the train, son, is very real.

you roar in your mother.

-

it is so loud you cannot hear an angel ****** an angel.

-

the country has a leader. the story is
she has a whiteness

no one can see.

-

I’ve not understood the saying
of weakness. that said, I’ve one for

tunnels. cloche hats. and Africa.

-
 
I broke my arm, I met your mother.

it is of use
that I push
this train.

though equally bright

the glow from pregnancy
and the glow
from a beating

are set apart
by their
duration.

mental age is a relic of my son’s afterlife.

when dimmest, our women
young and old

climb trees.

so plant.

the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.  

having a baby is a mouthful.  

-

think of yourself as a journal death keeps.

as a shepherdess

overly
reflective…

at what age does it become

this black
hand

a grey
tear?

-

it worries me

your use
of the red
fox

-

on baby
there’s not
a scratch

in the stranger’s vacated car, he counted seven dogs.  

the town was a.m., a grocer’s dream, a fisherman’s desperate tooth.  

tragedy, his raincloud, what else

     it wept.  wept the window down.

I was male, 37 and some days.  had just dropped the kids at a house where kids can have cookies and god knows.  looking back, I shouldn’t have been driving alone.  in such a state I give women money when they approach me at gas pumps.  ten dollars is all I have.  two weeks is a plausible amount of time to be homeless.  the attendant he tells me she’s here everyday.  he’s the sucker.  I lie less when I have coin.  she’s in the process of an overseas adoption.  looking back, I was driving preoccupied with another’s woe.  woe adrift.  I rub my right eye and flip my eyelid and my car hits a kid not on a bike.  my car mourns but not in the driveway.  low, I look its way.  snow-covered.  snow-covered energy.  my wife sees me doing this then disappears so quickly into our room I think she has disappeared into her purse or into the book beneath it.  our children write about grief.  I complain it’s too short but can’t stop reading.

a note on my chapbook [infant cinema]: it may be a temporary thing, but it’s been reported to me by individuals attempting to purchase the book, and I’ve also verified it myself, that the website for **** Press, the publisher of [infant cinema], is currently reading as expired and has been for a few days.  while I hope things are okay over there, I wanted to let everyone know not to direct anyone that way because I’m not a liar and neither are you.

in such times, it is constantly 2am.  a friend pulls carefully at your ear.  a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb.  you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential.  because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen.  your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked.  this is done in secret.  what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago.  when things were the same.

as human as the main character in a robot’s dream.  as human as the next, as the previous, as the kid playing mine as a *******.  as alien as father sleeping in a grocery cart.  as alien as my sister’s death-metal band my brother’s anger.  as animal as the wire your brain calls inside when a child’s finger is shut in a car door.  as animal as pawing at the keys

of piano.

because god
knocked herself
so silly
I became

pregnant
with a praying
child.  it entered my story

to tell me another

of bomb
removal
and nervous

energy…

she kneels
and she kiss

grasshopper

she fight
to be

fluent
in longstanding

interruptions

she father
the skirted
issue

she make for mother
no baby
but tends
an entry
in

its travelogue

she not wear
anything
under
her clothes, tells me

she pray

to headcase

the bawling
gift
apple

muffled by a pillow
stolen
from some
honeymoon
destination
for third

wheels- the penny

in the horse
father hurries
me from…

you is part lake and some bellies
were skipped

three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find.  a bit of my mother

is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan

directions.  a drug dog

on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower

of lost
men.

And his wife would dab at the foreheads with a steam cloth and she would murmur leave my sons and he would count his sons and come up with four. And he would keep it from her that this was the bruising work of the fifth whom he had beaten in a hidden room and left for dead. And he would leave the kitchen walking backward and his heart would try to stay.

When finally God spoke it was not with mouth but with hand if one can imagine an emperor of puppets.

The heart it jumped back into its rightful cave but was not afraid and could no longer beat.

And the man took the boy by the ear into the room and asked for a quarrel and one was provided. The boy though was protected by an upturned glass and watched his father bat himself as a puppy will its nose.

After which the insects began to land but always the blood would come back to the face of the boy.

And the father was made to spit on a cob and with it brush his teeth. And he called them his sons what were four spheres of water.

I saw you pretending to be part of that family as they made their way across.  I saw you put that doll’s mouth to your breast and enter a tent.  I saw a white van mock the pace of a white horse while you slept.  I saw your mother bite the hand because it was empty and I saw its emptiness wake you.  I saw you eating the password to eat.  I saw you at auction and thought for all I know you could be your father whose stillness was my address.

