say even god / would leave / this church

to step on the bones of a star

loneliness
is often..

loneliness is often.

personally, I touched
your food.

I brought a girl by
to see
your lost
hands-

this is when
you washed
a dish.

what one man
can do

is strike
suicide
with awe.

dismiss me, then, from the garden of ease.

pockets are fingerless gloves.

loneliness is nothing without you.
is being reincarnated
as someone
you lived with

who was given
an additional
year
by a tall
pointless

ghost.

on my way to a rose, I passed your father.

he was brushing a moth
from the ageless fly

of his eye. his body

he said
had been called
by a bell. balefire,

mine body.claimed
he’d counted
ever hill

in the midwest. his bike

he’d pushed up
all three. in the late field

your father
did not ask.

I told him you were.

heartbeat is god has a drum.  footprint is they held her down to comb the beach.  handful is the blowing of bubbles into falling ash.  bloodwork is the soft biting the soft on the subway.  body type is baby.  see:  commonly evacuated cities.  eye is eyewear for the beheld.  mouth is you’re good with your mouth.  soul is god doesn’t.

only god himself can enter the church of the easily missed

so make
of boy
a stray
being

the man began by pointing at the spots on the baby’s head and then he looked to us as if we were to answer for each.  he turned the baby’s head carefully- it might’ve been an old globe to him.  he apologized more than once for his age pocked hands.  his apologies were unsettling, each one moreso than the last.  his assistant minded none of this and sat reading an upside down newspaper while curling and uncurling her bare toes at no discernible prompt.  when the baby squealed the man went pale and dropped it and his coat opened and we saw his naked wrinkled middle turn to ash and we saw the baby scooped up by the feet of his assistant and then saw the baby fit in her mouth.  she never moved from her chair to do the scooping or the placing and we were horrified as she righted the paper and silently admonished the man for being momentarily vacant as to the whereabouts of her shoes.  he went to his fours and nosed the shoes to her feet and we said amen to the tail of his coat.  the assistant then stood and as she did so the man made swallowing noises and because we’d said amen together we were able to form a search party from which we periodically broke to *******.

I try, but can’t make my bed. mom says maybe I’m grief. after coming back to touch me, she wishes herself a bird.

I hope she eats.

–

then

I had a word for marble that wasn’t marble. both were swallowed.

–

thirst is not the same as forgetting to drink. god talks up his handicapped friend.

had he not been all those years
writing a review
for the last book
in the world
my father
would’ve been
a poet

there are only so many crows
one can see
outside a laundromat
for the drowned, scarless hawks

so maternally nudged
into the travelogue
of my staying

we peck
in the darkroom
at the wrist
of a fish
our body language
proofing
the baby’s
dream

a year older than his violence

the over-feeder
of goldfish, the quietest lover
of his voice

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

the first person to use these steps went down these steps. violence is the new past. I see a dove and think god will never know who it was ate his crushed light bulb. I betray my ear. the seashell of the stomach.

at a time
unlike this

the father
is all
appetite

the chicken, gone
he points

to its ghost…

–

my mouth
is a church, my clock
a Sunday spider

in a dry
toilet

–

(I’m passionate about my grief)

your shadow

dolled up
in the yard

–

cyborg, minotaur

not once
did I watch
them sleep

shape is a future fashioned from god’s inability to reflect

–

(she thinks her hair came from an egg. she is not alone.)

–

there’s nothing in the food

upon my double
being seen
I am set
to self
destruct

I am no sadder
than twin, no sadder
than dog…

my wrist
is nothing’s
neck

dream is a boy dressed as his abuser sizing aquariums for the hand of a spider

life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage

dream a grave dreaming
of a cactus
for nothing’s
crow

night is the sound of my father’s adding machine. of mother narrating the life of a stone. lake is my brother’s action figure learning to swim on a full stomach. lake is a bird going from dream to dream as a mouse. hole is anything I bring home that isn’t my body. home from the city where sisters drink in silence to footnotes of future fictions.

