Weirdly gentle pictures of my sons

Found by a woman so strange
She strangely

Cannot die
From being

Who is the angel for the angel of death

sometimes they **** every last
others
every
first

oh nursery of injured microscopes,
we only bomb those whose blood can disappear

when I don’t hear from you, I don’t think you’re dead

I’ll see it when I know it
in fact
I have
the words

what time I have
to write
I spend
writing.

the insect
in the room.

infants for the end of tourism.

your mom
salting
the empty
doll.

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

Acne is the only intimacy that god allows the lonely.

Face
is the star
nearest
to death.

to it that hawks the mirror’s television, eating is the oldest trick in the book.

the ghost of my clone

/ does death
get the message

no luck
at the inn
the couple
entered
the garden

god
he mourned
the lizard’s
tail

they, the death

their distracted
baby

I wanted to smoke and look at water. I turned left at a tipped over gas can and walked until I heard fireworks. A small tv was showing god the hole it needed help making. A dryer with a baby in it was won by two mothers. They tried to scream. I made a sound and the sound stayed that way for good. I recognized my kids for years.

gesture 5, in three failures

I let a kid punch me in the stomach might my brothers ride their bikes down a hill and later I let two kids pull me out of a bathroom stall might a bike upside down in my dead sister’s room stay upside down in the photo of that room held up by my living sister who claims it can doctor god

~

Death keeps time by the far amen of the face. You have to be very still in your clothes or they won’t last. God is two dead creatures looking at each other.

~

What doesn’t happen in the current dream

stays
in the next.

I roll my own wasps.

Curled in a junkyard tire, the sibling christ blesses oil spots real or no

each letter
of this word
is silent

I worship too quickly.
My gods think they’re still alive.
Am I the world my children worry over.
Am I the worry.
My job is a soap fattened in hell.
I send my brothers songs sung by women
In the language of my voice.
I didn’t drink until I missed being sick.
I love my father in a way only my sons will understand.
I love my mother shhhhh.
Being quiet is the childhood of silence.
Hear underwater
Touch
Starve.
Or be
With sightseeing
The lord
Of your phone.
I’m sorry if that was your body.

why are you here?  no one left me.  do you know god?  boy skipping recess to play dead.  is your mother sick?  she packed a lunch I’m still eating.  have you ever given blood?  to a parrot in a time machine.  have you ever been arrested?  no, but my father is alone.  how alone?  a fishing pole and a pair of handcuffs.  name three gifts.  invisibility to bread crumbs.

grief in the near future

(practicing)

safe
grief

age I’m at
I go
from bath
to funeral
to bath-

puppet
that made
a fist

a wasp drops into jesus.

Anything you do to my mother
you do
to my mother.

Eclipse, the painter’s toothache.
My uncle

cuts hair wants to go to space and says

Nothing ever became art that had even only
once
ruined
the hand.

Hell had already a garden.

All we see
we’ve watched.

The shape you left open so you could ***** on your walk with god.
Our uncle's blood that went back in time to skip us.
Horse twilight. Bombed omens.

I took a toy car from the fire and put it on my wrist.
The far ambulance

of your drinking...

Name in Ohio
no one. Arson

doxes
angels.

my stories go nowhere.

god
and his tree
of hunger

A crushed moth in my mother’s throat is dreaming of a red lightbulb. The silence of our hair is too much. I say to brother break the same finger seven times you’ll hear a churchbell. Eyesight changes what seeing owns.

When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. *** sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.

Dear Ethel Cain

My belly drew circles around me. A scarecrow with cancer made peace with paradise in a cornfield of melancholy. My parents fell asleep but neither one before the other. Some bad kids formed a church then left it so they could pour glue down a rabbit hole. A short period of drunkenness found a mistake in a star. I didn't know how many rabbits to pray for, so I just prayed for one.

I am not sure which of us has no one

the dog
or the me

–

violence
my crippled
editor

hides
her hair
in grey
spiders

–

grief takes a picture of something I drew

I bring wine to the table but also my will to place the blood piano on the front lawn and play it for the vomiting passersby. Touch writes the unreadable bible on privacy. Fill a baseball with the stop sign’s blood. One death is hard to process do you think Death has a story about a particular life? In the afterlife of your gone-ness I am de-blued by shock. I write stuff like that because I can’t write more than three times with my wrist. I know you’re tired of me carving belief into the face of god but please **** the golden poet who knows we can’t eat food. Howl non-starlike into the flash of the eye-prone before. Dear addict ask image what god did only once.

a skateboard
on a kitchen table
I am
in your dreams
more possessive
balloon
a sort of theft
what
to imagery
is a month
a backpacking
angel

a confused

I lose in the dream

each child
in a way
I’ve imagined

Memory stops eating in the afterlife of the past.
A cigarette can sometimes be a search party that finds nothing.
Angels change their *** based on the owl that hears them.
In church I break my fingers trying to open a baseball full of rice.
The breaking happens so silently we are noticed, say my fingers, by god.
Will my children see my body

a barber
in a swim cap

combing
the dream

for a surgeon’s
toothpick

~Notes for film 8, the last~

I notice the bathroom floor isn’t healing. There’s a roach in the house of the miracle-worker. Just one, just one. Age isn’t here, but it’s not a thing of the past. What I thought was guilt, was guilt. God’s god is touch. Worldview, worldvoid. The alarmist nostalgias of my faith. Seeing double is a sickness that disappears my children. My password made me look like this. Nonsense, angel. I am lifting with my arms

red weights on a white lawn while the leash of a blue dog tells my wrist a secret about my neck.

Mirror invents the ghost.

in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past

say even god / would leave / this church

to step on the bones of a star

A horse and a moth pass through heaven where heaven used to be

All my friends are quiet

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

touch sleeps in a blue mirror

I wrap a dead mouse in a blurry map and miss
three
of the four
children
that were me

super quiet parents