(-)

existence is the wrong inquiry.  I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

a pinkness has always gone on without me.

I didn’t know I was naked until I had somewhere to be.

can one get pregnant from being pregnant?

suicidal, mom is thinking for two.  the storm says again there’s a hand in my soup.  my ears are sounds from the son of god.  the sister of sister insane has an arm and with it throws a roller skate at a school bus.  you can’t see my ******* anymore than I can see the worried eyes of a giraffe.  people are people from church.  the we in we let her believe.

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured.  moon of the blind.

we proceed
as in recess
of mourning

outward
of the brief
city-

longing is a pup, a kit, a word
the stupid have
for infant
ape-

we constellate
in godless silence
only to form

our tragic
figure’s
jawbone-

it may be
there’s no future
immune

to the draw
of evacuation-

but sway

beneath the high
empty

crib

the evacuated court of my son’s illness.

the blind man’s
missing
eyelid.

the grief, the broth, the reacquired thrift.

the dispersed body.  the hotbeds

of skeletal
trauma.

the dance music as mother’s
chthonian  
darling.

the sorrow method.  the rhythm.

tell them they are nothing more than the lot the dream surrenders.  that gender is god’s eyepatch.  child abuse has its own race.  that dead or alive, god has never been sick.  to stop acting as if they were born tomorrow.

I change daily the size of the bird that will carry me to heaven.  I don’t know why my kids dash out of public restrooms giggling at having pressed every hand dryer.  I don’t know how they recognize you from your tv show.  you wouldn’t believe the business a broken metal detector attracts.  my gift is not lonely but it is mine.  when I dream the tornado I dream what is in it is undisturbed.  man in a chair reading a book.  in a tornado.  it is hard for me to exclaim.  I saw a dictionary drop and miss by a mile a baby’s head because the baby’s head was elsewhere.  it is like I am again addicted to those double A batteries that as a boy I’d **** on while outside uncle was kicking that tiny dune buggy at a cat most likely as perfect as any cat we’d come by.  I say perfect because it was there and gone.  I used to be fat.  it felt true.  and then I had a fat friend and I went and told him no bird would be able to take him anywhere.  you have a wife you have someone to have your child.  the success sorrow has brought me is perhaps underground.

I hear
again
of your
death, I do

the rabbit
math

-

I have a son
passes
for time

-

crayon
he says
or crown
of thorns…

his language
I try
to watch it

-

his blood

goes from soap
to mouthwash

a miracle

-

a miracle’s

mutant
reverie…

-

stick, stick, bone

-

for dog, I do
the math

our father was on the hook for his mother’s failed symbolism.  our god slipped into character but not before we gave thanks.  we ate as a unit.  we kissed, or agreed that kissing was second only to swallowing.  we grew in secret a garden of hair.  going online was rare.  we feared satan but only as much as we feared tattoo removal.  in the end, you thought more of us than our subconscious ringleader.

****, kid, your poems.  I took a page from your father’s thesaurus and played scrabble with god.  I came back knowing your name as code for omission.  your mother didn’t break a chair over my back because the chair didn’t break.  I worked it off in a building from the wrong twin city.  after that, my homeless jailer became your brother’s landlord.  your brother he played citizen’s parole to my arrest.  borrowed my hat on account it wasn’t full of money.  like most men, we were in love.  he had a note he’d written that would appear before a big fight it said don’t let my suicide beat you to death.

what they mean  
means
there is one place
to hide.

I come from the woman
who knows
they’ll come
for the baby.

my four children, I need them
to hoard
awareness.

often enough, bad men do nothing.

some err on the side of believing
a woman
is an unfinished
man.

bad night, sitting on a swing, I can look or not look
at a star-

is your mother a one-man fistfight?

my father came out of nowhere.

while investigating the disappearance of her father’s belly button
my mother was killed for wearing a wire

fat
with crocodile tears
for the alien
dead
your stomach
rings
a private
bell

your father says pets are for decoration.  my father says pets are for storage.  your father has a boat.  my father has a boat called the buddhist window.  our fathers go boating.  our mothers have in common the land of two left feet.  your brother doesn’t speak when he’s writing ace dialogue.  my brother doesn’t speak because of a brain disorder.  our doctor has good news and bad news.  you have a top bunk, I have a bottom.  our god is not real.  you say he has a sense of wonder.  I say he healed too quickly.  your legs give me sea legs.  our mothers balloon

and dot the horizon.

