doctor brother’s dollhouse is a hospital.  television is a byproduct of my mother’s human longing for animals.  if my arms were healed, I’d keep the baby from swatting its *****.  I call my next trick rabbit sorrow.

be the abuser you want to victimize.  repeat your father’s compelled evocations.  if fat, absorb your mother’s least favorite hiding place.  if not, borrow your brother’s future.  plan it around a mirror.

I am trying to lure my brother from the woods with a semi-flat basketball and a fallen wasp nest.  at home, the neighbor girl he has a crush on is using our water.  the first time he disappeared like this, she wore my mother’s bathrobe and called his name all the way to junior until her voice went.  her note is the oddest thing I’ve not reread.  

there is smoke coming out of your father.

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 )

because god
takes serious
thought

the woman
who will remain
specific
puts a second

spider

in the discarded
freezer
for meat
overflow
that does not
a junkyard

make

our boy is gone.  boy’s mouth, boy’s knees.

I drop my jaw in an open field, turn my head
while pointing
at a kite.

     a man sets a chainsaw
beside the ax
at my feet.

man
calls the ax
a quitting
cross.

he seems so disgusted, honey, so disgusted
I lose hope.

the last time our daughter
fell asleep on my chest
must’ve been the last time
our daughter

fell asleep on my chest.

-    

    I hear you sometimes
using my razor.

disappearance, firecracker
you never
get past it.

in the angel’s book on animal visitation

a deaf clown
bombs
a flower.

poor devil, his eyes are so dark he can’t close them.  don’t get my brother started.  as soon as I stop moving, there’s a picture of me still.  a story develops in broomstick hell.

the imposing figure read silently from a magazine of immature fictions.

an amulet predicted itself grey.

a symptom presented my sister to a non-speaking heroine who by all accounts had been only mildly *****.

a boy, having recently written to the head of the household about dirt clods being mysteriously removed from the backs of toy trucks, could be heard sizzling as he dissolved into the memory of his father’s cooking.

a trophy room made trophy sense.

for Brian Dawson*  


god
to me
was any
word
my father
didn’t
know.

profess
to know.

night terrors for which my daughter has a few choice words written in cursive.

that have told her she is black but have used the blank communique of her skin as proof she’s surrendered.

I want to speak with the angels.  visibility should have no viewing hours.  the angels send me away.

night terrors that only occur in gated communities.  present in children susceptible to imago.

the angels need pictures of the poor.
the poor my contraband.

home sweet brain
activity.

dog door, bible.  

a brick
from the wall
of crow.

father, thunderbolt, tongues
for totem.

outing.

the light
under which
I fought.

as it models
brief

and deformed

halos

the arthritic
hound

knows

if I blow
my brain
it will lick

my face

I make my daughter see a gnarled tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.  I look at my father and commit my face to memory.  I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.  I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.  thirty seven when my son graduates from gag to blindfold and wants to know why it rains but never snows blood.  when I learn from an owl of my daughter’s aversion to pillows.  god is more and more the map he left in the kitchen drawer of a dollhouse.  I shoot into the air a rubber band given to me by an alcoholic relative recovering from the time I called the white of my eye the ******’s acre.  my wife is holed up in an outhouse shunning her diet of run-on sentences about the Qibla.  I don’t have an answer but change it.

I’m going to let this **** me.

I’ve hired two frail boys
to roll away the stone.

my father is the man
with his pant legs
rolled to the knees
standing in the mall
fountain’s
waters.

my mother the woman
bewildered by the boy
in the food court
typing on a keyboard
attached to nothing.

closer inspection
reveals
my lover’s cigarette
to be unlit
as he waits
outside
the madhouse
I rob

30% off all print books on Lulu thru the 24th with coupon code of LULU30

some of mine are there, including:

~ shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems]

~ MOON tattoo

~

poems, from:

[ally]

the robotic jaw
lifting otherness
from a hole
in a body cast

no litter
of bewitched
kittens, no wild

crop
of soundlings
angry

at the wrong
life

~

[tocsin]

the singlemost mother has heard of a skin cream can turn one into darkness.  

a bar of soap that reads palms…

-

on display for the poker face of birth, you are the vision footage dies for.

-

you have this father
leaves
no stone
unseen

this brother

haunted
by surplus
aftermath…

-

before it was an ear, it was where

she scrubbed  

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[purlieu]

a bruise, a school

of fish.  a caterpillar

crossing

the floor
of hell.  a thought

sick
to a son’s
stomach, a winter

glove
in spider’s
nightmare.          

~

[notes for eggshell]

beneath the tethered astronaut of his dream

the impossible boy
misses

something small

the human ear, its recent
brush
with whale

~

[domain]          for Katherine Osborne

falsehoods
I was sure
to say
to a horse, things like
god is sending
his middle
child
to collect
a drop
of my daughter’s
blood, or

it’s a sin
to be
1989, things I felt

I owed
the horse, that were
horse-like
in their stillness, that went
nowhere
when nowhere
was

come fly
or flat
earth

the dark’s
*****

when I think for my children I find they think only of themselves.  reminder:  this is not the place to make observations.  travel is hard.  hard but for my god given moral myopia.  I am so attracted I have to sit.  thrum.  this means the idea my daughter has is presentable.  cages in a field are empty for the moment.  people all sizes sit cross legged.  the cages are locked but the people are too recent to care.  my note to my daughter is a metaphor for couples who want children.  some of the people can fit through the bars.  most have to settle for a head, a leg, an arm.  my daughter loves her patience.  when asleep, she grinds her teeth and curses the expiry of the years she pretended to be a rabbit.  no matter the season she wears many layers.  the grinding is mistaken for god’s anger.  not moving is sad.  being everywhere is sad.  the temperature she is running has no impact on the plot of her body’s rise.

how many last words are there?

