you can have it
the inside
of my mouth
a mirror’s
hell

-

it’s a toothbrush
lamb-dust

not
a moth killer

-

saint of consensus

god
a toy
that doesn’t
share, mosquito

-

the dream’s
church bell

abortion

beneath
the highest
pop fly            
on record

divination

found myself alone
in a *******

*******

epitaph

easier
if I
imagine

you are     clothed

angels

any mystique
surrounding
  a small town
   search party

blood**

     this *******
from the reader
of my

palm

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as a globe with a knot in it, knot made of knots from the belly of my brother, nervous fat friend only friend of the outdated world.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.

the shape

consumed by another man’s pain
I stayed close to home
but worried

that if even my mind
wandered

none would find him

or discover the shape
he was in



this that informs

I scratch the cheeks
of my sleeping
son.

both of my secrets
are hands.

my son has only one secret.

it curls his body
into a claw.

it caresses

the sibling world.



years I was not kind

playing flashlight tag in a darkened church
I kicked whatever form
hid under

the pew I’d chosen
for mine.

though I’d not hear the squeal of an actual pig
for some time

I’d seen Dorothy fall
in black and white

and had cast her most anxious
uncle

as Lennie
in Of Mice and Men

and so knew to broaden
god’s periphery

playing dumb.



the draw of evening

if I manage to hear myself
in my children
I can close
my eyes



museum with one exhibit**

everything his daughter makes is ugly

hide it all
he says

until her soft fat hands
remain only

to lead him
to the others

become kind
from waiting

awoke.  was not wanted.  not wanted in the way a war is wanted.  but being awake was at least something.  the other side of a pane of glass.  not the side a god would touch.  a finger belonging to the earth is a bit much but the unwanted was pressed by it deeper into a softness ascribed to the dark.  the unwanted would lose its three surviving teeth on the way down.  one bets they float there still in baby room.  (baby rooms across the country lift in slo mo when another god angers.)  what age appropriate thing the wanted would do to choke back some dirt crumb stars.  those teeth.  my first word was water.  your first word I drank.  my body is a photograph of the oft cut child whose parent was an atheist made of darkroom chemicals.  whose other parent was made of angels arguing.  whose final parent witnessed nothing but drew a blank with gusto.  

-              

the moral was always at the beginning.  this is how my mother kept after me.  

-

the naming ritual offers its own blood in increments.  a date on a red brick takes on water.  we scratch our heads but not without vigor.  I reach into my brain.  I use one eye to do it.  you follow suit but fail.  because we have each two eyes our creator is self reflexive and thanks god for the both of us.

-

insights occur most nobly inside boys boxing tether *****.  you are an abortion that lived.  I know to turn away from it.  I know one thought should lead to another.  you were creative but only on second thought.  you were disabled and you died.

pregnant, my wife
scraps
her report
of missing
person.

as a disenchanted
surgeon
might find
religion,

I search your face for what god kept.

I will do my best to remember in order these the prayers satan has returned to the adult me...

(please help me to absorb the paranoia of my uncle who
after putting a clear piece of tape on his belly button

drinks
too much)

(please make her hair fall out)

(invisibility)

(tell god but take your time)

(a secret brother.  a brother I can beat on.)

(power over girls I want nothing to do with)

(a job my mom can turn down)

(muscles that make me high)

(pain in the useless privates of my guardian angel)

(the best birdhouse)

(a grandfather or a frog, or both, with teeth)

(a nativity scene built around a piece of spat out gum)

(comic book with ******* scarecrow)

(a baby sister
to radio
my mother’s
coma)

(messenger stones)

(a double
where my hands
can sleep)

(the last dropper
of dinosaur
woe)

(Eve whose ears have amnesia)

(you, from my past)

i.

though still in the process
himself
of being
created

god is an expert on earth.

he is just now beginning to regain his composure
after a short stint / speaking in tongues.

ii.

laymen exist
to question
what my mother’s body
cannot identify-

a specific amnesia
that attacks
her many
pseudonyms

iii.

stories keep my children perfect.

in the story of the rabbit’s mask
one finger out of every ten
is as empty
as the rabbit’s brain

iv.

to bring my first stranger
to god

I plan to use the alias
my father goes by
to pray.

after surviving
a form
of angel
hazing
the boy’s
disability
presented itself
in full
five months
from its
inception
and chose
therapy
locations
owned
fifty-fifty
by the conceptual
folk
known as
bewildered church
and stray
field
and went on
to signal
the boy
with a bruise
here
and a bruise
there
on its way
to a survival
from which
it would not
recover

what figure my father has
bends for the beauty
not of word but of word
unsaid.

as for intended use,
there are two ways
to stone
a raindrop.

some would argue
from hell
for recognition
of non
survivor’s
guilt, and from earth

for mothered

figures…

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.

the two skeletons it takes to lift a coat hanger.  the ***** it takes for them to introduce it as an ultrasound.  the excitement you don’t share.  the bone fragment that opens your brother’s eye.  the haunted tourist who never arrives.  who will adopt nothing because nothing is small when compared to the crucified whose toe almost touches the paper shredder we couldn’t move.  mountain storm.  moaning tent of rehab.  eating your hands when a phone call is a phone call away.

i.

diapered
fat legged

baby, propped in posture
by a stack of wet bricks
the flooded basement

provides     and provides

often

ii.          

     baby, under foot

bedpan for the sadness
of the upright

iii.

