kid has a headache.

has headache above
a toy sailboat
the water for which
is a waste
of water.

headache is trying to see the moon
from the moon.

dad is a reader.  written somewhere
is how a headache
in a child
starts out
small.

kid reports on the water’s
temperature.  it burns.

poverty a calendar we pay for monthly. birth a loudmouth.  my other yacht is a crow.

not for the disabled saint
of benevolent trauma
is there a thin line
between birth and death.

I mow the lawn like I’m trying to avoid a spotlight.

trauma
is an imperfect
inherited
circle
run
around a wheelchair
by a youth
knows

that even the devil
has the first half
of his life.

a certain house, constructed, to be empty.  

a postponed
staring
contest.

a suicide bomber at the start of this sentence.

     hunger
controlled
by a select
many.
      
my mother’s biological decoy.

the angel
made to sing
the alphabet

the hummingbird’s
wolf-pack

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.  

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

the black market is a state of mind.  I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.  my worry walks me three miles where I meet a woman trying to sell a book in a graveyard.  I trade her the memory of our previous trade for the book she tells me is shy.  my other possession is a neglected baby.

the soon to be mother
has a new man

he’s good with kids
because kids
are weak

his sister can keep a secret
like nobody’s business

the mother will have a boy
with spiral
fingers

that belong to a notebook
I can describe

comb sick
in the dunce
cap
dark

my son
means
to impress
his hair

they don’t tell you
when you have a baby
about the shrinking
babies
do.

we bought a smaller bird
but few
noticed.

we made friends, women

with lights
on their shoes, men

sold
on mittens…

we sent nudes
to the author

of babies
eat
sleep.

our mailman
he caught us
dancing
and threatened us
with an audiobook
on baptism

and that
was the end
of mail.

we sold headgear
we volunteered
to sell
headgear, put an ashtray

on the roof
as lure
for longing

that
of memory’s
narc…

the fat kid
whose mother
owns
a video store
will
for a dollar
let you touch
his eyeball

he is maybe
the church
of the seizure
I had
in a church
that is gone
much

like blind
invisible
women

as I go
in
one ear
and out
the same

my brother’s kid
comes to
in the mind
of a beast
that
like any
beast

exists
as its own
memoir
of unreported

sightings
made
to chart
god

by sound

winter

when the snow
weeps
on a warm
arm

and red dogs     deepen

and cats
all colors
are redeemed
at a town’s

vanishment

     there will be a church
     thieved

of its folding chairs
and a man
standing

for heaven     at a time

when its crime rate
lowered

for Aidan, Noah, Mary Ann*

The boy lived in a town by himself.  Because he didn’t know his own name, he did not name the town.  The town had one street that circled the town and there were no houses or buildings.  The boy was never hungry, and if he was, he’d never been hungry enough to know it.  He was thirsty often and because he’d had a dream about his body being full of water he’d spit in his hand and open his hand to the sun when the sun was out and then drink the warm spit.  He was not afraid to leave the town but still he did not leave it.  Perhaps he was its bravery.

it is for
the sake
of my mother’s
brother

that I
am named.

I know only
the most
insufficient
detail
of his life:

that he drowned.

a kind
great uncle
I imagine
he would’ve been
to my sons.

him regaling to my daughter
stories
of his wild
sister; wiling away in houseless trees.

whenever I hold my breath
my brothers fight.

toasting the cameo appearance of my twin sister, I admire the leg of two rather tipsy women.  a soldier stands on a bar stool in such a way his non-soldier friends become sad.  they shake the stool but not for long.  the soldier chides them for giving up.  the leg hops its way outside.  ahead of schedule.

penetralia

i.

forgive
each victor
his loss
of sin.

as a painter
of white horses

my talk is my talk.

the topmost button
corks

the wine
in my throat.

ii.

if you've blood in your mouth
you're a ******.

you've no mother
but it's her hand
lifts your shirt
to cover

that cigarette burn, that peephole
of god.

he invents
the last thing
his boy
touched.

in divorce, we are called
husband and wife
not mother
and father.

in reality, the horror movies
I’m addicted to
need me.

your life
is always
over.

bottom line, I’m not sharing a cell with god’s emotionally phantom parrot

if I die before my father, place my body in full view of the man tagged by god as a hunger strike.  if I have a meal left in me, listen for my turn-taking sons…

the earth is part earth and there is a hole in the sound I made you from.  I am

no I
am thunder.

i.

rain, bunny, prison yard

ii.

a boy
salts
a wet
fly, a hole

goes missing

iii.

soon as a spoon
a baby
becomes
its mother’s
bar
of soap

iv.

(going grey over parrot soup

v.

resurrection’s
hall of mirrors

vi.

a barber’s ransom note

night terrors for which my daughter has a few choice words written in cursive.

that have told her she is black but have used the blank communique of her skin as proof she’s surrendered.

I want to speak with the angels.  visibility should have no viewing hours.  the angels send me away.

night terrors that only occur in gated communities.  present in children susceptible to imago.

the angels need pictures of the poor.
the poor my contraband.

I saw nothing fantastic.

an angel
freezing to death
in a somersault. a mirror

coming out of its skin. emptiness

the size of a pea
no pea

empty

I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.

take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.