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.

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.

when I think for my children I find they think only of themselves.  reminder:  this is not the place to make observations.  travel is hard.  hard but for my god given moral myopia.  I am so attracted I have to sit.  thrum.  this means the idea my daughter has is presentable.  cages in a field are empty for the moment.  people all sizes sit cross legged.  the cages are locked but the people are too recent to care.  my note to my daughter is a metaphor for couples who want children.  some of the people can fit through the bars.  most have to settle for a head, a leg, an arm.  my daughter loves her patience.  when asleep, she grinds her teeth and curses the expiry of the years she pretended to be a rabbit.  no matter the season she wears many layers.  the grinding is mistaken for god’s anger.  not moving is sad.  being everywhere is sad.  the temperature she is running has no impact on the plot of her body’s rise.

mom in the hospital is asking a half-lost boy if he knows about the band-aid keeping her skull together. the boy is afraid and I get that. her hands are confused or small or both. I give the boy a cigarette but yank it back when I see he’s been here before. could god maybe leave a thing untouched. behind us a mummy with one ear

still visible

is crawling with parents to a place.

~ youth ~

holding a baby
as if she’d
had it thrown at her
my mother
came out of the museum-

it had stopped raining
it had also
stopped
snowing

and people
were giving me
money
 
~ to message ~

to be somewhere without a book on my person. hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief. to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel. to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside. to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to. to die well. die punctuated. by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

~ disburden ~

god went from wall to wall unaware he was god disguised as a graffiti artist.  renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  the homeless are tattoos that remove themselves.  I guard the outlying cross and go through the motions again of nailing to it the same madman.  my only tool is comfort.  in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.

~ apace ~

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.


~ clotheshorse ~

     a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.


~

from - father, footrace, fistfight -  (June 2014)

as children
we adopt
certain forms
of adaptation.

as lovers, always
an item
away
from owning
a pawn shop.

as adults
of parental
age
we become
our parents
those veterans

of apparition
improv.

in trying to be what to them she represents, she holds a pair of scissors while looking for her hair.  she is my mother and then she is my mother again in a car with my mother and my son.  the car in front of us goes left of center and said son speaks on the beating he’s getting from the driver of the drifting car.  I’m worried at the sanity of his intelligence but am also driving.  mother is taking his statement with lipstick and a wet notepad.  below me, a whole populace splits on the given permanence of surreal or ethereal when both are equally inexact.  if god needs to beat one body, I’d rather he be this down-to-earth not to use that of the son in my car.  I can’t lengthen my life with all the speaking and the writing and mother can taste it.  her silence introduces a third car as caveat and in it the belief I’m shortened by.

of a street person
playing a prosthetic leg
like a guitar

has been lost
by hell

I choose an icicle to be the mirror’s rifle as brother puts a cigarette behind sister’s ear and calls her transported.  father eats outside before smoking in.  mother does what she does for wind.  hangs a scarecrow’s keys.

I stab my father with a carrot so I can say he lives to the pacifist who broke the television we were called to witness.  I run after my children because they think they are chasing nothing down the street.  god blows two bubbles that become the eyes of a crucified man.  the last arm in the world will be a prosthetic arm made for the toddler who will die in the meat of the dying.  your father has an apple in one hand and a tomato in the other.  everyone is poor.  everyone is responsible for how it is portrayed to the bun in the oven.  the softness we reserve for women has gone to our teeth.

(all titles available on Lulu)


~



from The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake - Sept 2013, 211 pages, 10.00


the recidivist

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.        


within hail

     the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.


a country

i.

I approach the dream as if I'm asleep
the answers written on my hand

ii.

I stick out my tongue
at the mid
born

baby

iii.

I raise awareness by praying
you go through
my exact
hell

iv.

I see myself as my son
writing to his father
about deformities

v.

in a crowd of soldiers
my daughter's head
bobs up and down

as if passed around
on a stick

vi.

it takes an army to imagine
only one thing


assistance

from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

~

from father, footrace, fistfight - June 2014, 177 pages, 10.00


the gentle detail

in the time it took
his daughter
to soap
her brother’s
cradle cap

the man
was able
to lose
an entire hand.

every now
and now
he corrects me
with a puppet.

there is no place
where nothing should be.


lift

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.


deep still

ghost of snake.  

an adoration
of atypical
young mother
fear.  

mouse needs a toothache.

footwork
heads north.