I don’t know what she saw
in that jar

but she’s been hours

rubbing
my head
with a balloon…

dad switches out the bag on her head
and slips something in my mouth
while saying
mouse
in the dollhouse

I doze for a moment and see a priest
pretend to fall
from a horse, and a stork

act
as it should

I see myself
a form
forged
by a twin, a reincarnation

that perhaps impressed
my photographer
son

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.

the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things

that are also

no knife in the dog of absence. not a scratch on wind’s throat. winged things that belong to the tooth in your shoulder. lipstick. the unhummed ribs of your wrist.

suicide took the person she was named during.

I am old, here. a klutz abstaining from revelation.

bald as any
lover
of maps.

and there I was, sad

my robot
giving hell
to an elevator

and I was forty-one
and still not there
the day that kid
got beat up
for keeping sadness
close

and I was never the poorest
in any room

is this what being poor means or meant

grief
that we can brush at the fossil
of grief

body

like some use an alias. fingerprints

manna
for hand.

–

I was dreaming I guess
in the face of brevity

–

of god’s glassrabbit ocean

angel of the old well
speaks to god
in rabbit, I wish

jack-in-the-box
your films
were longer

what
will I never
see

lost
arachnid, a triangle

drawn
by others-

my legs make me lonely.

dream, put me down.

pills
minus the pills
given
by shepherd

I see single.

a girl not hop-
scotching
behind a man
who could be my
but is her

father
dropping
what is
half smoked
for her
then right
then left
bare

shoe

(a shoe is and can be bare)

they seem okay

the money he’s made
is delusional.

he comes to me with an aluminum hat
and warns me of a remote
area
that will soon take
the wrong
shack.

he watches as my mother
caresses god
with the cyclops myth
of touch.  

how many times has she washed
the defaced coin
of my stubborn look?  

though I value
over dialogue
the useless baby,

in what month is your soul?

the spell we’re under for mocking the wrong ballerina

it learned here to roll over

there
to be
on fire

childhoods of dog-breath and wand

playing kitchen
for the cup
game
of grief

the blind drunk
sees

a mouse

some entries from poem sequence [returning]:

~~~~

my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.

~~~~

there are pictures of me sleeping that are responsible for my brother cheating on his diet.  apples the shape of going home.  *** addicts fighting to direct a musical about the number of people disappearing

to let death
mourn.  there is a chair in an open field.  a throbbing in the palm of sound’s publisher.  a kid under a blanket asking god

when did she know
what perfection
was.  a mouth that was a bomb

/ before I had teeth

~~~~

with sound
the second language
of absence, with

mother, bible, bee

(I am trying to memorize missing you

~~~~

church
of the removed
stitch. what I would bite

to have your mouth.

~~~~

in the history of newborns
not one is named

shelter, and we’ve called

only two
attraction…

my dream priest
dies
in the desert
after making
with death
a movie, no...

the blood’s
search
for brain

~~~~

they took
the body

lamb
stayed with star

~~~~

you can train
a bird
but not
a fish
to care

for a thumb...

fire is the skin of god

~~~~

a father
at peace
with how many times
his hair
has died
is standing
in a museum
before the shell
of a giant
turtle

his infant’s mouth
has gone home
to lose
its shape

he is alone
like any
grocery cart

some
cribs

~~~~

place a wet diaper on a skateboard and send the skateboard across a non-busy street. we call this summer. the older kids arrange on a stretcher the pieces of a woman’s bathing suit. the older kids come for the skateboard. our tortured turtle is bad with names. the tractor has yet to reach the deer. this is also summer. the orphan keeps two diaries.

to god

god is
to some

some bread, some snow.

to a recovering aesthete
such as yourself

god
is an occupational
hazard.  to collectors

of inexperience

such as
the virgins
god, as subconscious

measure, created-

god is the vague
self-involvement
the mind
for body

devours.  to the parents

I brought upon
myself

god
is what
appears.

a man turns a brick into a bird, yeah

call beautiful
what you can.

bird has no idea

and my home
is there.

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 my father being gay

so you know
what it is
you have

(felt,
there is)

an emoticon

at the end
of this
book


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.