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

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 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.

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

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.

suicide took the person she was named during.

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

bald as any
lover
of maps.

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

life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage

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

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.

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

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

a year older than his violence

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

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

pills
minus the pills
given
by shepherd

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

the abandoned books of women

hurry, grief, your mice
to a nearby
field.

close, silence, your mouth
in the ****** scar
of mine.

distill, wind, the river
your ****
fiction.

scarecrow
if I am worn, let me help you

undress.

loss of the family dog

be alone. enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress
window shopping
for a red.

know

that in between heaven and hell, there is war. hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell. hell sleeps more than your sister in love. heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

annotations for daughter*

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.

.....

also:

for those interested, I have 15 signed copies of my full length poetry collection *‘earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from’ (Dec 2015, 98 pages) and 8 signed copies of my full length poetry collection ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015, 316 pages) that I’d love to mail, free of charge, for sharing and/or for burning. send me a message with a physical address along with the collection desired if this is something one hand or two of yours would like.

( Barton)

[airways]

I move
tonight
(while he’s
asleep)
my son’s
finger

across
my throat
/ everyone

wants to publish
my sister’s
ghost  

~

[confetti, glitter, sadness.]

to get news
in heaven
from other parts
of heaven
do you know
what it’s like
god’s blood
has fleas

~

[gulf musics]

two bodies of loneliness separated by the same beauty

(sea)

the eardrums of extra mothers

~

[soon musics]

i.

loss is lucky
to hear once
from absence

ii.

pregnant / reading fiction / to god

~

[aster musics]

i.

a god / whose god / has only / just died

that we understand
but cannot
by it
be understood

ii.

a deleted infant’s blank thirst

iii.

I thought it lost, a meal

our language
finished

iv.

or

v.

a ghosted

grasshopper’s
thumb / the sole / possession

of the brainless
calf

~

[a scene based on the need for such]

boy

(whose blood
is a fairy tale
kept
in his brain)

(who sees himself
reciting
for threesomes
the denial
of peter)

has his mother
cut the gum
from his hair

~

[vacancy musics]

how priest-like
my father is, the biter
of his own
breast, in the church
of my sister’s

bluer
moon

~

[on peacelessness]

no jump
scare
this losing
of child
to sheepish
math

~

[drift musics]

you won’t
drink it
but ask
anyway
for a glass
of milk.

vigil.

that bone you broke
while swimming.

[inspected musics]

with birth
we’ve bookmarked

the awestruck / god

still hates
his artist
sister / her flytraps

hang
in hell

/

[access musics]

I have a friend whose father called every basement the devil’s treehouse. a friend who’s here today because she hid a knife. whose brother met god too early on the path to god and whose mother would jump from anything to fix a tooth…

there are people who don’t smoke
who want to

when it rains

/

[thorn]

the dream
bread
of insect, horn

of dust

/

[Ohio musics]

a call-in radio show
whose listeners
are asked
to describe
loneliness
in their own words

(******

farness)

to a coal worker
or a clown

/

[corpse musics]

bread leaves home and food / comes for all / in animal / metaphors / favored / by god

/

[remote musics]

I write in this tongue and pray in another.  

we sleep
and are kissed
by an ear
in three
beds:  train, cow, frog.  

if you’ve seen one roach,
you’ve seen them all.  that’s where they come from.

[response musics (i)]

what nostalgia is to angel, eyesore is to animal

most mothers
hate
being filmed

there is the way I hold my son
& there is
the way I hold my son
while running
in place

tornado means
I am touched
in a house
with no
basement

wherever it is your father goes
the postcards
there
are small

oh to see jesus
walk at all

~

[response musics (ii)]

I thought girlhood the boyhood of grief

childcare, handprints, the failed hearts
of octopi

toy / on a stair / left there / by doll

god (memory)
making its way
through the useless
infant

myself
an impressionist

(because all

my mothers
faint

~

[a prayer for the tall mother whose cigarettes void brevity]

piano that disappeared
milk
that didn’t…

feather in the stomach
of my angel’s ghost

~

[cleaning the body small and boy]

the brain a ****
in the remoteness of god

~

[removal musics (ix)]

what a quick study
addiction is

this longing
my father’s

(her childhood a pinning of morose insects)

no horse but maybe
one
that pillows
a tree’s
broken
hip-

this poem, lonely expert
in a town of goats

~

[guest musics]

sand in her ear
she goes
as a seashell
her small
joke
a way
of living
on land
with the ghost
of her unbathed
child
her mother
calling clothesline
the scarecrow’s
scarecrow

~

[how to make a body]

sleep
until you feel
it passing
the slow
mattress
drowsy
and afloat
designed
for god

throw anything
you can find

stick, stone, nest, honeycomb

bird
the weight
of wasp

- name
what lands
with a friend
you can touch

~

[being alone went by so fast]

we have in my city a museum just like this. I, too, am private and have lost an unabsorbed child. I am,

inventory, very motherly.

this one-man radio show about a father looking for his mouth. this tornado.

my first owl was a bee-loving tick. my first milk
was jigsaw

milk. being alone went by so fast.