I don’t mean to suggest
my weapon
is heavy.  

before every meal
a voice tells me
in its best
voice
impression

that some bombs
don’t
go off.  this means eat.  

bait is a bird from a brother’s birdwatching dream.

it is sad like seeing a fetus
in the dark
is sad.

have we failed to water god?

brother Abel
the original
dogsitter.

metal plate
the mirror’s
pearl.

the treehouse and the crucifixion.

sister.

sister she’d overeat

and draw
all night
the adventures
of the subway
driving
egg.

the man whose blindfold I touched

I said his name
in the dark

he carried me once
on his shoulders
to a cemetery
where as a boy
he’d seen
a turtle

most kids see a mother’s
UFO, a stone

is god’s
giftwrap

it is not unheard of,

the composing
of a suicide attempt
note.

mine says

that the identity of the last one born
will be known
only

to those works of art
god failed
to revise.

you tell yourself
the smaller they are…

you see a cloud, a hospital
for a bird…

but then you’re six
and your sister’s boyfriend
is ripping out your hair
in clumps.

your brother is the storm before the storm.

your father doesn’t have cancer
your father is ******
during a longer period
of being
left alone.

pain is your mother in labor.
a time machine that only goes to the present.

most days your son can’t move a muscle.
looks bored to life.

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.

things are desperate because they are beautiful.  

my transparent sister
wants to be a surgeon.

rag doll
our talisman
of verbal
abuse

and crystal

ball
the whale’s
brain

/ ******

saw pigs in chewing gum

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined.  nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave.  the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube.  my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his.  mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost.  I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog.  I have not heard of the spoon that has a past.  something in my stomach wants to see a star.

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

the two begin to talk.  I listen from a nearby table but am perhaps too deep inside my own head.  I am recently divorced from a childhood fever now living happily in my right knee.  my left knee suffers from a sameness.  the two begin to kiss but they don’t know it.  I suspect each of them has been born more than once.  I intend to keep them.  every pregnancy is different.  a kind of kidnapping.

film 2

I am everyday older than my brother. Those years I did not have him, he did not have me. Gods die in the star they sleep in. There are eyes in my sadness when I look at my sons.

the farness of heaven is the farness of twin.  a packed theater starts a fire in a factory.  a mother and a father clay themselves as figures put to sleep in a clawfoot tub.  across the board, a boy is crushed after witnessing for the image of the crowd-surfing girl he was made in.  you can’t eat touch.

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

with a clear
head
I wash
my hands
in the dark
and spread
the fingers
of one
into the absence
of my father’s
glove
where
the fingers
of my other
had died
for the knuckles
mother’d
liken
to a puppet’s
ribs

bear with me, a man was going house to house.  a big handed hunch of a man.  he was wanting to know if anyone in the immediate area had seen the bird he was talking about.  his enthusiasm was off-putting and in the back of my mind downright scary.  the look on a face when a door is opened is often the look of one to whom the lord has reappeared.  I don’t think the man knew he was ruining the rareness of the day’s clarity.  the bird itself was not his fault and the bird sighting could’ve happened to another.  on a normal day a suspended woman sings above us.  there is a before and an after and a bit of mystery to the meal obsessed.

it was easier
to tell
man
he was missing
a rib
than to confront
the inquiry
her body
would pose
had it been here
with her
however
long.

dogs
were wild
then.

like the contents
of a purse

my sorrows
shift

a few
are darkly
touched

some are
chosen

one I think
for a baby’s
lampless

mouth

nothing could have prepared her for life in the womb.

not an ear in the shape of god’s mouth

nor a blind hand
in a woolen glove.

I was raised in a silence and went on to *******.  I was not close to any named animal.  I let my brother's leg break in the barn and watched as he appraised the length of the rope he jumped with.  when hunting together we followed telephone lines and shot into the air.  birds did more than resemble the feet of our jesus.  our mother was glad we lived but couldn't recall which of us snuck up on her.  our father let us call him by his first name.  his logic remained impenetrable.  he smoked to remember smoking.  slept on the floor so mother would stop making the bed.  before standing on his head in a full bath he'd promise to breathe with his brain.  he'd introduce us as my son the tattoo and my son the artist.  I loved him so much I had to run away and come back.  to this day my brother doesn't know if he was taught to distance himself from prayer or to embrace it

to distance himself from god.

he is a weak signal circled by two strictly circumstantial dogs.  the dogs have this hunger I can explain in my sleep.  once there I am suffering on found footage.  he doesn’t see my dogs and continues his optimism such that his hands are often in the early stages of being hands.  such that his heart is in a job looking for a job.  such that his muscles twitch with god and are not the muscles of Adam the only man with nothing to plagiarize.

I think of the wind. how all it can do is ask for mercy. do you know my mom? my sister? my daughter has a pet that disappears when famous. sadness has no opposite.

I puke sand
into the infant’s
mouth
in low
praise
of the male
form
made

famous

by a statue
that sold
not
for its representation
of a dominant
existence
but for
the delicacy
with which
its creator
handled
the angel’s
*******

in a childhood
some child
had

as if late
in locking
the gates
of the orphanage

as if drunk
on a long
history
of being average
in isolation

as if auditioning
for one
of four
sounds
a baby
simultaneously

makes
like
not exactly
this:

stork poor radio drama)

the father
pitches himself
to a scribbling
god

whose image
left little
else