boy finds
a plastic
fingernail
and suddenly
he’s a rat
surgeon
washing
hand puppets
for god
in the birthplace
of buzzard
fiction

i.

a puppet’s
glove
a gift
from the pilot
of paper
doll

ii.

a sock for the melancholy of distant hand

the farming out
of absence.  the broken

hand
of the android’s
pianist.  the silo

that invented
sickness.  

the brains of operation cemetery.

the lizard’s
tail
that returned
with a fingernail.

the demon
with a head
for ice.

male or no, the infant is not making eyes.  before you had hands I had two desperate weeks the books of god were between.  violence is a fattened slum bumping around in the dark.  there are two ways out of you.  one is a comedian.  one is a witness.  both wear reading glasses that rest on post nose-job acne.  I am in the bathtub thinking my son will live because we are skin to skin.  my belief is a chariot flickering beside a dim horse.  a second horse is a mechanical bull with a mind of its own.  if, then I am also a flare.  vacate the young.

my son’s body
is as believable
as my mind
before god-

the autopsy
he couldn’t
perform

even with her fingers in her ears, she can hear the toy horse whipped.  if we don’t have food, we can’t pray.  my father was hired for his quickness, his hands

to salt
the rain.  grief is a guard dog from the permanent circus.

as real as a grocery cart

in the kingdom
of sickness, as the store

I belong to, as the lonely

wheelchair
enthusiast, as the candle

lit
that becomes
the idiot’s
flower, as god, as real

as the owls
of those who’ve groomed
their spineless
sons

to wash
the hair
of the one
still
giving birth

on a rooftop, books

by the baby
nickname

awake and watching his bird feeder

now father
I scale
your mountain

like an apparition

while mother
gathers
what might
shorten

the prayer
my safety
accompanies

to an image-based
business
model

introduced
by the one
god

hopped-up
on ghost

adrenaline

a person
playing dumb
on land
for tree
my feet
were lost
in prayer

small things, tadpole

my mother puts down a grape

could be a fish

be

the blindfold
of the man
who pulled
my father’s

teeth

bat
bringing bird
some shade

you can have it
the inside
of my mouth
a mirror’s
hell

-

it’s a toothbrush
lamb-dust

not
a moth killer

-

saint of consensus

god
a toy
that doesn’t
share, mosquito

-

the dream’s
church bell

I know it is nothing

or a relative
of nothing

what mice
make
of a mouse
possessed

/ my distance from the unborn widens

I can’t make heads or tails of your fervor.  I can’t make body.  I put a hole in my father and through it watch my mother eat her weight in god.  I want what my siblings have.  each other, game shows, memory.  indigenous amnesia.

a man might talk
briefly
for hours
on the utility
of having
a more pronounced
dip
than another man
in his palm

and he might
retire
backstage
to a woman
whose cheeks
are gauze
whose ache
is mouth
whose greatest
nostalgia
belongs
to the left hand
of a pediatrician
buried
by god

not for carrying
the scar
of purpose
but for being
stuck

in a scene
of brutality
beside itself
with audience

the give in my tooth makes me think my father has two left hands.

the give
in my brother’s
brings me
to the tree
that took
his last.  to that day

he sang
god is glove
to the hose
that broke
my mother.  I am at the end of my blood.  

there’s a rareness

to him
not many
see.

as an only child to a mother wants three he buys two balloons already blown and fills the downstairs bath, the bath with the cold lever broken. it’s a one story house so any inclusion of down is a joke. his short arms match his legs so he needn’t kneel to put the balloons under. he loses them both below a minute and because they are still strong they make the ceiling. his mother is not there for long stretches but can’t take her eyes off of him nor put them on anything else. his father and stepfather are somewhere peeing on each other to keep warm. the balloons lose air at different rates so he has to lean toward the quicker to make himself develop. his father stepfather in unison and in blood dumb glory sway and are taken with the hymn when I raised him above my head his diaper sagging. his mother sees him taller as he should by now be getting and his mother no longer misses the baby untold where it went as in heaven there is no crying as in hell there is also no crying. the higher balloon hisses and can hiss all it wants.