I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.

stay small, future.  

persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.

I must remember
it happens not
to me

but to my son

     that it does not turn him
into someone
else    

lonely

self

is what I hold
when holding
that

thought

-

as I await
the cyclical
study
of your

poverty

have this friend
says
he’s still
inside

the dryer
had me

burned

-

I have seen
already
my mother
before

she dies

-

because the thing
is a thing
made of wood
father

as if he’s not held
a crowbar

enters

as if
it’s god’s
dark

the night

-

it is mom
the sound
mom

hears

-

if you could take
one paw

from my dog
and replace it

with a hand

which paw, whose hand…

adolescent my sorrow made me taller.  I could fold my ears without effort into the backs of my knees when I sat the unchaired ground.  

when we walked, sister she rode a worried duck.  we stilled ourselves on many an odd bridge;  pray, such pairs, that below any bridge passes the conscious river of horsehead and mudhoof.      

it was hard to tell what came first;  the duck or its worry.  hard to tell its not broken neck from its broken.  

the minute my sister and I were orphaned seemed an hour.  our mothers dropped easily into the same bottomless pail.  when we walk now, we listen.  my unmatched sorrow parallel to her mother’s appetite.  

I tend the bad back of a gravestone.  a broken tooth in dust-bleached shortgrass.  sister’s run off, but corpse

there are faster things in the body’s riddle.

never do we imagine the toy aisle
has in it
a girl

made mostly
of wheelchair

a skipping boy, maybe,
a parent
should holler at

better yet

a boy who cries
on the inside
of what

he can’t tell a baby
here
not from

a hole
in the ground

a white sock in father’s stomach

the rabbit’s head
we use
for mowing

saying
instead of chore

char, mother

saying
it’s his
her blood

sleepwalking

my mother
she stands
behind
four boys

her smile
mirrored
in each

like any photo
with my brothers
and I
it engenders

some to say
she was cursed

     I see it now

the ghost
of my camera shy
sister

miracle and forgery, mom’s funeral

it was your
or my
week
with god.

we took turns having a healed leg, a crush

on the same
boy.

a cigarette burn and the time it tells once. gum in the puppet’s hair.

blind date
with birth.

when father heard
it said
that god
reads only
to children

he began
talking to himself
behind
his mother’s
back.

a poor person
sad
about pillows, a stick person

sad
for a match.

baby, baby talk, and pilot light.

kitchens everywhere,
god is alone.

mother
as she
unrolls
a tube
of toothpaste
talks
of a crack
in the lord

these empty
things
I’d rather
they not
look it

take your father’s
drag racing
or a fork
with you
when you bathe

I was scraped, she says

your cheek
to me
a wounded
dream…

it doesn’t last
the prophet’s

grief

like maybe god got into your head and left her mark on a clue.  like maybe you’re the meal a father imagines he’ll make to injure an animal.  like maybe there’s the eye has mama’s strong stomach and the eye has her hypnosis.  like maybe you have one leg because it’s the leg taught baby to burn its food on a pig.  like maybe talk is the scar this language looks at while going from snow to ash.

there’s a kid on a bike with a machete and she’s run your brother up a tree.  your brother is taking off his clothes and the kid has a toe she treats like a loose tooth.

-

you watch as your mother tattoos the parts of her body she doesn’t like.  

the cross on her ankle
an insomniac’s
plus sign.

-

I say to the bird of the chipped brain
that faith
is fascination’s

bruise…

-

the food is gone that was seen by prayer

as it models
brief

and deformed

halos

the arthritic
hound

knows

if I blow
my brain
it will lick

my face

altar

the baby is too light.  its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break.  its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach.  some of the boys bail.  some don’t.  the mother’s nickname doubles as her real.  the baby is not called bricks.


zero

when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill.  years go by and I am zero.  the number arrested for suicide.        



basics

because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub.  something slides from his belly and becomes wedged.  his dream business goes under even in dream.  he makes eyes at CPR manikins.  his son, his life, pushes for legs.



safeguards

I call this piece

the hotel room
that left
your father.

a hammer is a good bid, an unmarked
bottle of cologne
is better.

your mother stopped in
to let me know
my high school
mile time

was threatened.

she said she would’ve come sooner
but she had to work
a fork
from her thigh.

the disabled are born liars
but lie
only once.  




turnout

before the parade
I carried with me
a trombone
and entered
the high
corn-

what I played
there

was mournful
after
the fact-

a tune
for no one, for a tree’s

late
cat


outlet

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.



viewership

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.



pressure

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.        



On having a secret mother

the boy is lacing up his right shoe
when he sees
the string
tied
to his middle
finger
and wonders
how asleep he was
when it happened-

(being forgotten
is a lot like
being forgotten
by) harm, that purple balloon

lowered into
then surrounded
by

the inactive
construction site
of the world




On suicide

you are further than I
in your worship
of the slow
vehicle
that carries
praise
back and forth
from appearing
to reappearing

god (how else)
to bully

what would
wipe you
clean
of body

language…
 
On foreclosure

any chance, no,
of improving
upon
my impression
of god.

