I am my own worst departure.

my father
a rock
trapped
in the worried dream
of his contortionist
mother.

I am gentle with the baby
though it screams
his face is getting away.

whose face
I want to know
before passing my want
onto a morse code
present in most
blackbirds.

speaking of blackbirds

I hear one has been tapped
to become
the dying parrot
of a priest
who’s fashioned
from a still
moving
train car

this church
that must’ve been
torture.

as you are sworn
to silence
by the man
your father
skips lunch
to feed

it is okay
to drift
between

(stay with me)

brother
suicide
and brother
note

the twins
of an only

sorrow

every day is a scar’s birthday*.  this is how I am able to start most of your sentences.  I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out.  on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified.  the termites fled your blood.  a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick.  the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness.  your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright.  for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries.  a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.

error

in the story
a father tells
to blood flow

of how
she became
eyesight / sloth

in the maker
of kites

since the bee sting, my son is a staccato of worry.  in his six year old frame there is not room enough for any belief that isn’t a bumblebee waiting six years for him and him alone.  I have to enter that darkness.  even with the catcalls of real suffering.  even cradling

your daughter.

being operated on
helps me sleep.

I was your age
when nothing
had been done.

the turtle in my father’s backpack,
the turtle loose
on a moving
school bus.

I crawled into my mother’s bed
and waited
for my nose to bleed.

you find the cut
like you find
where your daughter
is cut.

a sister ties
knot after knot
and opens
a window
only to *****
in a downstairs bathroom
from a fear
of heights.

god from a previous marriage.

as a ****** on finger becomes a borrowed cigarette,

what we don’t talk about
when we do
pools into mother’s
fat shadow
and / or

pregnancy
glow.

the man slaps himself
so hard
I am sure
the mirror’s memory
is for show.

god is god because he continues to believe
he willed himself into being.

my boy drags his feet.

rest the eyes
above ground.

I am in the saddest grocery
waiting with my mother
for the happiest
bike repair
to open.

the head deformed
is what the head
would want.

a shy band kid with a patch over his left eye

a crucifix stuffed in the front of his jeans

showing some belly
    its button made for the head
    of his small
    jesus

barefoots his dead father’s river

    cuts his heels
    each on a half of a split beer can

and is seen
by one of two boys

their treehouse
decorated
with stolen things

all abused

a brother sleepwalks and beats his sister. daylight, brother looks for her abuser but can’t stay awake long enough to catch the person he doesn’t know he is. sister fears what he may become. I have two children, Object and Permanence. they examine my spotless body

like aliens

who cannot hurt their own but want to.

–

boy has no name
so town
has no name

–

when my younger brother was born, his program made him human. because of this, my mother was thrown in jail. my own program gives me the power to look like anyone I’ve seen. I need you to write down what you look like because it’s me to the rescue.

–

her hand is a ray gun that can only stun babies not yet born. her grief is a time machine that wants to grow old.

–

as they had no memories of being children, mom pretended she had been their mother and told them stories of the funny ways they’d been in trouble.

i.

talk myself outta church.

ii.

ain’t sad enough not to goof on a tricycle.  jesus.

iii.

nuns in garters.  I can’t remember
or be expected to
all

the titles.  but that one, we’d out

our knuckles.  

iv.

she slid under me.  it was like
she was able,

had space.
 
v.

I loved a boy for his dog.  broke a ruler
for my ****
in half.  after that,

did things to my knee.

vi.

are afraid most water snakes of water.  spend they
lives

being fast.

vii.

to keep us from being poor
my dad
kept us

in one room
at a time
so we’d have rooms

all over.

viii.

batman’s mom had pearls.  made it hard for me not to be
******-up.
 
ix.

storms don’t have doors.  imagine my talk.

[story]

on the shell of my brother’s first turtle

the inscription

campfire
at the end
of the world

~

[impact]

as for the tree’s supposed headache, I don’t want to give it teeth.

your twin has tried to leave a dream.

~

[his body a small sorrow]

the proofreader
of grief

~

[akin]

just born and his bones go south.  cigarette, first-aid, airport.  off-brand invisible ink: a memoir.  I want knowledge to be sadness.  cassettes went away because we stopped recording god.

