what small apologies
to my father
my children

are.  headless father

his many acts
of embodiment

     his book of two
quotes:

money
doesn’t know
you don’t
have it

you can buy

sadness

I was made
to believe
in the making
of the thing
you were made
to see

-

Q:  what is a hand?

A:  my own blood squirting out of a fish

-

it is hard to choose a coffin
when your mother
is clutching
a purse

name the baby
and then
name
what it has.

an optimistic father
who calls
its insomnia

a god
with a god

complex.

at one with a lonesome populace

dream small, god…

about death
death
was a baby

some eyeless thing eating for none

a volunteer
to snipe
the crucified
dentist

appetite’s bedsore

a baby taking up for a chicken

have mostly boys and then have one of them need god.  stop the spread of suicide by not only creating an angel but by creating an angel that knows to cover its mouth.  kiss any person who says it’s your daughter’s height that keeps her from landing the role of jesus.  assume you are bait for touch.  dedicate yourself to men populations bore.  put the male in male ****.  ice your knuckles.  give death a day here and there with crow.  switch crows.  the past can’t leave itself alone.

we may not have invented god
but surely     we invented

god’s
silence-

he must
hear us
think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJXt4Gn0ZA

you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there.  you post the photos while your dog barks.  you doze on a hot day.  your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog.  your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing.  you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car.  the car is not yours.  your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

sacrifice
has its own
unbeatable
consciousness

I enter with my small life to profile the impressions you did of my brother.  these kids, they cough in photos.  as for her, her father’s voice could up and speak at a moment’s notice.  I move the gun daily.  if my head wasn’t glued on, I’d have lost my ears to the hive mind of ghost forgiveness.  my brother liked to play leap frog.  **** art.  we live too long.

after a spell is cast by one using a pseudonym

we start
somewhere.

being operated on
helps me sleep.

I was your age
when nothing
had been done.

the turtle in my father’s backpack,
the turtle loose
on a moving
school bus.

I crawled into my mother’s bed
and waited
for my nose to bleed.

you find the cut
like you find
where your daughter
is cut.

a sister ties
knot after knot
and opens
a window
only to *****
in a downstairs bathroom
from a fear
of heights.

god from a previous marriage.

I wash my own body. put behind me the death of outhouse slapstick. a dog is barking at a tractor. an older dog, wearing sunglasses, lets the baby do whatever. only some of these churches are mine.

as a child
the happy child
had no notion
of a childhood

he knew of ghosts
because things moved
whether he minded them
or not

he was haunted
by visibility

and cared for
in theory
by a woman

nightly moonlighting
as a man

I shot, one summer, both my hands at my brother.
the tree he climbed was the most realistic tree
he could find
in that city

and I
missed him.

sister has her tail

brother
his paints…

satan’s baby can clap underwater

she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…

I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue

that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…

if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…

I have nothing to shake

from death
their doll

death

pregnant, she was killed during a game of hide and seek.  a man passing through popped the trunk of his car going over a pothole.  disparate images of war took root in the photographic amnesia of crows.  brother smuggled a pillow into the meeting of the minds.  never much to look at, mother made a skirt from the executioner’s mask.

sometimes
you’re awake
and your son
is awake
and neither
of you
believe
in sickness
the raccoon
mask
of sickness…

no god unkissed, no dirt…

and sleep, sleep
is a priest
whose hilljack
blood
favors
the cult
of the noiseless
ant

i.

a lifejacket that small

my answer
is no

ii.

no
has one

eye

iii.

god is coming to touch your foot

~

paint

the heels
of saint
fetus

~

robot

sometimes when my knees touch

~

punishment

our mouths could turn food
into soap

~

dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.

says throw a ******* baseball.

-

I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers

-

I was not raised by scarecrows.

had a toy that answered to wolves.

