safe passage
in deaf
snowfall
for brother
who carries
a beer
from his house
to mine.

breath is the rock I’m under.

I don’t want kids
but sing
to my belly.

a lasting image?

a unicycle on its side
beneath a suspended cross.

a temporary?

that little
self-aware
apocalypse
boxed

up
in crow.

godless
balloon
animal

when dressing the disabled child in front of family

my language
is often
the one
I use

putting
in flashback

birth
on the map

my nine toed baby rolls its tongue as if to speak for the sock on my hand

he is born without stones in his hands.  she waits with him outside the mother.  the mother is their belief her history supports.  speech is a passing back and forth of names dogs don’t have.  before they desired stones, they’d egg the front of my jeans.  the pair

I wore.

a lake
on the loss
of its shadow

/ the projection
booth
its tugboat
sorrow

/ bad blood
between
the brothers
mime

Light’s
egglike
silence
Rock
paper
infant
Infant
omen
hair

it is not my detail to bedevil that she had on her person three library books when she vanished.  this word vanished like a **** toy most kids get for not shutting up.  then again I can’t even pronounce half the people in Mosul.

naked, I photograph your bed.  

it takes me where I stand
the low joy
of jumping
rope.  

birth has become a boys club.  

I can weigh two things
with what
you broke.

was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.

mouth pain.

dreamboat.

screen door
as hyphen.

god
as no
contact

with the inside
world.

in a town of gentle drunks

I found myself
helping your mother
place a brick     on a magazine

known to give
your father
hope.  

     when I told her I could no longer watch
your father
circle        
the brick

she told me she dipped it in motor oil
once     (and how that was enough

bible)

I see so much of myself
in my son
it is no wonder
he

is where I go
to sleep.  

-

his wakefulness
is a gift
handed down
by a sister

     he had to stop
making up.

-

(as I once thought to save my mother)

because no one in the hotel knew it was being evacuated, it took a week for it to empty.  the employees were told it was on fire.  some have saved their voicemails to play at sparsely attended parties held in country houses forgotten by the rich.  a boy in the corner of the hotel’s elevator goes up and down wearing a dunce cap.  please think of him when your mother is assaulted for monies the poor already have.  when your father is opened up and dictated to an irreverent surgeon as having the insides of a radio reassembled by a ghost.

my father
is like my father
on acid.

mother, she cleans
house
by hanging
a painting
of a floor
in the room
where the floor
exists.

the dog
is an outside
dog
dangerous
to some.

god’s alright
but escalates
quickly.

historically, I am the boy
my presence
requested, the great

stranger
who prolongs
the body
of my birth
and death.

language keeps us from understanding the world.

spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male

white
emulation-delayed
male

writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-

infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.

if it’s true, Adam must’ve been at an age strong enough to hold the baby Eve and she must’ve had some early teeth.  openings are like this when mother has been talking to delicate men.  in another, Adam has something the size of his palm in his stomach and no mouth to speak of.  in this one, mother mourns the loss of the uneaten fruit.  mourns the childless.  in the phrase wasted on the phrase pointless violence      

I don’t know like you don’t know

    we’re exiled.  in belly, a baby turns informer.  her loneliness

a first person
shooter.

the hangman’s bike shop goes under

it’s been
grey apple
a slow
year

mothers innocent of crow chalking about in white grass.  fathers, guilty and gospel.  gardens

and pocket deer.  my sister has a stone, one cheekbone, and a kite.  how you are seeing

that stone, let me this-  it is not god’s tear, tooth, godcrumb.  nor is it madly

a raindrop.  she loves it she says for its milk.  but she’s 12.  digs

in the night
at her ear.

a mother cuts her hair in the house they’ll drag her from

/ my hands, proof

I was born
at night / it is normal

for a woman
to have lost

to a vision
from Ohio
her speaking

part

I ask the mother if she feels abandoned.  she tells me her favorite teacher had a bible in the back of his head.  I ask for the teacher’s name.  she says it’s not something she returns to.  she calls me child, the little orphan gay, to the brim with unicorns and suffering.  in fact she quotes my pain in this very notebook.  I was left only by what happens.  that bible stopped a bullet.

