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

as a filmmaker
I’d bury
the permanence
of my son
the magnifying
glass
in full
dress
of the shadow
lurking behind
the crudest
of surveillance
systems

morning my grandfather wheels with one hand his chair and with the other dips a net into the many tops of a pool.  he taps the rim of the net on the walk to better appraise the wet calf legwork of a grasshopper.  he lets the net touch bottom then releases it wholly to its listening.  he will avoid feeling like the net and instead allow his hands their errancy to the tugged down caps of invisible boys.  a healthier man, a more nervous man, would smoke.

he rolls his sleeves and can better see dropped pipes, freed hammocks.  an ant in the low, upturned hill of his elbow makes for his palm and is quickly there and lost.  not today, but others, he has heard children skin their knees at which point houses appear for them to enter.  

from the chair he lifts his forgotten buttocks and they hold for only a moment their dream of sitting.  he circles then the  cement sides of the pool and then it’s dark.  so dark that when he is visited by two bright shoes he believes they are alone and so ties them underwater.

from father, footrace, fistfight (poems, June 2014)

(available on Lulu)

duologue

we’ll start here, turtle.

this is what I say to the grey thing I’ve been talking to.

the only buffer between engagement & constant engagement
is life
during wartime.

I conceive of a dropper
but hold it empty
above my eye.

because it is the one word without a beginning

suffering
because it is the one word without a beginning
is not limited
by its
vocabulary.

we wanted a sophisticated god
but in immediate
unison
called it
god.

this is the grey cream
that gives her privacy.

I am drawn to a sort of journalism
by association, a campestral formlessness
attached
for example
to the term

carpet bombing.

how is death, here? in an orange ball of yarn

she is not ahead of?

she has to stop, turtle.

to declaw an electrocuted kitten
she didn’t
electrocute.



isochronal character

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.


impossible beast

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.

***, make your face.

my father returned a clock
hair
fell from
a birthmark…

deaf as a housefire
my brother was *****
in two
tents, he pulled our mom

from a clown car
a tornado
died
in hell

lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.

we’re not allowed to be in the house past a certain time. we read in tongues from the book of that’s how babies disappear. we hide the insomniac’s handsoap. our fathers do impressions. our mothers the bulk of the digging. we waste little. blood, paint. from our dream supply.

lipstick on a juicebox

was hell
so poor

a raft     I did not build

-

a late entry
thunderstorm

-

a baby    
     waving around

another
baby’s
sock

-

the poverty I own

     the poverty
you

-

a man
on all fours

     a tinier
woman
rider

-

a kite’s shadow

on leave

-

expat nations

in an art
spooked
by loneliness

you did this
to yourself

infants
by nature
are cryptic.

beset by symbols of worry, parents

become clear.

draw for me
a bomb shelter.

     name those already there.

rag doll
our talisman
of verbal
abuse

and crystal

ball
the whale’s
brain

/ ******

saw pigs in chewing gum

word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.  

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

because there is more than one city, my brother falls asleep in the back of a taxi he’s pretending is an ambulance.  my sister remains close to father but not closer than he is to the mouth he used on the woman who reached me before I could get the neighbor girl to eat a rock for cussing at the egg she’d given my baby’s name.  it’s turned up again, the dog whistle I buried.  my brother likes to say he is no later than the man his dying adores.  I still show faith my signature move.

so be it, you’re a male.  in darkness sitting on the charred rocking thing stilled by your grandmother’s approval.  profoundly meditative.  a blessing to all who have in their future, what?  proximity?  ask any female reaching for the dark phone of your lap.  who returns to you a childhood fascination with ant
for your thoughts
on abyss.

cruelty gets an ulcer.  this is my first *******.  this is your kid making my kid sick.  I have achieved total comprehension.  you are so vignette.  your kid is a licked window.  my kid is two feet can’t touch the belt of a treadmill.  my kid is love.  is *notaltogether lostly.  is if you have a pain in your tongue like a nap.

Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.

choking
inside
a whale

/ sucker
from the world
of hands

or the last
to be

invisible