once
while being
tickled
and once
when god
was painting
my blood

I let
the itch
be

from ghost-written diaries
a constant identity

late
for its own
resurrection

simpler, then

the seizure
that set
your father
to music

the baptized
bowl
of your mother’s
hair

the book I brought to burn
blank
as always

the pair deciding which hand
would come between us
which hand
would enter…

I caught the poor mask
sighing
on its own

I am ugly and you are not

into the artless silence
of god
they come
as buzz words
from the life
of baby.

creation’s alibi
and man.

because you were alone more often than not, I thought you a church.  I attended you with others and they were to report back to me only if you looked up, away, from your book.  you did not.  these others were men and women whose children have found me.  I make it up as I go along.  my records are unreadable.

I can see with my heart a mouse tortured by the seedy youth of my disengaged elders.  my hands curl into the great relief of knowing they’ve lived in the stomach.  any walking exiles the feet from their genius.  I see for myself the man with a flower who enters the professional building to announce he’s witnessed the hospital nursery by word of mouth.  those first twins two black eyes god gave an angel.

after a certain film
a boy walked outside
worked the knots
from the yard hose
put the pistol grip
nozzle
in his mouth.

during the film
his mother aproned
a wet baseball.

before the film
his father attended
the occasional
but forbidden
house fire.

awoke.  was not wanted.  not wanted in the way a war is wanted.  but being awake was at least something.  the other side of a pane of glass.  not the side a god would touch.  a finger belonging to the earth is a bit much but the unwanted was pressed by it deeper into a softness ascribed to the dark.  the unwanted would lose its three surviving teeth on the way down.  one bets they float there still in baby room.  (baby rooms across the country lift in slo mo when another god angers.)  what age appropriate thing the wanted would do to choke back some dirt crumb stars.  those teeth.  my first word was water.  your first word I drank.  my body is a photograph of the oft cut child whose parent was an atheist made of darkroom chemicals.  whose other parent was made of angels arguing.  whose final parent witnessed nothing but drew a blank with gusto.  

-              

the moral was always at the beginning.  this is how my mother kept after me.  

-

the naming ritual offers its own blood in increments.  a date on a red brick takes on water.  we scratch our heads but not without vigor.  I reach into my brain.  I use one eye to do it.  you follow suit but fail.  because we have each two eyes our creator is self reflexive and thanks god for the both of us.

-

insights occur most nobly inside boys boxing tether *****.  you are an abortion that lived.  I know to turn away from it.  I know one thought should lead to another.  you were creative but only on second thought.  you were disabled and you died.

to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb

whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce

crow

whispers

in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming

wolf, pig, childhood.

a bit
of brother
on

the creative
side.

all in my father’s
imagination
were other
poverties

(where mother
assaulted
no one)  

(but faced)
with a poverty
of disguise
the dog
ate homework
I couldn’t
finish.

a discarded oven
in a driveway
its door
open.

for weeks, it has been
like that.

the bald woman won’t leave her house
in her car
because the oven
is too precious.

it saved her hair from keeping her up at night.
her hair was eaten by the cat
now lazing
on its rack.

if she wasn’t a looker
you can iron
my hands.

far be it from me
to stir
the madness
of fish.

age allows that we are younger for god.

sleep
is a shadow’s
bookmark.

oh recite
to the same
snow bent
tree

for which
the roof
of this house
waits

this wish
to attend
sparsely

the box
of dreaming-

for the sleep
we need
keeps us

so long
awake

that in the morning
we send
our sons

I mock blow my brother
who has just put
a snowball
down his pants
after claiming
it
a bar
of soap.

we are as high
as our father
is gay.

if we go in the barn
it’s for the Ohio
breeze
to begin
the joke
it abandons.

our mother is openly sad.

I try to make a fist but my hand is still being made inside the winter glove my nearby father lost.  

I do not go after the boy who’s called me a little ***** for wearing my mother’s Sunday heels.  

I have one of those accidents I am never far from having.

I sit in the bath and wait for my brother who is tall enough to turn the showerhead away.

by my reaction, the water is either too cold or too hot.

a tooth fairy sitting on the lap of a cannibal has just intercepted the message meant for my sister’s eating disorder.  I like that movies have no future.

A pregnant woman touching a window with a napkin
To stop
A black spider.

Her other hand, of course
Keeping towel.

The spider, then freed, under the door.
The scared leg it leaves

This woman of chore.