I stand
to sleep
standing

wombs itself
in the stuffing
of a pawn shop
theatre chair
carried by
a father
to his daughter’s
and granddaughter’s
wake.

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.

if I am still in one piece
is up
to you

-

as for ****, avoid

her
and / or
her

-

if above
some hobo
a soft
nightmare
hangs

in the balance…

a skinny boy with long hair
mid
koan

leaves me
his imagination.

     my mother
     shaving her head
     with a lollipop.

i.

when his fingers began to bleed, father stopped closing his eyes to pray.  

     the worst thing I heard as a child was how god made
not only
me.

it was either the suicide of my imaginary friends or the imagined
suicide     of my real.  mother’s hands were that way

because of the dye
in dish gloves.  

ii.

on this that has become the story of my prematurity
I’ll say    

the food we get has already been defeated.

iii.

the boredom of today’s children
has no depth.

touch a throat in a totem’s mouth.

iv.

your mother was a hologram of a voodoo doll.

when father
not father
as the gay
madman
first met
her     the bump on her head

was much
bigger.

v.

with a pocket knife or some other **** thing the word gargoyle has been scraped into every idle machine.

the drug addled uncles have a rare focus and take non-consecutive short naps.  

you can shake your head about the babies

they remember
nothing.

vi.

god is no more than a clipped moan
scrambles
the angels.

I think it’s a tuning fork.  I convince myself and speak to it.  the boy with me says it looks like a ******-up cross.  says imagine jesus got to heaven and was still part human just imagine.  the boy would be ****** if he were him.  next his mother is off her rocker and so on and soon the boy is muffled by where he’s hiding.  I’m okay with it.  I need some peace and scratching.  that’s my father’s, peace and scratching.  he’d set a shoebox with a live rat in it next to him whether he had one or not.  gotta corner that thought.  I look about, the boy has either shut up or died or is living quietly afar.  I sit on three stacked tires and fear a moment for my ***.  I brave what might still be a tuning fork.  I poke with it the place I was male then caress.  rain on the roof of my home makes the roof look like a lake.  one magic possum after another gives me depth.  I snap out.  the boy is circling me, he’s been struck by lightning, is in fact still being struck.  his hard-on looks to last.

I prayed for the wheelchair and then for the person in it.  I prayed for the water above which Jesus raced.  I knew full well that prayer was a starter’s gun.  that drowning was the silent education my grandfather on my mother’s side could afford and that his son frequented the left hemisphere of the brain by aligning himself with the right.  worse than prayer?  its dream of a retroactive birth defect.

adolescent my sorrow made me taller.  I could fold my ears without effort into the backs of my knees when I sat the unchaired ground.  

when we walked, sister she rode a worried duck.  we stilled ourselves on many an odd bridge;  pray, such pairs, that below any bridge passes the conscious river of horsehead and mudhoof.      

it was hard to tell what came first;  the duck or its worry.  hard to tell its not broken neck from its broken.  

the minute my sister and I were orphaned seemed an hour.  our mothers dropped easily into the same bottomless pail.  when we walk now, we listen.  my unmatched sorrow parallel to her mother’s appetite.  

I tend the bad back of a gravestone.  a broken tooth in dust-bleached shortgrass.  sister’s run off, but corpse

there are faster things in the body’s riddle.

it is god’s job to keep the world flat.  I stand on a wheelchair to change a light bulb while my brother goes down a hill on the sled sister disappeared from.  my parents are the bread and body of arguing sweetly.  they eat only when there is more food than can be thrown away.  I am hoping the sled does for my brother the nothing it did for me.

here is my brother, walking away from a horse.
I have been painting all day:  and my brother, walking.

I had a dream you were leaving me.
that a homeless man was trying to fix the leg of a wasp.
you were praying for the wasp.

the man was homeless and you were leaving me.

I had a second dream a trinket jesus came poorly
from its cross-

that this was the wasp
I gave to my brother.

lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.

mother of the hour-
I have
no clue
which.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

-

praying mantis
eating blood
from a bowl
of dreams.

-

toy phone
imprisoned

why, toy phone, has wheels
ask

your father.  

-

here somewhere
my nose.

get yourself hired
being sad
for my wife.

that you’ll report
to no one
is our
secret.

