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.

(for my daughter, Mary Ann, soon fourteen)

I was eleven years old when I first had something taken from me.  My parents were still married and my two younger brothers had not yet chosen to choose differently which one they’d live with.  My dog had not yet been made lame by a falling fat man who’d taken the gift of my father’s strange rage square on the nose.  And my older sister had yet to misjudge her jump from a moving train.  No, none of these things, whether they happened or not how I’ve remembered, had happened.

I was eleven years old and in love with an old red bike.  It had a license plate that obnoxiously read Go Now Mega which I’d scratched at with a fork and so became Gnome.  I would fail my whole life to accomplish a thing greater. Before school, I’d walk the bike carefully to the end of our short drive and then seat myself on it and be still.  I would often be so perfect in my stillness that I’d forego riding it and just listen for the bus and at the last possible moment walk the bike, still carefully, back into the garage and cringe at the sound the kickstand made when lowered.  If ever school didn’t go my way I’d think of the bike, alone, in the garage and be calmed.  When I did ride the bike, I did so slowly and deliberately that I could feel my soul get a bit ahead of me.  On the best mornings, I would have for company a bed sheet of fog which made me want to fake being asleep on the couch while my mother and father milled back and forth about who would carry me to bed.

The bike had come with the rental house we moved into just shy of my tenth birthday.  The house was a three bedroom one floor with one bathroom and what felt like two kitchens.  I was too close to my hands and feet to now recall any vision that might tell me how these rooms were mapped though I’ve always held aloft the word blueprint.  I should tell you that what I previously called a garage was actually our backyard and that our backyard was really the backyard of those living in the house behind ours.  I didn’t want you to know right away who took the bike.  Who’ve no imagination.

sitting on a decorative toilet in her child’s front yard, the mother scrubs her left wrist with a dry toothbrush.  her right wrist squeals to be cut.  there’s a wet spot on the grocery bag she wears on her head and the spot spreads.  her flower print dress is optimistic.  with a crow ever so lightly on his mind, my father writes the address of the electric company on a notecard and slips it into a pocket bible.  he tells me to forget what I’ve seen and I wonder if I get to pick.  my heart feels more like a broken light bulb the more I breathe and goes to my head the less.  beneath the malformed crow my father culls, he gives me the *** talk.  he includes that most crows are manna from hell or holes in the kingdom.

fat
with crocodile tears
for the alien
dead
your stomach
rings
a private
bell

I have a camera
sets a trap
for silence

an animal
you can borrow

a full-grown scarecrow

death’s first parrot

I have children, a suicidal thought
that can love
up to three

a pilot’s
paper seashell

like some verbally abused parrot

the crow
the phone’s
god

at thirty seven, I’m not far behind my wrists.  I am aware I put a certain strain on my sons.  I say to stones I’ve skipped my share of stones.  where fascinated, I am frightened.  the story of the foot that fell asleep then broke.  of the vanished schoolgirl on the wrong bus, beaten and pulled under seat after seat, taking with her

     that perfect weight.

I’m here, now, if you want to put a bug in your dad’s ear about pouring coffee.  in the war the thing I felt crawling up his spine became his spine.  in the war I called it abandoned and he said not while we’re in it.  he scratched the worst looking dog into the side of it so we’d know it was a church.  I shared more than once how I’d be stupid as that dog to guard a dogfight and less than once how jesus would’ve been a suicide bomber had the crowd been clueless.  we cried about women and children and by our crying they were found.

he emerges from the driver’s side of his stalled minivan as if you’ve been given too much information.  he holds a hammer in the looseness of his stung left hand.  for a moment it seems he’ll attack windows.  instead, he cries.  his shoulders give him away.  not a car horn sounds.  this is a kindness.  someone has an egg timer.  I locate the itch thrown off course by my lover’s legs and imagine her happy.  across town a silent alarm is pressed by the anonymous smoker of wedding cigarettes.  the bomb squad arrives before the bomb squad knows it and you join

this bomb squad.

yours
that the bird
not have to carry
its cage.

mine
that the bird
not have to carry
its cage
in its beak.

ours
that we are not tired
sitting together
this early

easing
fish bones
into bubbles.

you strike me as an invasive listener.  I love your body.  loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes.  does this make me look alone?  like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone?  my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with.  horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare.  earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant.  if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

for David Smith*

as I wait for what this painting reminds me of, a stickman with a short straw works my mother’s head injury into his teleplay of snowfall and crow.  asleep, you must be in the ambulance outside my father’s church.

when he stopped eating
the food
provided
the food
became angry
and impossible
to eat.

the food
provided elsewhere
became so calm
some used it
as a sleep
aid
secondary
to starvation.

I try not to think for my children, it’s hard, they are
delicious
children.

i.

though still in the process
himself
of being
created

god is an expert on earth.

he is just now beginning to regain his composure
after a short stint / speaking in tongues.

ii.

laymen exist
to question
what my mother’s body
cannot identify-

a specific amnesia
that attacks
her many
pseudonyms

iii.

stories keep my children perfect.

in the story of the rabbit’s mask
one finger out of every ten
is as empty
as the rabbit’s brain

iv.

to bring my first stranger
to god

I plan to use the alias
my father goes by
to pray.

take
to the sinking
city
of god’s
jack-in-the-box
a stick

from the wand’s
dream

the bean counter
of cigarette butts
our father
sits on the roof
reading aloud
from silence.

it is mother
has a mind
for arranging
furniture.

it is dog hears digging.

