~

paint

the heels
of saint
fetus

~

robot

sometimes when my knees touch

~

punishment

our mouths could turn food
into soap

~

~

reanimation

it is nothing

compared
to the sobbing
of worms

~

outhouse

the bathtub is full of ****

it wants to be
an egg

~

frogsong

depression

decorates
a bird

~

miracle

a bunk-bed for sister’s hair

~

ideation

the prayerful **** continues beneath the unfinished oven psalm

~

retrospective

dollhouse
fly-paper

~

newbie

­corpse bread

~

I am never where I am left. I am in my head where my hair is long. give god nothing to pull and the devil nothing to scrub. these, are my sister’s. and this: I was born to be here for my location. her exact words are covered in body language. her seizures come in twos in the order they were named. ghost reader, passive hypnotist. she wants only what I send in my sleep. her baby to beauty’s audition.

as for these eyes I’m supposed to get in the back of my head, do they come in like milk?  do they hurt?  will two of my friends suicide each other first?  what does it mean that I’ve seen a boy with a broken nose and bandaged mouth?  how can I tell him it’s okay to follow me to the third floor where my father knocks icicles from the gutter into a bucket and dumps them into a hot bath while sharing again how one got away and barely missed a stroller?  what good will my seeing be if my brother in my mother’s stomach looks as they say like a piece of gum spat into jesus’ blood?

dearest ear,
god is not my fault.

I can hear the worm’s message,
the anthill’s thunder.

revelation comes
once a week
to come out

of its coma.  between us,

my ****** belongs to me.

I started smoking in my early thirties because I missed my brothers.  because a train is the only thing I can act like I’ve seen before.  because a claw opened and a child dropped.  because unhurt the child was a girl and injured it was a boy made of being touched.  because giant birds were ****** to give other people rain.  because all hail, as all do, location.  because riot then riot envy.  because bright spot became a cloth in a police car.  because I can’t sleep and couldn’t without thinking of sleep as a copy of a copy.  because lost the baby wasn’t getting any younger.  because nightlight and tadpole, mom and dad.

dropped from a hand-shaped dream

were three fish the length of my beating…

–

your ghost town anthills

this blank
taxi

seeable

****

–

by horse I mean
thing without a ghost / that we followed with our hair

a man did nothing
but care
for a moth.

if need be, he’d cup it
to the mouth
of a neighbor’s
horse
gone lame
in its grey
little heart.

by one such as you the lake is crossed, one side to the other, on the hoods of cars. commonplace it is heard that I am in love with my
behavior.  the real you looks for the real me but only after your violin lesson.  meanwhile I am sharply anger.  my undershirts rip oddly while I wear them.  if sunlight were my body, says who, I’d be a torso of nervous pentagrams.  the one collects piano keys and favors the white.  they are his dream of clean teeth.  the black the slugs pulled from the dog and from the deer favored by the lake.

it was
before it met me

a town

/ it is now

both babies, it be

alone, it be

the number
of times
god

went missing / it does not be

what is touching
what arouses
acolytes

of narrative
****** / I spill

milk
and you

treat me
like I’ve stepped
on a stick / revelation

was the lord’s
idea / wasn’t

to have animal

devour
animal / until / it’s too pretty

what you’re putting
on paper

/ I get my food

from food, time
from the grace period
given

to clones /  a man

with bad posture
the posture
of an infant

dreams

the apples
in the house
have been
turned off / the darkness

of being eaten
once

when homeless, I would try to score a place to do chin-ups.  the false prophet of my inner life ran parallel to god.  I was one side of a custody battle that involved my brother and with him the depression he called Christ because it came and went.  I met a woman convinced she’d become a gate.  not heaven’s ever and not hell’s anymore.  I stood watch while she slept.  no one counts, she was right, the dead made so in a dream.  likewise, if you want to get to my brother you’ll have to go through me.

either I draw
from memory
my son
nuzzling
the only animal
he’s seen
or slap
my right
cheek, mosquito,
to make
a mirror.

(on February 5th, I am planning to send hard copies of my newest publication earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from to those willing to read it and to those willing to either say something about it or keep quiet.  if you are one of the first five individuals to send me a message with an address of where you’d like to receive it, I’ll include you as one of the individuals on the February 5th  mailing.)  

here are some poems from the book:

-

[from the book of waiting]

what is it
dissolves
in the mother’s
foreseeable
presence?

faith
a flashback
god
is having.

