men of a certain age vanish into witness.  two bricks are tied to a pair of hands that go on to clap above a baby.  I chop the tail of the mouse in your mouth to pieces.  optimism is any man after me also ******* unsuccessfully underwater.  is your god admitting there will be no more where that came from.

because I wanted the poem
to feel
as rare
as my father’s
anger, and because

a pigeon
is
what it eats, and because

mad with bread
the oven
my brother
buried
took a snapshot
of our dog
bigfoot
sleeping
in hell, and because

my son is not a pattern
his body
can resume:  the alien was impressed

but my mother
god love her
was bored

instead, the two large dogs go game over a single stick. a bucket moves now and then, mouth side down, and because I am high I put my heart to the right side of my chest. I have been told under the bucket there is a dead chipmunk. I periodically believe this, and cannot admit I am stirred by doubt. I focus on the dogs and on the stick I can see. you’ve braved the zip line that runs through the trees and I might have heard your legs crack on the road. I’ve known Ohio to be flat, but here I am. I’ve known Ohio to sound like the young adult Jesus strolling and that’s if I strain. I am afraid to go in the house; I worry the dogs will either disappear downhill to lick you or tip the bucket and be lost.

i.

this is what I was thinking:

blow blood from your nose.
the word

stem.

and lead me to a flower.

ii.

dies adult
the child
of god.

iii.  

wheelchair, from its

handle
a ribbon
you can flick

like a blue
ear.  

iv.

her soul
like foil;  why mama

she pillowed

the coughing
iron.

v.

stepping on a nail
this is my father

he walks like  that

on his hands.

vi.

a red oil
ants carry.

in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.

afraid of my sons I was born scared / I say sometimes to my friend of few words a few words on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered fish fresh from ghosting the underfunded aquariums of rapes that occur / at some point I’ll tell my daughter we’ve met / my father when he comes comes from another dimension to bear hug our dinner guest who’s arrived in a mirror / mother puts a gun to her foot

a father at a table
looking at
two blocks.

his hash
mark
mind
suspended above

his image
as it flickers
between

adult supervision
and acts
of resuscitation.

his child
breathing
for blanket.

doctor’s orders
my special hat
is a dark
cloud.

spacing issues
have disappeared.

thin air is a black sheep born without a black kitten’s heart.

tell him
belief
is twice
the distance
abandonment
leaves.

that for baby longhand

a father easily
beautifies
the unburied deep.

trained
to be homesick
the animals
disappeared.  dad advised

we get out
the way
of frost, let it get

to what it’s got
to chew.

we stayed inside mostly and hollered
loud enough
for mailmen
to hear

nicknames
like little
baby
bathwater
my favorite

from the year
god’s voice
changed.

in yours, I find the holiest of permissions.

in mine, slips of paper.  

and in that of this
oft cut
child-

the least of our forgeries.

upright, I display the dead
battery
of my dreams.

daylight
is the bald spot
of my father’s
god.

of late, rumors
have surfaced
in regards
to my mother’s
infamously
pastoral    

aerobics.

how to jack
a scarecrow

off.  how to go

unheard
by the occupant
of an outhouse.

most people are not women, and think
only
in birth

scenes.

my worries remain.  my double is moving up the ladder.  you think he is me and your thought is convincing.  I know I have a skirt because I’m wearing one.  the youtube video displays a duration of 5:11.  my mother pops in with a bag of sugary cereals.  there are great lengths that end with my father’s open mouth.  I am heartbroken that in the video the SUV has tinted windows behind which a daughter is supposedly processing the beating her dad takes at the booted heels of bikers.  if my double has a second life, I dream it.

but not a ditch
in sight

to see the stalks keep needle at the child’s mid morn journey
to scarecrow

is enough. my fist leaves me like a coffee cup

set down. even the scissors

are ghosted.

coarse, now,
the part
of my belly
that prays.

dry ribbon
this road
I could take
to the one
could tell me
it's autumn.

dogs, here, they parrot
the passing
sirens.  and trucks
pull nightly
away.

places where I worship

from the dark green church of my fascination with heavy frogs comes the **** body of a boy wearing the head of a heifer.  his legs are not entirely under as of yet but he is let stumble.  from the same dark an excessively wormed fishhook flies on a line and knocks the boy’s ******* behind like a bell.  I scratch my fake arm from shoulder to elbow and believe the sound is not coming from the hook scraping back into the dark.  even in dream I hallelujah lip synch.        


