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

**** nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you.

I come to in the middle of eating. I am making a sound that drags an ear through the stomach of an angel. My sons catch fish with silence. My daughter sings them to a cricket left in a human mirror. By the time our loneliness reaches god, we’ve been created.

birth
knows everyone

father makes a wound in hard ground.  may your body be with you.  father treats my most pale hand as if it’s a painter’s brush.  in what was dubbed the guest house craze we lost artist before artist.  father shuns the collective statement.  without my boy I come upon a red horse mirrored in calm by a white bull.  valley nonsense.  the boy didn’t suffer.

externally,  I believe in masks.  pull at my ******* when I have them.  pull old man.  you are my soul.  happiness is the impossibility of incidental sadness.  tell happiness to child one through child four.  too many tear too tamely at the face no goddess dies in.  a time honored receiver is disappointingly brilliantly a sponge

living off
your mother’s hand.

I bring wine to the table but also my will to place the blood piano on the front lawn and play it for the vomiting passersby. Touch writes the unreadable bible on privacy. Fill a baseball with the stop sign’s blood. One death is hard to process do you think Death has a story about a particular life? In the afterlife of your gone-ness I am de-blued by shock. I write stuff like that because I can’t write more than three times with my wrist. I know you’re tired of me carving belief into the face of god but please **** the golden poet who knows we can’t eat food. Howl non-starlike into the flash of the eye-prone before. Dear addict ask image what god did only once.

Movies
lengthen god

Write high

The heavy heaven horse
headaches

The infant cinemas

The invisibly tragic
frostbitten
palmist…

Go on, son

Toy blood teething in the church of my ear

exit music for stop-motion departures.

a son
a dying breed
of circle.

can light
perfect
a shadow?

The church is an iceberg.  

     from Winter Night, Charles Simic


No one remembers what it was
They were knitting
And what happened when the ball of yarn
Rolled out of their laps
And had to be retrieved.*  

     from Gallows Etiquette, Charles Simic



I was on lookout in a tower
     eye level with god.
I had a pretty little head
     on my shoulders.

the idea came to me
in fingers

that touched
my heels.

on behalf
of the soul
which entered

you, father
then you, mother

I report
my disappearance
and applaud
the cameo

memory
of the countless, sounding

born

the elderly
our unpraised
orphans
with healed
and self-taught
toys

~~~~

cancer is a pop gun and when I say missing I mean her body was seen by the lonely / her body / was having children but only those / we’d seen / in photos / I mean bus

of a christian
swim team

~~~~

when cooking, mama says she is burning the uniform of the country I was dragged through.  she knows better than to come from rib.  cheek, maybe.  or fishhook.  

~~~~

scar to my wound, this man believes in god. the last thing I learn is what I know. Franz Wright’s final book is called The Toy Throne. I understand this man when he says he was born with a disabled child. what is lightning

to a fish

~~~~

faith a shoelace in an unbroken egg

I stare at the letter x

~~~~

the plate

in god’s head
is a writer’s
dream.  she crows

her three
words
for stoplight
as a doll

bites down
on a stick…

math is maybe not the best look for grief

and hunger

too academic

~~~~

after suicide, everything that happens is the past

~~~~

I am not a ghost,

hand
I use
the least

~~~~

the mothers they were rehearsing in the drive-thru
the *** talk for boys they thought
were still
alive

-

crush a white tick / you’ll become / a projectionist

-

sleep is a bleeding stopped by the eye

~~~~

with god
prepared
to remove
its white
stomach, the dream

sees brain
as the print
of its thumbless
hand