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.

before violence can celebrate the sleep that got away,

my father howled my sister down until she became a voice in my head.  I go to where she might’ve been so I can be looked at as one asking before her.  men have for me two syllables that form a coma.  women stand in final stages of nakedness holding jugs of water but leave me to flower and to mull on them as incantations of the tin man’s great calling.  if I am romantic I am romantic in the increments my mother measures to dream herself to sleep.  beauty is the prop scale I rule from.  none are the mourners of gain.

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

the bicycles were given a much needed space and a few people went to their stomachs in a representation loosely based on the most elegant sentence ever written about a groupie     and even a baby helicopter with a hidden remote flew over the open gifting and caused a bit of a scare with a firecracker     our fear of it cowered the elements     but to disarm there came a cake in the shape of a church bell     the rain would ruin     but at the time to see people outside     being little ramps     of privacy

when her mouth arrives, it arrives in pain.  what gets around to my brother is that after her fire was dipped in hell she tried to drown her trigger finger.  I make a mental list of the oddest things that stick to my body.  my hands come from two camps of how to count the devil’s teeth.  food is the voice of god but it goes right through me.

the teenage boys
trade punches
after dark
which
if I thump
my chest
my daughter
questions
why not
say
during dark
and so
I thump my chest
and ask her
why she wears
only one skate
that is not
the skate
sails between
two pairs
of tired legs
and rolls
over
spots
of boy blood
each spot
drying
at a different
rate
the skate
carrying nothing
but stillness
if not
into the night
then
on that which
underfoot
disappears

ago, we buried something here that has kept us calm.  my father lived in a beat-up car and over time he became its radio.  some kids from town came once to push the car and my father got out to help.  one of the kids was my mother when my mother could still see what others could not.  her favorite sound remains that of a severed head banging around in a time machine.  so many kids went missing here that couples make more on the spot.  the animals try but have so far kept god going.

two ears
at once
her wounded
boy

–

sleep has one god

absence, none

–

the cough
he had
the week
he was missing

like the contents
of a purse

my sorrows
shift

a few
are darkly
touched

some are
chosen

one I think
for a baby’s
lampless

mouth

I say
into beer cans
code names
for ear

oh earth
to dog
miss

whole phantoms

the breast
the mother
is able
to keep.

the healthcare.

the train
lazily
unassigned

to freight or passenger.

the repressed memory
I think I have
of my oversexed
split

personality.  that I verbally assault

with my better
puppet

hand.

it is always a neighbor of ours tries to schedule amnesia and gets put down for suicide. it is always me on a farm machine hasn’t moved in years writing a poem for mom. it is never a mediocre ventriloquist marries a better.

walking
a blank
stretch

to rival / the disappearing /

wilderness
of starvation

/ the bride
of reflection
with her dog
made of sticks

backstage, the ventriloquist wept.
he shook one of his two dolls at a ceiling fan.
his wife in the show was not his real wife
but she put her forehead on the back of his neck
just the same. his cell phone rang
and the show wife made a little joke
of having the second doll answer.
I thought of my mother and my father
safely
in third person

they were taking turns moving shampoo
through my hair
as I hummed.

the poor
in Ohio
say
Ohio

as if god had poured oil
on an egg
about to hatch
I was up all night
sleeping
like my mother
before me
whose future
went on
forever
and I saw
again
the temple
of that hellish
artifact
from the first
suicide
yours
inspired

my babysitter’s best friend pins me to the floor with her knees and makes me say the word *** to my *** brother who’s still facing the corner he was put in for kissing a mirror.  in heaven, you don’t have a mouth.  the man who said he’d hurt before letting pain get stuck with a woman

is dying.

until he can recall being born
he will be an introvert
made
to endure
the props
of forgiveness
in the nowhere
theater
of his health
where a noose
hangs

from a showerhead
and live shows
are for the past

the boy takes a long look inside himself.  his girlfriend settles on a word she can spell.  they sit here on the kitchen floor because it is clean.  the dishwasher is old and runs loudly.  miles off an ambulance driver attempts to enter a silent film while holding a garage door opener.  now back to the boy.  as my dad would say.

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.

blow-up dolls, those

using drugs
to dream.

anyone
on stilts
but leave
the stilts
for god.  on that

note, any child

earmarked
for stilt
removal.  

a twin.

the pregnant
and the men
in the dark.