I fry a single egg
in a pan.  

the sound places me
in one of my mother’s
teeth

as it dissolves.

I bring mother
the egg, and she believes
I am the same son
who brought her an egg
yesterday.

she eats the egg
over and over.

her attempted suicide
is not something
I know of.  she keeps it to herself

in the person she was.

[magic pills]

a doll taped to a skateboard. you get the idea.  mirror for doghouse, nest for traffic light.

[mystique]

/ boredom, falling short
in a mom’s
coldest
child / I understood

your movie / is there a meal

choice

prepares, or a less

direct
psalm / a taller me

where ovens
talk

[scrap chapel]**

a black tire, the bed
of the fisherman’s
crow- death and guilt

genetic-

same dream, same bear-

the afterlife of god

– tree of more

far be it from me
to stir
the madness
of fish.

age allows that we are younger for god.

sleep
is a shadow’s
bookmark.

father makes a wound in hard ground.  may your body be with you.  father treats my most pale hand as if it’s a painter’s brush.  in what was dubbed the guest house craze we lost artist before artist.  father shuns the collective statement.  without my boy I come upon a red horse mirrored in calm by a white bull.  valley nonsense.  the boy didn’t suffer.

be alone.  enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress window shopping for a red.  

know

     that in between heaven and hell, there is war.  hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell.  hell sleeps more than your sister in love.  heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.  

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.    

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

a sucker
for anything
can’t come back
to haunt her
my mother

like a genie
rubbing
for no
luck
the arms
of my father’s
electric
chair

is aging

this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child    

ear to eardrop

a hospital tree     in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery

this is day 39 of 40
observations

each day I have so many
children     to name

differently

I don’t remember the first time you were here

anymore     I am blessed
to see your toes

hear a storm
when the storm
is distant

[the book of boy]

/ be the buzzard a shadow stuck in a trash bag

/ be the knees full of milk

~

[boy in darkness]

blood is a movie and none of it

yours

~

[reader]

of everything
his writing
destroyed

~

[wreath]

i.

upstairs
the last
to go

ii.





iii.

door
is so
forgetful

~

[nostalgia while we wait]

no god. no wind.

sick son’s kite.

the pea

asleep…

the kind of laziness animals have, that kind of panicked longing…

and brevity, the faith
of insects

-

my shadow, of course, afraid of its borrowed blood

-

that barn
in the middle of nowhere’s haunted eyesight

-

the invisible
after-hours
birth, and the woman

who keeps the baby
despite
its perfection

-

this quiet in the redneck’s
library
of forgiveness, this thunder…

-

the agony of the boomerang’s maker

speech itself is a failed translation

dreaming is a farm

a mother
makes it as far
as mailbox

bear
to fish
there’s water
in the water

is, today’s mousetrap
tomorrow’s

shoe

mother is too far gone to start small.  she is, as they say, pinpointing the outcome of a child blessed with field vision.  I am not my father.  my father is one of three men shortlisted for your sister’s pregnancy by the cult viewership of a propaganda film that showed my brother’s brain sticking out of a blanket.  my father brings my brother like a knife to a knife fight as heaven and hell receive different parts of the same bomb.  with another word for word, I have a woman on the inside who at mine will recover god from god’s plan and your daughter’s kite from a manhole.

i.

a brother
on the roof
with his raft

and the white mouse
his baby
takes
like a bottle

ii.

the coming
of radar’s
crow, the lights

of illegible
ambulance

it wasn’t
that he’d been
in a terrible
accident
but that
the image
I had of him
hadn’t

sight has a single trick

show me a food
can keep
itself
from being
eaten, one of these

is older
than the other (the hands)

the parents
of touch

warning label
error
on mattress

elicits
single use
applause

many
you could not join

her plane is in the air.  she is showing late signs of believing she’s left an octopus in the oven.  the man she is with knows nothing about paper.  on the ground, in awe of the bee stings on a sister’s bare back, a brother carries orphanhood to term.  everything I touch belongs to the same alarm clock.

