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.

a person goes dark.  night shifts disappear.  a lone panic capsizes the anatomically correct.  men fill up on mouthwash.  men float.  women bite their tongues in half before they can say women and children.  insomnia becomes more than the over-hyped novelization of insomnia.  a boy draws a cutlass in a broom closet and is told he can’t sleep.  I begin to want more from a diagnosis.  a kite being flown in hell by a son gone pro.