-

[voice]

*** as something that has an end.

evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.

I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority.  post-harm

pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.

-

[trick blood]

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth. the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet. the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention. the silence my mother kept quiet for. the second afterlife of a single breast.

-

[male music]

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

I am naked and wearing a football helmet.  in many ways, I am the memory my son has of taking a bath.  a picture doesn’t last any longer than it takes me to look at it.  when it’s my sister I can hear her pointing out

assaulted
places.  poor places, poor puppy.  I don’t know why I am a child.  my sister has no problem listening to herself.  her last blank book had only a title, a running joke she quoted from and called shower days.  to date, my son has had one seizure.  he shook the provided angel.  my body was at a press conference.

the boy on the stairs won’t be around much longer.  three days time he’ll choke on a paddle ball.  a detail will be passed around how a passerby tried to save the boy twice by pulling the paddle only to have it slip and snap the boy on the nose.  sadness over it seems impossible.  

not yet, but a tunnel under me as I carry my adult daughter from jailbird to jailbird collapses and I lose her to walking.

before my mother’s eyes were terrible things
she believed evolution would inform her next move.

it’s trash day in ghost town. mock scar, prop mirror. mom wants to make a footstep. dad a mouse. dad a flower. sister a hand with two tied behind her back. me a sound. brother is on his stomach trying to catch something from a snake. from god. the private life of recognition.

my father jokes that he is only attracted to gay men.  

that my two left hands
must’ve rubbed a balloon
the wrong way.

I know if I kiss his bald head
he’ll ask for a comb.

you’re angry that they’re beating him while you’re awake.  to qualify for the reverie of picturing a river it is necessary that you recall the correct number of infants that set sail.  the basketmaker has dedicated her life to relocation.  she leaves behind the ugliest bells.  your son has never been ill but acts like jesus surprised that he is.  the television powers down every time a stone turns into stone.  dying would mean dying before your brother whose blind wife means to live only as humbly as her dyslexia allows.  the *****.

instead of running the orphanage, your husband has been going to movie after movie.  he no longer acts like a child in bed.  his crying seems attached to sadness at both ends.  his mother keeps calling when he’s not home.  she’s never met his father.  his father calls from the same number.  you want to tell him but need his son’s blessing.  your own kids are full of woe.  they laugh so hard about it their poor stomachs skip meals 101.  when you visit the ATM it’s to put money in an account for a friend who married up.  it’s not you on the cross where your water breaks.

this must be satan’s emergency room.  where so withdrawn I declare myself in need of stitches.  where my mother empties vending machines once a week hoping to see me but dresses like a man her father knew.  where paperwork is accepted from females only and files one as pregnant or twice as pregnant.  where my son would make an airplane but for the heat in his hands.  where my feet grow toward the ocean until I am all feet and my face goes straight.  where satan himself does what he can.  fills the bedpans on days of inspection.

I am pretty like people.  to jesus on the cross this poor man brings umbrella.  he is still bringing.  still poor.  I am like his woman.  a child climbs onto my back.  my back is bitten and used to being behind me.  I drink from my shoes.  madness is an extra cup.  I know wanting all the rains is like not wanting one abusive boyfriend.  know mouth is mostly mouthpiece at a father’s funeral.  to all men a certain radius is hereditary.  I talk in cycles.

she lives alone.  from this, one can gather the things she owns.  1970s ****.  she is pregnant.  a week ago she went into town to pick up some new phrases.  while there, she slipped into a house and beat a sleeping child.  our deeds are weary not of a dog barking or of a cat hissing but of the overfed fish.  my belly button is how the marksmen touch me.  she thinks the child’s father followed her home.  she’s about to watch the videotape.

mark my words, wrist

-

with god
as my impression

mark

insomnia  

-

the mood was very ******, the mother invented

***
to scare
the kids, the mother

drank
cologne

-

I keep having the same baby

it comes
with a dream

underling animals
in times
of quake-

slight
swellings

in brain
of maybe
one mole

bottled
now
for sea-

if on a baby
your hands
would be

so cute

but as
an adult

you glove them-

world as wheelchair
the wheelchair
from which

god rose-

as sporadic
surges

switch on
the sink’s
disposal

pull thorns
from the rabbits
you dream

the woman knows she isn’t the one her angel wants.  god says we can do this all day.  I chase the car until it runs out of batteries.  mother needs little.  an extra night to sleep on the loss.

