we couldn’t get a horse because we had this one dog would fake sick.  had this nurse would sleep with her shoes on.  I don’t know how many of us there were.  I had more fevers than god had footprints to follow.  had an insect to offer worry.  we were poor and perfect when pretending to be.  father had a hat that remembered our names and mother a kite she called the birthday of a ghost.  I wanted to be a girl but my sorrow was too southern.  had a sister and she asked her baby what do angels have.  I never saw for myself the ransom note from hell we couldn’t touch.  parts came in pairs so both would answer.

the boy
all
of eleven
years

pauses
somewhere inside
his eleventh
cigarette
to say

earthly life
is god’s way
of telling time
and

as a father
who exists
only
to the kids
of others
I ask him
the whereabouts
of his
but hell

I know
before he tells me
the *******’s

with
my mother
writing ****
for his boy
to say
to girls

after a spell is cast by one using a pseudonym

we start
somewhere.

in a nightmare

(praying over
his father
to highlight
the size
of the first
computer)

he disproves

god

(son) who breathes

for a snake
made of milk

[for Kazim Ali]

pain has no spirit, I am never

so sad
that I can’t
scrape
the neighbor’s
car, probably

you won’t
survive, babies

are all
the same, I recite

what sounds
pretty, it seems

less happens
in the winter, to animals

and bread

seeing the cardboard box for which her blood became popcorn

I make my daughter see an old tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.
I look at my father and commit my face to memory.
I fall on one deaf ear.
I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.
I inject my sons with the truth of my mostly childhood placebo.
I disrespect the dead is *******.
I name names that are similar.
I sincerely form.
I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.
aren’t you the saddest thing I’ve ever laughed.

I make my daughter see a gnarled tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.  I look at my father and commit my face to memory.  I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.  I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.  thirty seven when my son graduates from gag to blindfold and wants to know why it rains but never snows blood.  when I learn from an owl of my daughter’s aversion to pillows.  god is more and more the map he left in the kitchen drawer of a dollhouse.  I shoot into the air a rubber band given to me by an alcoholic relative recovering from the time I called the white of my eye the ******’s acre.  my wife is holed up in an outhouse shunning her diet of run-on sentences about the Qibla.  I don’t have an answer but change it.

sons
gather facts
for loss
and sons
gather facts
for loss

you’re not the twin
I thought
you were.

in looking at my life

a fuckload
of sleep

I took shape
at the sound
of my father’s
whistle-

when well
rested
my mother
was the sense
god
left me-

here is how
I stole
mail:  I pulled my little brother

in a wagon
in broad
daylight.

here is what I know:

you’re not hungry
if you can’t recall
the last time
you ate.

a man dialing his palm
with a knife
from atop
a moving
train
may have
the aesthetic
dignity

you’re looking for
but it’s not
something
the anointed

confess

the boy
relieving himself
in my front yard
thinks
he’s *******
into three
bowls
of soup.

his blackness
a hole
the earth
refuses.

my neighbor
is a white man
whose toy
phone
works.

what statement
can I make
that isn’t
a cup
of tea
gone
cold, the doll’s

version
of a surrounded
star?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJXt4Gn0ZA

me, reading from my self-published collection 'Choice Echo'.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuqCv_ey1-0

sample poem from collection:

fantasy

the cyclops dies having never heard you recite the last two letters of the alphabet. it’s 1983 and you’re all of seven. hearing beautifully gets you slapped for hearing things. you kick your frog legs on a swing going nowhere and try to touch your mind with your forehead. from a stolen bicycle you quote future passages written by a lover half your age. your pity has the lifespan of a voodoo doll. sound is the word of man god disobeys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3qVTWRwxw

we came here
to create
the devil
the bogeyman
beat us
to.

despair.

despair is the wine
we age
imagery
with.

my boy
body
was at
the high
end
of the seesaw
when my brother
was shot.

as a date of death
might differ
from the date
pronounced

my mother
starred
in rumors.

with their whimsy, their lifetime
of human
limb
syndrome, their pseudo

humble
origins
in the mind
which knows
first

of their want
to flee-

hands
are enough
trouble.

death is not coming, sister.  brother, death has come and gone.  though a strong sentence may effectively convey the deprogrammed whim of one born to be all brain, poverty has no more a puppet for these strings than you’ve a doll to force feed.  I remember a woman who misread my closest as my closet

grief.  do you still have that mutt?  its messengers mourn the naught they deliver.

the looks my brother got when he sang seemed to say someone sold satan the wrong voice.  stories of an all-seeing god pegged my sister as the loudest person in two rooms.  to me, mystery had nothing to do with church.  if I’d survived, I had done so to wear clothes.  food and weather were the twins of a middle child.