I’m horrible with nicknames.

I’m horrible with a mammoth
white dog
not called

snow-fort.

send balled-up
paper
animals and planes
into a felled
by father

flooded
treehouse.

get yourself on video
being sad, or taking
a ball
from a ballplayer.

be my wife
in spirit, be

grief and the cloak
grief

is not.

get thee to silent
fireworks
above a tipped
canoe.

I have a friend whose father, though imaginary, was able to get work driving a cab in the country parts of Ohio. if I close my eyes I can see my own father lost in some wooded area naked and wearing a cape. the cape is deep red and my friend is female. when my mother reads me a book without pictures I can tell when she’s rewording the phrases she finds plain. how she reads ahead while reading aloud is something I hope to one day mimic. I do worry about the books I claim to know as perhaps there is a sadness in them that remains untouched. plain things are often sad things. I would ask which causes which but for the unlimited amount of time we have left.

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

I never thought the newborn
wasn’t
what we saw
when we saw
that hitchhiker
pulled
from an accident
vehicle
after which
my dreams
were printed
without me.

I play shepherd
with mother’s
wedding veil
and a gnarled
stick.

in some
I am alone
on a hill
sitting
in one
of three
electric chairs
thinking

madness
is too much room
to run out of.

in others
two of my friends
rub
together.

the parents
have each
a flyswatter.

they are very worried
about their angel, about their boy
with flu-like symptoms.

in two locations
my son
is unknown
is achieving
a boredom
his disease
can’t reach.

my father is speechless
after
he is left.  I write
about my mother
who is not pain
held
to the candle
of its possibility.  

the timeline is rhetorical, is a deposit
of sleep
disguised as longing
in the heads
of single minded
repeat
abusers.

my son floats for the first time lame,
it is uplifting, a kind of sloganeering
to keep
hate
local.

I want to weigh it, what is used
by the typist
to see
loneliness
from above.

I want it to be the star
your sister needs
when her eyes
claim her hearing
and hear

for example
chicken scratches
medications
disown.

after the standoff, god calls me a rookie.

the injured
disperse
to form
a language
I don’t
speak.

belief
becomes a remark
I make
to a mirror.  my hymn

critiques
the immortal’s
wardrobe.  

I am alone.  my son
is from the future
his illness
promotes.

madness took my mother’s purse.  I can’t find anything in it that isn’t the information which led the student of history nowhere.  one eye is a double agent and the other

a suicide pill.  availability repeats itself.  angels marry.  I am directed to stand-in for what the future is a shadow of.  

his women are made of sand
but wash prematurely
ashore

carrying broken babies that stomach the glass ocean.  we share a friendship

charm, an *****, and a bleak outlook

for the featureless face.

a man and a woman, as younger couples do, moved in next door.  my wife lifted her wine glass and mocked a telescope.  I noted how the man seemed to have his **** together.  wife noted that the woman seemed masculine.  things got complicated very quickly.  the man and I became brothers and that somehow led to a promise of equal ******.  our wives tilted the scales a bit and agreed to switch husbands.  logistically, staying in this house makes the most sense.  we unpack a box here and there, reflect on the wrongness of this bauble, that book.  our sadness?  protected by the dog with a weird name for a dog.

say poverty
could possess
a doll

a friend and shape
less
doll

whose favorite
and only
outfit

a schoolteacher
mends

while picturing
two pieces
of chalk

     the whereabouts
of her *******

her arms
gone thin-

her gait
these two
dark fish
chaperone
recalls me
to the delirium
of a prison

yard

cat-

her stomach
though
bulges
     is an upturned
bowl
of milk-

     it
that would
normally
disappear
before
my eyes

disappears
     after

would not recommend the usual quiet
or the quiet we project,

the necessary
the led to believe
quiet,

not even the quiet
of accurate prayer-

instead, the stillborn baby
into a room of loud colors

into a surrogate room
that is now
smeared

wall to wall
inanely
with moaning-

this is where we are, speak up, we come
with given
thump and wail-

better yet, make it some beast’s
unmoving
tail end
of litter, make the little
one

speak english- yip, mew –

the second
to last
man
on earth
sets a gas can
by a hissing
tire
and struggles
a box
from his pocket

     not knowing

how many
are left.

we move the cemetery to confirm there is nothing outside of this town.  the ******* remains a two man show.  leash laws are for dogs and angels.  our doctor has a touch of deer worry.  exercise is for the birds.  god is the pitter patter of imagined feet.  our fathers double over in bathrooms from the shame of not calling out for paper.  our mothers have done the math.  by now, most kids have eaten a popsicle alone in a church.  I’m in it for the stick.

my mother’s pregnancy comes to me in a dream.  the scarecrow that has me diagnose its doctor as having attention deficit disorder is the same scarecrow every time.  the soldier eats her camouflaged meal.

