I want
again
my brothers
to fight.

one
the animal judge of god’s time here
the other

the ocean’s
only
ghost.

the main character is removed from god’s existential drama and placed in a prop coffin referred to by a majority of the extras as a scarecrow’s outhouse where he is put to sleep by his hands that when put together become the coordinates of our assault on the secrecy embedded in the *** life of angels.

he settles on a word not because it is right but because his exhaustion has developed an independent streak and has abbreviated its calling to* terrain.  *I talk with him about the origin of praise and he imagines a woman swimming solo in a cirque.  he looks me over as if I too am held together by my clothes.  any sentence I come up with begins ‘the female form…’ and ends.  though painful, I rub my knees.

I put the shoebox to my ear and hear nothing. I give it a shake. in it, my stepfather curses and I breathe closer to my quota a sigh of relief. I place the box on a higher shelf where I plan to leave it for three years. five years pass and I mean that. I can no longer reach the shelf and need a footstool or something similar. I stirrup my hands and there they are suspended. I step back from them. a cat meows or my stepfather sobs. I am bogged down. I am under my mother’s heart. when I finally use my hands in the manner I’ve meant, my fingers break and I land on my back. the box falls and the corner of it finds the cup of my stunned and still suspended hands and the fingers hold for a moment and then they are weak and then they feather the box sideways to my chest. I lift my head and see my stepfather jolly to be on the set of a show he’s the star of. he is smoking a prop pipe and pretending to read a book I remember my mother being buried in. a few episodes into it I realize the show is missing something and so supply grief.

a creatureless forest
in the minds
of men
with shovels; a field.

/ birth outgrew its crooked coat

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary.  a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.  the animal gets between my son and my son’s imaginary friend.  the root of its insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.  god’s gone when the story starts.  to war, to war.

in the end, she was a pair of beautiful hands and he was mostly a heavy head.  in the beginning, she fed him too eagerly and wore a short dress of one color.  his own hands were hearing things and she’d put them on his ears.  he was either an unknown writer or a bill collector.  he scripted for her the last lovely times of the empress of bullish desperation.  as a young fathoming she knew him constantly.  I’ve ghosted for them since I can remember but am open to the possibility I haven’t.  touch is not touch but is where it’s hidden.

circa having visions of my mother while she was in the room

she began seeing things that weren’t there.  at one point I had three mothers taking shifts scraping the fur from my tongue.  a soothsayer with a cold spider was brought in and told me not to worry about him running low.  I read a book mother had written based on a mistake my father had made in a dream.  I was unclear as to the owner of the dream.  the book didn’t whisk me away but promised to.  unless you’re being touched, touch is inconsistent.  you’re on the loveliest couch.  you hope as I do none are healed.  one of my mother’s bodies is freezing when I am a coat.

a man has eaten a nail.  he must bed before it’s too late a woman with a breadboard back.  the man’s brother is married to such a woman, but does not know it.  the brother’s tongue is raw and wouldn’t know good eating were it a thumbtack in a lover’s heel.  the man decides to lounge hungrily in the slim wardrobe of his brother’s shadow.  the man will drink it like milk and let it slosh in his gut for three weekends.  the wife will shine more and more light on her husband; she will bend reading lamps around corners and forget she has things to do.  she will have well lit dreams of a man she can sense is behind her.  her husband will run from the light and she will jump on his back.  the man will come to this empty house and he will be angry and because of his stomach he will need to call someone.  until then, imagine we are in a box held by a thief.

the barber and the cyclops
in the nosebleeds

addiction did not transform into prose.
familiarity did not breed.

it was not cold, it was heartbreaking.
it was hearing

my blanket needs a blanket.

it was billed as frostbite
with a beautiful write-up
in the archive

of I cannot
move my eyes.  

it was not my imagination.

the baby was a city.
it lost us.

i.  therapy

please push this toy car.
it is going to the beach.

     in this activity, one makes a flower
from the parts
of a hand.  it is obvious:

people have time.

if I sob, it is so you know
to turn your head.

ii.  daydream  

if art, be sure to place the couple
carefully
on the donkey

     have them pass
a sunned whale

neither see.  

iii.  I can’t make myself cry without you

     I give instruction, I say sad things, I put my ear
to a belly of disparate

pregnancies.

iv.  a therapeutic image of your likeness

( foreign as
  one’s wonderment
  in coming across
  types
  of mitochondrial disorders
  
  or the oral
  beauty
  of reading ahead
       nicking oneself
  on chevrotain )

v.  terminology

mouse
inoculates
deer

because I wanted the poem
to feel
as rare
as my father’s
anger, and because

a pigeon
is
what it eats, and because

mad with bread
the oven
my brother
buried
took a snapshot
of our dog
bigfoot
sleeping
in hell, and because

my son is not a pattern
his body
can resume:  the alien was impressed

but my mother
god love her
was bored

alien
that I failed
my boys

are lonely

of course
young letters
of dear
crow and holy
scare

had to
survive

and the
papering
of my insides

with smoke

that, too,

and these: (a paw print she sponged from tile) (a cup the size
of devil hoof) (wrists
of clay colossus) (who giggled in us poorly)

for love

for the man
to break into song
he needs
hear
humming
the woman
who paints
her small part
of a nearby
church.

for god,
it’s the ridiculous
notion
that he go
from human
to human
without transport.

for me,
it’s a bird
sexually
abused
I’ve never
seen.

they are on
the same
sleep

schedule

my fingernails
and

my hair)

it has been the devil’s work but I would do it

again
to look

this

foreseen)

I want to have your babies
is this
normal)

not all of them and not all the time but

the rocking
horse
nods
like a real

horse

to the goat’s
gospel)

her body is a trick I play on my hands)

by now
they know

to fall asleep, I’d try to swallow my tongue.  my words came by way of spelling bees judged by scarecrows.  my father would’ve drowned had the rope not snapped him back.  it was a story he told to knock a letter from poverty.  my mother worried off and on how close I was getting to my childhood.  she looked at me like a pill as if to say dissolve already.  we lived in a room that for halloween went as a house.  that in the past had failed as a church.

