we bid
in Ohio
on a pack
of condoms
dropped
by the invisible
man.

birth approaches its black stoplight.

in clothes
that fit
I feel
remembered.

each letter
of this word
is silent

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.

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.

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

we peck
in the darkroom
at the wrist
of a fish
our body language
proofing
the baby’s
dream

my stories go nowhere.

god
and his tree
of hunger

grief in the near future

(practicing)

safe
grief

a barber
in a swim cap

combing
the dream

for a surgeon’s
toothpick

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.

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

Some animals have had success dying behind god’s back.

I squeezed in an airplane
your hand until it broke.

(that toy
car
from our blue
mom)

Storks
can’t lose
blood.

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

puppet
that made
a fist

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

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.

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

say even god / would leave / this church

to step on the bones of a star

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.

it was with me
absence

when I took
a shape / the alien

had wheeled its thing

in dog years
to nothing

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.

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.

~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.

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

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

Might a man come across the man he’s imagined, the man creates god.

My son, born sick, isn’t always.

in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past

gesture 7

Loneliness spreads into regions of sleep never before undiscovered

When I say my son is dead you can’t say if he is or isn’t

In a field of handpicked *** follow not the glow of a sobbing fingernail

Recognize time when I see it

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

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.

Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair

I lost you before I lost you. your stickmen were free of anxiety. they left a church to the potbellied ghost of your muscle. their word for tree was branch. what god couldn’t finish they called wind. baby an air that stopped breathing.

I am
when I drink
a birthmark
removal
expert
or an angel
privately sad
who prolongs
with a rabbit
held together
by grief
a whale’s
insomnia…

Boredom is a mirror’s god.

Pianos
in the winter
are cruel.

gesture 2

It’s too easy to have what you’re born with. Touch implicates itself in the theft of miracle’s diary. I keep the idea long enough for beauty to interrupt. Asked by three people at once have I ever been drunk, I answer to something lower. An eye is a cigarette made of tears. If I miss a shot, or if a brother steals the ball, an uncle’s ankle explodes in two hells. No teeth, but we lost bitemarks on the reg. Our bruises had five thousand people turning in their own blood to hear the devil. Lord take my child while he is pretending to be the child of someone else. God, blink so often that image has nothing to stare at. Whatever creatures walk out of Eden we’ll leave them out.