entirely the use of his body.  cigarette like a lover only there to sober his hands five minutes.  anything fell becomes the last link of a buried tow chain.  emphysema, the on again off again j-hook of his right heel run off with devil horn.  how lifts, watch him, the blank assigned weight of your firstborn without housing a single thought.  it is always, this, shoe that drops.  a lifetime of work, say it, **** your mouth away.  your mother has tried to **** him; she a lack river.  handless and is not the one pulls him out or keeps him from being.

the child, the loneliest

reconciliation…

-

it is not quite suicide, not quite

career

-

sorrow’s racket,

as in

a deer
in the path
of an oncoming
deer

-

son I carry

no one’s
blood

show me
a devil
can enjoy
lightning
and I’ll
a worm
an inch
of its life

sometimes
you’re awake
and your son
is awake
and neither
of you
believe
in sickness
the raccoon
mask
of sickness…

no god unkissed, no dirt…

and sleep, sleep
is a priest
whose hilljack
blood
favors
the cult
of the noiseless
ant

brother says

how thin
we've grown

on the fat of self.

I hold the map.
am

its only
reader.

a bone drops.  

desert & cathedral
I tell him

     the words

I can figure.

bone like that don't break.

he has come to see the marrow of angels.
and I

what devours.

and the glacial
pace
of god

talk early, walk late.  

eat
for food.

hold kitten
like a rifle, your father’s head

to god.

call my / with your

premie.

the war, the war, the brother.

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours in which a ******* dyslexia
goes undetected
in parents of special
needs
children.  the explanation.  the action

words

mixing twice.

the face first exhaustion
brought to bear
by
a behind
the scenes
taste test.  

the cyst on a brother’s knuckle.

the fight, the civilian
birthday suit, and

the civilian
burned
by clothes.  a she

as, just as

deserted.

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise

mother in mouse slippers sees a rainbow and burns the bread.  ******* rainbow was hunger before someone tried to erase it.  I am not god but I do have insomnia.  mother can do in her madness what most can in sleep.  father hollers at a soldier suffering from memory gain.  I throw baby brother’s rattle over a moving tank.  

count for the dead their black sheep.

(for Noah)

I can’t tell my brother how his amnesia has given him a second chance at life.  his kid is a real ****.  so’s mine.  still, there’s not enough here for it to have all been a dream.

the book is a mourning vessel for what its reader stands to lose.  I have a father for every type of silence.

why did Shia LaBeouf cross the road?  because he wasn’t a chicken, he was Shia LaBeouf.  I want to worry.  it is funny to me like Patton Oswalt and Lena Dunham being flabbergasted.  I wrote once how suicides fight for position.  suddenly everyone knows they were once Leroi Jones.  some of course were and I want to be sorry.  the original thought in my head was to be postdated in birth like a present.  because of where his home is, Lars Von Trier is homeless.  imagine I lived from the age of 18 to 23 and from the age of 24 to 29 I got paid to reenact those years previous.  I will waste my time with yours and there will be a whirlwind of poverties speeding by and seemingly one.  if the great performances of James Franco say again how the unknown soldier is the eater of fame I swear I’ll call you and your double out as Lynchian.

the amount of thought
given to locating
the secret
mind.

I am on count eight
of ten-

ten, the future.

I call your hiding place
water.

-

of course you dream of falling-

those toys
are the toys
of god’s
children.

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor.

-

let there be
all

the light.

-

I’ve never seen

a dead body, a pair
of handcuffs-

but don’t ask
the wristcutter’s
ghost.

-

I have the words to tell you about my son.
I hate that he needs me
to take
nothing.

-

a member of my search party
is rumored to have left
the lucky gal

a one pet home.

keeper
of fields, clean

destroyer
of rooms
where the boys
of murdered
women
single out
a spirit
for doll

crisis…

-

the world of the reminiscing
earth

~

[On mother, father, god, dog, *****]

what if the eyes in the back of my head

hallucinate

what if
the eyes in the back of my head

during surgery

during

a haircut

~

[On foreclosure]

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I
am rowing

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat

~

[On the past]

my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow

full view
of the aging

marksman

~

[On phobia]

as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug  

~

[On the need for a watchlist]

if one can talk of it, one is most likely not poor.  we called you to life to give you a name.  god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress he could see through.  a short history of heaven made its way to hell to have its location shared.  your mother developed a stutter.  your fake cry took on a depth of meaning made us dip

(psalm
for satellite)

into your brother.

~

[On paternity]

as his mother has heard only yesterday how he was born to some nobody that everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear.  as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream of putting a cricket on the witness stand.

~

[On my son having little to no vision]

I am on count eight of ten-

ten, the future.

I call you raindrop,
your hiding place

water

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor

~

[On decompression]

the zombie movie about buzzards.  the hours that go undetected in the parents of forty-eight special needs children.  