I have a better word
we can use
to abbreviate
your dying
language

seeing mountain
then moth
gave god
a mouth

a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.

20% off all print books, there, thru October 3rd with coupon code of SAVETODAY

my latest self-published (on demand) Lulu books, as such:

[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from]
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

~

[MOON tattoo]
9.00
114 pages
published March 2016

~

[shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)]
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016

~

[FOUR]
12.00
340 pages
published June 2016

~ this is a combined publication of these four collections: earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from / MOON tattoo / infant cinema / shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems] ~

~

[depictions of reentry]
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016

~

speaking of books, and of talking to myself, I said some things about two recent, and excellent, books of poetry:

Nothing Good Ever Happens After Midnight, Sarah Marcus, GTK Press

thief

I can live knowing it goes missing. but, it being here, toppled from its rightful place…I can’t live knowing there are two. that it has no plural. that I have to say it twice. that I am asked on my deathbed about deathbeds in general.

–

bear

can we talk about bears. no, can you. that’s what I mean. I mean I want to listen. is there a bear I can learn about apart from the others?

–

panic

can we say muscle memory is the orphaned narrative of a bilingual body? that a house is so clean its rooms disappear? can we say home?

book, even?

the empty room released into the wilderness.

–

reader

this book by Sarah Marcus. while you still exist.

“Find a midwife whose name sounds like a spell.” – from Do-It-Yourself

“…Water
finds a way out. When I enter a
room, I locate water.” – from I Didn’t Know

“I research how to remove a body: a strange erasure, an omen.” – from Fetching Water

“Her dismantled den. Her dismantled den.” – from Den of Thieves

~

marshland moon, Eleanor Gray, **** Press

“(it is nothing, is nothing

…and so, where fables began)” – from [Lady’s Slipper]

After reading:

if there is no card

the flowers
are
from loss.

I didn’t know how to end things. I threw a soft doll

at a bullet.

I was trying to be quiet
but silence

it has
a safe word.

The way swimming plays with my shadow. The prop

high-chair.

~

During:

The missing child learns a new word. Not from me. Not that I remember. Our favorite program? A previously ruined nostalgia.

“a nameless sensation which perpetually haunts the body” – from [and then, Monsters]

I have a look I want to give loss.

“I want to say goodbye, I want
time to say goodbye” – from [Skeletal, Furred]

In my dreams I am ugly. In my dreams I am not differently awake.

“and so, what then of
colossal sleep, “ – from [Zero Beauty]

~

Remnant and Root:

“there is no language that can articulate what it is I suffer by, or do not suffer by- like all the sufferings suffers I am…” – from [Inactive Currency]

“/ do I even know of longing / I know of being held / “ – from [Wormwood]

“how do I
…love the very gnat of self” – from [Plox]

“holy, holy the black asterisk of wound
for the child I never was” – from [Languid Limbo]

“ ‘murmur’  I had forgotten the word
ash without meaning, death without purpose”

“-I am
a song, an urn, a stairwell” – from [Susurrus]

~

This is a book. The title, to me, is very alone…and, intimacy, the most distant of permissions.

asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.  

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark.  I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured.  if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

don’t talk to babies.  write.  write to be the first one there.  the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth.  walk once a week into the wrong bathroom.  worry.  bump around the house at night, noisemaker.  a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard.  pull.  pull from your habit forming past.  be the bomb god’s yet to wear.  surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty.  open your mouth then look at your son.  call it photography.  if spotted, be a monster.

