god has gathered the disabled to make his case against reincarnation

-

unable to sleep, I become an alcoholic

-

I prefer
like my father
my insects

noncommittal

-

insomnia is the insect my scar becomes

-

noggin, mouth-hole, skinflick

-

a ghost
when I study
angels

this year’s
nativity
will require
the latter
non-speaking
parts
to contact
the former-

please see my brother
to reenter
the lexicon

your chance
for a lifetime
of ***

god says
you have the soul
of a tapeworm.  

the luck
you’re in
is your father
the kisser
of baseballs.

the sound
in my body
do you think
it’s gone?

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.

a brother wets the bed

is reminded
of age, the number

of kissable
girls-

in another life, he has
this one

there is no
imagining
of his
surprise

sad is the man convinced he will one day beat
to the mirror
his reflection.  sadder still

the cognizant woman.

immediately old, the statue of the woman with child.  the baseball star, the soldier whose gun won’t fire, the preacher whose bait palm seems ready to deliver,

     or to receive a dog’s mouth, or pitch underhand.  we try our throwing arms.  poor mary.  you can stone her.  she will never lose the baby.

I have a dog waiting for me
when I get off the bus
and a brother
if I put
my trombone
down.

there are ways to be sober
ways
a pace car driver
can save
for a hearse.

the rapture, the afterlife
are both ripe
for reenactment.

dad ain’t said, but will

no person
truly ****
would disguise
blessing. thunder

has done its homework.

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay.  I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child.  eat snow, understanding.  

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

the ransom note
in suicide’s
dream journal

the ghost of the brainwashed rocking chair

fingers
teeth
who’s keeping
score

a woman with nothing appears beside a horse as one of us recalls our failure to give her anything to keep from it.  we watch her as if she were a documentary on the tunnel vision of our blood.  our hearing of the riddle we mistake for a language.  if a child has time to squawk, a child has time to pout about how it’s been portrayed to the world.  thus far, the world is a dark wall said to have donkeys pinned to it.  I’m starving, but only on the outside.

a cigarette burn and the time it tells once. gum in the puppet’s hair.

blind date
with birth.

though younger
than a father’s
nostalgia
you are
my boy
of 10 years
this day
which has
always been
a reflection
of how I miss you
on the others

the creature
that was to carry
in its belly
the lord’s
second
son

could’ve been
the horse
our mother
steered
into a crowd.  the creature

that was to **** itself
in our father’s
sleep

could’ve been the giraffe
we knew
as crucifixion.

the creature that was to groom
for our
viewing
pleasure

a stone

could’ve been
the ape
that buried
our dog
in television.  the creature

that was
to embody
complete
thought

could’ve been the snake
we bathed
in a bug spray
that would hypnotize
birds.

not much happened.  after I was born, father stood outside of a church and watched mother go in.  before I was born, they had eleven cigarettes between them and smoked maybe nine.  

not much happened.  my brothers joined me on a bike ride.  we made visors of our hands and squinted into the sun.  we looked for a hill.  I’m not sure what they saw.  

a boy pulled into a house by a spotted arm.
an increase in sadness.

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise

this was after your brother had died everywhere

I was calling shotgun for poverty’s mistress
during a game of shirts and skins

I think by then
jesus had fed
nearly two of the five
thousand
with a sunburn
and an ambulance

& most animals were still having four dreams)

anyway, something flew into your mother’s mouth
and the look on her face
told nobody
it had teeth

outside the dream, this anger.  

the kids are happily
the kids.  they think

to paint
the ****
mama
with snow
one must
more quickly

create.  I am here

to pin my sadness
on

its applicant.  when first

I was poked
in the ribs
how hard
I was poked
in the ribs
didn’t matter.

extramural (i)

as he prepared to leave my world to the memory of a man addicted to god, my father was stung by a bee.  this matters.  bees carried the scent of absence.  bees spoke to mother.  mother was the woman it took two like my father to make.  mother swallowed to bruise the body of any dropped thing sounding itself out in a nightmare had by children new to infancy.  mother swallowed and called it singing.  there will be a god.  this matters.  perfect, now, the nothing you say.            



extramural (ii)

as acne commits my face to a memory of scripture, god worries that man’s silence is a pox upon both the crow and the crow.  on good authority, the cyclops is blind in one eye.  you were tortured, yes, but nothing stands out.  my living hand performs for my dying.  imagine my father’s dismay at the realization yours had of having done this autopsy before.            



extramural (iii)

the fireplace is on drugs. get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

-

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold. jesus-on-a-stick. the crown of thorns, extra. I close my eyes. I dare the brain. the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

-

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful. I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams

dreams only

-

everything happened in 1985. words don’t mean. numbers mean. tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

