oh
voice, my immediate
orphan

to stuff our faces or to knit the same hat for the unseen gargoyle of our still life or better yet to give legs to the rugburn it takes to find a newborn’s nose

[in the past I am describing god to my attacker]

I don’t take good care of things.

I can’t even give you
examples.

~

[dead child]

the future
the past
both are ready

to talk

~

[late poem]

one can only write so long
about loss
in pencil

find my house,
dog-on-fire

~

[reading and writing]

which one of us did loneliness hear coming?

the woman she is holding an umbrella over the man she is yelling at.  the man he is blowing into the bowl he’s made of his hands.  a boy sits at their feet with his back to us and is bringing what we can guess is a toy to his mouth.  you joke he is laboring to light a cigarette.  in the rain.

House,
A light socket finds the first tooth of god.

Church, I am too old to imagine the waking hours.

Sleep,
Being in the water
when the song
is heard.

daughter has a language keeps her quiet.

penny
is a pillow
for my father’s
blood.

lamb- every other

instead of goodnight, my father says he is putting away his feet.  instead of cutting my fingernails, mother has me wear her favorite gloves.  I am a child

but know we are getting by on the shelf-life of secret hands.  I don’t pray but if I loved god

I would put us here to impress him.

I don’t see
size-

stormcloud, stone

it’s no
gift

–

it is hard
kiddo
to be a mouth
in the land
of embrace

–

love
two of your fingers

the rabbit they make
they wound

It hurt
Being made fun of
In the bathroom
That way
I got myself
Back to class
A whale
Shrinking the ocean
With sleep

Last night I told my wife
There were little hands
Tugging
On my jeans

Small enough to die
Please
Pleaser

this foster boy
known for changing
his name
back

and forth
who lit a cigarette
without removing
the paper bag
from his face

has the only
photograph
of my mother
my mother
took

0503-2017

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.      

0504-2017

his weight a cricket on a piano key

0508-2017

disability as competition, jesus.  and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled.  here we will coin transformative indifference.  a body is not a teachable moment.  as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut.  meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.

0513-2017

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

0515-2017

there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once.  echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf.  you breathe and say god gives out  no more than that which I can handle.  the next breath is mine.  god gave us god.    

0602-2017

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

0613-2017

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

0620-2017

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.  because I want to.  

0627-2017

magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

0627-2017

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

0706-2017

the disappearance surrounding said event.

a horse belly-up in water’s blood.

see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost

0719-2017

today was more your hand than the photograph it was cut from.  a family of five in the bed of the unremembered present.

if the poor could keep to themselves, they’d have superheroes.  hey man, hey beast, them aliens already know what it means to be human.  abduction is the fingerprint of loneliness.  

-

what I teach my blood is grow up.  I put everything I had into ruin.  watch as my mother becomes your mother trying to be two people god can use to carry tug-of-war from a fossil.

-

my dream house is language.  you say it to my face how there are beheadings that have made a wish.  before my son was a giant, he’d somersault.  cigarette in mouth he would.

in it
brother
levels
his eyes
at the fog
with two
red rubber
*****

the *******
registry
posted
at home
highlights
the name
of a local

     thing our father
calls demon
our mother

confused

I bury the carnival fish.  my neighbor pretends he is casting while my son ***** on the opening of a plastic bag.  I take the bag and blow into it then pop it on my palm.  my neighbor’s heart is safe but he tries to grab it anyway.  the vietnam war is a pop-up book of the vietnam war.

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

in madness, explain a chair to the ocean.

unborn, be buoyed by pregnancy.

scrape
mother images
on a cave’s wall
by the glow
the unborn
have.  

I sense I still flicker in two lost minds.

she would say god planted in her a notion of anorexia.
she would sanely say her morbid obesity made her largely abstract.

to sleep
on your son’s
insomnia

my son
has enough
light
for god’s

cheek.  in pain

I am over
the moon.

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.

/ does the demon
know
I’m the same
clue

kiss me like I’m not here

like my belly
is

think of blood
as the author
of bruise, of the baby

you’ll not
see
blue

My clothes burn in the dryer. No one is drinking. Hurt mice turn dreamside up to sigh footprints away from a naked garden. I flicker motherly through sight’s obsession with possessing my eye. Your elbow clicks. Your elbow clicks and it’s still genocide. Forget the spine that moans my son to sleep. We have to see this angel getting sick on a birthmark.

newly
with the knowledge
of being
god

a man stood
woozily
in an Ohio
field

feeling passed over
like a horse’s
one
thought

and was hit
in the head
by a pebble
masquerading
as a stray
bullet

now, no matter
if he rubbed
the pebble     or his head

he was not given
three wishes
but three
separate
people     to forgive

and chose
himself

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

is my son
alone

ask

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

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry ******* forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time

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.