The comb
born
too early

How long the hair cries

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.

A cornfield made of rain

A ruined ghost
showing the palms
of my mother’s
hands
to infants
ecstatic
with eyesight

The low miracle’s most vanished
pleasure carried to its invisible end

the eyes
in a sad
race
a game
of godless
tag

No newborn can reach existence.
Sleep knows memory
cannot fix
an eggshell.

( into a field
  fled water
  from the spine
  of the lord )

Erections turn the stomach to salt.

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an ****** that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc.

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow

Are you willing to leave them alone on the earth for their last twenty years?

I doubt with presence my absolute hereness.

Amensia.

I believed inquiry would mean I had a
Question.

No one likes your gesture sequence of
Poems.

We left the water
To leave the water
Guessing.

Don’t get mad at babies.
Be nice to god.
Tender soldier, there are birds

That bury teethmarks.

The ground is too soft.
Your hand will die.

My uncle
Lost god
In a bet
Came home
Asking
Had we seen
A man
Or a woman
Taking
His clothes
Half of us
Said man
The other half
Started drinking
And got
Naked
Longer
Each time
This poem
Wrote itself
Death
Is a radio
What was it
Before

Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

sacrifice 6

we look all the time at dying and call it stargazing then while whale watching someone says you know alcohol disrupts your sleep

Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.

No god called me into this poem.
No god
calls me out.

Existence a distress signal

mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god

Emptiness uses the unfed to see time.

The angel of dearth
Is the dead
Twin.

A comma is in a bird.

No one
on the moon
gets dragged
by a train.

A star
milks
a split
baby. It’s noon

and you are choosing
******
for god.

The land is ours where we cry on stilts.

odd that the abuser lives for flashbacks. that movies ask god for more time. that I smoke might an angel picture thirst. that I say not here, mouth. in the church of the empty bowl.

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this anymore than I’m.

An ambulance filling with doll bones hits a dog made of the wrong echo. A swimmer’s skull leaves itself to the math of passing through god. A tattoo artist, who once longed to show roadkill to a star, peels in the moonlight the white apples of tortured stickmen. Bringing them back won’t bring them back. The angels knew for three days where Jesus would be. Faked amnesia thinking they’d stop.

film 5

Each creature in heaven thinks it's the only creature in heaven looking for god. I itch at night with the short life of my skin. In a world without touch, I am sleeping you with my hand. Anyway, I want to say I'm sorry to my mother and my father for keeping them awake. For making them read this right now.