to find
it’s the other
way

around-

life
a metaphor
for sport.

to know
     without

sufficient
notice

we’ve been here
so long
that none
are from
the future.

to provide
the afterlife
to those
left, those

available.  

     to realize
the town
of our birth
awaits
the return  
of our most
male
follower.

to be kept alive by a disease loyal to another.

to scroll, down, and cross
our legs.

our lost
way
of thinking

forgave
different
films

I prayed, yes
but in
a dream-

ghost
was a book
with pictures

not by its neck
my grandfather's
bottle.

his penchant
for the bodies
of things.

were the prayer
of his line
too broadly
cast

he'd say
good fish
and go hungry.

saved
every Sunday
christ
in both cheeks

and fought
all day
drunkards.

     once fattened
a crow
for his son
run off
 
but could not
watch it go.  

once choked
for nine months
a man.

so full
of stories
     I am not like my father

who died
today
in a field.

there I was

lightweight, eyesore

baby satellite
and baby
drum

imagination’s
dull witness

my hair
prematurely
cat-torture
grey

my person
the length
of a sandbox
shovel

teeth
a tooth, a commandment
from the past
lives

of milk

I was your mother. on television, one could see what other televisions were watching. I tried to tell your father you wanted a bird stuck in a frog’s body. that a sleepy afternoon is the poor man’s insomnia. he hated that I wrote down your thoughts on thoughts. by the time you get them back, you’re someone else.

said if I let him
touch my breast
he’d put his palm
flat on the road
let me run my bike
over his hand

said I could
think about it
didn’t say

it would be
all

-

my sister backed out
of teaching me
to kiss

she told me
don’t worry
as one cannot destroy
or be destroyed by

the aftermath

-

someone
in the film we’re watching
turns off
the whole room

little boy

20% off all print books at Lulu today with coupon code of LULU20

/ from [shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~

[untitled]

hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~

[untitled]

she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

~

[entries for giants]

not a thing born
nor a thing
howled at
no
you are not
again
these things

the baby
it continues
to purple itself
where it can

it crawls, but is mostly stunned
by its own
vocabulary

the dog has the tongue of a cat

this is new

~

[the exact]

father became the man his possession foreshadowed. mom had a purse full of spoons. brother bathed any form quiet enough to make the kitchen sink. I began to believe. I began to hear in the rock

the thorn
it spoke for. over the nest of a bird,

the nothing to eat.

~

/ from [MOON tattoo]

~

[catastrophe]

I am differently
afraid
of each
cigarette

-

thematically, father hopes

to operate
on a clown

-

compared
to his

my hunger
is having
a flashback

-

wheelchair, oh

to its dog
door
bliss

~

[moon tattoo]

birth, or god’s
way
of erasing
our memory…

this
more than you
will hurt
my neighbor’s
doll

I am a dark spot
in the ocean-

     mother
she presses
down

     if I had legs
I’d want them

the day the crows
flew into

youtube

the thing
each crow
stood for
stopped
advancing
as did

god’s future
but the men
and women
of god
kept eating

animals
and kept
praying

for individuality
to come from
being
the first

to gut
a mirror
and god

himself
began to write
a poem
with nothing

behind it

in divine distraction
to worry
on the child’s
past

brother is digging barehanded in the backyard a hole for what he hopes is the alien of god’s choice.  as for existence, my mother’s is low on mine.  my father is keeping out of the same sentence any mention of ****** and totem pole.  no one including you cares for my sister’s worry that this no this is the bottom of a rock.  if asked, I will say I was visiting with my arms the museum of rowboats during the regional spike in baptisms we as a family failed to interrupt.

in a home
for animals
that have tried
to undress

she weighs
the child
and the child
the doll

I play my father as a man terrified I’ll return

my mother steps on a wooden block
with both feet.

stepping off,
she announces
she is going
on a diet.

my father covers his ears
and gets shaving cream
on them.

he turns me in his hands
like a dish towel
then drops me
at the base of the tree.

I transport
god’s blood
on three
disposable
razors

to my neighbor
who

on a high shelf
has a microscope.

the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.  