[in no language]

does echo
have a word
for dream

[bring meat]

in becoming less alone, the beasts have begun to care what I do with my body. this thing I save

it crawls on water.

[snakeskin]

by the time god gives you a daughter
he’s already met
the one person
in the crowd
he can make
disappear.

older now, sadder

I admire
love.

[her faith]**

motion detectors
on the loss
of imagination

the dream
aware
of its fame

the toy exile of a lightning storm

the scene

anti
pastoral, deadpan

crow
in mom’s
blue streak

dolls
moved
by what
she ate

sleep, kid. give grief its carrot. I’ll be right beside you, awake, wearing one sock. I stepped on a man today. for context.

forgiveness
was always
assault

/ visions mutter
in the ghost
of my stomach, film

is low
fruit

two girls replace two boys and continue the good work of making a ******* sandwich.  

I become a woman to watch my mother die.

father
he jumps
less and less
rope.

things come in three raccoons
to rearrange
a rabbit.  

a baby avoids the plague
like a first
word
amen.

brother gives hell to my sense of place.

we have come because you’ve been associated with sadness.  try to pretend we’re here.  as a kidnapper mum about being pregnant, you will soon have something to say to the microphone in your bra.  I am the face of this operation.  my lips are whites only like certain water fountains.  thoughts on the whereabouts of the gun you own are superseded by images you dance to of babies born wearing mittens.  in your father’s abandoned car you will be asked to recall the location of the buttons on the dashboard your brother showed himself to press.  we love your brother.  he invented a game, what was it?, kick if you’ve been muzzled by god.

mother is too far gone to start small.  she is, as they say, pinpointing the outcome of a child blessed with field vision.  I am not my father.  my father is one of three men shortlisted for your sister’s pregnancy by the cult viewership of a propaganda film that showed my brother’s brain sticking out of a blanket.  my father brings my brother like a knife to a knife fight as heaven and hell receive different parts of the same bomb.  with another word for word, I have a woman on the inside who at mine will recover god from god’s plan and your daughter’s kite from a manhole.

from [shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~

it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.

~

when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~

church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits.  church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse.  church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair.  of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.


~

and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man.  and we struggle to hear a father verbatim.  and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace.  and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~

(all print books on Lulu are 25% off thru July 11th with coupon code of LULU25)

from self-published collection Abandonesque (December 2013)

available on Lulu.

abstract qualities

above me many characters frequent my father. they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth. I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times. in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss. in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun. moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body. when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me. I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold. I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there. when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

dear infant

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

trades

a baby appears onstage in a kick drum. the more I think of time travel the more it can do. when I ask about the fresh blood you say I should see the ear muffs. you say they are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot and stared at to avoid the sight of your father the walking anthill. my privates move in my sleep. my privates are outside the governance of worship. you can have me from the waist up. my ******* are alone. the devil shares a history with god. in Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card.

expertise

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay. I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child. eat snow, understanding.

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

forte

addiction did not transform into prose.
familiarity did not breed.

it was not cold, it was heartbreaking.
it was hearing

my blanket needs a blanket.

it was billed as frostbite
with a beautiful write-up
in the archive

of I cannot
move my eyes.

it was not my imagination.

the baby was a city.
it lost us.

talisman

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.

forms

in the end, she was a pair of beautiful hands and he was mostly a heavy head. in the beginning, she fed him too eagerly and wore a short dress of one color. his own hands were hearing things and she’d put them on his ears. he was either an unknown writer or a bill collector. he scripted for her the last lovely times of the empress of bullish desperation. as a young fathoming she knew him constantly. I’ve ghosted for them since I can remember but am open to the possibility I haven’t. touch is not touch but is where it’s hidden.

the inspection

my son helps me open my fist.
he rolls up my sleeves.

Christ is still dead.
my mom doesn’t smoke.

abandonesque

what can god read to make him feel more human? then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing. I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering. then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs. point wildly. it’s not a shame beauty ******-up. I look sometimes like a different baby.

always crow

the boy keeps quiet about his room. his toys gather for bully scenes. his toys even have a graveyard. when one goes missing, he believes in an angel. his mother hides her applause from his father like a tracking device. the three live together at different times in a pre-existing broken home with two chimneys. forest the boy thinks is the forgotten back of a forest creature. when in the room he is quiet about, the boy grooms each wall to be a window for one day and for when that one day comes. my girlfriend grieves in public to tell me how his mother and father were not long ago so lovely and so accused. he was the only boy who couldn’t see a crow without seeing through it. could be he’s the blood in her voicebox.

when there are no mothers, I will crawl toward the one sitting with what her legs couldn’t burn and I will ask my blood to be the same fish

it occurs to me that my brother’s intermittent addiction to waiting caused him this insight: your real life comes true.  it occurs to me he remains a telepath.  a telepath whether or not I write as beautifully as he remembers.  he sleeps without a pillow claiming it gives his ear nothing to do.  he scratches his cheeks and says look at these they are the ribs of a pup I am caged in.  

     the future of war is war.