how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

your heart
becomes good-

     the older three
notice

the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew.  her insomnia

has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill.  her milky eyed

-

husband
revs a tow truck
to death

in a heavy fog.  it is possible, humanly

-

possible

-

there’s nothing
to see here.  that her god

-

is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s

spirit

-

animal.

I am old enough to drive.  I can’t tell you how big my hands are.  I glide or think I glide like a priest and allow a white butterfly to brush the black robe of my passage as I would a woman’s glove.  I place a pair of roller skates in high grass and put my knees on them.  I watch my uncle, because he is mad at my father or because he loves my mother, throw chickens by the neck into the pond.  his teeth clamp a cigarette as if it might leap.  keeping it exhausts him.

the barn
bat
with the eyes
of a diver’s
shadow…

the dads were all digging
the nudes
were thinking
small

every chair
an electric
chair

in daylight, that motherless grief

"We enjoyed our time together, all the good and bad weather and I cannot forget the cries of my friends before they died."*

I am explaining it’s a duck that for some reason sings you to sleep.  I say I don’t know what else they will come up with.  a man in the alley has brought his daughter there and is punching her in the arm and I don’t think it’s playful.  I say this, too, but the duck is singing and you are drowsed.  the man is hugging now his daughter her arm a carnival prize.  I turn the car radio on and have to lower it but lower it too much and leave it.  I watch as a woman who seems to be hiding some fetal creature in her back walks to the door of the clinic and leans at it with a key.  she then pulls the door but it doesn’t come.  she is surprised and drops the key and bends for it and its then I swear the creature yawns.

your mother came at my mother with a fork.  

those first days
though I kept it from you
I told myself
you were too sad to eat.      

-

dusk, hide & seek.  

I’d count
and you’d count
behind me.

-

dusk, losing sight
of the frisbee.  the scarecrow

we think is a scarecrow
until it bends to pick up
a cat.  we think is kind
until it swallows

the cat
cat noises
and all.

-

I think I’m elderly

you somehow
replied.

we’ll start here, turtle.

this is what I say to the grey thing I’ve been talking to.

the only buffer between engagement & constant engagement
is life
during wartime.

I conceive of a dropper
but hold it empty
above my eye.

because it is the one word without a beginning

suffering
because it is the one word without a beginning
is not limited
by its
vocabulary.

we wanted a sophisticated god
but in immediate
unison
called it
god.

this is the grey cream  
that gives her privacy.

I am drawn to a sort of journalism
by association, a campestral formlessness
attached
for example
to the term

carpet bombing.  

how is death, here?  in an orange ball of yarn

she is not ahead of?

she has to stop, turtle.

to declaw an electrocuted kitten
she didn’t
electrocute.

asleep, he was loved.  loved, also, in the margins of waking.  a hand on the head, or breakfast after payday.  he would try to keep quiet the unclosed wound of his voice; a darkened bandage, like bacon, held to his mouth.  but the morning, each morning, would leave, more so clothed than it had come.  if ever you’ve looked, at noon, for your mother, she would’ve been with his.  two sets of thumbprints, two glasses.  he would put his thumb to one, then the other.  days your mother stayed with you, his own would give him crayons.  once, that he can remember, he put the white in her cigarette box and heard about it.  it’s the kind of kid he was fully awake: bad.  his cheeks often burned.  their redness would unhinge his mother so that she would slap at the pale inquiry of his neck.  seven years old, and still drawing stick figures.  he could not keep himself from it.  three legged figures, one armed.  torsos were a problem for him, and crotches.  but there they would be, middle on middle, three lines to indicate ******, or wind.  his mother wouldn’t get sick but would say that she was.  before dinner, she would give him ice cream.  he would fall asleep without dinner and his father would come home, shower, and leave.  it made him stronger, not seeing his father eat.

     the stick figures, when he met them, were not like his drawings, but they wanted to be.  they would contort  and untangle from each other and giggle.  his mother once came upon them and they broke into many sticks at his feet.  she did not know what he was laughing at and tried to lift him but he was fat for his age and she pulled a muscle in her stomach.  he put her on his back.  she would not unstiffen.  at home, in front of the fire, she was angry.  her arm was crooked, aimed at him, and one of her eyes was trying to watch him.  he shut the door to his room and practiced becoming many.  his parts would not let.  he gave up; the fire lowered.  the noise his mother made sounded set aside; some special box opened in the house of a demon.  he had to cut her clothes from her so she could breathe.  she rose, simply; not like the dead.  something, in the second box, skittered from it.  the boy crumpled.  his head did not roll like he thought it would, but he smiled anyway.  if his mother was screaming, only his ears could hear it.

a plastic spider
in the cereal box
glows.

my foster parents
think
I’m asleep.