what brings you
to this untitled poem
is not real.

seeing my mother
gives me
the swallows.

her sickness is bravery.

she tells the tv
its food
is too close.  stillness

that she’s already
eaten.

our house is surrounded by sticks.

it is not god
gives man
something to bundle, bring inside
and break.  I can ****

and put soap
on my hands.

weather such that the man is moved to write about taking a walk.  a walk he steps out of to attend a street play put on in order to raise awareness.  they trouble him but not deeply the dramatic women on the verge of girlhood.  nonetheless his despair deepens and he feels he must widen his search to include the beast in its youth.  he resumes his walk in a past life no different than the one he had.

two birthmarks

one
temporary, one

invisible-

when god
was young

I never thought the newborn
wasn’t
what we saw
when we saw
that hitchhiker
pulled
from an accident
vehicle
after which
my dreams
were printed
without me.

I play shepherd
with mother’s
wedding veil
and a gnarled
stick.

in some
I am alone
on a hill
sitting
in one
of three
electric chairs
thinking

madness
is too much room
to run out of.

in others
two of my friends
rub
together.

god says
you have the soul
of a tapeworm.  

the luck
you’re in
is your father
the kisser
of baseballs.

the sound
in my body
do you think
it’s gone?

sadness
is suggesting
I use
the email
of someone
I lost

while investigating the disappearance of her father’s belly button
my mother was killed for wearing a wire

I pray to god for good things and to the devil for bad.  the focal point of any daydream is a crow.  in my father’s mind, his mind returns.  in my mother’s there fires impulsive searches for lonely teeth.  at the sound of anything overhead, our dogs are trained to dig for confetti.  I have an odd request, I say to my neighbor the cat person.  I want to talk someone out of suicide.  the cat person is on her ninth vicarious life.

dread he came upon them. the slow father; his shadow, ill. he came upon them, those girls, punching his daughter in the stomach. had a couple years on his daughter, and weight. it was not dark. school had been out an hour. he had taken a walk. had to drop his cigarette. had to pick it up. fixed on a point beyond him; his daughter’s eyes. ***** of paper not anymore burning. first girl had one earphone in, and one come loose; a string undressed of puppet. the song that was playing, he listened. he had the time to listen. mostly his daughter read books but she would sing and he would know she was alone. he counted. there were three. it took a long a time. he paused on ‘two’, good in his mouth. the earphone girl was holding his daughter from behind. his rock cleared her braces and she choked. the two, they kept at the belly. props of delay. he ****** once and pulled the light from his lips. ashed it under the right eyeglass of the skinny one. her body made off with her soul now less a window. fat girl chewed her gum and made like she could run. he dug the house key from his pocket and placed it like a second knuckle. heard the bones of small animals, crunch of hairspray, ‘fore the key notched the back of her neck. his right hand went numb as if he’d cupped the ***** of god. fat girl good part of her landed on his daughter. he pitched her with his foot but she didn’t go easily. when a bit of day could be seen from his sentence, he received a longhand letter from his daughter and among the common she also shared how the fatty eviscerated her by email.

as a child
the happy child
had no notion
of a childhood

he knew of ghosts
because things moved
whether he minded them
or not

he was haunted
by visibility

and cared for
in theory
by a woman

nightly moonlighting
as a man

as the hell it was
to record our whimsy

     as the hell it was
to read it

death writes to me from an unfinished foster home.  other things are also untrue.  how subtle.  light’s

list
of demands.  focus

on crying
in a messy
car
absent
the animal
you’ll worship

last.

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

the feeling
we’d not
been here
before

-

doom’s little hiccup

-

my brother
dead serious
that we pronounce it

hick
gnosis

I am driving barefoot.  my brothers are crying.  
my mother’s wake

the wake of my mother’s powdered cheeks

is over.  we pass the house my shoes are in.  they run
to one side of the house which makes it lean.  

my brothers to keep from crumbling are sharing bread.
hansel dum and hansel dee.