-

the wind is asleep. it sleeps outside.



extramural (iv)

uncle has been all day figuring the teeth of his that will never touch. he has this riddle he calls code for what to get the man who has nothing. if I can get him to stop biting his wrists I might be able to chalk something won’t need moved. when I was born, I was small enough to fit in most mouths. uncle is not the tiniest bit mad. he holds babies only when they are hungry and he is not. those with angels think those without are selfish.



extramural (v)*

the people are looking for something that tells them what to show. my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees. at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends. a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth. grief is a good listener.

we recorded, badly, birdsong.

we lit sparingly.

we scissored
cloth
for puppet
rain.

we asked
was having
a boy
the trap
we’d set
for the wonder
he’d come
without?

as always, we ate
from a basket.

I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.

take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.

I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.

stay small, future.  

persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.

we were telling so many stories we stopped having to make them up.  I dragged the murdered bodies from my dream and buried them in places that exist.  nothing happened and we started a club for our brand of intellectual improv for more nothing to happen beneath.

life outside is either an ice cream truck or a skeletal dog.  both give the boy claim to name them his early snow.  life inside is a tape measure.  there are three spaces he can free in a hurry for not just any xerox machine heaven doesn’t need.  when his mother gets taller she will open a cupboard and in it she will find the spotless knowledge he’s yet to get sick on.  she will find one plate missing.  presently, the moon is no lie and the white men move under god and god is the view from here.  in a secret the boy calls closet he has stashed a bag of basketballs that become fish when his sister gets a mouth on her.

my most recent self published Lulu book, [MOON tattoo], was reviewed by Krystal Sierra, and part of what she says is here:

Because of the relationship between the line and white space, the reader turns back to the poem again and again, a practice that speaks to religious tradition, incantation byway of word and image, how the poem itself becomes the way God, or Spirit, communicates with us via channels we understand, the interplay between the word and white space much like what we know and do not know about the nature of the divine. – Krystal Sierra

~

some poems, from [MOON tattoo]:

[level]

brother is digging barehanded in the backyard a hole for what he hopes is the alien of god’s choice. as for existence, my mother’s is low on mine. my father is keeping out of the same sentence any mention of ****** and totem pole. no one including you cares for my sister’s worry that this no this is the bottom of a rock. if asked, I will say I was visiting with my arms the museum of rowboats during the regional spike in baptisms we as a family failed to interrupt.

~

[meditation]

summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine. say it with me this was not that summer. as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.

I am a person away from receiving the baby.  my arms, like yours, end.  my wife is elsewhere as even elsewhere is needy.  my wife hollers into a pillow.  my hands are the many crippling fights over which is echo.

you were born on the losing side of an argument so great it nearly cut your mother in half.  to his knowledge, he shook you once, became your father and a hider of the rattled hand.  when I wanted to drink, I watched you not sleep, and carried you to sounds I could not make.  we each had one eye that believed in god.  what eye you had made artifact of light itself.  light’s longing.

if it’s no trouble,

I was
to my infancy

everything

the room is no longer
the sick
relative
room.  

our guest is discovered to be a lack of absence.  

here and there,
astronauts prefer
uncalled
to earthbound.  

it wasn’t until I was reincarnated that I began eating animals.

I knock on a baby’s head, a light knock,
the someone home
will need
your voyage.  

lakeside, we forgive
the lone thought
as if the thought
is as alone
as the one
underwater
who

     visible only
to the orphan
form
chain-smoking
beside her clothes

does not
repeatedly
surface.

before asking
to be levitated
the masters
made themselves
invisible.

it was my mother
told me this
while pretending
to read
my future
copy
of how
to make
a medicinal
strength
boy

and it was my mother
who wondered
aloud
if interrupting
the voice of god
was possible.

it was my father who said
laziness
in all things
and for
so saying
was crowned
the shepherd
of time.

I yell at my stories
and my children

tremble
but brave me
like one
braves
a chair
one knows

will break.

I want to tell you, but can’t, how obsessed god is with me

-

hears the whole
of the devil’s apology
does the man
with one ear

-

when nothing
was on fire

nothing was proudly
orchestrating
itself

based on the church fire
famously started
by two pieces     of convenience store     bread

-

I am going to zip
the tent
now

-

a chalkboard eraser
still strikes me
as useless-

a boat
in the hand
of god

-

poor speech

imperceptible narrator
of the wound
my mouth
endured

for Gen*

it was not art but is was my son agreeing to draw a picture of a man with an itch.  it was not exceptionally large but it was enough to clothe a scribble in my mother’s diary.  it was not lost but it was lost on me how the very baby I used as the window of my window seat was able to stiffen at the sight of unrolled dough.  it was not for nothing but it is

now.