-

my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.

The angel of the zeitgeist thinks death is a lover of short films.



It was a game I played with my sons. Like this: It was cold, and my brother was dead. My brother was dead, and the music said drink. The music said drink, and I sang god down. I sang god down, and god bent himself to a moment in Palestine. God bent himself to a moment in Palestine, and he was othered by his own brain. He was othered by his own brain.



Time uses god to tell time.
I drink myself to life.
Nothing outside of Ohio

is there.

I am counting on my fingers
in front of a mirror
those I’ve known
who’ve died
of fright.

I am working the loosest brick
from the house of god
while standing on the backs
of two kids
whose father
borrowed
then sold
a crowbar.

I am telling my abuser
how to direct
with a magnifying
glass
the stream
of god’s
****.

I am charging the riding mower’s
battery, I am alone, I have a hair

on my head
for my son
to pull.

she imagined herself pregnant.  she fell behind her best years which became predictions.  I brought her a cake on her fortieth birthday to show her what I could do when given a cake.  she asked me about the men in my friendships.  candle-makers, mostly.  a few with toddlers a football knocks over.  it took a moment, but she added sound.

eating lamb
for his lovely
misheard
boy

his father
has taken
like medicine
to sleepwalking
as something
they can do
together.

if you see them
man and boy
sharing
a robe
keep your
car horn
safe.

your mother is a fawn.

he wasn’t overseas to be difficult.
he had pain in his arm, he thought

he could find a snake.  a cut-off toe.

our insides were still inside the time
that we knew him.  his arm it sorta  

came like a slug you might see freed

from a puddle’s hinterland eye.  slow

like that, wrong like that.  like these:  

hippies and father time.  a mole enters
an infected shoulder:  yours.  a mole

has been your heart, and peacefully.

your mother doesn’t know about the mole.
it’s not in the letter.

my father
the father
of a city
he was born
inside.

     father lit
by the soul
of his shadow.

-

city first, as in

city dark, as in

city first.

-

     his child a partial vow to be lonely
in moderation.

the ancient anxiety of dogs.

has winter
no levy
it cannot call.

bread;

the saying of bread.          

bald man
in a hair salon

religion.

but also, bravery.

our present loss, lost
to the foreclosure
of immediacy.

litany's take,
a rake.

treads your boy
to banquet-

passes my own
pulling a mouth
from a wire fence
and waves.
 
was not believed
a child

this faith.

the strength of my father
to **** his due.
the strength of yours, too.

be still.  and full.

has place
no debtor
in lull.

i.

it is my first time dying.

I have no friends.

my arms don’t feel
like your arms
when they fall
asleep.

when born, each of my thighs
took three
injections.

I will my scars to open.

tiny human fingers breach
the top
of an egg.

I yawn by vomiting.

ii.

my parents look the same in the dark.
one of them brings the other
white pebbles     in a glass.

iii.

death
surprises only
the look
on your face.

online
a photo     of a young
girl
after some
self harm    

inspires.

iv.

bottomless     you are snagged     on a bird

v.

nowadays, child free
is the term we use
to separate
ourselves     from being

kidnapped    

vi.

be heartened.  

suicide
remains
impartial.

wide-eyed with our father’s exhaustion, my drifter of a brother enters the new house at night to steal a less than perfect fang.  the infamous gun of our youth.

illness is
as illness
narrates.

I self-pierce.  medicate
like a missing man
at a party
for baby.

take this balloon
from me.

baby suffers
from heavy
elbow

and wilderness.

the identity
of the kid
didn’t
beat us up
is

the schoolyard
our church
of arson

the three point line
is the madman
spots
a cigarette

lists* (iii)

with what there is
of my tongue
I think
to reach
the back
of my head

-

televised

offsite, a cat
bathes
its softened
image

lists (iv)

a bruise
on any
visible
child
is

the father’s
jump
on winter


lists (v)

the rare
the black
the eyes
come in threes

the right hand of god squeezes a bar of soap until it becomes a crow.  

there’s nothing wrong
with your son’s
black
heart.  

before I had a ****
I told everyone
I had a tail.

tragedy
to an angel
is

the ghost
of an alien

its mother
has it
born
the day after
it stops
talking

it is the animal
gods
miss

I rarely understand what I read as I read it.  a horror movie with the working title

god’s wound
is being scored

in the mind of my unborn kid.  by the shyness

of my blood, not again.