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into
by lightning.  

when I was a boy I sat a whole week in plain view
with a diecast car behind my teeth.

if you are one to dislike ‘in the end’ and ‘when I was a boy’,
you can hate this all you want:

a nightmare is a dream the heart is having.

I am driving barefoot.  my brothers are crying.  
my mother’s wake

the wake of my mother’s powdered cheeks

is over.  we pass the house my shoes are in.  they run
to one side of the house which makes it lean.  

my brothers to keep from crumbling are sharing bread.
hansel dum and hansel dee.

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into
by lightning.  

when I was a boy I sat a whole week in plain view
with a diecast car behind my teeth.

if you are one to dislike ‘in the end’ and ‘when I was a boy’,
you can hate this all you want:

a nightmare is a dream the heart is having.

not one thing
has the devil
made a satellite
do

the wind overturned our trampoline which pinned the wild white pup named Fossil.  the storm passed and was our father.  our mother dragged a broom behind a small brain.  two things that are both cognitive dissonance took root in the dead twin that once bit my arm before going back to eating crayons.  one of the children I wasn’t was thought to be unlovable but later succumbed to an adorable Holocaust survivor.  are we trash?  as the pup relays itself

to god’s headache.

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

I read some poems here:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY5_boQYfJk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiqLUwP68oA


and this is from 8.8.08 - published online at Juked.com-


day makers

when from the well
the call
came to me

I shot once
into the air
and left the horse
to hang
in the barn.

said goodbye
town that I know.

little black feathers
on little black ants
     better
that this also be
goodbye.  

I saw many things
wrong
as a child.  

the way the living
not the dead
would turn.
 
the night
pared from the wall

a thin thing
over the thin mouth
of my sister.

I thought it all
a circus
sorrowed
but a circus
still.

now I watch
a barn
being raised
and want nothing
for the swallow
on my arm.

a human word

is ****

and human
to go
when called.

I wanted the space
between the skin
and the fruit.

I read some poems badly and in bad light, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR3w2eHYE5Q



from 12.9.13


messianic allure

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord. political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness. my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station. do animals wait? several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist. I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear. as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose. any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbhgB9GVnM0

the face of Jesus and in it the human aspect of aging.

Anne Sexton
nine years my senior.

I bury the bone I never gave to my brother’s dog in a whites only cemetery.  my wife is safe at home trying on dresses my kids would’ve seen me in had they not been trying so hard to recall their black childhood.  my father finds peace, his speechless snake.  god, god eats all by her lonesome the bird she made small.

I held the puppet down
father
he cut
a deeper
ear, hunger

ours
was going

bald

you sleep on your left side because of an iffy heart.  the man sleeping beside you, zippered into a dream life, represents poverty.  you dream only the overpass.  each stick on the fire is alone;  a single promise of a dog’s return.  in the early goings, it was a magic to put camp before fire.  in these later, poverty needs no introduction.  you want to say something to the child you did not become but are sick on the talk you were born with.  this nonfiction-  not what you’d imagined.  I slide the man from his bag.  my mad hen pecks upward.

it is not always with me, this burden.  its balefire that is my brother’s body.  I am without him and I am without his power.  I introduce him as my twin, identical, whose power is to disappear when I’m around.  it is like failing to impress you with a metaphor for metaphor.  I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.  imagine being on the same side as metaphor.  a man in pain calls you from a payphone and speaks instead on the joys of a predicted parallelism.  in pain like no other only because pain is treated with a redundancy.  in John like no other.  pain is unlike pain.  a baby is a man’s son and this baby of this man lived three days in a body blessed more and more with lesions like black treetops over which the man could only hover.  I am as angry as any shell company employee.  I have a belief in being Jesus and teaching myself to walk on water

on my hands.  you believe in my brother.  I write him letters when my power is to read.