(to see her crippled from pointing
to the sadness in her hand)

you are here for your own protection.

I know
to be disabled
is to live
introduced.

I mother
the way I mother
my hands.

I do this
in the city
of retroactive
imaginings.

I salt
with memory
a deer
and am told

lose
the deer.

(-)

poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

the crying

it so
happens

is also
the frayed

mom
who stole

a vacuum
that broke

inside…

-

the crying

the ****
in your ******
stories

her parents ask her to babysit the boy of the couple they’re going out with.  her brother knows the boy as the one who doesn’t get to read aloud in english class.  her parents want her to eat but she ate in her sleep.  the other couple has problems.  her father isn’t jealous.  her father is ugly.  the first thing the boy does he does with a pencil.  a thin line moves across the white wall that in her dream is a tooth.  food comes to her brother in small portions.

yours
that the bird
not have to carry
its cage.

mine
that the bird
not have to carry
its cage
in its beak.

ours
that we are not tired
sitting together
this early

easing
fish bones
into bubbles.

notes from my brother include moments of outage.  typo, testament.  I’ve never experienced anything so awful as talking.  during *** I pretend I am a surge protector.  my death is over.  I slip into god and it’s painful bad.  sorry, I took the ******* my phone had in it and made him write this.  back to god I feel I’m praying him through the first break-up he remembers.  headlines rip me the **** outta mom.

to god

god is
to some

some bread, some snow.

to a recovering aesthete
such as yourself

god
is an occupational
hazard.  to collectors

of inexperience

such as
the virgins
god, as subconscious

measure, created-

god is the vague
self-involvement
the mind
for body

devours.  to the parents

I brought upon
myself

god
is what
appears.

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures

using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.

birth mothers
move
the word
of god.  

from this point on, I am not dead.

is this
how I sound
saying
to water
that beneath
a rabid
bat
two sisters
share
a leech?

cairn
is to
the father’s
stomach
what melancholy
is
to sorrow.  would that one’s

non-existence
could be
again.

and the glacial
pace
of god

to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb

whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce

crow

whispers

in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming

a lake
on the loss
of its shadow

/ the projection
booth
its tugboat
sorrow

/ bad blood
between
the brothers
mime

a father’s brain activity
charts its course.

piano hands
thrum
on the hood
of a junkyard
car.

I am hard to look at
because I thought my head
a burn box.

the sound of a microwave
has a short time
to spend
with the blue
puppy’s
whine.

the theatrics
need a mother.

a mother needs
to populate
or to paint
a factory.

we are less and less particular
about the nowhere we come out of.

mother, factory.

god’s
untouchable
childhood.

the long married man and woman nightly swallow string from the same ball of yarn.  the man is pleased to have recently weaned himself from flashing the public by way of privately showing his tongue to the aquarium pets left alive.  the woman is pleased to exist as god’s only means of communication with her husband.  the two keep to themselves until everyone in the world is crying and then share a moment with their talented baby.

I’d put something
in my mouth
and my nose
would bleed
and mom
would press
my ribs
and know
like that
the name
of the boy
buried
a horseshoe

-

return is a drug

hunger
a choice

-

and the lord said one of these animals is a writing machine
and the lord

he turned
the woman’s
shadow
into a garbage
bag

and the man’s
into water

-

sister dragged onto some dance floor
a scarecrow

-

pregnant / is what you get

if memory
remembers
to eat

sister in the shower sings of taking a thunderstorm

/ smoking
was my way

is

of becoming
a woman / we know

a carpenter bee
as the simplest
foot
of an injured
possum

new
to his arms
his anxiety

-  

wrongheaded
toddler
goes

for swim

-

outside the prison
some tattoos
and some
hunger

and some dog’s
unique
bark

-

his voodoo doll, its tracking

number

-

forgiveness?

that thing from your past

15% off all print books today on Lulu with coupon code of LULU15

some poems from some recent publications:

[untitled]

what seashell does for ocean
my pillow
will

for hunger.

oh dream,

insomnia’s
wiped out
city...

is this
a stone

or the mating
call
of grief?

~

[untitled]

the power
came back on
the boy
didn’t.

I had my chance
to believe
in god.

the beetle was on its back
and the woman
unable
to **** herself
ordered
online
a rowing
machine.

mother’s garden, father’s ladder.

a black cat
where nothing
grew.

~

[untitled]

church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits.  church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse.  church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair.  of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

the shopkeeper’s wife is named after the town she was taken from.  I work for no one.  when I tell her this, she gives me a gallon of milk she’s reported stolen.  three days pass in a house known for the loudness of its phone.  I meet a stranger in a park of suspects.  bread is the main concern.