I slip with god into a movie about a crying baby  

/ the museum
doesn’t have
a bathroom

that suicide
be
a medical
procedure

for the layman
in
you. that evac

be exodus.

the attractive couple carry a live lamb to the last place their picnic blanket was not seen on fire.  the lamb taxes their young muscles with every weight gain its mind records.  they point and the lamb shifts but does not fall and it’s their pointing makes me hope they are happy.  the whole scene overwhelms my leg and I ask my closest son to rub at a certain area with his palms.  my failed son, son I am lost on, son I swing

at and miss
who goes on to refer to kites
as fireworks.

a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

who swallows
fire
to cremate
god
the *****

donor

poems from my most recent self-published collection {name calling}, available on Lulu:

~

[boy with bible]

scissor his hair
with fingers
from the hand
of your longer
arm

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

/ the frog shepherd

~

[entries for loss]

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

~

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for water]

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

~

[a letter, silent]

a letter, silent

dropped by a word
into window’s
bible

–

cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost

search

for earpiece.

–

medusa

her headless
horseman

I am told by the bulb of this reading light to fear my father.  to fear the midsize pig he holds to his chest.  I am scared enough to know the bulb is my father’s failing heart.  I am brave enough to be nothing but confused by the pig.  in real time my father is taping together the eaten film of a videocassette.  a film that yesterday had him jumping up and down.

by morning, the bite marks on my son's arms have moved to his legs.

as for magic, there is none.

one must go everywhere in person.

the second thought of our hastily created christ was to encourage the brutalization of magicians, most of which we corralled into footage of women having out-of-body boredom.  the sons we had not killed came out of hiding and we scratched them openly behind the ears and gave quarters to the fathers of the sons we had.  like yours, my mother started a grief sharing group to bring me the glimpse I starred in.  animal shaming was passed like a torch above rabbits and dogs.

the abandoned books of women

hurry, grief, your mice
to a nearby
field.

close, silence, your mouth
in the ****** scar
of mine.

distill, wind, the river
your ****
fiction.

scarecrow
if I am worn, let me help you

undress.

loss of the family dog

be alone. enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress
window shopping
for a red.

know

that in between heaven and hell, there is war. hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell. hell sleeps more than your sister in love. heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

annotations for daughter*

the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.

having a baby is a mouthful.

–

think of yourself as a journal death keeps.

.....

also:

for those interested, I have 15 signed copies of my full length poetry collection *‘earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from’ (Dec 2015, 98 pages) and 8 signed copies of my full length poetry collection ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015, 316 pages) that I’d love to mail, free of charge, for sharing and/or for burning. send me a message with a physical address along with the collection desired if this is something one hand or two of yours would like.

( Barton)

at her back
the boy
is thinking
of a letter
and not
of the ghost
his finger’s
from.  the mother’s guess

is early
but correct.  always

this sobbing
at the base
of things.

if you were injured
before or after
you fell
from heaven-

well

it’s not something
I dwell on.

     up ahead, I am a busy with

the god question

dropping you, loving you

separating
the two.

the baby was found, after the fire, alive and well in the oven.  god showed his face until, again, the world made him hungry.  at the time, the painter of babies was a baby herself.  her brother had been dropped long ago by a man reaching for a foul ball.  

the sweet tooth’s bible was putting blood on a napkin.  

you want grief that is a seashell of grief.

the composers of rain
fight gently
but fight
nonetheless
over the brush
that first touched
my mother’s
teeth.  mother

is asleep.  I’d leave

a thumbprint
but am not sure
which lid
covers
the eye
she drinks with.  I want to say

dying
is the bath
we draw
for death
but know
father
can’t hear
a thing
since losing
his voice.  

/

though I am rarely old enough to have seen a boat

the boat is weeping

a widow
with three hands
has ten
doomed
acquaintances.

god’s tacklebox is too light
to carry.

think of it as your ascent into feminine indifference.

think of your son as the incurable
made
thing

on the factory floor
of my son’s
use.

a male mime
bites into
a bar of soap…

***
is a bruise
in a blizzard