~

[musics, other]

mother’s
farsick
palm, father’s

pack
of disappearing
nails-

our goldfish
insomnia

~

[toying with object permanence in kidnapper’s invisible world]

how
to unfossil
the mourned
boy
kissed
we believe
on the wrist
by
(we don’t)
the last
to experience
déjà vu

~

[lawn musics]

books on arson, grammar, vandalism…

god, multiple owners.

a typewriter
touched by father
at night.

the electric chair my brother imagined
& the hair
my sister...

adam (who’s never known the age of eve

[removal musics (ii)]

how naked
the alien
as it paints
pictures

(nest
after nest)
for the ghost

of a bird
birds
want

~

[altar musics]

you were not wrong

(child)

to come out
scared

(thought you’d be)

my haunted
proof

of lisp

(and home)
yourself

~

[having a disabled child]

means
it is enough
this morn
that the weak
kneed
angel
of small
hands
dreams
from the disposal
the rabbit’s
foot

~

[son musics]

i.

the ambulance
the fog’s
chapel

ii.

the angel
obsessed
with a human

ear, the overbite

iii.

common
in creatures
of departure

~

[fact musics]

my dad’s
second book

how to look
for teeth
in the rain

forgotten
like every
spaceship

sister
            saw

[removal musics (x)]

this father
handing bibles
to prison scene
extras, his sadness

sorrow’s
nondescript
editor…

the drive-in’s
elegiac
dog
/ nose
to the scarcity
of theatrical
emptiness…

the fish a cigarette burn on the body of god
gets bigger
over time....

how unfair
to insomnia
the monster
with child

~

[give god my space in the unleft church]

as you count on your teeth the losses
I’ve turned
to stone

~

[no musics]

I am to bed without supper for hiding my face from the lord. in the city, my brother is handcuffed for biting his wrists. still unborn is the calf that invented sadness. do I look like what you feel when you look at me? I think there is only hell.

[I still bring snow]

I think mom’s new dog must have the bones of a kite. I have a lover, now. a he, a beekeeper. a she if she saddens in the nearness. a nothing, a dowry. ghost china. spacesuits for stillborns. under this blanket, a puppet reads to a doll about light. under that, the shape of what goes blind in a poem. I miss you. plural. I don’t wash my forehead. I still bring snow.

~

[house musics]

no star foreign, brother kisses a spiderless ceiling.

the diver
dead
our father
loved

~

[untitled]

a sick child can be in two stories at once. anthill. calvary. tell neither. I feel like maybe I am talking my way up the dollmaker’s ladder. eat? I won’t the black duckling. god

won’t the owl. angels

just birds
that faint.

~

[response musics (iii)]

...weigh god in photos. free a crow from the gospel of the negative. (we) revisit the medicines. call you dead and call you hawk gone to curl in the lap of a cyclops. ask (we ask) for what landbound thing did your body carry time? your past, every year, the same spot. thing never shows.

~

[response musics (iv)]

a run on mirrors. lowkey exorcisms.

wheelchair, lamb’s minus
one.

mom and the angel
of last
names. dad

and the snowplow.

dad and the ballet slipper.

yea the shadow
of his yawn.

~

[removal musics (xi)]

it’s always your story to which the afterlife gets added. did you even want children? do crows

hear thunder? no butcher believes in time.

~

[how I want you to remember my sister]

in a puppet show
about washing
my son’s
feet, or waving down

the ice cream truck
with her bible, or

as farewell

to nothing’s
church
of neither

~

[pseudo]

between the house of the first suicide
and the house of the second
there’s one
with a dog door.

the moms all work at the same ghost jail.

the dads say things like

/ finally a parrot I can hear / & / in hell
nobody steps
on their reading
glasses.

the dream is there we put our mouths on. our hands.
the dream
that was nest.

brothers dressed like jesus
brush their teeth
and sisters
keep a tender
thumb.

~

[takeaways from his speech to the poor about what happens overnight]

horror movies are all the same.

babies can’t get amnesia.

I once pointed a starting gun at the head of a thing that wasn’t looking.

sleep is the christ of the mind.

