the note is from your mother and tells you your father is coming to town and plans to bring you to the circus. the money is for your mother from the last time he visited. the poster has never been unrolled and was given to you by a friend of your father’s you had no doubt was the strongest man in the world. the spoon is for those times you have no heat. the dictionary is fairly new and belonged to your brother. he circled the word phantom twice, ****** once, and underlined strife. presumably before he died. if you happen upon my half sister you can give her the picture you’re going to use to recognize her. I’m looking at it now. it’s definitely her.

the anxious god of my brother’s mirror

said
to me

trees
don’t grow
on trees.

it can’t all be nonsense.  

shoes are being made
for the born.

no one
was fooled
by your
suicide.  more and more

I am more
alone
than the baby

machine.  we touch

touch
via

imagine being told you cannot walk through a hospital’s emergency room.  
imagine having to document an itch as if it’s where your body resides.

recommend 2013 titles in **** romance 2013.
attach a ****** to a person whose ****** gets maced for drug smuggling.

he has been hours
out there
under handing
the baseball

     catching it
bare

and wincing-

his father

him left, him right

don’t know

I am

in that sleepy
window
where lives
double

crushing pills
for the scarecrows
of trampoline
graveyard

/ suicide, it lowers
a shoeshine
chair
in a spotless
interrogation
room
for pregnancy
thing
of the present

the age of my exit wound

the order
in which
we die

of
velvet crow.

     what moving here
might mean.

that waking
beside you
is old; and land.  that the land
beside you

is asleep.  beside it

a creature
indigenous
to another.

that something
in me
is rich.  not to place

in drawers
used

tape.  that if a train

is crowded, it is crowded

with libertine

balloons.
 
the word chthonic.

     flatlands, or lowered

beds, when we get there

the top bunk
is yours.

when the white spots on the baby’s tongue mysteriously disappeared, I knew it had eaten the instructions it had come with and everyone rejoiced.

for fainting
in the afterlife

closer inspection
reveals
my lover’s cigarette
to be unlit
as he waits
outside
the madhouse
I rob

on the weekend, we will go to a play.
some will bring their children.
the play will change many lives.
at intermission, I will want to leave.
you will lead the hand of the man
sitting next to you
to my ankle. he will use
the weight of his chin, the lullaby
of his baby lolled head.
I will not be able to hold
the brief kiss of my knees.

to see his hand
you will lift my skirt
from behind. I will ask
that you
be furious.

i.

in the clay bed
of my son's brain
where abides
pillow

the print
of my thumb:

     flower, lie down.

ii.

to the maid
sleeping
in the foreign
house

of his
undecorated
death:

dream
of my attic
blind
wife, and what
she might
there

recover.

so often we voice
our want
to turn off
the brain

when in truth
we desire
the brain
to momentarily
empty

that the film
in front of us
can quietly

go about
in the dark

no slaughterhouse
ever
moved
by rain

–

my kind
and subtracted
child:

the time
your bottle
spent
in microwaves

–

holograms

–

holograms
that ****
with my
mirage

you step off.  if you’re lucky, a dog.  if you’re not, a cat lady who worries all cats are alone.  you step off.  every mile or so stopping to bribe your subconscious.  food is an issue until it dissolves on your tongue.  *** an egg that weighs lightly.  here and there a job but not a single one odd.  

egg shells on the floor of heaven.  I am quiet but nobody listens.

I possess my son to ask into his heart a milkman based on comprehension.  

I am father whose mind drifts for dear life.  

I have a bowl
for the parts of me
don’t work.  bowl gets full
I get a dog
for a day.

when day is done
day becomes a meditation
on dog’s
whereabouts.

I obsess to maturity my daughter who is the bliss
the brainless
hammer
finds.

busy as a blood trail
it is still my mother
passing only
the time

in violence
not sudden.

a bird watches my brother eat a parrot

my new diet requires me to have
the same
dream

language is a broom

between the legs of a showered orphan
is a sponge

from the story of her stomach’s exile

I took to my red and brother to his blue.  we were far from any head in its right mind.  I didn’t know what he thought of while sharpening his stick but I thought of two sisters fighting over a glamour shot of their mom.  homelessness experiences one man at a time and violence ties his shoe.  it came to me on a moving bike.