the night vet drawn into a field by the pink glow of a housebroken piglet.  when the piglet blows, the vet may want to rethink his face.  forgiveness works alone.  I have never seen an attractive god.

to overcorrect
the subtitle
of touch

give him
a moment-

then
just as he
whether he’s
a him
or a her

lifts
the temporary
tattoo
of light

say

you’d stay
but your pain
needs you.

if you can, for me.

you’ve so much
to miss
doing.

fellow travelogue, and stunted
exodus:

older says to his younger
your pants are a bomb
you have to take them off

man shoots woman
just in the knee
she is on her other knee
refusing to plead
a bus brakes
her children

look at a goldfish
in a toilet
a solemn oval, a broken…

narrative is dead
is not a boy
with a long
illness

jesus frost.

dog attack.

sold bible
to bible
salesman.

made me sick
did the weakness
of mass
mailbox.

would be
bloodbrothers
instead I witness
them take
separate
*******
photos.

I am not smart about it.
it lives alone.

or dies maybe
surrounded by
those who
were not there
the man’s
men.

I want to capitalize
***, capitalize
on your two
ruined
entries.

jehovabeast & throng-
ophile.

want go
unheralded
as misanthrope’s
diary
of winter.

**** if
both sides
of the nose
don’t marry
while the mouth
is on
location.

lose a hand
swatting the neck
to get the swatting
done with.

then it’s church
the hotel
for church
goers.

some dads
get they
insides
bit
to bite down
on god.

I’ve been outside
and I’ve been outside
women.

don’t have a clue, army.

I wear a blindfold.  I look my age.  I push an empty wheelchair and with it map the way to your room.  I go without.  my children rebel.  my children rescue their behaviors for later use.  I tell my oldest she was my idea of a first thought.  I tell her in a dream.  I have a disorder in which I add to everything an ‘s’.  a second disorder in which I taste chalk when your father eats it.  my mother is a two-man show.  says for example by god I’m next to jesus.  I hold her hat.  she looks into it this time and the next longer than the last.  the rabbit doesn’t make it.  my boys enter a room that’s been moved.  my father keeps me young.

on the off chance
one of the buried
has a shovel
we dig
with our hands
while telling
these stories
of men
with headaches
whose women
would gain weight
to absorb
the souvenir warmth
of wanted
pregnancies
which made
some of the women
smoke
so as to be
in a constant state
of unveiling
bruises
seemingly given
by demon
toddlers
yet to be
crossed
by hunger
hobbled
creatures
being that the bruises
recall to us
the botched
renderings
of paw prints
and then we’re on
to the women
who don’t smoke
who are puppets
with frostbite
and believe
the lord’s stomach
is sometimes
bowl
sometimes
plate

she drinks to the image I have of myself as a naked man on roller skates who continues to have the fistfight he’s late for.  she drinks to toast the pain she says she stole from a pregnant unicorn during a longer than usual drought of immersion.  people keep us together because they are bored.  when sober, she returns to them the delirious boy who on his bedsore back carried a pair of skis throughout the only entire summer of his youth.  from her father’s memory she eats for the both of us without touching her food because her mother was the bulimic god could taste.

after a certain film
a boy walked outside
worked the knots
from the yard hose
put the pistol grip
nozzle
in his mouth.

during the film
his mother aproned
a wet baseball.

before the film
his father attended
the occasional
but forbidden
house fire.

peace and quiet haunt each other.  there’s a hole in my soup.  no disease is rare.  no son.  god taps me on both shoulders because they are his.  my father is the soundman who fails to establish his mother’s voice.  my mother is seconds into sobbing when she disappears without it.  the tv show is very kind.  the old man dreams his wife is young again and she dreams he is strong.  the cemetery may remember death but needs told.  the hallway is nothing more than the hallway of a particular nursing home.  light throws itself like a voice into the deeply peculiar where I touch myself when I clap.  a ghost pokes itself in the eye that undressed you.

had we one mouth. had our teeth been field workers swept into a bar after a fight. that we could find them. that we could tell our wives where to look. had we not been dragging our shadow by the foot. had the ground not shrugged itself lower. had it opened. had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death. so that when it prayed. so that when it tried.

had they not banned, so early, the dogs. had my best friend a suit. had he not talked so much about getting one. had it not been his hand I seen come outta the earth to take its pick of hats from the wounded. had I not laid his fat sister. had I gotten money for it. called her fat and not loved her for standing upright what was another’s tale of composure.

a dog can still breathe steadily    
as I hold a basketball     and wait
for my ears.

I am someone I am.  a meditation
on a father.  an intro.

a mother can still claim
her belly is an air bubble
kept for the mouth of her oldest
who swims to middles
of ponds    
in jeans    
on the same
dare.

I am the alarm that is later
not
a heart attack.  just a sharp pain

the size of your son

blinded again
by the ache
in god’s
toe.