paint for me / in lost / white

an Ohio / so divorced

from its visionary
plainness / that one

can brush
an erased / hand / at the mere

thought / of spider’s / hair

hit your children. my own, I love the way they look

before I don’t. every shadow

leaves its post

here is my son asking me if I love a piece of bread.

I understand it as his speechless inquiry
outside of the eating we do
and into
love.

you have heard, or are about to hear
of the boy who said nothing
for his first five years
because everything
to that point
was fine.

sometimes the boy is a girl
to whom god
also
speaks.

they will begin to think you’ve lost them. a mirror will go to prison for harboring the invisible cyclops that discovered how to miss the trace nakedness leaves. a rabbit’s foot will pray from inside a crushed hat. and the land will be flat because a hill stopped filming.

what would she ask
sadness

that old blindfold
from the future

how did you
get old, how

did my father
eat
and eat
at the same

time

perhaps
you’ve seen it
the mask
that took

my face

as real as a grocery cart

in the kingdom
of sickness, as the store

I belong to, as the lonely

wheelchair
enthusiast, as the candle

lit
that becomes
the idiot’s
flower, as god, as real

as the owls
of those who’ve groomed
their spineless
sons

to wash
the hair
of the one
still
giving birth

on a rooftop, books

by the baby
nickname

the boy
in another
language
pays
attention

light
marks again
its territory

grief beds sorrow, sorrow’s
eggs
mostly
hatch

dream only
of discovered
things

I am a boy because of the boy who killed my family. she wears a swimsuit designed by a hole.  we eat together these fireworks in the mouth of a frog.  our gargoyles worship food coloring.  our father for a living disguises his mother’s roof.  his mother speaks to the animal animals don’t.

seek poverty for the instant nostalgia it provides

my eyes were invisible

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

0503-2017

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.      

0504-2017

his weight a cricket on a piano key

0508-2017

disability as competition, jesus.  and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled.  here we will coin transformative indifference.  a body is not a teachable moment.  as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut.  meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.

0513-2017

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

0515-2017

there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once.  echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf.  you breathe and say god gives out  no more than that which I can handle.  the next breath is mine.  god gave us god.    

0602-2017

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

0613-2017

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

0620-2017

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.  because I want to.  

0627-2017

magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

0627-2017

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

0706-2017

the disappearance surrounding said event.

a horse belly-up in water’s blood.

see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost

0719-2017

today was more your hand than the photograph it was cut from.  a family of five in the bed of the unremembered present.

the better part
of isolation

fact checking
his father’s
loneliness

mirror
to window
we’re moving
away

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean.  the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple.  I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

thinking for shadow

(all my homes were entered at night)

and then for the crow
hit by the crow
our baseball

imagine having to haunt doom. sole cornstalk in the dreamworlds of tree. I cannot track the beauty of my children. it’s as if they are egging the model airplane of a pilot who loves matches, declawed cats, and wax museums. imagine chickens. leaving the anthill.

Letter 061624 climate sameness

Dear Ethan Hawke

Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I **** a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I **** a rabbit. I’d never **** a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.

it gave me nightmares, from mating call to church bell, that air conditioner in our third floor window. thematically, the poor are closer to death. my people don’t move. god is where you left him. god where I put.

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

when I say church
she says
widow
then admits
it wasn’t
her first
thought

was church
mine

miracle and forgery, mom’s funeral

sleep, kid. give grief its carrot. I’ll be right beside you, awake, wearing one sock. I stepped on a man today. for context.

a person
playing dumb
on land
for tree
my feet
were lost
in prayer

small things, tadpole

my mother puts down a grape

could be a fish

be

the blindfold
of the man
who pulled
my father’s

teeth

bat
bringing bird
some shade

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.

a mention
here or there
on the police
blotter, a chicken
scratch
on a giant’s
petition
to condemn
the church, kids
we lose
to birth

/ his stomach
attended
like church

I want
again
my brothers
to fight.

one
the animal judge of god’s time here
the other

the ocean’s
only
ghost.

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth.  I say dog for both dog and puppy.  pray for things I know will happen.  a rooster through a windshield.  a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.

/ the baby whose worship returns to put hair on your doll’s chest

/ the time your twin broke stick with a woman at the end of her rope

/ the ring-bearer of silence

the insomniac’s apple tree and a pig paler than its own star

the pinky swearing ghost of my rib

not roadkill
what crawls
from a costume

the children
how they love
their self
harming dog

it changed me none to see my father rubbing a lamp in a time machine. mother, too, ain’t been different

since.

–

mirror miss your clock.

sons
gather facts
for loss
and sons
gather facts
for loss

these names, before you were born. colorblind orphan, yawnless fish. ghost with calendar.

look at me
when I’m invisible

I play my father as a man terrified I’ll return

before violence can celebrate the sleep that got away,

sorrow the mudwrestler of my drought

whose tooth fairy
does
impressions

can we erase
what silence
films

a dog
a smaller
prison

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

to present oneself so falsely-

be happy
for the work

I know it is nothing

or a relative
of nothing

what mice
make
of a mouse
possessed

/ my distance from the unborn widens

the fat kid
whose mother
owns
a video store
will
for a dollar
let you touch
his eyeball

he is maybe
the church
of the seizure
I had
in a church
that is gone
much

like blind
invisible
women

[for Kazim Ali]

pain has no spirit, I am never

so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably

you won’t
survive, babies

are all
the same, I recite

what sounds
pretty, it seems

less happens
in the winter, to animals

and bread

the day you were born
you were killed
in a dream
where some
were wounded.

I was there / to look / at the sky

I wouldn’t worry.  I myself didn’t walk until I’d put everything on the floor in my mouth.  even then, my right leg would sometimes fill with my left.  dad would warn me about bumping my head and mom would remind me to make him hungry.  anyway, I told your kid I don’t know how to read but the truth is reading makes me want to see two women fight.  I blame my brother.  some people have the attention span of satan.

I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our **** and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo.

tragedy
to an angel
is

the ghost
of an alien