I broke the boy on my knee because I needed a switch.  we ran around an empty crib.  I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel.  we tiptoed in a manner of mocking past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied.  he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined.  I swatted him to let him know I was dying.  his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown.  I swatted him again to let him know I would live.  the tea was gone.  the rest is sadness.

it was not yet an idea the timid had to put the helpless all in one place.  the thirteen year person was not yet.  I wanted a water fountain for the person and I wanted it to know a female by her fingertips.  that’s what I wanted bro.  brother became toy for toying.  he was molested but said it went away.  my father was still many colored.  I couldn’t look his way without falsely moving.  I loved that like I love this:  the true simpleton sets his own house on fire to confuse the devil.  the graduate sets himself.

a week ago, sister bled to death on a rocking horse. today is the short memory of our pig farming father and the suicide of the knife-thrower’s surgeon.

notes will be notes from when I was alive. all men, amen. oh infant, teacher of spiders. the future of adult bookstores. yes they are dreams and yes they go to church. lose a finger, it becomes a ghost. a paw and the children think maybe their mom is having a mother. I’ll sleep with anyone. doctors each from the birth of my past. animals denied the policing of crow.

I wash my own body. put behind me the death of outhouse slapstick. a dog is barking at a tractor. an older dog, wearing sunglasses, lets the baby do whatever. only some of these churches are mine.

(iv)

flashcards for women in labor. predictions for memory. sheep.

the hidden breads of snow.

(v)

history is not a person. these are the kids it tried to name.

(vi)

elevator country. the hangings of nothing pregnant. baby knows a shadow that knows a shadow can tell a map what to do. can get a small library to carry books on men eating men in the right bathroom. baby is here for trying to stay. its tongue came out that way, stuck to its nose. a moral choice on behalf of its mother whose water we drank blind.

(vii)

I was having trouble remembering my dreams so I began to see someone who wasn’t. my demeanor was approachable, he said, but cerebral. he said we were in unfamiliar territory. he asked me if I’d mind looking at some pictures he’d forgotten to draw. jokes of the trade, he said. the first few dreams I think were his and were probably so by design. the two scarecrows, witch-hunt and crucifixion, came soon enough but were paired wrongly as husband and wife. their little klutz.

(viii)

I thought it was a movie about dancing and you thought it was a movie about the devil. our feet were warm. remember the alarm? worlds to which none were added.

I imagine it puts a hole in a demon, this combing of underwater things to protect the toenails of painted men. mom is this void the last of its kind?

this was in my dream. and this. and she was there and she has two kids, a boy and a girl, and a husband, there he his, who’s killed himself. I kept saying, after every thought, behold. went home with a woman who insisted she was born pregnant. slept like a wolf addicted to car alarms. saw the saddest foodfight.

the man lives in his car and his children live in a store that’s out of everything. his dog has forgotten how to eat. things are on what any good god would call a collision course. he shows me **** photos he says he can’t look at until he knows for sure that the people in them are somewhere naked. he wants me to work on writing with a sense of place. not me, he says. move grief.

I was still new
to the angel
when I reached
gloveless
into the deer
for the baby
god
froze

mom looked for a large moth
to stick
with a fork, brother

made to strangle
a coat

pain had a son whose right hand became the receiver of a jailhouse telephone. whose left remained a seashell. pain’s wife a daughter whose shadow became a puppet when she’d floss.

(xiv)

/ seen shoving a burnt doll into a book return

the nobody
birth
reminds

(xv)

puppets for dental hygiene

god
the animal
on auto
pilot

(xvi)

the overmedicated bear cub

and the jawbone
from snake’s
nightmare

/ driven by flower

this moving
van
of loss

(xvii)

orphaned by imagery,

the vision
comforts
foresight.

writing
is a non
event.

ghost? my one

for boredom’s
three.