~~~~

/ to a breathing machine in a swimming pool

the angel says whale

/ my nightmare

has a whale. it takes grief

from a mule

/ my brothers are ****

and star. claustrophobes

haunting
the hard
to forgive

~~~

alone in that no-name church of dream

scales of grief
and thrown back
fish

the saint of the poolside ***** twister brings a syringe to a puppet show where his father is busy not meaning all women.  brother is showing me around the space he promises will be a kick in the *****.  I am waiting to donate blood to little baby bear hug when I hear we share a mother.

no longer
a god
the male
finds mother
hard
to worship

-

I am
what I imagine

eaten

-

who the eyes

undress
in Eden

the healed are chewing their hands beneath posters of fast food taken from the walls of god’s cell. poetry is dead. prose the bone placed in the bowl of a frostbitten dog. nothing burns. not like a baby’s ears at an oyster farm.

loneliness changes hands.  when wife mentions the baby, I borrow a phrase from father and it works.  care packages are my sister’s forte.  by the way she dresses, you’d think she works for heaven.  you would not entertain for a moment that her child was sent by god to interview itself.  on the plus side of my brother, my brother has a fog machine.

and stork
is never
home

I’d answer
the phone
when it doesn’t
ring
but on
film…

I’d save the drive-in

from children
indians
and sound

here is my son asking me if I love a piece of bread.

I understand it as his speechless inquiry
outside of the eating we do
and into
love.

you have heard, or are about to hear
of the boy who said nothing
for his first five years
because everything
to that point
was fine.

sometimes the boy is a girl
to whom god
also
speaks.

Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.

a disabled
child

and the chance
to destroy
my body

my son
created
for me
a world
I wasn’t
in.

in world, no person
was named
that had not done
an act of note
good
or bad.

very few  
cold
standing outside
fancy restaurants
as most
were on phone
trying to make
a reservation.

the world presented
its problems, and one of them
became mine.

I took it by the hand
to bite
what was Timothy’s
finger.

any bird
with no birds
around it
was a bird
father called
his good
his writing

hand.

you
are a better man
than you.

for Andrei Tarkovsky

It takes three ghosts to end the present. Outside it smells like not touching you. I don’t go anywhere without my bomb. There’s no place on earth on earth. I don’t take photographs I can look at. My body has never been a body to your quieter mother. I drink myself into walking. Three ghosts eat the mouth of an angel from the back of the very spider that called god with a handprint into hand’s only dream. There a tooth, and trainsets. Inside the movie there are two rules. We’re alone. You can’t miss it. Don’t look at photographs that answer to image.

her eyes

loot
the imagination

whose only obstacle was god
the dying woman
returned our baseball
to another’s yard

where it stayed
where it might
still be

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

(I know by cobweb)

the childbearing age

of a ghost, that dream

has taken
mirror, and also

that I cannot reopen
the mouth
my mouth

erased

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

ask a man what a rabbit hole means
he’ll say
logistics

/ everything I had was in that mirror

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire

you can’t take the wire out of the lamb.

when I look you in the eye
I feel my brain
is cared for
under the seat
of a snowed-on
forklift.

to get my son’s attention
I tap with a spoon
on the glass circle
of a running
dryer’s
door.

my son is of course
hungry     but in the meat
of a difficult
book.

the night is never young.
to read the book
is to believe
one can see
blood     with blood.

at times my father
in the middle of my dream
sits on a riding mower
as if it’s a boat
he dragged
without help
over the parts of this land
feared
by glacier.

part of my body is sad.

with one finger in his mother’s belt loop the child lowers then lifts then lowers again his free hand without touching once the grocery’s tile.  the long front pocket of his jacket boasts from one end the upper body of a woman whose ******* have been covered with one stamp each and from the other the woman’s bare feet I’m guessing won’t make the trip.  the child’s two younger siblings recognize me from last week when I halfheartedly rolled over them with my cart and they graciously go stomach first to ground with their fists under them as if they’ve been given charge of a rose but are unsure which has it.  the mother looks at me like I am long division to be avoided much the same as I was looked at in my prime.  I have no cart this day so instead I mock stand on the boy and girl making sure my balance keeps me.  the mother says enough and presses the right side of her nose with the back of her wrist which upon removal has on it a spot of blood I follow to her hidden belly button at which the transference clings and then reveals.  I want to tell her my brothers never retrieved a single bright kite from a tall tree nor did they ever pull from their loose and ***** jeans any kind of toad that lived.