Her audience wider
I’ve asked her to cross-

But I’ve looked from my longhand’s impossible loss.

immediately after I left my baby sister in good hands to deejay for my brother’s above average loneliness, she was struck in the head by a rock so small she thinks it is still looking for her brain.  my brother blames me for this as often as he doesn’t.  he knows it is common for my sister to get ahead of herself.  when she is not telling us about the people of heaven, she’s telling them about god.

from the bottom of the stairs he looks like that girl we saw at the park sitting on her hands at the top of the slide.  I’ll be the pudgy policeman and you can be her doting father from a white man’s perspective.  he doesn’t remember what he did after lifting the baby from its crib.  god doesn’t speak language but I take it to mean if you’ve seen one flower you haven’t seen them all.  when he was himself a baby his father held him upside down above puddles to develop his form.  absent a similar explanation, I’ll share that sometime before lunch his female boss used her broken wrist to push open a door he’d always thought would lead to a broom closet and not to a bare bright hallway with carpeted ceiling.  as long as I’ve been here, said his boss, none have made the far wall.  memory is a man dying in the ocean and becoming a ghost there.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

my mother’s pregnancy comes to me in a dream.  the scarecrow that has me diagnose its doctor as having attention deficit disorder is the same scarecrow every time.  the soldier eats her camouflaged meal.

for Alex*

a man holds a good book
as if his hands are cuffed

turns each page
if only to relieve
this, that, wrist

when late
he may
set the book down
to light, or drop
a match

his whole life, planned out
the lit and the dropped

he may pause
here and there
to smoke
to belabor

the end of his life
where he sees himself
slipping from the cuffs
which undoubtedly
fall, then disappear

into some
nightly sound
that wakes his wife

who disoriented
is thankful
she will be on time

     her first date
with a man
not yet
apprehended

father sees the doll in a striptease window.

mother touches the doll
with kid gloves
that fit.

brother hears the doll
brushing the teeth
of its newer
version.

the doll’s feet stick out
from under a hotel bed
marooned
in the ceiling’s
mirror.

thinking the doll has vomited
sister gags.

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.

I babysat for children whose mothers didn’t want to come downstairs. I was driven home by men so drunk they knew my house like a muscle. the children ate what I made. I taught boys how to fake an illness and girls how to ask for pets. I could change a diaper and smoke at the same time but then it got away.

a boy of five give or give years without a shirt holding a half empty soda bottle and blowing into it while scratching his bare big toe with his other and rocking the porch swing back further than front and he is the boy I see as I return after these many years to the house where I killed by accident my mother and he is the reason I turn back pretending I’ve come from somewhere still and waiting because he has riled in me a peace I haven’t had since that span of counting to 30 instead of 20 while my mother hid under the car my father had jacked up and left so as to chase a girl riding by on her bike wearing only ******* and a t-shirt which is dangerous and my father knew danger and loved warnings such that he would swear he would one day coin the phrase financial violence and he would be the first.

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as my mother took up the inquiry into what had died, I was made god.  father pretended to be my ***** and praised me for putting him in good hands.  my sister gave birth to a very large head.  what’s the first thing a baby does with its body?

blame the tree, what in it, burned:
a scarecrow on hands of straw and knees afire.
a pinball rabbit surrounded by ankles.  
a soldier’s kite.
you, who walk in circles.

brim of my hat.

days after **** is celebrated for having

no

anniversary / mom

stops looking
at her feet

~

days before I keep it from my ghost that I am in the wrong

person / dad

tells me that if I concentrate hard enough I can get god’s fingers stuck in a bowling ball

in hangman, how the head
is first.  in chess

how father.

my friend’s father had his legs break from standing after a day of drinking the father’s milk he said would take our guts to places not even babies had been.  friend took what of it he could into his mouth and left some there to smuggle into mine.  the moms thought we were kissing and his cracked a tooth on a cigarette.  my own swooned but kept composure enough to catch something in her stomach.  I don’t have an ounce of quit in me that’s not addicted to keeping quiet.  I know worry has some use but in these woods I’ve not happened upon any age of tree growing into another.

i.

when his fingers began to bleed, father stopped closing his eyes to pray.  

     the worst thing I heard as a child was how god made
not only
me.

it was either the suicide of my imaginary friends or the imagined
suicide     of my real.  mother’s hands were that way

because of the dye
in dish gloves.  

ii.

on this that has become the story of my prematurity
I’ll say    

the food we get has already been defeated.

iii.

the boredom of today’s children
has no depth.

touch a throat in a totem’s mouth.

iv.

your mother was a hologram of a voodoo doll.

when father
not father
as the gay
madman
first met
her     the bump on her head

was much
bigger.

v.

with a pocket knife or some other **** thing the word gargoyle has been scraped into every idle machine.

the drug addled uncles have a rare focus and take non-consecutive short naps.  

you can shake your head about the babies

they remember
nothing.

vi.

god is no more than a clipped moan
scrambles
the angels.