places where I am discontent**

in an abandoned dog’s house, I am, shoeless, with a slipper, in my mouth, a spotlight, caresses, dry grass, my mind, I mistake my mind, for the brain, cinerea, for cinema, my thoughts are meat, are herded, whipped at by a whipping tool, I fear nothing more than I fear, my *****, what it thinks of me, or that it thought, me, first, and lastly

beneath that whip, at the end of which, some interrogator’s, bulb.

return trips offered
for body.

some, we separate
long
after birth.

fourth baby
the first
errant.

surveyor of train car interiors.

job creation
as healer’s
refuge.

godmother
in a borrowed
copter hat.

the boy we call
egg mouth
who frees
his sister.

our meaninglessly
oral

talks.

we brought you here because your father has written a strange book.  there’s very little in it about you.  we think the aim of the book is to make people sad.  news anchors, you name it.  not much in it is hard to believe.  my wife looked at me last night as if I had no secrets.  I say we but it’s just me and her.  we live in a drug free neighborhood.  look, if I had my way, Pilate would’ve made Christ wear a bowtie.  the title of the book is lesson plans for orphans.

I put a make believe woman through hell.

I worship the devil.
I worship the devil because my dog drowns in a water bowl.

I pass the time writing holy, holy.  

I condemn my body
as I need  
proof.  

I say to a particular no one a boy after my own heart.

I’m not sure what makes mother power off the television.
she moans afterward as if it is the great work of her neck.  

I keep an appointment to be blinded by a window washer.

every other word of my father’s autobiography
    is not so strange.

if I hadn’t ****** myself in second grade, Hector might have.
his brothers would’ve beaten him.  his unborn sister
would’ve been premature
on purpose.

    I can count on your hand the Hectors we know.

it could be that mother worries we are wildlife.
she wrote once

    depression is a dog whistle.  I missed dinner sounding it out.

between me and you, you’re the private
sort
of person
women
like.

god was created to remember everything.  so says the rock to the tooth starting small.

-

there is a gallery of unfinished work and a space for the baby to crawl through.

-

her feet stick out of the mirror she’s been using to give birth.

-

lost:  frostbite.  lost:  space suit.

will work
for feeding
tube.

-

holy asthma
holy

crossbones

-

old hat
this human
head.

on the day they were born
I murdered my brothers
in reverse order
to teach them
about sticks

more specifically
about my love
for what can break
easily
on the knee

     for what gets smaller
the more
it is shared

- 

premonition?  the delayed seizure of our mother’s countenance.

she could recall the brokenness of a toy car but not the location of the shop it drove itself to.

she needed two people.  one to smooth the map before her.  and one to laugh when she’d blow

playfully    
from her palm
the ants     the car’s tires     had become.

- 

to remain
brothers

     brothers
keep silent
within
earshot.  

distance?

     the hole
god leaves
by not
existing.

     confession?

the seashell comfort of a woman’s hips.  

- 

in baseball
one could ******
the pastor’s
nose

wipe the ball
on a white shirt

and transfer
worry
to the tick
heavy
dog

lazing
in the rabbit blackness
of its ongoing
joy

- 

     as an inner child searching for its twin

     the loneliness
of our sister
is twofold.

blame the tree, what in it, burned:
a scarecrow on hands of straw and knees afire.
a pinball rabbit surrounded by ankles.  
a soldier’s kite.
you, who walk in circles.

brim of my hat.

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.

I thought I’d teach them some looking.  the well’s bucket I was careful to quietly lower.  I meant to halve the rope with my tied legs and arms, to bewilder it with hugging.  I saw myself do it twice before I gave three.  the dark above me seemed jealous of the dark below; my long hair took on a glitter of crickets but would not be led away.  I waited for my name to sound its foreign bid but instead heard only the silently local.  I could see the bucket if I closed my eyes; and it, me, in my puny dress.  when my feet began their sleep they were napped in by circus water.  how cheered I would be for slipping.

yet it was another took audience- I made the junkyard breathless; my fingers already forgetting to stay their swollen proofs.  I called her name with the others, she whose own fingers had cleared the closing of a refrigerator’s door and so would not be found in a lesser hiding place alive and ******* a knuckle.  I strayed to my brother’s punishment for inappropriate play-  a scene with his therapist saying one can’t die from nothing.  there has to be something.  my brother having his hands pinned to his knees for covering his ears.  his therapist wishing he were someone else and someone else him.

since being found, father busies himself helping mother locate her copy of the report of missing person.  if sister thinks hard enough about puberty she can pick a lock.  she treats her fingers as if they’ve fallen into the wrong hands.  paints her nails with white out.  