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat.

wheelbarrows, wagons.

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

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

no cats
on cat
island.


On libido

the previous verse was a poor man’s bible.  like wildfire a fondness for appropriate discipline spreads.  one scarecrow means practice, two scarecrows mean parentage.  a third is your father’s failed garden of baby teeth.  is, by definition, is.  I are

motherless.  what mother doesn’t know doesn’t worry.  many spiders came on the wind and a few were swept into mouths briefly opened by age. what made woman did not make the disappearing girl.  flashing back to a scene that’s not there or forward to one dependent on space, pain arrives

in memoriam.  


On memory*

for all the showing, one would think the only things born were eyes.

when lord
says
or lords
say

this is the body

I tend  
in unison
to trail
behind
my voice

as if

I could make my own
remember
the anesthesia
it underwent

to intervene.





On devastation

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise


On the past

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
 


On supervision

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)


On phobia

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.  






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.
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)


On paternity

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.



On contact

talk early, walk late.  

eat
for food.

hold kitten
like a rifle, your father’s head

to god.

call my / with your

premie.



On looting

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.



On my father being gay

a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark



On having little to no vision

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.

 

On decompression

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours
that go
undetected
in the parents
of special
needs
children.  

the civilian
birthday suit, the war

footage.





On the expected delays**

in this place
paid for
by another
country’s
melancholy

two dreams
of being
run into
by a newly
pregnant
late

bloomer

are had
by the one
man
we share

like a comb
to forget
whose hair
was first

places where I worship

from the dark green church of my fascination with heavy frogs comes the **** body of a boy wearing the head of a heifer.  his legs are not entirely under as of yet but he is let stumble.  from the same dark an excessively wormed fishhook flies on a line and knocks the boy’s ******* behind like a bell.  I scratch my fake arm from shoulder to elbow and believe the sound is not coming from the hook scraping back into the dark.  even in dream I hallelujah lip synch.        


places where I am discontent**

in an abandoned dog’s house, I am, shoeless, with a slipper, in my mouth, a spotlight, caresses, dry grass, my mind, I mistake my mind, for the brain, cinerea, for cinema, my thoughts are meat, are herded, whipped at by a whipping tool, I fear nothing more than I fear, my *****, what it thinks of me, or that it thought, me, first, and lastly

beneath that whip, at the end of which, some interrogator’s, bulb.

a hearse emerging from the shadow of a school bus

/ a mother
trying
to return
a baptized
mannequin

/ that poorly
lit
bait shop
star

as violence
might recall

nothing’s
gospel, I wear

a mask
and poke
your baby’s
eye-

forget beauty, ah

/ the description of a monk in the notebook of a nun

there are men in my life would find it **** to look in on a woman bathing a puppy.  they are good men, and wrong.  I met your husband in the waiting room of an abortion clinic 101 miles from where you live and 73 from where you work.  I know some intimate things- you were driving, your son was playing the flute.  I know the damage a flute can do- it does a number on the lips.  I was moving my hands in my lap imagining film trays of broken water as if I might guess with my knees the weight of a newborn.  your husband has a wobbly right knuckle.  with that face he could be a mime.  he could be armless.  I tried to think of my belly as a balloon with a manageable amount of candy on the end of its string.  the night last to this morning I put a pillow under my back and tried to fall asleep but I have one eye insists to understudy the moon.  pregnancy as idée fixe-  moon and balloon.  your **** daughter wants a puppy but where would we put it.

anomalies, brother.  we are not surprised.  I speak for myself when I say it is beyond me how this is déjà vu.  

-

my kid is a television show.  a sorcery no environmental issue you create

can create.  I am going to have

a brood.

-

forgiveness, forgiveness tracking.

say this:  the street is quiet and the wall.
the children bring snow to snow but haven’t
a guide.  a car is also quiet.  blankets
in the back of it.    

a baby is flying.  a small one has come  
for the blankets.  but the car is moving.
the wall stays put and the street.
the small one  it is clear is wearing
two hats.  nothing more
on the baby.

I tied my bike to a tree and placed a water bowl
beside a food bowl
and kept the bowls
in mind.

she had entered a phase of absolute transparency.

she called it suicide and said so repeatedly.  

any was a reason she would not be around for.

he thought of his mother and father, how they avoided
being together
around the dog.

-

she was okay not being believed.  she chose both

the **** and the mythical beast John.

his two right-handed sons bite equally into the legfat of his ambidextrous third.  he photographs all three by closing one eye at a time.  his boys look so real they could be paintings.  his wife makes an odd announcement about dinner.  an announcement that includes

paper plates, her therapist being kind, and the recipe she’s repressed.  

     he thinks on those for a moment.  then on the terrible things he’s sure to reveal.  his palms.  the downward progression of his mother’s push mower.  the scissors he stole to replace the scissors no one used.  the ******* the school bus he’d punched in the back of the head so she wouldn’t see her house burning.  in the back.  of his.

five bodies
in a one room
cement
house.

an inventory
of warm
voyeurisms.

I don't want to know
who's been looking.

it is my job
to approve
the older machines.

add
a second room.

three year olds
not seeing
birds.