I heard myself reprimanded for childless behavior.  I saw myself as two of the same people.  my older brother gave me pennies he thought were sleeping pills.  we later agreed I thought the same.  the funny talk went from my mouth into god only knows.  strangers begged me to repeat myself but not a one could tell me what I’d said.  those far to me sent word, or meant to.  my sister showed up out of the blue but stayed just long enough to send her privates into hiding.  my mother and father promised to punish me for no reason.  I began to love them for giving me a son.  I began by telling them I was in some trouble.

no name
for what
I name
I’m
the news
I get

–

she couldn’t
bring herself
in life
to talk
to the kids
she had

–

wounded in the whiteness of god,

his brother was a helicopter
they called
tornado

–

a sack
of kittens
the swimmer’s
gold

I appear to your helplessness

warming his hands above a baby’s crib.

massaging the lame leg of a dog at rest.

accidentally crushing the pack of cigarettes in his right shoe.

being ours.  being her memory’s
unsent
reply.

when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent.  for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut.  I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood.  instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company.  mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach.  apocalypse came and came.  the act was the act’s debut.

god
wants
nothing

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick

let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

burn the scarecrow
your mother
translates for.

make your daughter
believe
that a ******
is a nobody, that a somebody

does her own
stunts.

hire
grief’s interpreter
on a part-time
basis
to blow
your son
in your son’s
presence.

as a symbol of your absence

disappear.

pocket
the small christ
of lover’s
grandmother

have, later, a weak
child, a sibling
of some
nobody…

imitate
when alone
at the grave
of that clumsy
cat

the sound
of a sobbing
tacklebox

a man
home
after exposing
himself
to children
of late
life
blindness, the man

we bike to
while able-

the suicide
of a different
man, a changed

man-

the two men
briefly
neighbors

both refusing

for the non
emerging
newborn

my mother’s
failed
cake.

not as common
is the dream
stuck
in the man.

not all wounds
report back.

I’d look for my father
if I knew where
to begin.

with my mother
it’s like my mother never happened.

I am the man whose missing woman
was bedridden
first.

I depend on my safety.
I worship a sleep that worships.

my brother feels no pain.  a characteristic
he blames
on my sister’s
begging
to be interrogated.

not on speaking terms with a former self,
the dream is god.

I have been avoiding your paintings.  your paintings blindfold me.  I see what I don’t.  a puppy addicted to its tongue.  a heaven not of this world.  stillness turns my stomach.  outside the womb.

the kids
they are calling
the girl
my mother
an oyster

-

all elbows
they are calling
them
my privates

what I think
are teeth

-

what I know of bees
can fit
in the bee
my brothers
lose

-

lost

[hunger anomalies]

your son
he has
two brains
that’s great
but we’re looking
for water’s
stomach

~

[starvation names its food]

ask the sickest boy what a pig says to the pink phone of god

leave fingerprints for his hand to find

have words
with echo-

he will die
he will not die
laughing

~

[death has too many mothers]

in me like a sympathy pain

is Christ, her language

a fasting
echo

my first worm
I thought
it was being
dragged

I was just a boy

it was just
worm
like

/ stillness
has it always
been
genetic

/ the context of god, the deadpan

birth
of son...

/ nowhere’s

by design
butterfly

your cigarette
slant

for the stone
in your mouth.  mother

she ******
the blood

of towels.  made I

from a lesser
stone

two birds.  things, like singing,

that didn't
happen.

birth mothers
move
the word
of god.  

from this point on, I am not dead.

is this
how I sound
saying
to water
that beneath
a rabid
bat
two sisters
share
a leech?

cairn
is to
the father’s
stomach
what melancholy
is
to sorrow.  would that one’s

non-existence
could be
again.

my children were running and were plucked.  eyewitnesses were arguing over a comma their accounts did not include.  my brother was nearby and heard a voice he thought mine.  he used it to say that’s not a landmine that’s the body of my dad.  my children were running from me when they were plucked.  I was on fire which is coffee talk for surreal.  in actuality I was on fire just a little.  but my kids are **** smart, or were, in the sense they were needed elsewhere.

by morning, the bite marks on my son's arms have moved to his legs.

as for magic, there is none.

one must go everywhere in person.

when out and about, we bury baby brother’s head in big sister’s chest to keep his acne from strangers.  when inside, we rotate setting leftovers in front of our only mirror.  my growth spurt happens overnight.  I start telling stories of a woman dentist and the family she doesn’t see.  baby brother starts to bite.  his parents buy a hairbrush and work together to thieve a single paper plate.  someone gets too close to the face of god.

she had early on been beaten into one piece.

it was true
the broom
had gotten
taller.

mom said nothing.  mom swept.

in a ******* on fire
the arsonist
fills
the mouth
he is trying
to leave

(it is not hunger that eats the horse)

I am past the age of what
in a former life
I died as, a spoon

is a fork

asleep in the hand of god