the coloring books, the angel

wardrobe, the maternal

scoliosis

i.

diapered
fat legged

baby, propped in posture
by a stack of wet bricks
the flooded basement

provides     and provides

often

ii.          

     baby, under foot

bedpan for the sadness
of the upright

iii.

I stand
to sleep
standing

the boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar.  his mother is somewhere a girl set to play the moon in her school’s version of talent night.  his sister is giving birth so calmly her midwife is a male blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold I wore to fish.  his brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke.

sister spent the summer making a horror film.
she had begun to show and father was wanting to be sober.
the depth of our poverty knew no mirror. here’s how mom said it:
mirra, mirra. it made us laugh, leave, and come back.

I relayed the lie I was told about paint drying to my brother.  he put his hands on my shoulders and resumed a sobbing he didn’t start.  I couldn’t see the wheels turning in his head but he could.  he drew for me what I thought was a sketch of god’s little tormentor.  it wasn’t a sketch.  our future interactions were followed.

inside me, the baby
is eating
snow

-

the phone is on
in my turned
off
home

-

at the top of the hill
a boy means
to hop on the disc
with his dog

-

bring back
a memory?

I am too poor

as proof of shyness. as death

rounded down.

nothing could have prepared her for life in the womb.

not an ear in the shape of god’s mouth

nor a blind hand
in a woolen glove.

as sure as death
does its job
to keep one
from further
dying

I carry

my boy
to bed
where I remove
his remaining
shoe
and am seen
doing so
by my wife
who thinks of me
as one
who acts

in theory
on a thought
to ****
some spider

we both know
we’ve lost

my daughter is seized by a dream to endure her mother’s preoccupation with death.  while waiting for his pillow’s heart to stop, my son resolves to keep the mirror’s brain.  that each might skip the parts I’ve memorized, I read to them from a room I’ve put on the spot.  when we pray, we’ll pray we were here to the idea we are.

could be
god
is god
because
our world
is the least
of his father’s
worries

I put a make believe woman through hell.

I worship the devil.
I worship the devil because my dog drowns in a water bowl.

I pass the time writing holy, holy.  

I condemn my body
as I need  
proof.  

I say to a particular no one a boy after my own heart.

I’m not sure what makes mother power off the television.
she moans afterward as if it is the great work of her neck.  

I keep an appointment to be blinded by a window washer.

every other word of my father’s autobiography
    is not so strange.

if I hadn’t ****** myself in second grade, Hector might have.
his brothers would’ve beaten him.  his unborn sister
would’ve been premature
on purpose.

    I can count on your hand the Hectors we know.

it could be that mother worries we are wildlife.
she wrote once

    depression is a dog whistle.  I missed dinner sounding it out.

between me and you, you’re the private
sort
of person
women
like.

father waits for the empty elevator.  in dream, he understands the holiness of such a place and takes to mourning the momentary loss of his interpreter.  he gives me a toy and blesses it with what he calls alone time.  his exact words are you have to like it before you’re asked.  you sleep on the stairs in a house you enter shoeless.  stay put.  the movers of my bed move my death.

the demon ***** a child in the dream of yours where it first appeared  

the mother gets less and less attention for being born

the baby uncrosses its eyes

at a lone ******, I lose hours to the handstand
the occupiers
of my city
worship

proof a mosquito in the gravedigger’s ear

kid with dog, I know, not what you’re thinking of my midwestern peace ****.  for lightning burn a stick above advancing plastic army.  make zeroed the black kid with red dog.  this I can follow.  my loyalty to shame and to the poorness of my spirit’s ghost.  god drawing himself in god’s raffle.  a woman with cigarette on a zoo outing.  bold I make her in images mine.  I stalk, don’t worry, I tell her myself.  it’ll pass being tired of god.

in the gospel to revise apocalypse
one cannot abridge obsession

one can however
follow a man
pushing his son
in a wheelchair

to a word and that word
is amen

-

for the time the wheelchair wields a person
it will use the person
to leave the dead

alone

-

but oh
to sink into the living
with such a contraption
is impossible

loss goes unnoticed.  

I made for you
a scarecrow
from the textbook
violence
of a midwestern
poltergeist
as lightning
took a step
from the baby
I crawled
beside.

be
not memorably
young.

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

**** I carry my untouched handprint into the past disappearance of a photographed leaf. Pain and sickness lose each their memory but lose god’s first. It’s dark in the dark. Lift a spider’s broken finger.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

In reverse, the baby looks like it's helping the doctors build a machine. I smoke on the roof and my brother gets a nosebleed in the cellar of a house we're not going to buy. Art invents time to impress pain.

SMALL POEMS AGAINST DYING

Erasing the scarecrow’s ankle with a cigarette.

Cutting the hair of the crucified.

Stars
and jobs
and stars.

god
is for tying
the tongue
in the blank
face

it passes
for meaning

kissing
is how we kiss
the nail’s
brain

if my brother was too long in the bathroom I would begin to think I was handsome. fairly early on, I was able to square myself in the mirror and land a couple good ones. at the height of my endeavor I lost a tooth that had been loose for three days but I gave it to my pride nonetheless. from there, I hadn’t much hope. my brother was less and less able to stand himself and the bathroom became more and more mine. when my arm muscles began to bulge I was afraid I’d hurt myself and so I let them slacken and went so far as to draw on paper the plans for a homemade stall to restrict my movements. my brother had always been the artist and so I entered without knocking and found him face down in the tub. I shouldn’t have been able to lift him. my parents were good people and worried gently about what I had seen. I thought they must’ve known I was ugly.

i.

I watch my cigarette make the water and step from the dock onto my father’s boat.  a large fish moves from beneath it and I sense the fish is of a tearful species of fish and sense that to it my father’s boat was a shadow.  alas, fish, I am trying to know the first thing about boats.  

ii.

my father makes it hard for the cops because he isn’t hurting anyone.  he avails himself of the dense novel and uses his ***** to camouflage the riding horse.  he goes headlong up the slide and enters a realm where he is embraced for blowing a tooth from his nose.  by the time he’s using the seesaw as a surfboard, he feels the cops haven’t had enough.

iii.

my father is asleep on his back with a book across his chest and my sister nudges me like it’s never happened.  I ask her what she sees and she sees a man missing his glasses because they are on his face.  for me, it takes two fathers to begin the long process of choosing an epitaph.

iv.

I cannot mention my brother without mentioning how in that old farmhouse he saw a ghost leaning over the bathtub wearing nothing but a yellow rain slicker and how he used ten of his eleven years to push my father down the stairs while screaming don’t look don’t look

enough to make ****** mary jealous.  also how brother denied it later and called it a joke but I knew better because after the sighting I began to see my brother everywhere which made it easy for me to be there for my mother.

v.

presence is a petition.

I don’t know why it is that this thing in my father merely comes loose when in me it disappears, but am grateful that my mother can hear him getting ready for church no matter the rattling of my hunger at the weepy shapelessness of spoons.

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.

A horse and a moth pass through heaven where heaven used to be

All my friends are quiet

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 *******.

One is born
with one’s
own language

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