a street vendor’s cup game in three geese.

a slim parade.  even the clowns.

a bus stop where you can  
brush your hair.  

a girl’s arm
based on
loosely
others.

a cell phone beside a dog.  ringing, then not.

a notice, a nail-  the police cannot save them all
they are leaves
after all.

a returned
front room
window.  left to right
the life
in it;  the van of flowers.

writing her leg:  dear leg, I’ve written
your cast.  

two men saying yep.  then nothing.  then a third man
late with
yep.

divorce.  but I would be remiss
to drop
its equal-
a baton.                        

candy wrappers at the base of an oak
we call
tree.  

a boy walking his fingers into his mother’s purse.  a boy and a purse

that abandoned year.

I can’t write about angels when I’m drunk.  my father’s blood

dries
on the hand
of a mannequin
in a shop
I no longer
own.  the drugs I take

I take only
when brother
has a bike.

the angels I refer to

refer
to my mother’s
bib.

in the scene,
I happen upon
an off-duty
cop
whose leg
is pinned
beneath
a vandalized
carousel
horse.

the kid
I carry
on my back
stirs
in my father’s
sleep
and I’m in
my brother’s
tree

again

dropping
the cigarette
that will miss
my mom.  

I’ve started the cry
that can’t
begin.

I burn
sticks
for dreaming
dogs

/ forgiveness

you empty
crow

father
son
I saw them ****
out of hunger
the angel
could prepare
angel

-

it is wholly birdlike
the thought
that brings oil
to god

-

the sleeping alien
is not without
its headless
astronaut  (the first thing

-

one sees
hallucinates

the owl-headed man
what
can he do
in the crocodile’s
dream
of disappearing
lamb
but watch
the egging
of a hearse…

Ohio
a woman
found dead
in a cake

after the mugging, my father was asked
to describe the assailant

a man with a gun
who looks like
he’s just seen
two
ghosts-

I am still waiting to hear about my son’s color.
he’s been in the bath for hours.
his pruned fingertips
for him
are a first.

I would rather come from soot
than dream.

sacrifice 2

Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.

sacrifice 6

we look all the time at dying and call it stargazing then while whale watching someone says you know alcohol disrupts your sleep

sacrifice 1

Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.

sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.

sacrifice 3

God
a mere
flare
Creation’s
signal
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing

sacrifice 5

I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.

Before death dies does it see every lived thing

I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first

It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.

Any last silence

sacrifice 8

Gaze
Is a lost
Film
Filmed
In the seen
Abyss
As memorized
By a mother’s
Basilisk
Star
I don’t
Say after
Life
Around rabbits
Cigarettes
Give the dead
Roots
Made of smoke
Gaze is the unnamed
Limb of sight
Time a pause
God takes
In the post
Angel
Tantrum
Of a carpenter
Ghosting the ghost
Garden yield
Of his father’s
Pawprint moon
Loss
Has bones
All of them
Found
Fact
After sobbing
Fact

sacrifice 7

I want all hounds to sleep through their death. I hate grief, but not for the reason you think. I am less weird.

Thunder forgets
its god.

Television, our widowed star.

I’m in all of my dreams.

fish
fishing
for grief
idk
I always
cried
near spiders
so made
to display
their hunger

before the feast
there is one
erasing
the doll’s
eyebrows

the hostile witness
left her dorm room
to the daughter
I always wanted.

my son secretly existed
to burn live music.

the baby had nothing between its ears.

my wife saw the light
that was god
that to her
was bait.

god’s brain was devoured by a stone.

I saw my father. he was on his second bird.

his teeth were yellow.
or yellowish.

little doors, little me.

a room of real yellow.

sad prom music** (i)

the boy is wearing heels because he doesn’t live with his mother.  his right ankle pops and he breaks his nose on a puddle of evil.  a machine with a baseball in it shudders.  we throw cigarette butts at a girl jumping rope.  the boy stops what his eyes continue.


sad prom music (ii)

movie on with no one in it.  you scratch your son’s arm.  he is made of train sounds you make yourself.  the movie is terrible but is surely just as terrible far away.  you are not waiting to hear anything god hasn’t said better to doctors young and old.  you’re not drunk but your eyes are.  a nightlight in every outlet.

dear pilot of my father’s animal

dear tree
the ahistoric
ghost

dear space
blood

the soldier's father sleeps so as not to be occupied by the exhaustion of a civilian whose mother was killed for harboring a pedestrian insomnia inside of her daughter who was removed from the war for shooting at herself and missing and for shooting at herself and missing again-

I have to pull her bullets from the no eyed mule my memory puts to work.  father is a blindfold.  the soldier not a homeland.

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