as asleep
as my legs.

i.

thoughts of brother-

     a panther
half biting your arm
while you sleep.

ii.

     deliberate man, your father.
his early morning, his garden of bookmarks.
smoke from the ash tray, from the picture
     of him on the tractor.

iii.

on the news, they are talking to your mother.
she tells them her son
your brother

walked into a crowd
once before
but did not
explode.

iv.

she looks good on camera.

     greyer.

the antecedent story would be a simpler telling-  how it came to be the boy and I and three cows.  one can imagine; one must.  we celebrated spontaneously in our biddable house and we lost track.  sufficient that I was aged and he much less.  our argument presented itself like this:  magic paper or magic milk?  boy he would hold the bucket above the paper and pour.  I noted this was an act magnificent and an act personal.  I was pulled into the boy initially but pulled back.  the milk though went into the paper; abandoned, freed, gone.  the boy did this once a day for three until the bucket was empty.  I said paper, he said milk.  our further experiments left the paper sunned and thus brittle.  we then had only our cows which led us to grass and hormones.  hormones led to science, grass to god.  grass to his mother.

calls me by cupping his hands and hollering.  is convinced he needs delayed attention.  senses my immediacy and waves me off.  his hands go into remission.  his hair darkens.  darkens as grass dryly chosen by a nearby frisbee.  we are here to celebrate.  three years without driving.  three years backing over a bicycle his daughter could not abandon.  bookmarks and powder.  brain a busy insect.  seasons placed on torpor’s waiting list.  the recent wars have been a clarity.  people want what we have.

she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

in the tomb of my father’s influence
a single
****** on
juice box.

     assigned seating
in biology class
a giant     a boy
beside the me
most grotesque
and we share
a model
heart     as a found
piece
of gum.

in cafeteria I am untouched
as a tray of food     I fraternize
with my new name     jovial
pisspants.

the boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar.  his mother is somewhere a girl set to play the moon in her school’s version of talent night.  his sister is giving birth so calmly her midwife is a male blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold I wore to fish.  his brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke.

a late swimmer, touching
one side, then the other.  
night window, this wine.  
a walker, beggared
to the wend of a wheel

loosed from the lean of its car.  
a bad man jawing
a gradient slur
of hand puppets

on another's dark drive.
a second swimmer
I hadn't seen, touching
the first.  same stone
on the pool's bottom-

unmoved, unmoved
by the yaw of the moon.

a boy of five give or give years without a shirt holding a half empty soda bottle and blowing into it while scratching his bare big toe with his other and rocking the porch swing back further than front and he is the boy I see as I return after these many years to the house where I killed by accident my mother and he is the reason I turn back pretending I’ve come from somewhere still and waiting because he has riled in me a peace I haven’t had since that span of counting to 30 instead of 20 while my mother hid under the car my father had jacked up and left so as to chase a girl riding by on her bike wearing only ******* and a t-shirt which is dangerous and my father knew danger and loved warnings such that he would swear he would one day coin the phrase financial violence and he would be the first.

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after whitening
the teeth
of the adult
orphan
you might have seen
on the shoulders
of a tired usher

a deep sea diver
swims solo
in a private lake

means:

I don’t have hands and my eyes are trying to kiss.

yester.

a drone’s
love
for a landmine.

knowledge
is perfect.

the garden is just a room
without a door     inside of which

the world’s first doorknob

has to be seen     to be fixed.

     try knowing now what you knew then.

I am reading
about a piano
when you begin
to play.  

-

I will continue
to wish
you were dying.

-

you say
to pictures

me, before I was taken.

-

you have one story involves a failed grenade.
I wish two, you wish
ambitiously
none.

-

forgive me, death, I am drunk.
sober, I sell doormats.

-
  
in our imaginings
gutted baseballs

became

the skulls of small animals
through which the wind

called heads.

-

in daytime, you inspect
a dark stone.  you tell me it could take

all night.  

-

in heaven’s garage
they’ve yet to make
a horn
that works.

-

if I leave, it is to write this poem.

carry the kids upstairs.

pause the credits.

put water on for tea.

whistle.

leave a comb, lose a pigeon.

wonder the deep couch in the drawn bath.

find it strange.

use my razor.

don’t worry.  as a favor.

I led the babysitter
to where I thought
her child
was.  

I lost my legs.  

they went slowly, as if
I’d taken
a hoof
to the chest
underwater.

I swear
her father
brushed my lips
with the ******
of a bottle
while his wife

held back.

alas, children are not
the most
economical
memory.

male is to female
as gender
is

to genre.