/

[a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore]

the root of the animal’s insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.

-

when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.

-

grief is the herd my sadness trails.

-

my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.  

-

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  

-

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

-

death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.

-

trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast.

-

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

-

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.

/

[rabbit horns]

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  

-

I saw my youngest brother born.  I saw his mouth.  I thought he’d ripped.

-

the dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. my anger has gone the way of the milkman.  his doomed child with her piece of chalk.

-

it is childish how much time she thinks I have to touch everything in the store.  I am slapped so hard I am sure the mirror’s memory is for show.

-

my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower. at home, my mother puts a clean shirt on the bed and jumps from her death.

-

I am secretly happy that you’ve taken an egg for each day of your life to a doll so doll can sleep.  as your mother, I often follow a black ball of yarn into the lake of how you remember.

-

a male mime bites into a bar of soap…

-

her father is just as she imagines-

a man not making siren sounds pulled over by the man who is.

-

you will know the hoof of satan’s chosen deer by the way it glows when any female announces from the seat of a stilled tractor that she is pregnant.  you will be the age of your mother’s baby bump, older than your father’s knife, and lit by the grape in god’s mouth.

-

I am in the saddest grocery waiting with my mother for the happiest bike repair to open.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

/

[gestural transportation]

in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.  

-

I am quiet but nobody listens.

I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.

-

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly.

-

while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree.  there are egg shells on the floor of heaven.

-

the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his home in a delirium brought on by a toothache.  also, Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.

-

god goes from wall to wall unaware he is god disguised as a graffiti artist.  

renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  

-

in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.  forgiveness works alone.

-

I have never seen an attractive god.

/

[the upper body of the minotaur lost everything]

mother prays for odd things.  like passwords.  and that there be one day a mirror she can warn.  

-

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left. he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

-

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  before I can play doctor, he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  in the opening scene a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.

-

your sister is the only person on record to have been born without a gift. I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal the size of which escapes me.

-

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here. at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet and later to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

-

I know it’s early but I need you to make sure there are no bugs on your father before he goes to work.    

/

[materials (ii)]

nostalgia no longer has a church

if these are your children, I’ve lost years keeping them away from bugs

like her, I’ve never seen her starvations touch

it’s like waiting for god to donate hair

/

[materials (iii)]

I hate baseball but enjoy covering my left hand.

headache
oh pearl
of birth

/

[materials (iv)]

a painting of your whereabouts. the popcorn stoning of your first wheelchair. soft edits. pentagram. spider.

the look of a thing that wants no hands.

/

[materials (v)]

eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.

a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.

/

[materials (vi)]

she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.

/

[materials (vii)]

god twisted her ankle on a toy phone while thinking of the child you love least. mother was passing for an underwater attraction based on the inherited imagery of oblivious angels. photo credit had been done to death.

/

[materials (viii)]

an aversion to sleeping on my stomach.  needing to be alone after eating in front of people.  my father asking in the library for books on Nagasaki.  field trips to indian mounds where bullies would worship my retainer and put mud in my mouth.  my permissive mother and her essays on the grief of a social god.  not understanding how in some films there were women speaking on what was heard in the distance and how in others just men sitting around to surprise satan.  my brother threatening to run away and me showing him how my ghost would look breaking his toys.  sticks from a dogless future.    

/

[childlike boredom]

never be more creative than your abuser.

I’ll bring christ, you

canary

/

[brevities]

the voice of god is the light by which a cricket kills its ghost. grief the chosen dress of our no-show photographer.

/

you were born on the losing side of an argument so great it nearly cut your mother in half.  to his knowledge, he shook you once, became your father and a hider of the rattled hand.  when I wanted to drink, I watched you not sleep, and carried you to sounds I could not make.  we each had one eye that believed in god.  what eye you had made artifact of light itself.  light’s longing.

[removal musics (xxi)]

the agreeable loneliness
of dog
and the detail
I don’t
go into-

binoculars
and the neck
of christ-

~

[suggested titles]


nothing goes through puberty quite like the hands of children who keep track of god

-

for every cutter born in an Ohio treehouse,

-

an infant becomes attracted

-

I got a splinter.  someone gave me a goldfish  

-

for what image have you taken root

~

[in the toy aisle making a promise to my hands]

footprint
a gift
oh if bird
could nightmare

~

[removal musics (xxii)]

the first thing an ant does is close its eyes. of the three people who identify your body, all are god. no one was meant to write.