~

[you were born the day your body came for you]  

photograph
what you cannot
lift

~

[white movie]

death’s dog wouldn’t **** a pony
says the man only men can hear.  

repeat after me
says the baby.  
nothing’s publicist.

for you I would covet the broken arm of a snake

in grief’s
heaven

two brothers come to blows over which sister likes fast food more.  a man we want to love is shadowboxing a snowdrift from the parable of touch.  blood is a food group.  I pray to my hair.  call my footwork by name.  take my time

with amnesia.  

baby facts include being born again in the museum you were carried to.

I lift baby onto my back.  baby is twenty nine years of outsider atmosphere.  baby swallows and my stomach becomes the pecking in my stomach.  baby is distracted by the attention eternity demands.  baby drops and my mind enters a snowball disappearing centermost of a dark summer pond.  baby’s mother rafts workaholic to where work suffers to invent for the harmless

today this trap door
for an unfinished
fly.

I was an entire baby and then a picture of me as a baby.  I had as part of the **** shaming process a father wheeled in and out of the sun.  here is a boy with a red brick looking for an anthill.  the sun was out.  I brushed from her bare back a piece of straw and it stuck to my leg.  in the barn I built another barn so I could go to both.  here is the eater of stones in the privacy of an outhouse.  I lie to her face and then to nostalgia’s outlook.  the collapse of my favorite cow is followed by the cow’s collapse.

the poor are beaten
from the future

they get off work
the day is hot
it's ungodly

as ungodly as placing a single chair in a garage

the poor get home
the chair remains in the present

the dog
can't afford to be here
appears mid-scene
in the backyard

the poor imagine
an electric fence
scrounge together
the amount they would pay
to fix it

& smile as they would smile
at the mindless sap
whose job it would be

whose chair it is

a father and son argue outside a small town barbershop in windless ten degree weather.  inside the shop, which is closed, the barber’s wife is clipping away at a wig.  nearby, and quite by accident, an invisible man uncovers a fainting spell before which some will disrobe.  namely, women declaring that the eye is always naked.  who are these women?, ask my teeth, which are snow.

father arrived
with a convincing
deafness
in one ear
a broken pair
of handcuffs
he'd named
the left hand of god-

mother had called him from sleep
with a birthmark my mouth

the letter of our father’s suffering gets better with age.  in longhand he writes of a feast, of the fish made out of fish.  in childlike script of the child-actual, our father speaks to the gun he wants to own.  dear gun, he writes, but his arm locks itself in tic and fails to reset.  behind him, we perhaps foresee a pup pawing at a full length mirror.  as tonic, his mother suns herself nearby on a gravel driveway and her boy dips a small net into the back of her head.

the anxiety of my body arrives
before the patience
of my mind

-

     my soul is a pop gun
or is
convinced  

-

          I Apologize

For The Eyes In My Head – Komunyakaa

-

for the aftermath
of witness

three skinny kids, boy, boy, girl

beat on a fourth
and leave him
wheezing
in what they know better
than to call
but call anyway

     forest.  the beaten boy

swoons
into tree after tree
and loses
his memory.  

     he spends a few good hours trying to pin
the small shadows
of overhead birds
beneath his feet.  

he thinks there might be a girl
watching him, that she might weaken
for one

who possesses
odd powers.

it is coming to an end but I am still very proud to have kept my hands from my eyes for so long.  as for my ears, he hits me for letting them ring.  I hear by example.  I hear your father doesn’t need to look to know he’s been caught by his reflection.  as a last act, I hold this baby over a rain puddle, the devil’s television.

the tinted weakness of late day.  the sound of a mother being driven into the child by its legal father.  biology as paperweight.  as bird hopping on earth.  god as the oh well limbo in limbo.  are the many heavens of discarded appliances equaled in number by dolphins unimaginably safe?  does the thought, to be darkened, arrive?

her dream the one where my father pretends to research the wrist of a deer

–

given another chance, I’d check my memoir to see if it’s happened yet

–

god is the least efficient way to feel nothing

boneless angel whose love of knitting)

(the boy from the second garden takes a bath

the microscope god avoids by ******* his thumb

–

dream and blood- their unpainted rooms

–

the deer tipped off by mannequins

–

a zookeeper’s empty mom

the stones
die
and turn
ghost.

I ask them
to mention
my throwing
arm.

traditionally, one sings
when around
water.