I clean only at night.  I scrub severely the bottoms of my feet in the event I start retracing my steps.  any thought I have lasts as long as any thought god has

on volunteering.  my one friend became my friend by feeling up the top half of a train tied mannequin I’ve come to believe has been falsifying evidence.

a short period of poorness is already underway when I enter to promise my dog and nod to my wife.  dumb in the mouth I announce I am thinking behind.  my shyness is a chair sent from a distant church.  the one man in the room tells me I have a purpose and confides that he too is a rental.  I’m just here for my unmarried wife who was recently overwhelmed by the human response of our dog.  being that the women are slow to evoke, I’ll have myself know your sons are on a flat surface having a nightmare nightmares notice.

the coloring books, the angel

wardrobe, the maternal

scoliosis

a shy band kid with a patch over his left eye

a crucifix stuffed in the front of his jeans

showing some belly
    its button made for the head
    of his small
    jesus

barefoots his dead father’s river

    cuts his heels
    each on a half of a split beer can

and is seen
by one of two boys

their treehouse
decorated
with stolen things

all abused

a man might talk
briefly
for hours
on the utility
of having
a more pronounced
dip
than another man
in his palm

and he might
retire
backstage
to a woman
whose cheeks
are gauze
whose ache
is mouth
whose greatest
nostalgia
belongs
to the left hand
of a pediatrician
buried
by god

not for carrying
the scar
of purpose
but for being
stuck

in a scene
of brutality
beside itself
with audience

sister stood on a rocking chair
blowing kisses
to brother

who *******
was using
as a surfboard

a mirror
that made him look
like an egg-

the two
like two
sounds
listening

could hear

father
walking on his hands
in the attic

and mother
nailing
her extra
pair

pulling on its teeth even though it’s not a baby anymore.

a sheep-dog
and its troubled
sleep.

my father
in his father
marooned.

white fish / yellow when / I shower
in salt.

their little nets are nets.

we believe in the coming
of the white fly-

in the demotic ear
of angels-

that we will enter
the lottery
of ****, else rock-

and clutch
at the neck
of god.  

or swat.

my father winks and shares that his shadow has lately been in a dark place.  he means to throw a baseball but forgets.  he secretly hates any book that says simply how a man enters a woman.  when he shrugs his shoulders I imagine his arms are the knee socks my mother tugs then clips on the line.  this brings me to a painting my mother abandoned herself in because of thunder.  in the painting she is either swimming or for some other reason face down.  not in the painting she has her mother’s eyes with which she can see herself pregnant with her mother’s belly.  father winks again and says he speaks for my mother in telling me nothing I don’t already know.  a list of curse words I repeat underwater.

the black market is a state of mind.  I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.  my worry walks me three miles where I meet a woman trying to sell a book in a graveyard.  I trade her the memory of our previous trade for the book she tells me is shy.  my other possession is a neglected baby.

if I am not near them, I do not long for music by them.  at my lowest, they are hardly men and women on all fours eating garbage.  you seem to know they’re naked.  what they cannot eat they pause above.  a baby’s black crib beneath a dream.  the dream a charred tree bent over a rabbit turned inside out.  the ark was Noah’s belly.  the gods and the devils

simpletons dumbly yearning for a more personable abandonment.  

I am not alone but am its aphrodisiac.

a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool

a dead spider
beneath it

I could talk nightly
on these-

my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt

above me many characters frequent my father.  they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth.  I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times.  in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss.  in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun.  moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body.  when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me.  I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold.  I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there.  when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

you will never be
a virus

-

the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named

-

*******
as the seizure
had
by hologram

-

the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down

a pendulum maleness
to the clothed eye.

     a half dropped ceiling
under which
a prediction of snowfall
sends puppy
scribbling.

a man well endowed
making like
the empty cross.

a delivery room floored with bubble wrap.

nudes in short supply.

eventually, I was asked to write about a dog.
there was a letter, and a man above it.
in my own letter, I asked for the woman behind him.
she arrived with the very little I came to know.
I could’ve been a room she sat sewing in.  
her one hand nibbling the other, the foster door
of her back.  my whole life in front of me
on another’s fours.

a street vendor’s cup game in three geese.

a slim parade.  even the clowns.

a bus stop where you can  
brush your hair.  

a girl’s arm
based on
loosely
others.

a cell phone beside a dog.  ringing, then not.

