being
that you know
how my mind
works,

revelation
is suspect.

one needn’t have a baby to leave it alone.

better to brush
the combs
from my hair.

dogs don’t run off, dogs find
the twins of other dogs
and are
home.

I heard the couch was dragged
outside
with sister
on it.

this from one
who smokes
in her sleep.

suicidal, mom is thinking for two.  the storm says again there’s a hand in my soup.  my ears are sounds from the son of god.  the sister of sister insane has an arm and with it throws a roller skate at a school bus.  you can’t see my ******* anymore than I can see the worried eyes of a giraffe.  people are people from church.  the we in we let her believe.

for Jake, for Amy, for those who know*

in the beginning,

his mother and father
were there
to be
the parents
he’d lost.

his first tooth
anchored
a ghost
within

shouting distance
of the boat
named

for ghost.  he amassed

a useless
vocabulary

that nonetheless
included
the word

amidst.  when women  

and children
waged war
for the men
who’d agreed
on the drug
god
would take, he burned

etymology’s
least favorite

haunt
with a fire
he’d ******
from a sword…  

-

the lives we touch are evil.

go
to a different
hell.

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.

watching a horror film
barefoot
     when the high
priest
of my eight

thoughts    

carries my mind
to a corner
church

funerals are a form of menticide.  also, writers.  undead, I don’t mean to talk.  what I mean to do is approximately yearn.  for something nearby.  an old computer.  plugged in, cursor blinking, hell’s door.  for awareness.  priesthood.  box-cutter.  wayside.  what began as Franz Wright.  what became Lou Reed.

leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards

happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe

reverie a learned behavior

god a tornado warning and hearing
a ghost town, this

a cigarette from the purse
of a past

/ mother

i.

two boys
skipped school
to fight
in a field.

we who stayed
took sides.

I somehow became a leader

      which mattered only
when the boys
returned.

their original quarrel
ended
in that field
     where a scarecrow

interested
both-

ii.

     boys
whose names
imprison me.

it was easier
to tell
man
he was missing
a rib
than to confront
the inquiry
her body
would pose
had it been here
with her
however
long.

dogs
were wild
then.

her mother
left the house
each morning
to work
inside
an animal
that was always
on the move

her father
spent the day
spitting
into toilets
for any sign
of tracking
god

why
every year
she goes
as blood?

she says
until
it’s hers

I am looking
to be sad
whispers
who else
but the blind man
in the poem
previous

son
face down
in an empty
bowl
of milk.  

his long hair
carried off
by his sister’s
head.

no one told me
you were sick
but you

our mother
was not one
to make sounds
above an infant
in another’s
house, no, our mother

our shepherdess
mother

would have us flock
to god’s
epizootic
nostalgias

brother is convinced his ear muffs will any minute play music.  mother like a bible is made of books.  I am not in a movie and I am not in the movie based on this beating.  I am tall for my church.  when I look jesus in the eye he thinks I am his cross.  father packs gospel snow in a gospel plant.  father sends his love in a spraycan he lifts with his mind.  mother’s breast, I forget which, is still to me an untouched baseball.  when an actual baseball presents itself I avoid my fingers.  sister is the tactile learner of the bunch.  I stitch her drug dolls.

lost
like you
my memory
twice

some were spiking wrapped pieces of hard candy off a baby’s bare back.  some were burping dolls and making physical notes.  some were shoving their feet into small shoes right in front of a working conveyor belt.  some had aches in their bodies that sounded like the popping of corn.  some were fathers their fathers would’ve prevented.  some were mothers unwanted by pregnancy.  none were disabled.  none were coordinates.  a hash mark, an eyelash, she stood for the death of one man and finished the word she’d been pausing between.

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.

he picks up another
heavy book.

lets himself
**** himself
all boy.

duster of crickets.

I tell my boy
shuddering
at the word
doesn’t mean
he’ll shudder
at the thing
itself.

I make my girl
another’s
homemade
soup.  she is nervous
mostly
about where
my cigarette
is
now.

what is the search term
status
of ****?

I carry the brain that is bomb in a timeless infant.

the future repeats nothing.

warning label
error
on mattress

elicits
single use
applause

many
you could not join

gender control
has highlighted
a single
glaring
omission
while population
control
has issued
one person
per
god.

still, she tolerates
the fetus.

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby.  not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do.  I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality.  had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.

fake interviews with fake people*.  the wording lures them from the fattening of babies who talk early.  my silent uncle dying on a bed was asked if he had any first words.  I was going to slice bread but pointed the knife at my ear hole, held it with my left, and slammed it in with my right.  a man writes a song and sings it to the belly he thinks houses a son.  his daughter stops a bullet from bruising his wife’s spine and is delivered unmolested but in high school begins to smell like gunpowder.  she joins the KKK but doesn’t tell the KKK.  I wake up behind the wheel of a car just in time to kiss the driver’s neck and the driver makes a fish face so horribly a child giggles in hell and pretty soon.