~

[response musics (v)]

the splinter in your wrist
you start to worry
is it warm
no one
gives birth
while you’re
asleep
so what
you can’t describe
an action scene
to god

~

[response musics (vi)]

what would I say
but there were people
and I was sad

why would it return
this once
your sister
acting out
rabies
in private
and why

were we there
how much
glue

is a scar
of glue

[on seasickness]

my father saw his first ghost and his first UFO on the same day    

-

canoe

of heartbreak

a wound

is

-

a fish
occurring
to fish

~

[tooth musics]

I patch my son’s nightmare with the shadow of a fish

-

Cain
had a sister

he wouldn’t
****

-

raise mosquito
the lost earring
of christ

~

[existential passivity]

sister
a loneliness
for which
I was framed

~

[removal musics (xv)]

whose purple thumb is found in a grey ball of yarn
has remembered
every baby

~

[removal musics (xvi)]

have you written slowly enough for things to happen?  lovely

wrist
I will eat
what is there.  a flower, a clumsy

angel

touching the nerve
of a ghost

~

[reading]

inside
an apple
by the light
of a tooth

where nothing
has belonged
to god

~

[starlit]

after staring all day at a birthmark, father asks can he wear my glasses. done growing, sister breaks her nose. shadows mother from birdbeak to mudmask.

~

[stopping to pray]

how angelic
the nervousness
of insects
offering acne
to god

/ to glacier, crow is not
yet a thing

~

[removal musics (xvii)]

those first animals
were angels
who’d either
slept
in their clothes
or caught
god
eating

/ has memory
always
denied
being young, do I look  

shape
like death
is an idea

shape is waiting
to have…

~

[cont’d]

I am tired of being curious. what I mean is my son is cheering for a photograph. what I don’t mean is you can’t drown a ventriloquist. here is what I remember: his body bouncing around inside the ambulance as if the ambulance wasn’t there. what I don’t

is that first, that invisible, pill.

~

[moth to moth]

a shadow
a ghost
lost
to drugs, hey

you wanna
later
touch
the blood
with bug spray, if

say our stomachs

have the same
mother

[sailboat]

his sister, three years away from leaving social media, has a boyfriend whose depression is a feminist. darkness lands again the role of weather. on paper, his cough is somewhere between cricket and cross.

~

[nymph]

yesterday I sent to my mother grief as an attachment

-

it continues to matter
the spell
your god
is under

-

(what began as nostalgia is now

~

[concern]

I pass my son in the hallway

instar
and throe  

our unpracticed sleep
our elbows

he learns this way
of my mother, her father, the nothing

time does

it is not unheard of,

the composing
of a suicide attempt
note.

mine says

that the identity of the last one born
will be known
only

to those works of art
god failed
to revise.

I accompany the peddler
to the widow’s house
hoping to get a glimpse
of my mother.

on the way
we share coffee
from a thermos.

his car rattles to a stop
in the small drive
like a dog     I remember
then don’t.

in places like this
nowhere     lacks
a middle.

before we get out of the car
he tells me
not to worry
he was born to sell
grief insurance.

at the door
I begin to think
this is the life
then it opens

and there she is...

as far as she knows
she didn’t hear us
knock.

our father was on the hook for his mother’s failed symbolism.  our god slipped into character but not before we gave thanks.  we ate as a unit.  we kissed, or agreed that kissing was second only to swallowing.  we grew in secret a garden of hair.  going online was rare.  we feared satan but only as much as we feared tattoo removal.  in the end, you thought more of us than our subconscious ringleader.

it’s the medicine
makes mother
proclaim
that what sizzles
in the pan
is the soul’s
muted
telepathy.

it’s the memory
my son’s muscle
doesn’t have
makes life
the dream
our longing, preparing,
wastes.

I fry a single egg
in a pan.  

the sound places me
in one of my mother’s
teeth

as it dissolves.