a notice, a nail-  the police cannot save them all
they are leaves
after all.

a returned
front room
window.  left to right
the life
in it;  the van of flowers.

writing her leg:  dear leg, I’ve written
your cast.  

two men saying yep.  then nothing.  then a third man
late with
yep.

divorce.  but I would be remiss
to drop
its equal-
a baton.                        

candy wrappers at the base of an oak
we call
tree.  

a boy walking his fingers into his mother’s purse.  a boy and a purse

that abandoned year.

oh and honey, look, it’s the same scarecrow the lightning could not wholly take.  it is telling me, oh gosh, about the suicide of our neighbors last year.  says they kept it a secret from each other.  the man got to himself quietly in the bathroom and the woman took a shotgun into the basement.  time of death had the man going first.  you think it was them on the left or them on the right?  them on the right had a kid, a little boy, I think.  what age would our son be?  their boy was about his age because I remember taking our balloons down and the man asking me should he take his down.  they didn’t give the boy a middle name, he said.  out of the hour or so we talked, I couldn’t file that one.  was the main thing scared me off.

sickness led my brother downstairs to a blanket.  outside my mother was asking our mailbox if the man in the helicopter was alright.  my father snored in my brother’s bed while I kept from laughing in the tent beside it.  my sister brought a tub of snow inside to dig a baby from.  something my uncle said was like ******* a seashell.  he shuffled cards beneath a golden brain.  our ears heard the same god punching the extra pillow.

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.

the nothing
that’s out there
I keep
to myself.

my talk talks me down.
my kids laugh

in sweet tooth and funny bone.

I am not god’s father figure
but bring anyway
a nervous energy
to my own
birth scene.

it is pretty how one manages
to populate
a personal hell

and it is too pretty
to base an image
on the diary

soaked but drying

in a little house
with a kicked-in door.

some have a story and some think
the having
avoids
the generalizing
others do

to clear space
for space.

for a hobby I’d say
be stunned
by the baby
before
it inherits
separation

anxiety.

     once, beneath a storm, be a ghost.

father arrived
with a convincing
deafness
in one ear
a broken pair
of handcuffs
he'd named
the left hand of god-

mother had called him from sleep
with a birthmark my mouth

kiwi fruit
can be held
in the mouth
for minutes
at a time
without
causing one

to gag
     I know this
because my mother
is looking for me
in this short
poem

I know
she is a quitter
     she knows I am
asthmatic

fragile

a thief

the **** came boatsick and I made to light it with the marshmallow burning at the end of my shaky stick when father pinned it at the neck with his right foot and kicked it longside in the beak with his left and then brought the left heel back to break for the second time its neck and the **** hummed and then died and then I thought it hummed again but it was my father lowing in the soul he didn’t believe in as in life he finished nothing so couldn’t on faith have something that everyday waited and I remember thinking later after learning the word rabid and of the affliction rabies that authors swan to the dying animal from the shallows of knowing that the animal mourns maybe nothing and definitely does not mourn this that happens no other way.

i.

     I crumble

chalk
on the black
paint
of a water
holding
its breath
in a single
fish  

     its glass eye
of evolution
and the sound
of god
making light

of his angels
unfolding
as they are

hospital beds     to guide
a piloted

     exhaustion-

flight reminds the dead.  the solo

moan
of a bird
lands
on the shoulder
of a widow

     as the twice devalued coin
          of looking, looks
               on.

ii.

     I wish

I could dream
away
my name, the bad
mornings     spent cheating

     on her sadness

her sadness a jewel

madly
in the mouth
of a thief
some redundant

angel

chewing
the root
of its own
absence.

in anything, uncoupled, there is death.
carneys, clowns.  canaries, in them, that sing.
soul: one of many karaoke bars
from which the devil was primarily
thrown.  this work

of taking, from the body, its death.  work
for men whose eyes if shattered would release
nothing.  men at your window.  men watching
you watch
horror films.  the cant of each head
polling, in its mask, a sameness.

soul's arbiter:  toothless.
because it is a tooth.  the poor, they take
the head of an ant
from the die
of god

     they take it to mean
decay.

cutting your **** off is not something you fail at.  when I ask you where it’s at you will first be sad to have a mouth at all and second say legend has it.  my thinking is trying to think in a helicopter.  you climb a tree to drop a rifle from it.  I have so many real friends and I call them my gay odds.  and so many dreams that these waking hours pass only to embellish them.  if there is one thing it is Elliott Smith the name of a hungry deer.