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  he is so happy to have a listener, his microphone could be the ant I lost my voice telling.

wrapped in a sheet from my mother’s bed, I make my way to the outhouse to show my brother there is a future in smuggling the skin of god.  my father is scraping leaves into an empty pool and the earth with a rake.  if death speaks briefly, I am in two places that cannot exist without exposure.  gone long, it spoke once on the loss of loss.

back and forth the boys texting about **** and about standing on indian mounds.  think they are gentle because everything is a button.  my lives are both private.  two empty salt shakers I can’t look at.  my father is somewhere saving his breath and ignoring all but one finger.  I too plan to write my last from inside a glass coffin.

the plot of my dying son’s dream includes an alien technology meant to isolate what makes us inhuman.  he is unable to ascertain the holder of such a patent as his disorder wakes him before his time.  I direct his attention to the youtube video of my injury.  it’s the first time I’ve seen myself sleepwalk.  as with all my children, I get his attention by waving the rolled up catalog his mother failed to sell.  I keep it with me at all times and have been caught using it to spy on what I cannot provide.  in the video I look surprisingly fit.  my oldest daughter is sitting on my shoulders and her hair is on fire.  I am running through a sprinkler in a front yard I don’t recognize and am taken at the ankles by some animal the darkness hides.  here the video stops but I’ve heard there are others that go on a bit longer.  when my stepfather was very sick his memory convinced him he had traveled more than once to a foreign land.  the most valuable thing he came back with was his father’s gentle nature which he uses often when guiding me to clear a path for EMS.

no one goes to the crazyhouse
for having a hand
that repeats
itself.

in a new place
my brother
does one
of two
things:

masturbates
or says
deja vu.

if he didn’t tell me
I wouldn’t know
I’ve slapped myself
awake.

one of us
then one of us
will die.

by his friends
my uncle was known
as uncle
****
because he curled the word
as if his mouth
came before it
and waited.

he took me to a meeting once
because he wanted me to have
real coffee.

he winked as if to say
I know a paper cup
when I hold
a paper
cup.

he said as if to say
*******
it’s not like you’re watching
someone else
live your life
it’s like you’re someone else
not helping.

uncle **** didn’t believe in oversleeping.  
he believed in making a blindfold
for the blind.

I was at my best
letting him think
he gave me
my first
cigarette.

everything you’ve heard was read by me.

the thinking was

the kids
they’d report
my disappearance

-

I saw two men trade guns
and assured
my brother
that men
differ

-

no one
today
is dead, the newborn

is letting
the lipstick
dry

-

my other movie is a fistfight

-

my other movie is the horse
my drowning
mother
drank

-

my other movie is not the dog
of my sister’s
first

hand, nor the nothing

I taste
on my way
to salt

I have a dog waiting for me
when I get off the bus
and a brother
if I put
my trombone
down.

there are ways to be sober
ways
a pace car driver
can save
for a hearse.

the rapture, the afterlife
are both ripe
for reenactment.

dad ain’t said, but will

no person
truly ****
would disguise
blessing. thunder

has done its homework.

I fear most
the silence
of god.

more than that,
the silence
of gods.

if any one of you
marry
a haunted man-

die first.

time and god trade barbs clothed in genericide.  metaphor’s child is a condensed version of what the kids these days call *******.  younger, my pain was outdated but had its own phone.  I meet my parents.  I begin to act like my son.  I leave myself to marry what is mourned to how it grieves.  older, I go alone at night to where I am worried.  like existence, I overstate my daughter’s angelic disability.  my wife hears what is heard by one who flits from mirror to mirror.  I lose a black wallet.  I pray.  sky for the dollhouse, amen.

we’re here to ****** the head of the boy who put a clown’s red nose on the girl playing jesus for stopped traffic.  if I spoke your language, I would tell you.

my son was taken from me before I knew he was mine.

     when this is true
I can talk to no one but God.

I rub my hands under a faucet you’ve yet to turn on.
I hate the faucet so much my hands swell.

your mouth is a bullet hole covered by a before picture.

after therapy, I put my son on my shoulders.
he bites the top of my head.

your legs work.  you are who you think you are.

as if night
knows when
to sleep

it is behind us, now,

the telling

that had
god
being sentenced
to heaven
for tracking
his own
paranoia.  

it is with her, now,

the little
bundle

blessing
of nerves.

up ahead
the women
are bathing
the stray
that bathed
a bullet.

it is lost, now,

the black egg
once rolled
by an unattended
populace  
to the front

of a parade
where
as a boy
I dressed as a bird, tore off

my beak
to smoke.

sick, my son says he has an eye behind his eye.  says he can see it.  at night we huddle in separate corners of his mother’s bedroom and take turns pretending to be on watch.  mornings we cup the mouth of our dog and shake the rocks into our palms.  when my son’s health returns I will need some help throwing the rocks, but for now I can manage.  the city has gotten closer but it’s a secret I’m okay with.  

     scary how almost nothing can happen.  when I was a kid I had a neighbor boy to poke holes in and a brother to give him to.

and, beheld, she imprisoned the god
seen by those it changed

a woman
with a handsaw
whose rabbits
dream dove

she thought nothing
of the *****
shaped
bar
of soap, and nothing
of the boys
who’d no doubt
worked together

in close
quarters

to create
from their
gods
the ball
god

dropped, and still

nothing

of the note
in her locker  
instructing her
on how
to take

a bath-  not everything

takes the form
of a sickly
double
afraid
to meet
its match

father sends me to school after being won over by what mother calls the artifice of experience.  father puts the dirt in my blood.  father cares for the doll of my instructor, a woman whose pet writes on the board that we feel neglected.  my twin sister puts gently two eggs in a bra she’s saving herself for.  I don’t hug.  I don’t hug and so prove my father’s rib that I am the tombstone half of **** and tombstone.  my boyfriend says I can have any girl I want but he also says his mouth can bob for snowballs.  this is my body the teachable moment.

if I had an animal
I’d poke it awake
father
and cut myself
in front
of your mother’s
dream

a woman with nothing appears beside a horse as one of us recalls our failure to give her anything to keep from it.  we watch her as if she were a documentary on the tunnel vision of our blood.  our hearing of the riddle we mistake for a language.  if a child has time to squawk, a child has time to pout about how it’s been portrayed to the world.  thus far, the world is a dark wall said to have donkeys pinned to it.  I’m starving, but only on the outside.