I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our **** and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo.

as for hangman
and as
for the donkey’s

tail

mother

wets the bed
before leaving
to weigh herself.  

-

the cave is all mouth.

-

when they ask what our sick
son
has
say

echo.

the one time it crossed his mind to hit my mother, the garage door opened.  the day I was born, a man called my mother at work and left a message that was mostly breathing.  the story of the message was repeated to those born after me when each became old enough to need a laugh.  when it was known no more would be coming down the pike, mother began hitting herself.  it was in this era of standing room only that I was able to convince god we’d slipped into the water satan said was there.

notes from my brother include moments of outage.  typo, testament.  I’ve never experienced anything so awful as talking.  during *** I pretend I am a surge protector.  my death is over.  I slip into god and it’s painful bad.  sorry, I took the ******* my phone had in it and made him write this.  back to god I feel I’m praying him through the first break-up he remembers.  headlines rip me the **** outta mom.

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

sacrifice
has its own
unbeatable
consciousness

I give the rat my dollhouse at night.  our basement has a disease.  my brother brings a flashlight to dinner.  mother says poor devil to the poor devil she can’t stop eating.  I have my own language that in hindsight is an age gap.  I am so heavy.  I jump and water gets out of my way.  between you and me, sister sees me coming and throws herself on the trapdoor we’ve made a game of rolling eggs over.  father shares a hat with god like there’ll be something in it.

means:

I don’t have hands and my eyes are trying to kiss.

yester.

a drone’s
love
for a landmine.

at this point
means:

river deer
     like you’ve never seen.
a soup bowl; empty, aglow.
another’s head
     in my hands.
coordination.
energy.
receiving the word
a day late
  that energy
   has arrived.
marriage, or a single
parent
  torn.
perfectly mediocre terror.
a love of statues.
love of placards.
showing my son
the man I’ve chosen
  to remember him by.
art not reflective of, or art
     sideshow.
knowing the kids of others.
knowing just how many gifts
     god had.
that the word overcome
has always been
  past tense.
weight gain. weight loss.
detecting
no difference
  in weight.
telescope, or the long
thin hat
  of god.

and notice, in my knee,
pins, toothpicks. randomly.
the kitchen, softer, than recall.
than rain, than book, or empty hall.
than bird, than bee, than tooth
in straw. what bird what bee
I wouldn't know. save sounding
what a day might own. I wouldn't know
my wife has left
but for this brush, its night haired theft:

my wife has left. she wasn't tall. my sons
have gone
to hobble dolls.

a runway model
in a cornfield

/ the stone a short film on snowfall

conduit of bliss

with a phobia
of narcolepsy

-

walking

as if hacked
by a definitely
clever

****     newly enrolled

in a course
on private
speaking

-

my brother

-

who staged
his after life

I step inside myself
to address
the thinning
army.

age is the only distance my body can record.

my thoughts go unsettled.
they are held
either
in an ant, or in the sewing needle
the ant
climbs.

I scratch nothing’s mark.
I kiss what’s left
of my father.

god’s nose breaks on the ankle of a peasant.
remains mother
a meditation
on the heaviness
of stars.

my brother calls a stoplight the math brain of god.  my best friend bites the apple that once controlled the minds of sheep.  scenes from your childhood bring back mine.  her memory is all she can think about.

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.

i.

an aerial view

of parked
white

vans

parked
impossibly

close

ii.

a hinterland
boy

packs snow
into his mother’s mouth
to keep it
open

iii.

only a snake
uses
the jawbone
of a snake

gender,

a ****** woman
for every
crucified
man / nostalgia,

a baby
undetected
by the mother
we see

it gets around
at auction
that the crucified
they are planning
to bid
on a pair
of ballet shoes
worn
thrice
by the mistress
of radiation’s
exposed
angel

/  still, it’s nothing to shake a stick at

the addict’s
board game

the farness of heaven is the farness of twin.  a packed theater starts a fire in a factory.  a mother and a father clay themselves as figures put to sleep in a clawfoot tub.  across the board, a boy is crushed after witnessing for the image of the crowd-surfing girl he was made in.  you can’t eat touch.

we share
an evacuation
process.

there is nothing in this
or that
world.

I am what’s left to say
to the saying.

it’s as close
to fight
heaven.

she can see the beginnings of a boy in her husband’s abandoned poem.  a skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven.  god is in the air.  her daughter is taking a pregnancy test to prove one can get food poisoning from hunger.  

all I seem to lose is ghost fat.

I am a person away from receiving the baby.  my arms, like yours, end.  my wife is elsewhere as even elsewhere is needy.  my wife hollers into a pillow.  my hands are the many crippling fights over which is echo.

heraldic entry (ii)

god is the secret god wants us to keep.  I hold onto my leg because you cannot return without it.  children drop in on women men ******.  this, I share.


heraldic entry (iii)

we junk the stove by not thinking about it.  I hide my gun inside and then find you doing the same.  we survive and believe it’s a sign from television.


heraldic entry (iv)  

the wee sharpshooter is scratching his ear with a sprung mousetrap.  you tell me, listen, when I am not.          


heraldic entry (v)

the healthy son has a sick.  well I’ll be.  of all the implausibly hedonistic, god is the one who didn’t get away.

i.