I bring mother
the egg, and she believes
I am the same son
who brought her an egg
yesterday.

she eats the egg
over and over.

her attempted suicide
is not something
I know of.  she keeps it to herself

in the person she was.

my father knows a ******.  it’s not my fault.  the two of them share a cigarette outside of a house they’ve never been inside.  it’s winter.  I scroll across Ohio on a sled with makeshift sail.  I associate sorrow with the very short.  I associate my father with sentences that end abruptly.  I wear the mark he meant to leave on the world.  I understand.  it is forgivable.  there are harder things to get in the way of.  a mirror, perhaps.  a hand on a bible.  my own hand, which tells mother I’m adopted.

in bed with the animal, after choice cuts of echo, the man calls on the peace of having a third wish.  at a sleepover, his son falls from a top bunk.  as he waits for his bones to return unbroken, the boy imagines he is paralyzed.  the  paralyzed boy with the ******* of a woman.

the insomniac
the conductor
of the sleepwalker’s
train

the centipede
a sort of
wrecked
spider

bunny-eared
watersnakes…

god
took all
my mom’s
ideas

beaten
as it was
beyond
anonymity
it had
no choice
but to hear
from birth
whose face
it had.

mother is down to almost nothing.  recognition

is not
so fast.

soft pilot
she lands
open field
in a chopper-

it is
not as loud
as chewing
on a leaf-

could
minutes ago
have touched
the bald heaven

head of a boy
naked, in a low
tree, the white

socks
of his feet
dipped
in ghost deer.

i.

at Beggar’s Pond with cousin I seen this bullfrog leap open mouthed from a mud bubble at a low bird and it took the bird to depths.  we wowed our way through reenactments but there was no betraying.  frog thrash nor bird thrash came to relieve the sight which had passed

had become
our post.    


ii.

men on break from the hauling of your stretchered father     men parked     yonder.

my long stick tied to yours and may our greatest concentration be with us     may it scoot

god  

over.


iii.

this ladder once leaned on the Tower of Babel.  black cat, these are the jokes.  

as crow
& thunder  
battle.


iv.

then again, a pair of babysitting sisters thought he was

plenty fine     like a little

*******
tornado.


v.

I look it up about bullfrogs.

the parents he doesn’t believe in tell him he is god.

I ask him
if it’s true.  

for your own good,
two people meet in person after person.

convinced of its shadow,
the heart
beats.  

I ask
before I ask
again.  the holiness

of my disrepair
belongs to a city
where none are killed
by my son

for being
possible.

collected
by absence
his body
a truant hobby
pursued
by career

my father
built himself
a darkroom
where he’d often
retire
to adjust
the variances
of a single
delay

to pace
as perfectly
as the many

visitors
he was wont
to follow
with a great
and private
affection

coarse, now,
the part
of my belly
that prays.

dry ribbon
this road
I could take
to the one
could tell me
it's autumn.

dogs, here, they parrot
the passing
sirens.  and trucks
pull nightly
away.

“There is no time for comedy;
every stone regains hope and dies immediately.”* - Frank Lima

sleep,
the clueless angel of a working elevator…

(father likes to say
a cricket
in a stone
is not
trapped)

meal of the orphan
part orphan

guessing
the animal
at the end
of the chain
that’s eaten
the matchmaker’s
rib
but what
do we know
of weather
and its persons
gone to salt

I’ve been alone longer than you’ve been alive

-

it
that sees double
is not
a ghost

-

puberty left me for the doll this eyepatch belongs to.  (I did not deny

-

a talented god

I still need a mother for my action figures.  still pray for the baby in the hand-soap commercial.  still make, in dream, symbols for what died there.  still hold photography

as god’s
early love.

out loud, Ohio sounds like some kind of eating contest

-

a mother here is partial
to prose

to the ovenly quiet of a spotted tornado

-

oh human
thumbprint
in a horse’s
ear

when was it
that emptiness
left
the sea

-

is meal
the most common
bruise

a skateboard
on a kitchen table
I am
in your dreams
more possessive
balloon
a sort of theft
what
to imagery
is a month
a backpacking
angel

a confused

this machine
it counts
for your mother
your father’s
sheep

that’s all it does
but is very
large

(everything
from the year it broke
is remembered
by the dog
that looked
with me
at the mouse

I ate for

maybe he begs into megaphone
too quietly
for sign
from man.

-  

I am in the room that sold everything.

-

you who said
it’s not sad.  it’s money.

I hope it makes you sad, this poem, and here is why:

no longer are you on your way.

toothpicks

babies

a closeness
to captain
birdbrain

hard-on
amputee

toys

new
to his arms
his anxiety

-  

wrongheaded
toddler
goes

for swim

-

outside the prison
some tattoos
and some
hunger

and some dog’s
unique
bark

-

his voodoo doll, its tracking

number

-

forgiveness?

that thing from your past