I like to think of your house
as a treehouse
and imagine

the tree.

penetralia

i.

forgive
each victor
his loss
of sin.

as a painter
of white horses

my talk is my talk.

the topmost button
corks

the wine
in my throat.

ii.

if you've blood in your mouth
you're a ******.

you've no mother
but it's her hand
lifts your shirt
to cover

that cigarette burn, that peephole
of god.

you can’t take the wire out of the lamb.

when I look you in the eye
I feel my brain
is cared for
under the seat
of a snowed-on
forklift.

to get my son’s attention
I tap with a spoon
on the glass circle
of a running
dryer’s
door.

my son is of course
hungry     but in the meat
of a difficult
book.

the night is never young.
to read the book
is to believe
one can see
blood     with blood.

at times my father
in the middle of my dream
sits on a riding mower
as if it’s a boat
he dragged
without help
over the parts of this land
feared
by glacier.

part of my body is sad.

a mother, a red permanent marker without a top, and a light Ohio rain.  a patient’s outside Monday allotment.  Tuesday we’ll try to find a vein.  proof of actual motherhood.  we are not far from doing this.  the time it takes to find a sturdy rocking chair in a recently dusted room.  the time it takes to sit there, pull an arm hair from the weak **** of one’s inner ant.  as it is, utter as you were, madness.

my pupils conserve blood for the dotting of your thighs.  the stages of grief omit grief.

trauma
that it is
to be
in such
a short
time
the same
age
the ghost of rob zombie
invents
futility:

ghost on ghost.

show me my mother’s back, and her elbows.
the faucet’s spit on neck.
eye black to eye black my brothers checking
for teeth.
show me insomnia, the pacing witch hats
of a dog’s great attention.
my father, but don’t
take sides.

you sleep on your left side because of an iffy heart.  the man sleeping beside you, zippered into a dream life, represents poverty.  you dream only the overpass.  each stick on the fire is alone;  a single promise of a dog’s return.  in the early goings, it was a magic to put camp before fire.  in these later, poverty needs no introduction.  you want to say something to the child you did not become but are sick on the talk you were born with.  this nonfiction-  not what you’d imagined.  I slide the man from his bag.  my mad hen pecks upward.

young for a mother she takes daily photos of gravestones she will not develop.  her aside that they are better than children is locally famous.  I begin to want her in a way I can put my finger on.  my brother dies and I wait.  the funeral is boys only.  I rip off the arms of an old monkey.

perhaps there is or isn’t
a thing lonelier
than a naked man
looking
at his privates
while kneeling
beside
a globe
at the tail end
of a spin
but I don’t
care

it is for
the sake
of my mother’s
brother

that I
am named.

I know only
the most
insufficient
detail
of his life:

that he drowned.

a kind
great uncle
I imagine
he would’ve been
to my sons.

him regaling to my daughter
stories
of his wild
sister; wiling away in houseless trees.

whenever I hold my breath
my brothers fight.

my wife is opening her eyes and looking at our sleeping son and then of course she is closing them for show.  I am somewhere in my drunkenness and then I am definitely drumming my right thigh with both hands.  I tell my knees up close they are each a secret ear.  

downstairs I walk gingerly into a tower of paper cups and saving one of them I sit.  I put the rescued to my mouth and make public to my mother’s breast how its milk had a hole in it.  I can hear my wife’s hands exploring the boy’s legs for heat.  it’s not something one can usually hear but I am as quiet as a wheelchair set before a window.    

in another life my son will know great pain.

she believed the spider
had yelled at her
and she yelled
back
but yelling
wasn’t enough.

her boy was at a friend’s house
again and again.

in house, her carsickness
consumed
her shallow
sleep.

she had yet to believe in god
but believed     dreams
to be god pulling her out
of her eyes.

good people
don’t see
the highway
helicopter
as bait.

when I was a child, the children I was with did not turn on me.  like our parents after us, we took on faith that our present loneliness would go elsewhere.  if at any point I felt strong enough to lift a boulder onto my back, I became bored.  I was drawn to books having in them unreal prose dedicated to thunderstorms and I filled these books with joy.  I don’t mean it salaciously when I paint for you the few women cramming into an outside bath.  they had me surrounded.

her isolation has become a habit.

her name is prologue.

too many stories
get smacked in the mouth.

violence did not tiptoe into a trailer park.

her author doesn’t know
*******
a white male.

she does everything
in the outhouse of a haunted astronomer.

a hotter hell fore I got that praying mantis in the jar.  tighten that lid tight said god said father as he took a match to the tick on my neck.  he went inside, I picked up a stick.  stick I threw short the length of heaven as heaven I thought was a road.  the road, at that, our house was on.  get yer brother's dog and call it a night and I did.  and the dog, too, making it in, before anything fell, that stick caught on the bottom frill of some curtain calling down the middle of no show nor audience for it.  