a non-person interacting with a baby I began.  I am bright
but want to be distance.

inspiring kindness
busies
the kind.

the photo captures nothing
that is not
aftermath.  you can keep

your

to god I tell my secrets.

to be my father
I fight his.

when younger
than ***
but older
than grief
my greatest
ambition
was to give
context
to the left hand
applauding
despair.

now, what I do
for grief
is translate
a passage
from one language
to the same.

your attacker has a history of being baptized.  identifies as male.  was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father.  we shot him not knowing he’d already been.  his mother says his stutter is an act.  she is what we call empty inside.  you look like your father.

i.

his hands looked as if they’d been born inside a tree.  his **** as if god had thought twice about burning the entire stick.  who am I kidding.  find that ******* tree and have its baby.

ii.

my body was so hot the stretcher caught fire outside the pig pink temple.

iii.

what’s left of the human wall are the feet of the human wall

says mother
to the family
of the secret
wig.

i.

the only nightmare my parents remember me having was immediately traced to my prolonged exposure to a select group of schoolchildren I’d bloodied for how they spoke to god.

ii.

the bus rides lasted long enough for me to cultivate the belief that no being is brought into the world.

iii.

drought’s teacher paddled me into reciting a prayer from a ghost town’s chalkboard.

iv.

father protected me by saying there’s a word for how you feel.  he was a writer because asemic writing had yet to occur in the randomly evil.  abuse was a star.

if they were the stories of my adoptive father I have no way of telling.
he told them and forgot.

two brothers I remember in one had built, separately, time machines.  
their sister, though, had been done for a week.
she lost them to anger.

my real father noted the repeated references to god and rolled his good eye.

god, he said, is the mark of a first work.

I had spent years changing them, hoping my brothers
would visit.

this
is a projection
of my mother
reading aloud
to herself

she is preoccupied
with the worry
that her gift
to my son
is too big

I want to tell her
it is just
a shirt

     and
about the crowd

they wanna put my teeth on a billboard. mom doesn’t care.  cremate the moon.

the whole town was in the parade.  the newer babies had a float to themselves.  at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father.  I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory.  somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire.  I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness.  my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart.  she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

he’s died
and envies death.

in life
he drew
what didn’t arrive
and did not
draw
the line
rumored
to separate
the heavy drunk
from the unaware
sober.

he was part
openly
gay
and joked
if he left
a will
it would be
god’s.

was it the dog
fixed
its little
house?

mom, keep your magic.

memory is a funeral-

attend
in my absence.

I fall asleep
on my hand

my hand
reciprocates

-

a baby
there for me
to take

from that high
chair

floats into
a pig / enters

pig

-

a mother expects to be careful

but is crazed

     it is a very strong soap

she uses

this soap that squeals
against

the skin

-

inside a bubble I scour the bubble

-

[sic]  terrified
god has given me
gifts

god

is the beast we believe has power
over
the dog
that answers
to bloodbath

the name
of a child’s
fish.  

(I can only speak for my daughter)

how

when her hand
to her
appears

a white man
gets a typewriter.

knowing
I will soon
go soft
on spiders
my mother
crushes
an egg
to keep it
she says
from choking (father

he brains the head of what god could not squeeze into (brother

invents
a dead
sister
and with her
laments
the loss
of the throwing
arm

that now
predicts
the rain

"We enjoyed our time together, all the good and bad weather and I cannot forget the cries of my friends before they died."*

I am explaining it’s a duck that for some reason sings you to sleep.  I say I don’t know what else they will come up with.  a man in the alley has brought his daughter there and is punching her in the arm and I don’t think it’s playful.  I say this, too, but the duck is singing and you are drowsed.  the man is hugging now his daughter her arm a carnival prize.  I turn the car radio on and have to lower it but lower it too much and leave it.  I watch as a woman who seems to be hiding some fetal creature in her back walks to the door of the clinic and leans at it with a key.  she then pulls the door but it doesn’t come.  she is surprised and drops the key and bends for it and its then I swear the creature yawns.