~

[On lore]

I have two dreams of running into the newly pregnant late bloomer.  in the first and most recurrent, I am operating a remote control car I’ve lost while worrying about a brother’s closeness to a certain pilot.  in the second, my mother is talking lights out to nostalgia’s previous owner who agrees with her that the roofs of buildings need to be smaller.  in both, I get the sense my father has already hit the pop fly under which he collapsed muttering baseball, baseball, ghost of a baseball.

~

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[On writing]

my sense of place is a person.  *** is odd,

right?  this thing that auditions

for what it has.

an indian woman, you guess, runs room to room.  
moves, by herself, beds.  

sleep, but for its vacant host, would sleep.

the hollow locust in your right breast
     leans for the dust in your left.

for roach, your hands made of toast.
for mouse, a mouse-sized moth.

a crude infant can be made and will be
     from a phone’s receiver.

     dark food, and below it
your body of bright milk.

as the elevator operator
who cut
my grandmother’s
umbilical cord

was dying
in a stairwell

my son
ate
without assistance

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.

we move the cemetery to confirm there is nothing outside of this town.  the ******* remains a two man show.  leash laws are for dogs and angels.  our doctor has a touch of deer worry.  exercise is for the birds.  god is the pitter patter of imagined feet.  our fathers double over in bathrooms from the shame of not calling out for paper.  our mothers have done the math.  by now, most kids have eaten a popsicle alone in a church.  I’m in it for the stick.

babies

gone
that were never

here, this

is the worst
we can do

in both
worlds, this

is nothing, the nothing

that nothing’s

crayon

draws on

in record
setting
heat

to hearten
the chalk

outline

of a mother’s
body, the mother

like mother’s
husband’s
coat

big

~for cousin~

I injure
on my own
my right
hand
to give
the left
I was born

with

a break

/ wonder
whose hands
does father
have

as his mother heard yesterday he was born to some nobody everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear.  as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream to put a cricket on the witness stand.

before the brat kid
can repeat

this is not
the television
my father
writes for, it is my understanding

that such a child
belongs
to the itch
to have a child
disappear.  as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug.

as if
the news
of your marriage
is still
a secret
kept
in the mouth
of your bride
you go
to fill
your own
outside
while slapping
to your palm
a new box
of cigarettes
and see
a man
with his back
to you
his pack
half gone
most of it
spent
listening
for beauty-

your daughter
clopping
in heavy shoes
toward some
distant
thing

you’ve both
come to miss

a ghost
in love
with a paintbrush

this ankle
not
from memory

i.

chemo
makes
of each bone
a wind chime
which
in poetry
would be
some first
house
beauty
but  

in the body
of my father

    no

ii.

it is cruel to hang anything above a baby’s crib

iii.

I can only guess
I was happy
in the womb
with how
my mother
looked

MRI, or the stickman’s

first
snowstorm.

a telephone called depression.

we can no more save
the alien
that died
for jesus

than we can write
the dog-whistle
bible.

I’m sad because I’m circumcised.

the scarecrow
has dreams
of becoming
a surgeon.

I’m no expert on sleep. I’m being followed

by a coat hanger.

ask my hand if it’s true that all the babies had to stay in their mothers to survive.

you may have been a child
projecting a maze
or an adult
memorizing
the hollowness
of things.

in a condensed version
of poverty’s
obstacle course
I still hold the hammer
that works for a mirror…

with dog or with dogs, we were presented
as two examples
of how to be
family.

I love me a farm machine
and the week
you knock yourself into.

(a silo
saddens
a drunk)

I was trying to write about ***.  
it’s not like I was planning to be there.
I had a cotton ball in my hand; I walked out.
a bird circled high.  
I could hear my garage door surrender itself, flatly,
to a low heaven.
I was sad not to have the work of my arms behind me.
sad god would not once be startled by an animal.
the leg of my pants drooped from the mouth of my mailbox.
gentle cloud, and I quote

I thought of you in uniform and was copiously delivered.

it is enough to know

god will never once

be startled
by an animal

I snap out of dropping
my mother
on her head
while the young man
looks at his feet
as two dreams
of being
run into
by the newly pregnant
late bloomer
his father
warned him about
after filling
his backpack
in this place
paid for
by another
country’s
melancholy
where next

we share

a comb
forget
whose hair
was first
and refuse

to be sorry
for the baby
having gotten
its grandparents
down
for a nap

if one can talk of it

one is most likely
not
poor.
    
we called you to life to give you a name.
odd imagery ensued.

a prisoner gave birth in the yard of your mouth.

god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress
he could see through.  a short history
of heaven
made its way

to hell
to have its
location

shared.  