I trace my stutter to the narrative delay that uprooted my father who broke his foot in his sleep trying to kick his mother’s television.  I limp circles around those who’ve gone quietly.  grandfather, from heaven, I see my body as a surplus of irretrievable peace.

natal homing makes me ***

I am too wrapped up in my own stomach
to visit the mother
who worships

mine

pain passes out. boy is almost

body.

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poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~



NOTES FROM LIFE UNDER BELL

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church. an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore. my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth. a bomb is dropped on a bomb.

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller. the mosh pit is weak. last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole. onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch. dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood. some god

seeing me
as a person…

how quickly birth gets old.

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma. genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea. this open umbrella. ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby. a door was a door. a ghost was a ghost and a door. the house was possible. its rooms were not. baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub. I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow. said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

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.

–

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key. it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.

–

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

–

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise

–

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.

–

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

–

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.

–

the disappearance surrounding said event. a horse belly-up in water’s blood. see telescope. also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.

–

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.

–

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.





WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY



I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

~~~

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

~~~

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth. I say dog for both dog and puppy. pray for things I know will happen. a rooster through a windshield. a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.

~~~

mother and father give their word that all narrators are orphans. that blood is a short leash. sometimes, a fence. be, they say, the symbol your god remembers you by. tell your brother to act like a chicken. your stickmen to share a toothache.

~~~

I saw a cigarette with its mouth open. today was hard. hate is amazing.

god will die with his ear on my stomach.

~~~

the darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

seller of the disappearing stone, the mouth names everything and is born after eating a blindfold.

~~~

for desperation, boy puts a bird in a hand puppet. here a finger and there a worm, sadness has no family. oh fetus my moth of many colors. oh mosquito that bit an angel. time with my son

in scenario’s territory.

~~~

atavism
(god is someone’s calendar

–

valley
(a girl with a marble who answers to overdose

–

pulpit
(rooster ghosted by elevator

–

subculture
(in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down

–

alpenglow
(the scalp will baby its grief

~~~

on muscle detail, the clapping boy from the cult of thunder brings a wheelchair to the last rocking horse known to model swimwear for the few dolls that remain married to the same mask. the boy is weak but maybe he puts two words together. like ghost

and exodus. for the second coming of the handcuffed animal.

~~~

the boy picking flowers for my shadow loves no one. everything I touch remembers being my hand. the world has ended, or started early. god’s heartbeat. sound’s watermark.

~~~

because her son can see the future, she is not yet born. god matters to the discovered.

~~~

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

~~~

for the gone and for the nearly, brother has the same stick.

I call belly
what he calls
eye
what answers
to limb

~~~

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

~~~

she says
three times
the word
brain
to her stomach’s
blue
mirror
and scores
sight’s wardrobe
of rags
in earworm’s
dream

~~~

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel

would not recommend the usual quiet
or the quiet we project,

the necessary
the led to believe
quiet,

not even the quiet
of accurate prayer-

instead, the stillborn baby
into a room of loud colors

into a surrogate room
that is now
smeared

wall to wall
inanely
with moaning-

this is where we are, speak up, we come
with given
thump and wail-

better yet, make it some beast’s
unmoving
tail end
of litter, make the little
one

speak english- yip, mew –

if you can enter the coupon code without hating your life, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books today with said code of HUMPDAY10

~

below are some poems from ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015):


[tautologies]

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

[first appeared]

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

[notes to abuser]

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

[immersion]

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.

[onlookers]

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.                  

[maker]

when I think about you

I don’t

[incarnate]

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

[exposure]

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

[a photographic memory that applies only to acts of eating]

in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.

Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who's lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.