the yellow sea will take you away and the yellow sea will bring you back.  in between the coming and the going, your father will speak to your mother about the tales her brother tells.  the one about your father being born to carry a ladder and later in the same your mother born as well and with her an extra shadow.  the two about her brother himself insisting to multitudes how on its mother’s command a tadpole swam into his ear.  the unfinished few about who I am.  the thrice changed account of the man with three hearts just like Jesus.  the one he hasn’t told you about the visitor that eats tongue but is never hungry which is also the one about how we know what it eats.  the story of two men hating the same woman over and over until they can close on nothing but frog-like delicacies.  your favorite where he becomes your father and becomes too sad to release your least.  the hated woman whose stomach is a black tire, the bits of which are found here in the meekest bull and there in a massive fish.

her first love
a clockmaker
in a forgotten
teacup.

her second love
she abandoned
in the topmost car
of a ferris wheel.

her third love
an eyeless
thief

who once emptied
the coins
from his hat

onto the counter
of a small balloon

shop.

her fourth love
left sugar
on her back, and a hook

breathing
under the coat

of her fifth.

to be completely dishonest

being told how much time a son has left

turns the body to hourglass
and bones to sand

-

rather, I know
my father    
disappeared
from his cell    

     rather, I believe
he was eaten

-

this is the cigarette you’ve heard
spoken about     in other

males.  that females

keep
enjoying.  

it never ends
and it’s not like thinking it does
destroys

male me
male you

-

what is death?

-

     but the second showing
of memory

the land very well of my tongue but I was asked to know the tongue of my land in the tongue of my land.  doc the veterinarian hired me anyway.  I was to myself in the dog cages and in their runs I would kneel and let the hose seize with water.  I was to myself in the sick and brick room fearful the slow cat would rent with its curl my stomach.  I was to myself when the parrot so parrot told me in so many words separated partially its upper bill on purpose.  was I dumped the dogs full asleep and half from a wheelbarrow into a pit and I in trouble doing it when we were busy.  was I would basket my arms upside down above three dogs a day at most while the needle made sometimes the back of my hand and somehow on that four dog day my chin such that it got me my funny talk and fired and I had to tell my home early dad.

a mirror keeps leaving me in the same toy. smoking allows grief to imagine thirst. I have a mother; she misses yours. god

sees turtle, thinks mask.

brother builds a time machine from trigger warning ****.  brother puts his little earthquake to bed.  brother swears on god’s jawbone he’ll pinch a baby from a pouch of tobacco.  move for move, I match our mother’s stillness.  my eating acts alone.  a symbol for leaving a mark.

he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.

I am differently
afraid
of each
cigarette

-

thematically, father hopes

to operate
on a clown

-

compared
to his

my hunger
is having
a flashback

-

wheelchair, oh

to its dog
door
bliss

your sadness ran as a midday special on nailgun accidents in my area.

if I stay in one place, my mother will die of sleep.

ideally, it’s the image I have of realism.

I am at the tail end of being but a child.  aloud, ghost sounds to me like guest.  the dog looks to be eating its paws with its hands and will do so until my hands are gone.  influenced by the simple living of trauma, mother’s handwriting emerges to document itself.  brother he is on the dreamy side of becoming the product of a his-and-hers overactive realism.  in his own words, father is moved by one thing and by what went on in it.  a shadow picking up litter, I love him both.

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.

you will know
the hoof
of satan’s
chosen
deer
by the way
it glows
when any
female
announces
from the seat
of a stilled
tractor
that she
is pregnant-

you will be the age
of your mother’s
baby bump

older than your father’s
knife

and lit
by the grape
in god’s
mouth

slicked
with sadness
a branch.

the skinny
legs
of rain.

into the wood
a man
whose daughter’s
hair
is a ghost
fighting a ghost
for her head.

whose daughter
has not slept.

such cures
the town
talks.

put the sick
every morning
on a different
porch.

use
the same
nail.

if one is awake
**** a crow
or *****
a stop sign.

how many fingers, fork

will hunger
lose

-

I am the trap
god sets
for my kids