     I crumble

chalk
on the black
paint
of a water
holding
its breath
in a single
fish  

     its glass eye
of evolution
and the sound
of god
making light

of his angels
unfolding
as they are

hospital beds     to guide
a piloted

     exhaustion-

flight reminds the dead.  the solo

moan
of a bird
lands
on the shoulder
of a widow

     as the twice devalued coin
          of looking, looks
               on.

ii.

     I wish

I could dream
away
my name, the bad
mornings     spent cheating

     on her sadness

her sadness a jewel

madly
in the mouth
of a thief
some redundant

angel

chewing
the root
of its own
absence.

she believed the spider
had yelled at her
and she yelled
back
but yelling
wasn’t enough.

her boy was at a friend’s house
again and again.

in house, her carsickness
consumed
her shallow
sleep.

she had yet to believe in god
but believed     dreams
to be god pulling her out
of her eyes.

good people
don’t see
the highway
helicopter
as bait.

a woman

(mother
of
a fingernail)

kneels
in snow.  a man

we miss
like a film

thinks

(canvas
of
yen)

I don’t have any last words that aren’t interrupted by one parroting my father’s belief that god was a temp.  had it been hell and not hell abandoned when it began to grow in our minds.  as created, satan couldn’t live with himself.  without piecing together how it fell into his lap, we found his umbrella, it wouldn’t open, and we did our rain dance on the earth.

I may have already saddened

-

a sameness in the parrots we care for

-

our suicides
fight
for position

-

we twin the parable

this one:  she pushed the baby carriage and in her going made quite

the parabola     /     the baby bounced     but was dead     the baby

bobbed

-

habitually I displace:

     the ether / a god’s trenchancy

-

the academic scholar of woe whose grave I would visit

uninterrupted    

     whose stone now is a lonely letter *f

who would’ve partnered with me to abandon

my freighted usage
of lonely,

-

     of heart, of amateur eulogist

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean.  the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple.  I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

to a baby’s swing
or to a fine horse
with one
good
ear
or to the weary
haymakers
that are now
my mother’s
unkissable
arms

my father
his head full
of hot soup
but not a minnow
burned
recites
the toy
gospel

as I begin
to take
my intelligence
personally
here among

the floored laundry, the raised unawareness

of the powerless mad

I show signs of having been alone beside a machine.  I can count on my fingers the fingers I’ve lost.  I am not like a newborn.  my feet are each one smaller than the last as are my meals.  like my father before me, I have a hard time being drawn to what attracts me.  like my mother, I cook for those who’ve gone in and out of the eating disorder condoned by the church of sleep.  like sister, I watch as my brother sets forgiveness as a trap for god.  not every animal I see is an illusion.  my eyes open twice to be flashed by the same short life.  anything I name I give a prime number.  appear to the sick I remember.

it reads and feels nothing. a reminder’s footnote.

memory forgets its hermit father

& painters
go bald.

a mother says little.

each cigarette
has its own
language, this match

the pen
of the afterlife.

give prognosis its non-crying baby.

after many nights spent praying to my mom, gender was my only option.  by some miraculous failure of successive thought, I watched as I vanished before I could become the living proof I needed to circumvent nostalgia.  does god still control himself in front of children?  you made a robot from the parts of a peeping tom.

i.

the biological mother

in her eighty first
year

appears
in an online

article, something

about catching
frogs and keeping

active, she is in a group

from which her photo
was not
selected, the group

catches
more than just
frogs,  the article

goes on
to say…

ii.

the biological father
suffers

from jet lag, maybe, maybe

also

pushes
wheelchairs

iii.

of the attempts
made
these were mine
at being
differently

****

self-harm

a nostalgia
that suffers
touch…

assault?

a hobby

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.

mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.

father, I can’t bury
my face.

in lieu    
of the lord’s
dog, raise

the lord’s
bone.

as a first timer, or
a satan

in the moments
after
a different
pill’s
return

father gives himself
the once
over

to fraternize
as before
with the born
again

the clock in my brother’s room
has a visitor
in the form
of a tattoo
artist
who believes
sleep
is a brand
of insomnia.

my brother is here
because he swallowed
an ant
with his heart.

he wants a doctor
with snow
on her knees.

for her date with the giant, mom is putting on her face. our time, invisible chameleon, is over.

brain of a white mouse.

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.

to be moved again by the stillness of things a still thing I muscle into.
it is why when you walk you are above a cage afloat.
it is why your legs do not fly off the handle.
I am bound to the world and my head bobs.  what great arrest    
to be under- in this room survived
by a wounded curfew.

her mania
trembled not
before
but during
god-

a whole year would pass
without
an episode

     then three days
she’d widow
for jesus

for the unreal
attentions
of my male
competitors
I created
a woman
based solely
on my mother
patient
zero
of perceived
consent

he wants to know what he collects.  he prays.  he is blindfolded by the parent he rarely sees.  he is taken on foot to an empty showroom only he can imagine.  he is hugged.  not asked, he goes into detail about his outfit.  parent flips through a notebook.  parent leaves to find a pencil.  outside in a miniature snowstorm another parent throws an egg through the tail end of melancholy.

my closest frat brother looks at the toad and says frog *******.  tackles me.  fact:  there is a certain kind of toad that by staying still can **** a drug dog.  in this country, a man can sell doves from the back of a white van.  a man can run out of doves.  my ghost is obsessed with caterpillars.  it doesn’t matter what you say.  they found that woman.