~

[dream saw and dream tooth]

to be
as asleep
as a father’s
left leg

as a birthday
for a window

~

[removal musics (xii)]

if childless, we call it mother.  

-

how long
did you fake
being young?

-

this part / of her poem / is empty

-

three men remove my shoes

-

translates

to yesterbed

-
  
self-portrait in milk

[confession musics]

I planted
a gun
on myself
in a dream, also

dad
I was faking
sleep

sometimes death

~

[blank elegy]

after death
nothing
(oh citizen)
of god

~

[phase musics]

not all of us have a sister and not all of us have a sister whose first job was to run security for a petting zoo.

not even in dream does she have her own room.

her lifetime of sickness
god’s
hidden fondness
for

/ the tattoo.

when she gives birth she gives birth in a field
to a thing that records
her lost
nothingness

& we visit

where ****
we cricket.

~

[diagnosis musics]

what moon
were you on
when you lit
that match

when they could still be made

the sounds
that choke
your son

~

[prognosis musics]

get a rabbit.

put a penny in the microwave.

run.

ask
for a third
breast

any
size.  burn

on a kiss

your son’s
foot.

pretend every day

it’s just
for one.

~

[known musics]

as a birthmark
on a fingernail
the boy
is young
and scratches
into mother
the unauthored
south
of illness

-

photo is a color
is a scar
raised
on or by
(**** it)
the moon

-

I have my health / can hide

from god

[tunnel musics]

metaphor to grief: one hand grows faster than the other. blood is just milk that can’t see. the way you hold a gun makes me think of a baby’s ear. I do not want a long life.

~

[***]

in how many dreams have you appeared

that were not
at first
yours

-

hey

-

in movies

-

when streetlights go out one by one

I don’t feel
Interrupted

~

[treaty, grief, moon]

no clock
fast
we live
in the house
beside the house
we bought

treaty, grief, moon

some far
tornado

some nakedness

~

[returning]

he takes baths instead of showers

the boy
who believes
in ghosts

~

[returning]

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain.  no cricket you hear is alone.  in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong.  his first sad poem is about an oven.  his second calls dust the blood of a seashell.  his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon.  my friends they are made of grief and brilliance.  they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft.  I sleep and my sister paints my nails.  kisses my head.  she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.  

~

[having a disabled child]

means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism

~

[I have avoided hugging those who miss your phantom limb]

no windows, ghost bird.  

lo a mirror that picks a side.  lo in rock the bones of bee.    

~

[lapses]

we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog

it is good, you say, absence
with faces

and what / from the fire / would you

breathing machine
or canary

who has
a canary

~

[removal musics (xiii)]

has hunger
an ear

do barbers
when lonely
jog

is there glass
in your belly button, is this

why you feed
the unfinished
babe

what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh

question-

by know we’d know
god lost
a father

~

[a delicacy, here, this harm]

mother my eyes
my longest
miracle

mother my bones

I owl
your voice
above my son
how much hair

can christ
swallow, is it human

to want
for the uni
cyclist

a more
cinematic

church

BURNINGS

~

church

entering the body after a stroke

~

milk

my shadow made of grass

~

cow

dumbly regarding another’s art

-

radio

grandpa cursing outside
then inside
the barn

~

crow

we don’t use the crow

~

owl

pillow for which the night has long been looking

~

yawn

moaning
into mother
my father’s

swimmer’s
ear

~

high-dive

or a very private room

~

***

two
as if they fear
a third

~

suicide

might I record
this moment?

~

divination

found alone in a ******* *******

~

angels

mystique
that surrounds
a small town
search party

~

blood

******* from the reader of my palm

~

drone

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

~

chthonic

a prayer asking god to brush your teeth

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.

it is like trying to pinpoint the body’s first secret.  dear depressed woman.  unpopulated cities abound.  a screenwriter has a ******* and one is supposed to say what exactly train sounds trigger.  the human head passed around at a party.  partially, but also.  the human head my life parades with confidence.  past children sitting on their hands to make them sleepy.  into something even the third act would understand.

nose to nose, my hands under his armpits and his hands soft and missing.
his legs holding onto his feet and the river or the rug pulling away.
I haven’t looked at anyone like this.

if somewhere a knife slips in and out of consciousness, I don’t care.
it will not be news.

not at the same time will I break every bone in your body. god can brush his know-nothing tree. satan run a bath for a hole.

your mother, she’ll eat you in shifts.

a sort of
human
grief

in the dog’s
mouth-

a stick man’s arm, or leg, or crutch.
something

from the world of sticks.