1998-2014

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

~

from The Women You Take From Your Brother - Aug 2014, 351 pages, 18.00


joy and joy alone

I broke the boy on my knee because I needed a switch. we ran around an empty crib. I let him catch a breath and he let me kneel. we tiptoed in a manner of mocking past private make-up to which his mother had been softly applied. he drank tea from an eggshell and I declined. I swatted him to let him know I was dying. his bent sister fell asleep and the boy was kind enough to believe her hair was a nightgown. I swatted him again to let him know I would live. the tea was gone. the rest is sadness.


being

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

~

from Misreckon - Dec 2014, 115 pages, 9.00


clear heads

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.


untitled (ii)

afraid of my sons, I was born scared.  to my friend of few words I say

a few
words

on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered

fish
fresh
from ghosting
the underfunded
aquariums
of rapes

that occur.  at some point
I’ll tell my daughter

we’ve met.  my father

when he comes
comes

from another
dimension
to bear hug
our dinner guest
who’s arrived
in a mirror.  

mother puts a gun to her foot.


end psalm

god had an earache and I heard thunder. I learned to shrink into the smallness of my brain. I associated money with my father’s funny bone. my mother with the dual church of hide and seek. I went on to have a son with special needs. he cried once. cried milk.

~

from Eating the Animal Back to Life - July 2015, 316 pages, 10.00


off night

when what we thought
had entered
our father
left

we used him
as an alarm

god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones


neglect

it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me. some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before. some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have. when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk. god came to me sooner than most. mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to. my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for. by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.


contact high

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby. not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do. I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality. had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.


themes for country

I am at the truck
getting ice cream
for the overly
nostalgic
girl
who refused
to cut through
the cemetery

~

from Drone & Chickenhouse - Oct 2015, 84 pages, 6.00


chaos

brother drinks water enough to shock the devil. on the inside, he’s all doll. I shake him for show might our sisters travel in pairs. I used to talk but had to close my mouth when the soft spot on his head kept my mother from her toes. it’s the second stone that really lands.


deep scene

speech itself is a failed translation

dreaming is a farm

a mother
makes it as far
as mailbox

bear
to fish
there’s water
in the water

is, today’s mousetrap
tomorrow’s

shoe


language

word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

my father winks and shares that his shadow has lately been in a dark place.  he means to throw a baseball but forgets.  he secretly hates any book that says simply how a man enters a woman.  when he shrugs his shoulders I imagine his arms are the knee socks my mother tugs then clips on the line.  this brings me to a painting my mother abandoned herself in because of thunder.  in the painting she is either swimming or for some other reason face down.  not in the painting she has her mother’s eyes with which she can see herself pregnant with her mother’s belly.  father winks again and says he speaks for my mother in telling me nothing I don’t already know.  a list of curse words I repeat underwater.

the devil
puts hair
on your chest
but takes it
from your head.  

mother’s mirror
catches lice.  

I am working on my tongue because father is late.  
his speech
on narcotizing
dysfunction

is longer
now that mother
wrote it.

where no surgery
is
is where

brother
has an itch.  we call it

trouble
in the garden.

there was trouble in the garden
when I filled my father’s
foot
with blood.  I had seen

a woman’s
legs

turn
inside out
as she ******
the poison

from a gas nozzle.  legs

she didn’t need.

[cognate]

to build something inside the church
they had to close
the church

those who wouldn’t normally disappear
were said to be helping

shape began its story
with veal
and ended
with the man
dad choked
for nine
months

I imagined
foreign
injurious
objects
and my brothers

spoke
from a sandbox
of seeing

a late
deer

on the roof
of a nursing home

~

[supplication]

is voice
the shadow
of song

swimmer
whose blood
has feathers

~

[notice]

hooked on silence, oh sleep

/ long before its descent into me

~

[apple]

in defense of snake, this is my mom’s curling iron

/ ghost
a vacancy
I cannot
dismiss

~

[we got our hands on some fingerprints and did not feel poor]

the invisible man’s ghost, them polaroids

of sister’s
feet…

dream differently, microphone

~

[god and time are the same age]

a child, an oven

how both
distract
touch

~

[annihilatives]

go home, sadness

–

of exposure
to birth

~

[no kids in Eden]

door to door we are selling knock-knock jokes

I am the body
travel
came with

between my mother
and her paper
cup
I’ve heard tell
that even sorrow
has a life.

father yells
at dogs, at the necessary

born, at me
in the mirror
to turn

around
get someone
can clean
this up.  father calls

light
the unspilled
blood
of the god
we're in.  he suffers on his path

the suppressed
amnesia
of faghood.  being gay

has long been
being open
to the possibility
he’s not.