your mother developed a stutter
for which I developed
a stutter
application.  things began to click

on you
and when that
didn’t work

your fake cry
took on
a depth

of meaning
made us dip

(into
your brother)

in the midst of its most moving performance, the house courts a mother’s indifference to the make-believe called to blind its only son.  the old, so serenely full of chaos, are elsewhere.  a father communes with god.  together, they form a placebo of distance.  a room without a mirror attracts a room with.  my brother

(a suicide
watch  
on steroids)

wants his face to leave a mark.

my death a warped photograph of a former awe, my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow
in sight of
the aging

marksman
I’ve given
a sporting chance

where I wrote

the most startling entry in my mother’s diary

when she was not the greatest
source of pain / in the household

she pulled her own hair

a man with a vacuum cleaner
meaning to knock
on a door
is possessed
perhaps
by the heat
of day
to instead
answer
the door
(while)
behind him
a girl
wearing
the hat
of a dead
witch
is carried
up the street
on the shoulders
of a boy
whose bald head
is empty
(above

it all)
a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark

father would later say he did it

not to smack the name out of my mouth
but to give it a good limp
on its way
to my heart.

I think of my blood as an evening wake.

my heart
as this woman
one day buried
with a man’s
cane.

I can hear your ears

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

in the child’s work reverie, man with chainsaw
we intuit a certain progress
has been made
in regards to the child’s
reaction to seeing

for the last time
a chainsaw.
  
we declare
man

to be an angel
given everything
but the memory
of its death, and suspect

ourselves incredulous
at being returned
to the earth
on this
our first
visit.

before god knew it
man needed a mind

to move a band-aid
with.

for you,

the baby
disappointed
in itself.

for me,

3-D glasses
the mask
makers

lose.

you tell yourself
the smaller they are…

you see a cloud, a hospital
for a bird…

but then you’re six
and your sister’s boyfriend
is ripping out your hair
in clumps.

your brother is the storm before the storm.

your father doesn’t have cancer
your father is ******
during a longer period
of being
left alone.

pain is your mother in labor.
a time machine that only goes to the present.

most days your son can’t move a muscle.
looks bored to life.

before he is out of the city, he takes a cheap umbrella from under the passenger seat and rolls down his window at a stop light.  he motions to the fat woman he thinks only he can see.  she is ugly in all kinds of weather and she is ugly now in the rain.  though wide awake, the thought of her walking is an insomnia that torments him with the restless image of her walking.  before he is out of the city, the woman catches up to him a total of three times.

-

    over the course of a day, the perfect tongue god gave me might cross my mind once.  

my son was put on this earth to worry about his baby brother

not being able
to do anything
about having an itch.

-

after knocking the girl from the bike
I stay in the car.

as for facts, she has six ******* sisters and two middle fingers.

-

as for confession  

I have a kind of claustrophobia
brought on by having a body.

[baptism]

the home’s weekend janitor placing ball caps on the elderly.
something is said, and he is fired.
his kids recall the egg he’d make of his hand.  the delicate knock
of his joke.  their hair, or something in it, weeping.


[******]

father offers, no, we are bodies trapped in people.

he was known to be monstrous when inside a vandalized church.

if gay, he’d ask
does anyone ask
if you
were born?

yesterday, she was identified by her dentist.
she was recalled as a hunger pain.

man is a rumor
started by god.


[bread]

the baby is white guilt. is walking early.
is outside picking stones to give to loved ones.

Jesus is a moment of peace
on a skateboard.

the fish are five thousand
isolated incidents.

vandalism is vandalism.

the numb hands of a child
go rolling after
crayons.

this is you, beside a flower, in front of a mountain.
your eyes are so big

and the bread
so quiet.


[a.]

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.  


[catharses]

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.          

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.


[loyalties]

the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.


[vasectomy]

I open out from another’s dream. I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it. my female wife- this much is the same. I’ve been here before. nothing happens. she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news. this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building. the heat that gets to others is god.

~


poems above were taken from books available here:  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

instead of singing me to sleep
mother would put a cigarette
in my mouth
and have me
hold my breath
while she peeled
an orange.  my feet

were the first
to go.

the back of my mother’s head was spotted in an Ohio movie theater by a boy whose eyes were covered or maybe closed.  I received word secondhand from the boy’s stepfather whose own recollection was marred by the violence he shied from to reach me.  in fact, the theater was even possibly a drive-in where the boy remains in the bathroom standing on the toilet to avoid the knowledge he is no longer deaf.  like most information regarding my mother, it hasn’t aged well.  she’ll set the table at noon for two and drink her coffee and I’ll join her convinced no child dies from its hair being pulled.  more secret than my son is his ability to withstand miracles.

father offers, no, we are bodies trapped in people.

he was known to be monstrous when inside a vandalized church.

if gay, he’d ask
does anyone ask
if you
were born?

yesterday, she was identified by her dentist.
she was recalled as a hunger pain.

man is a rumor
started by god.