like some verbally abused parrot

the crow
the phone’s
god

in more
than two
nightmares
now
I’ve been
towel dried
by a father
whose baby
was given
a brick
for sounding
/ scrapegoat

this word
at mirror’s
grave

mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.

father, I can’t bury
my face.

in lieu    
of the lord’s
dog, raise

the lord’s
bone.

it is for my ears that god gave me a stomach full of cotton.  my mother’s fingers are made of bread.  her blood she says is dieting for the blank book of beauty sleep.  I have an inside animal unable to move on from the rained out magic show.  its only joy is to bring me shoelaces.  after building houses, my father shakes himself barefoot in the railroad car of a train his angel plans to swallow.  I have nothing for my throat.

leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards

happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe

reverie a learned behavior

god a tornado warning and hearing
a ghost town, this

a cigarette from the purse
of a past

/ mother

as happiness
abuses
the brain
of a dollhouse
plumber

think
of Ohio
as a bed
above
a restaurant

then
of a man
and a woman
each
trying separately
to have
the baby
god
won’t recognize

that in sleep
can play
pretend

as any father
quickened
by the specter
of an amazed
god

father
had me ball
the baby
up, had me

find the sweater
his wife
was in, had me

turn
all the water
possible

on…

what differently
father did

was, while there,  

off limits.

-

I heard my brother
ask himself
to stutter, he was

no fake, I heard him

often, I was maybe

the lord they used
to freeze
my mother
open…

-

illumination
is the person
I am not

is the person
others
agree with
thinking    
the person
will change

is like preparing
to receive
a runaway
sis

I would read my books by the light of brother burning his. sister could heal with her bare back the angels of lab rats.  father drank water and mother its hiding place.

I was blind but now I was blindness.  religion turns water into the snow jesus healed.  high in tree I have spotted the baby before it walks.  the closest thing I can say to jogging in place is don’t be black.  my son is the museum a hospital wants to be.  life expectancy is I don’t think the world of my children.  my son is my language.  if I speak I speak skip to video.  I’d cheer but it’s not my first heaven.

for the man
to break into song
he needs
hear
humming
the woman
who paints
her small part
of a nearby
church.

for god,
it’s the ridiculous
notion
that he go
from human
to human
without transport.

for me,
it’s a bird
sexually
abused
I’ve never
seen.

I’d answer
the phone
when it doesn’t
ring
but on
film…

I’d save the drive-in

from children
indians
and sound

as human as the main character in a robot’s dream.  as human as the next, as the previous, as the kid playing mine as a *******.  as alien as father sleeping in a grocery cart.  as alien as my sister’s death-metal band my brother’s anger.  as animal as the wire your brain calls inside when a child’s finger is shut in a car door.  as animal as pawing at the keys

of piano.

the abuse
continued
it was almost
slapstick

he looked
at a plate

clean, hell’s radar

prayer
dedicates
for god
his time
to memoir.

fiction is the blood of a short person
spilling from a tall.

I enter again the room of the screaming man
who was screaming
when I left.

silence is par for the quiet.

this was in my dream. and this. and she was there and she has two kids, a boy and a girl, and a husband, there he his, who’s killed himself. I kept saying, after every thought, behold. went home with a woman who insisted she was born pregnant. slept like a wolf addicted to car alarms. saw the saddest foodfight.

the name of this scar
is
they couldn’t hide
the canoe

mom says there’s an oven
at the bottom of every lake

that I was born asleep
surrounded
by toe touchers

is art
world-building
for the geeks
of grief

have you crucified

starfish

the fly
has a bed
and cat
was declawed
by snow

I feel nothing
for her
but also
nothing
but-

she is
then
a writer, partial

to now, and to now’s

book.

is
then
prayer, loyal
to the past
most

current, to the believer

who contacts
touch.

Memory is the afterlife of existing. In the dream, my dream is a dog made of blood. I’m sorry that you cannot sleep. My mouth is a bone writing to a bitemark. Bees from your childhood are trapped in bees. There’s no god and no way for god to know.