     if it could have been reached, the blackest point in a man, it wasn't.  but the point just before, my mother knew- to turn the bulb, in her white hand, just so.  turned as a globe with a knot in it, knot made of knots from the belly of my brother, nervous fat friend only friend of the outdated world.  he would take with him one night his dog

and shoot himself.   they'd argue what night for a week after.  loaded the gun proper at least and my father would be dead today white hands or no had there been more than one gun she knew about.  I never told, not even the night, how that mantis stayed alive on its tack beating its wings at the frog-throat black like an eyelid against a thumb and my brother I told him he can't sleep through anything but go to sleep anyway with that dog that was my dog long before you were born dumb as a ****** in a mirror.

conduit of bliss

with a phobia
of narcolepsy

-

walking

as if hacked
by a definitely
clever

****     newly enrolled

in a course
on private
speaking

-

my brother

-

who staged
his after life

when in poetry she is referred to as mother she uses it to show others her fatalism has regressed.  on par with such beliefs as voice recognition and voice recognition technology.  she knows a dream is a good reminder of how someone looked.  when detoured from the road they’re filming on she manually rolls up the driver’s side window to say curse words.  a tire rolls by.  then a second tire called ahead by a bus on fire.  adventures in adoption.  her diary keeps a brother.

at the local library
books
separate
the victims
of home invasion
from those
researching
the doll’s
propensity
for drunkenness.

I stumble in, stumble out.

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

again, we have given the baby too much credit.  these are simply the gods I grew up without.  here is my son serenading the seizures his mother salvaged from the praying I do for my hands.  here he is repeatedly not.  here is yours the psalmic nonverbal.  here they are shadows limiting death’s vocab in a tiny tent not crawling with legs of lamb.

pregnant, my wife
scraps
her report
of missing
person.

as a disenchanted
surgeon
might find
religion,

I search your face for what god kept.

my brother apologizes for being beside himself with the worry of his split personality’s identical twin.  his hospital gown is missing a hospital.  he asks my children kindly if they are at all possible.  he maintains that pain is the best editor and unveils the knee closest to undergoing brain surgery.  my revelations pale in loneliness.  my brother says it’s because they were spanked.  he says visiting me has given him a case of racial motivation.  he lullabies what I have identified as my wife’s newest.  he wonders in his own withdrawn way if the newbie sleeps out of a fear that is homosexual in nature and ****** birth in spirit.  he sings to a bag of salt and knows it.  don’t be sick.  father is my only copy.

of the three tenses
only the future
can regenerate.

but for the tongue
the mouth would be
forgotten.

I guess we’d still have to look at it.
the ugly open thing.

I strained my eyes reading in the dark.
pretending to read the bible.

I don’t love words.

currently I’ve convinced myself
that in my tall cup of coffee
a spider
can sense itself
separating.

give me an easy one.

earth on hell
your local
gas station.

I pushed a baby
in a grocery cart
from one spot
to another
and back.

I only just remembered
no one noticed.

he is the father of a child stuck in traffic.  he is my father finding this out in the middle of trying to be successfully beside himself.  he is all muscle.  he is every man kissing a trash bag swollen with stork blood.  do the lifting.  his friends languish in the availability of their art.  who are these people, they are sermons, they are the dogvision greys of a bluesy priest.  I am yellow in my mother.  his mother is his endeavor.  he hits a wall he slaps it.  endeavors to magnetize his mother’s ******.  it pains him.  there is a man who writes to himself.  people say it is ****.  he takes the terrible writing and turns it into a pity none can feel.

woman not womanly.

living's dry gesture
at the open gown of the sick.

scraped by leaves a body.

a second son
in a blanket grandmother makes.

of god we've been speaking.

hospitals when we were younger.

the tree where snakeskin.

hope not for.  but for

statues of them.

live in a dent.  the electric

left in a crater.

we release, outside, a balloon.

bury in the land an arm made of earth.

     to curtains as fingertips

of babies
to scars.

click in the hall of yesterday with.

heels of irretrievable mercy.  

hope not for.  but for

statues of them.

     an agreeable ****** in stirrups.  a cradle

taken by birds.

the free kittens and then just the one.
how I tried
not to run
out of people.

how I kicked
in a town
famous
for two things

     a quilt and a lake.

how before I could throw it in the lake
     the stone became a drop of water.

these are not without image, but I did see them.

     the miscarried child in a graduated medicine cup-
how I almost poured mouthwash there.

the war, the war, the brother.

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours in which a ******* dyslexia
goes undetected
in parents of special
needs
children.  the explanation.  the action

words

mixing twice.

the face first exhaustion
brought to bear
by
a behind
the scenes
taste test.  

the cyst on a brother’s knuckle.

the fight, the civilian
birthday suit, and

the civilian
burned
by clothes.  a she

as, just as

deserted.