I want to drink and watch a clean body enter clear water  

-

I have prayed naked
over
an insect, have lost

mother
to her gift
of not talking

to animals…

-

the ****** believes
loneliness
can be
exaggerated, dear

spider:  I swaddled

in blankets
so many
babies

as an uncle
can enter
any garage
and sense
the absence
of a nailgun
so
can a holy man
prepare
a meal
in the missing
church

the identity
of the kid
didn’t
beat us up
is

the schoolyard
our church
of arson

between my mother
and her paper
cup
I’ve heard tell
that even sorrow
has a life.

father yells
at dogs, at the necessary

born, at me
in the mirror
to turn

around
get someone
can clean
this up.  father calls

light
the unspilled
blood
of the god
we're in.  he suffers on his path

the suppressed
amnesia
of faghood.  being gay

has long been
being open
to the possibility
he’s not.

the stone’s wait-listed heart

a god with something to prove

the common telescope of a haunted cyclops

a round of leap frog
played in poverty’s
backyard

homicide

grasshopper

in plainclothes my uncle claims he’s a disappearing clown.  says he’d take me to the park but boy god borrowed my pigeons.  we’re eating in a stalled car the grapes he’s pulled from behind the ear I didn’t get from my mom.  when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.  grief is the herd my sadness trails.

my wife and I
we walked
in our sleep
with Jesus
on the water

my wife knew
instantly
but I had to ask
his name
which woke

the kids

angel: I know

my son’s
disease
is lower
than pork, that suicide

means god
has a say
in how
we’re prepared…

also, that above
the lake
in which
my father
sees

a strange
fish
there flies

a burning
bird

I saw my father
standing on a chair
waiting for god
to take him
for a walk.

I started sleepwalking
around the same time
I pretended
to sleepwalk.

there was this bible
one had to step on
to reach the phone.

I am waiting to have the one dream
belongs
to my ghost

-

in heaven
the story
of my emptiness
has only
a middle

-

what I teach my dying son
is be good
to god
now

-

here are a few words
on context
and here
its haunted
postage

-

the past
is lonely
if someone
arrives

-

between birth and death

the gospel
of aftertaste

-

grief
has its own
cat

-

grief
has its own
cat

a brother
dodges
suicide
with a piece
of paper
that doesn’t
work. a mother’s
blood

goes white
at the ink
of amnesia.

bus stop, breastmilk
there was

no me.

at what would god
not
be caught
dead? speaking

is how we talk
to the words
we say.

and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours

they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

and she was nice to her kids not because she loved them but because not a single one of them was predicted to reach an age high enough to become an only child.  and she held on to coat hangers and to memories of pressing outlet covers into place.  and she lynched dolls claiming they’d be lanterns for god when god got brave enough to move again.  and what went on without her went on to cheat death or her brother out of his massacre.

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.

I’m here, now, if you want to put a bug in your dad’s ear about pouring coffee.  in the war the thing I felt crawling up his spine became his spine.  in the war I called it abandoned and he said not while we’re in it.  he scratched the worst looking dog into the side of it so we’d know it was a church.  I shared more than once how I’d be stupid as that dog to guard a dogfight and less than once how jesus would’ve been a suicide bomber had the crowd been clueless.  we cried about women and children and by our crying they were found.

during the assault, I was seen praying an oceanographer into heaven by all but god.  a body entered a nursing home to find a suitable head.  I stayed put to care for the little blood they say never hurt anyone.  I have since held that some have both haloes of bird and star.  that any man with two has a single unnecessary blindfold.  long

that there is no wrong way to collect errata.

as the hell it was
to record our whimsy

     as the hell it was
to read it

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

in a photograph
taken
by television
the boy
was hidden
from children
whose madness
gathered
eggs
for the animal
in tail’s
dream

was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.

naked I have cleaned the story of my own drowning

-

father leaves his raincloud

mother
her trapdoor

-

sometimes when my brother is near an apple

a body-bag
fit for a mouse
changes
color

I will be pumping gas into a make of car I call off-white when a passerby of guessable hostilities won’t know enough to ask if it’s my dog coming dazed for every one of its legs down the road at me like at a spot it senses I’ve disappeared near and I’ll have to agree with my mind it’s the **** dog for sure and it’s not far from where my boys are huddled in a borrowed blanket smelling smoke and I gather it won’t be long before the dog is nothing more than its best instinct so I let the lever and reach through the space where a passenger should be blowfishing on a window for my last gallon of milk to pour on the car like a rehabilitated pyro to give that dog something to see and something to lick.

I mock blow my brother
who has just put
a snowball
down his pants
after claiming
it
a bar
of soap.

we are as high
as our father
is gay.

if we go in the barn
it’s for the Ohio
breeze
to begin
the joke
it abandons.

our mother is openly sad.

yarn
disappears
and blood
shows
its hand

-

homesickness
is what curls
in a mother’s
foot, her toes

-

having babies
for the color
white, this boy

-

he comes
came

-

compass
the thumbless
orphan