I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

the future sees itself as a man unable to be forgiven in an Ohio of pawn shops and nakedness

before you know it, you’ll create time.

let now
give me hope
for the past

gathering roadkill for a game of musical chairs

/ the juggler, the darkness

anyone with sight was put here to warn my son.  the past is the past of no sudden moves.  the future is the language god uses to hallucinate.  if I remember correctly, memory is the safe word my father avoids to make his presence known.  touch is the cage in all things mom.

it is common for the male cannibal to carry the skin of the due child

fasting is a sin and starvation a commandment

orphans are given home movies and edible pillows

language is a head
we bring it cake

my grief writes in the wrong diary
of the orphan
in her tummy

I pull them on
as the pair of gloves
I haven’t worn
around a baby.

I hear
behind me

(in the voice of someone
imaginably
younger
than those
who make
short work
of god)

a stone
being named
repeatedly.

*** is both
the girl
and where
she was bitten.

how long might satellites mourn? sickness took the lord. a scarecrow the pulse of a cricket.

not every image was worth the effort.

let in them
a thunder, a counter

of breads
and sabbaths, an infant

struck
by owl

mother is in the zone.  is writing a birth scene for a specific kind of person.  she has this window she’s named god’s narrow.  my only job is to leave my father alone.  I am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it’s a boy when I share it with my brother.  it keeps getting sick from being around other kids my age.  when I catch a snake I tell it satan had to worry about being you first.  I hear almost nothing because I want the voice to be perfect.  it will say I had, quite by accident, become evil or it will say finish your bathwater.

this repeatable body, these monologues for echo

–

suicide’s mother, parole’s father…

–

snow a cemetery with mascot christ

I am at my skinniest
asleep

it wasn’t my dog
put the rabbit
shot
from its mouth
back
in its mouth
but

I was lonely
from seeing

things

[removal musics (x)]

this father
handing bibles
to prison scene
extras, his sadness

sorrow’s
nondescript
editor…

the drive-in’s
elegiac
dog
/ nose
to the scarcity
of theatrical
emptiness…

the fish a cigarette burn on the body of god
gets bigger
over time....

how unfair
to insomnia
the monster
with child

~

[give god my space in the unleft church]

as you count on your teeth the losses
I’ve turned
to stone

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick

let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

the distance between my brother and a random sister

if

what they struggle
to share
is darkness
their childhood
blanket…

-

realistic depictions of my mother watching films

-

also

for a shy
god

my mother
divining
from belly
mud

trends
in angel
fashion

-

me
liking only
the me
I see
in mirrors

cigarettes from your dad the impossible shepherd

a longer god

the cats
of a cruel
friend

the food bowl
of a baby boy
is the nest
of a fool’s
bird  

~

something smaller
than my brother
has been killed

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

mark my words, wrist

-

with god
as my impression

mark

insomnia  

-

the mood was very ******, the mother invented

***
to scare
the kids, the mother

drank
cologne

-

I keep having the same baby

it comes
with a dream

any bird
with no birds
around it
was a bird
father called
his good
his writing

hand.

you
are a better man
than you.

writing again
in longhand

about what
a lover’s

lung?

bike repair

my problems
with mice

as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue

dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine

go on, birth
take silence
from a baby

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world.  hell was always the preparing of hell.

I *** cigarettes
from the butcher
gave boredom
a fat
lip

/ death has been trying to guess my age

in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

mid polygraph, I lose
the baby

/ the loneliness
of its food

in one car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three.  in another, my sister takes photos of her dog.  dying is a chew toy.  be as unmoved as your attackers.

I went through a period of sticking things in my ear. not too far except this one time mom said it sounded human but also like all sound had lost its memory.

being poor is a myth.

myth
a fact
with self
esteem.

a father was running circles around a baby.

/ not that I have two birds
but that I ask
for the stone
back

/ nothingness
edited
for space

a smallness
that skips
a brain

a stuffed creature from god’s cage

-

sickness, the second person to forget my dream