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.
for my distance from him, I am disallowed
any inquiry that would flower.
he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god
at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.
I am holding my son nostalgically. was my tooth would ache
and his tooth would ache
and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

somewhere, the mostly boy body pretends to be explored.  we are not we.  my mother ruins a sketch of my mother.  my father smokes two packs a day because online he was called prematurely haunted.  the name of your existence

is

priest retires to make umbrella for jack-in-the-box.  (her bus

is rain)

15% off all print books and free mail shipping at Lulu through the 31st with coupon code of SHIPSAVE16

my books are there.

~

some poems from books available:


[male music]

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

~

[afteresque]

what bone am I, stillness?

what can I tell my son
I carried?

what is it knows me
that isn’t god
by the humans
I am
in my sleep?

infancy, what overtakes
your period
of mourning?

~

[pocket]

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined. nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave. the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube. my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his. mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost. I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog. I have not heard of the spoon that has a past. something in my stomach wants to see a star.

~

[church bell]

the waters recede and god

good for him
saves

with the carcass
of a deer

mama’s
parking spot

/

unrelated, I have begun to see

the fat kid we surrounded for pulling a knife on a bird

I had a dream you came to me in a dream to tell me my book put you to sleep.  that a book is no way to live.  you showed no signs of being sick and your apparent health was disorienting.  a man stood behind you whose sole purpose was to know who he was before I did.  it bears repeating that over time I’ve added an all white parrot to my shoulder of choice.  on the one year anniversary of these dreams ****** preference can happen to anyone.

the boys are off to hang a turtle.  I didn’t know I felt nothing.  her father impressed a piano from puppet heaven.  but pregnancy was all god knew.

dreams my dialect coach never had. birth and the boring outcomes of immediacy. oh grief, the first to mourn the fast learner. it’s your story, but you can’t name it resurrection, your spacecraft, without considering the mortality of your audience. I sleep crooked while watching ugliness. I love my brother like a leg but he brings to choir exit music for nomads. what does god think of the future? we carry the virus that killed our ghost.

it is not suicide to bomb god’s shadow.  I am the dot my father calls button.  my son’s mind would’ve given oxygen too many places to go.  his body happened overnight.

we stomp the child monster.  my blood goes so far as to break its promise to leave my body.  a dog with a broken jaw whimpers beside the unthawed baby of the odd seamstress whose love of bubble wrap is genuine.  god says in the same voice step away from the vehicle as a boy close to his attacker touches himself under his breath.  The Jesus

can’t hear in the dark.  the last thing I see is making this up.

mother, mine, in the footage god used to justify creation.

swallow the egg before it explodes.

the future of my ant farm
is the mirror
delivers you
as advertised
to satan.

in this version of my father’s bully
I am always
a boy.

I kiss my son’s foot.
his parachute
does not
open.  I am taken

from the dream
by childbirth

just a face
I make
at god.

I panic.

a woman with a spotted neck
asks me for a drag
as if I’m hoarding
flashbacks.

is my son still sick?

would amnesia know
it’s outnumbered?

in country
I knelt
openly.

an ant carried an ant
from the shadow
of a mushroom
like luggage.

ache’s password
is ghost
I mean
what I hear

...had to put aside
for the moment
that the sick
angel
was in fact
an angel

it needed immediate attention

it said god would know
he’d helped it

not someone
you want
happy

do not open
until
I am born
this love letter
to the unreadable
child
who spoke
for god
to god
in poem
the lesser
pity

do
tell my brother
if he has not
yet

wrapped himself

in police
tape

that lightning
above a snowplow
puts a creature
on the roof

allow me, wind, my unnoticed resurrection and forgive my smaller ear. the *** we had saved to cut the bread of bilingual angels is now a ghost watching sleep improvise. church bell beats dog-whistle and rocking chair empties horse.

the boys
are not
taking turns
punching a snowman
in the face.

a car
slides by…
someone inside the car
snaps a picture.

     these Ohio winters
glaze hell
blind.

I bring
to city
a pen light
that this time
works.

earlier
in mock
fit
I shook
my head
for the blood
in my ear
and listened
to an ant.

her last words
were oil spill
or so I thought.

she went on to say
very daughter-like
poor bird, so small.

I want god overwhelmed.

my boy’s mouth
couldn’t be
anywhere.