(xviii)

I am the least, no

I am

–

look what they’ve done
to the lightning, dad

to your scarecrows, mom

–

all the toilets were in the trees
the trees were taller
a flat

bird
how
the ****, roadkill

was on
the moon

(xix)

a chicken with two heads. a burning bush. a cane only a dog could love. a barber whose hair, nevermind. an arm cast bearing the hangman’s faded autograph. invisible milk

and the nothing you bring to my godless poems.

that, or a seven day vigil for the one he destroyed

having one word for my voice, I would read to death from the book death borrowed. my armpits were those of a mannequin thrown from a horse. I gave no birth. I ate what I could of the kidnapper’s dream. upside down fish. crippled fish. boatloads of black sheep

puzzled
by the eclipse.

killing the firstborn is so yesterday. let’s be lonely. maternity leave for clowns. ant farms on airplanes.

to the man who enters this poem looking for a gun. to the woman whose animals pray. to the giant with a memory like a model airplane. to the boy burying his sister’s ****** nose. to the bottle-fed scarecrow. to the dollmaker on the bridge and to the doll-god of country eggshell. to the possum and to its babies in my brother’s ballcap. to god’s only with god’s disabled. to a shadow’s early work.

the kind of laziness animals have, that kind of panicked longing…

and brevity, the faith
of insects

-

my shadow, of course, afraid of its borrowed blood

-

that barn
in the middle of nowhere’s haunted eyesight

-

the invisible
after-hours
birth, and the woman

who keeps the baby
despite
its perfection

-

this quiet in the redneck’s
library
of forgiveness, this thunder…

-

the agony of the boomerang’s maker

my son will never walk.

it is not unbearable
but it is also
not
still.

he rolls from one display to the next.

the beatnik Lucifer
using a fork  
to make a ripple
in the second
bathroom’s
mirror.

the spider’s immaculate web in the open mouth of the baby Jesus.

Gatsby’s gay lover working a hook from a woman’s lip

a day before going blind?

he wasn’t put here
to beat you
in front
of any
fool
reminds him
of that woman
who wished herself
into a fly.

he has been more than open with you
about it
about
his reincarnation

how he happened
to be the first
to know it.

you keep it all in, bring your mother
noises

from field
so she can determine

which ear
works…

word association
is a thing
of the future.

be the property of your blood.

fellow travelogue, and stunted
exodus:

older says to his younger
your pants are a bomb
you have to take them off

man shoots woman
just in the knee
she is on her other knee
refusing to plead
a bus brakes
her children

look at a goldfish
in a toilet
a solemn oval, a broken…

narrative is dead
is not a boy
with a long
illness

as intended
we do not
immediately
know
it’s a mock
resurrection.

our fathers do not suffer
magicians
lightly
and hoard
blindfolds
as if they are low
on photographs
of women.

our mascot pig
is a ****** elephant.

if I am not near them, I do not long for music by them.  at my lowest, they are hardly men and women on all fours eating garbage.  you seem to know they’re naked.  what they cannot eat they pause above.  a baby’s black crib beneath a dream.  the dream a charred tree bent over a rabbit turned inside out.  the ark was Noah’s belly.  the gods and the devils

simpletons dumbly yearning for a more personable abandonment.  

I am not alone but am its aphrodisiac.

get yourself hired
being sad
for my wife.

that you’ll report
to no one
is our
secret.

I’m horrible with nicknames.

I’m horrible with a mammoth
white dog
not called

snow-fort.

send balled-up
paper
animals and planes
into a felled
by father

flooded
treehouse.

get yourself on video
being sad, or taking
a ball
from a ballplayer.

be my wife
in spirit, be

grief and the cloak
grief

is not.

get thee to silent
fireworks
above a tipped
canoe.

even
longing
loses
me

visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke.  leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad.  my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays.  sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.

I was still inside my father when I was asked to talk about his shadow.

he had lost the voice of god.
he hid behind a tree
but my mother
could see his toes.

she dreamt of the day
she’d find them
attached to something
shy.

is the twin bed I go to hell to make