     I walked early-

two to four weeks
before my mother
began

her lifelong
affair / with baseball.

poems from my most recent self-published collection {name calling}, available on Lulu:

~

[boy with bible]

scissor his hair
with fingers
from the hand
of your longer
arm

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

/ the frog shepherd

~

[entries for loss]

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

~

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for water]

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

~

[a letter, silent]

a letter, silent

dropped by a word
into window’s
bible

–

cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost

search

for earpiece.

–

medusa

her headless
horseman

i.

the buzzard my brother keeps alive

ii.

the bowl, a clock

the dogs
avoid

iii.

dizziness

that strikes
the struck

a hotter hell fore I got that praying mantis in the jar.  tighten that lid tight said god said father as he took a match to the tick on my neck.  he went inside, I picked up a stick.  stick I threw short the length of heaven as heaven I thought was a road.  the road, at that, our house was on.  get yer brother's dog and call it a night and I did.  and the dog, too, making it in, before anything fell, that stick caught on the bottom frill of some curtain calling down the middle of no show nor audience for it.  

     if it could have been reached, the blackest point in a man, it wasn't.  but the point just before, my mother knew- to turn the bulb, in her white hand, just so.  turned as a globe with a knot in it, knot made of knots from the belly of my brother, nervous fat friend only friend of the outdated world.  he would take with him one night his dog

and shoot himself.   they'd argue what night for a week after.  loaded the gun proper at least and my father would be dead today white hands or no had there been more than one gun she knew about.  I never told, not even the night, how that mantis stayed alive on its tack beating its wings at the frog-throat black like an eyelid against a thumb and my brother I told him he can't sleep through anything but go to sleep anyway with that dog that was my dog long before you were born dumb as a ****** in a mirror.

I skin my knee.  I skin my knee a total of three times.  I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake.  he demands nothing.  he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference.  he crookedly shrugs his shoulders when I curse.  it’s the shrugging that pains him.  it is his hope that one day sin will be a pet peeve of mine.  so that we can share.  he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long.  my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become.  I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother’s wafer-dry tongue.  how she takes it with her when she smokes.  on the roof.  in her Sunday beast.

each nun my mother sees is shorter than the one after it.  this too shall pass?  she remains nonverbal.  I try to include my son.  my depression is a tractor beam that attracts newborns.  my thoughts are a thought below the whimsical race.  I take photos of escalators paralyzed by three dimensions.  I give them as gifts to my father lost at land and sitting on steps to hear the silence in his head.  a toy pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store.  you are made melancholy not by the pup but by its fallen battery pack belly.  I say to a pockmark what I say to immortality.

we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…

I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue

that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…

if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…

I have nothing to shake

from death
their doll

death

we’re at that point in the conversation where someone is called someone to protect someone’s identity.  we’re in a sparsely populated room where last time I checked you were having a party attended by people who believe people **** people.  I am currently the sobriety story you beat into your kids until the neighbors take them away to a toy train that circles someone’s sister who is convulsing on the carpet to free her braces.  your dee-jay brother is being a **** to everyone but me.  his song makes me sad the rest of my days which are also the rest of my snow days.

the man says I can’t seem to get out of my own way.  the woman says I have a child inside.  the girl at my bedroom window says it’s the same rock every night that hits her in the back of the head.  the boy says he is silly with love.  he says this as his eyes cross then close before I can see them touch.  I am told by all four my mother and father live just down the road.  that at times they are not made for this world.  and at others, not ready.

these names, before you were born. colorblind orphan, yawnless fish. ghost with calendar.

look at me
when I’m invisible

she is
by the tail
easing
a mouse
from the bell
of her pant leg.

present tense
my love
I have broken
the teeth
of your purse.

he thinks
of a pill
and bottomless
rabbits.

tied a string to a stick and called the stick dog.

for this, the boy received a beating
half of which
he shared with the dog

     so he could eat
in peace.

noises the poor can’t make

and mugshots

my lord

blue hair crying
in your wrist

boy is, when sad, what father

dusts off
and coins
anew

(this was your mother’s)

qualifier-

(your mother is a lemon
god’s lemon
tows)

but back
to scarecrow, as in

scarecrow lucid, the formless

boy with knife
in lacking
wield

slouching
before a blank
television, his missing

tooth

false