I am not one to placate beggars of description and hardly know where I lived besides.  early on I picked up a stone and my friends passed it around after I threw it.  few went braless.  *** was something of a docile raccoon cub in a half globe of ice.  fathers all were barked down from the same tree by the same poets.  in the previous I will be refusing to enter the trailer home of my ninth grade love where for all I learn her hound might still be waiting for its ******* to fall.  I will inspect only what is already true.  if in the following you do not come upon a series of blank pages just when the getting is good than my publisher was chosen too quickly and my brilliance is of less remain.  as I am well versed in parental infighting I have little vote but to edit my mother and abridge my father and say they were kids looking at an ultrasound of an empty stomach other than my mother’s.

I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent.  listening to his radio was a long way off.  you sat early.  you called me mother before I was ready.  if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream.  I looked at stars and you were a toddler.  our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned.  he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of ****** abuse.  you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.

a dusty toad gives my father fits.
my sisters run through cobwebs.

I pluck ticks from our dog and put them to my ear.
I think of my blood in dog years.

     it is good to be old.

to step once and smallish away
from bare backs and on them the spiders.

sack race. minotaur.

(the stone)

a before
and after
picture
of absence.

a boy in a diaper
covered in flour

a sadness specific to elevators

cocoon
on every
menu

a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

who swallows
fire
to cremate
god
the *****

donor

beauty is the beginning of beauty.  a man and a woman wait together for a stripper.  you know the man like an intimate thought.  like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door.  the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides.  the man is aware he’s the devil and this makes him god.  the woman is unaware she’s the devil and this makes it easy.  the stripper is watching a horror film and it makes her want to have a child.  she decorates her home then tries to remember moving a muscle.  the blood you don’t see is fake.

the man and woman didn’t feel ashamed until they put on that show for the snake.  hell, it wasn’t even a snake but primarily a rope that couldn’t facilitate their double suicide and then it was a snake from one’s imagination, yours or mine, torturous.

I have what is called my father’s face.  my son has a hand because my son holds a stone.  the mother stomps her feet in the name of the holy ghost known for running the orphanage into the ground.  the sister sees god but does not see god shove a dead bird down her brother’s pants.  the brother believes in god so god will cure him.  sitting on this swing has made me fat.

she is not crazy, the mother, this happens:

her children die, in a bathtub, silly.
her husband, on a banana peel.

later, she calls about the tent.  the police take it down.

she says nothing to them until they leave.
a boy stops walking, says lady, and whistles.

each day until her daughters are grown.

the *** machine has begun to breathe on her own.  father ***** a brown bruise into mother’s half of my cigarette.  I could be doing a handstand in a prison yard or watching as my cell is turned upside down.  brother uncurls a finger from his made fist so deliberately I know he means it to be a hard-on.  I crush my eyes with my eyes and try to remember the name my son gave to the loose tooth we hung together from a doorknob.  was my son told me the puppets need our hair.

there is no light in the darkness
that is not a worried man.

I can tell you nothing you know.

my sons are two.  my sons play faith.

under my wife I am a shadow of joy.

-  

(over which I smuggle the thoughts of my acquaintances)

one-way bridge.

-

my hands are weak or would not be called hands.

when mother collapsed
god had a plan.  it included
the double life
of my father’s

ankles.

-

some I sanction, some I don’t.
some are **** creative.

suicides leftward of the unlit life.

-

I put my fist in your purse and leave it there and you let me.
we mass produce

eye contact.

we are both small, about love, about to bang
our heads
on the poor.

we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet.  we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks.  the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others.  we limp beside any creature that limps.  the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other.  our father is two mathematicians who argue.  our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave.  our guesses mean little because they are facts.  at school we are voted on and kissable.  if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket.  details belong to god.

the doctor
wore secretly
a nightgown
and poured
a glass of milk.

     his wife

disappointed
she had not seen
a ghost

     remained his wife.

-

( the wellness of my mother
  does not need
  my mother
  nor does
  the wellness

  of yours )

-

if you see a white mouse
in a dark city

a light
for which
I have kept
vigil
goes on
in my son’s head…

had we one mouth. had our teeth been field workers swept into a bar after a fight. that we could find them. that we could tell our wives where to look. had we not been dragging our shadow by the foot. had the ground not shrugged itself lower. had it opened. had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death. so that when it prayed. so that when it tried.

had they not banned, so early, the dogs. had my best friend a suit. had he not talked so much about getting one. had it not been his hand I seen come outta the earth to take its pick of hats from the wounded. had I not laid his fat sister. had I gotten money for it. called her fat and not loved her for standing upright what was another’s tale of composure.