as ahistoric
exit
music

plays

you leave
the beast
in the *****
of its
amnesia

-

themes for prey

-

infant cinema

sister
she bleeds
in the bath
thinking
we’ve finally
run out
of water.

of the cheering
mothers, my mean
***
mother
wants to be alone
with the two
it took
to cut a baby
in half.

myself
I take it on the nose
the baseball
my father
doesn’t
crush.

I feel nothing
for her
but also
nothing
but-

she is
then
a writer, partial

to now, and to now’s

book.

is
then
prayer, loyal
to the past
most

current, to the believer

who contacts
touch.

mom would start in on god so fiercely that we became preoccupied with doors.  we got to saying and I’m taking the baby with me at the close of anything said with passion.  by the time our speaking allowed for speaking parts, you’d think a cameraman had asked to use the bathroom.  father had his moments.  being thin is an adventure.  this egg has given me an idea for a different kind of chicken.  

agewise, I was closer to my parents than most of the kids I knew of.

dreamt
I was ****
on rice
beach

-

dreamt a mother had gone to the desert
for fish

her son’s
fish

could eat
while swimming

-

two martyrs
share a camera
both

call
touch

-

dreamt sleep
was the eye’s
blood

relative

your son’s disorder
is used
by some
to draw
a straight line, a sleeping
circle…

-

my soul is eating all my food

-

agenesis
of what
of nostalgia’s

panic

dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.

says throw a ******* baseball.

-

I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers

-

I was not raised by scarecrows.

had a toy that answered to wolves.

shake a broom
at the sky
then make
the ocean
watch

-

have a kid
in the next

life

-

to a highly
visible
other

become

attached

-

marry
and ruin
sight
unseen

you will never be
a virus

-

the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named

-

*******
as the seizure
had
by hologram

-

the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down

I am half
the survivor
I ate for.  

I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.  

my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking

of all the things that had turned into her hands.  

communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.

alone
I can cover
two handprints.

the rooms my father enters are bugged.

mother is dumb from pretending
to hit her head.

talking is hell.  hell belongs
to a little
devil

that shrinks.

you throw a cell phone at a dog, okay.
pick up the phone
and find
the dog.

let god think
he sees
our puppets.

memory proves god
in that it proves
god
is lazy.  

she oversees bathroom breaks for the crucified.  

I was born without a twin.

the lost baby
for a moment
is doom’s
afterlife.

I don’t think I can be kind anymore.

alone time
is patience
as melodrama.  the second coming

of my father’s belief
is a memory
that talks to itself
while saying
don’t make of me
a habit.

dear godless koan,
my wheelchair has an ashtray.

there’s the god I remember.

I’m fasting
for two.

in our own way of toying
with the disappeared

we name
weekly
a new

inside animal.  

that something comes when called
separates

the lonely
from the missing.  if it matters to god

let it matter
to god
the eraser
of lightning.  in this Ohio

one is always a day behind being destroyed by the past.

the prodigal son of simplicity

-

the pill popper’s
demographic

-

the mouth
as it keeps
the face
from parting

-

the canyon
of where
not
to snort
the ashes
of risen
sheep

-

paper
and the cup
it’s being

when toothpick young you see a snake go mad with second nature and a sponge dragging your mother through nothing’s data

be the abuser you want to victimize.  repeat your father’s compelled evocations.  if fat, absorb your mother’s least favorite hiding place.  if not, borrow your brother’s future.  plan it around a mirror.

the blood
the spiritual
eyesore
of the woman’s
body
mirror

-

here is what it said, it said
I think
I have
a mother
whose hands
he tells
apart

-

christ I’m close to my face

outside the garage door
of a cement building
I break no bread
with the silence
of my nose

what a clown

-

the wound’s depth
leads me
to believe
in a part
of my father’s
leg
I didn’t know
I had

-

mother’s pain
is other
pets, the devil

is the devil
forever

-

this egg on my face
is from the eye
of yours
that hatched

in a small attic
a boy
on all fours
being weakened
by a spider’s
dream
is putting
an ear
to the roof
of his sister’s
dollhouse.  for making

the wrong
sounds
for animals
poor sister
was lowered
into the baby
you were born
to lift
by two
scarecrows
you’d think
were separated
at death
for the way
they don’t
carry on.

thing is, my eyes are rarely bigger than my stomach.  mother says I have a face for makeup.  I babysit often.  victims, mostly, of tooth on tooth violence.  my brother drinks to our father’s medicine.  water that’s been walked on.

the nonfiction section in my father’s library of sleep
is faith

-

mother comes to me in a dream to tell me she’s thinking of pulling out

-

epilepsy isn’t something you can see.  clearly, it’s the snake
one tries to give it to

-

when people are gone, they’ve gone to ask

to tell god
he swallowed
a thunderstorm
you will need
a seashell

-

I say to the boy
that before
this brain
of his
there were other

brains
the angels
thought
were bugs

-

malnutrition
can close
a wound

-

on the moon, my name is Noah

the woman who doesn’t believe in light
can fix your mouth

-

I have no double
to love
my triple

-

the man with no teeth
borrows
a ladder

I used my nearest
sister
to strike
my brother
who’d wasted
the last tooth
of his horse
meant
for a slingshot
on a meal

for a scarecrow

-

the power
to mother
went out

-

father
compared
puppets

-

our heaven of socks and string

dad loses a brother while drawing a straight line for a haunted circle

-

I tell
two jokes
well

in the shadow
I’m in

-

no one replaces my father like my father

prayer
dedicates
for god
his time
to memoir.

fiction is the blood of a short person
spilling from a tall.

I enter again the room of the screaming man
who was screaming
when I left.

silence is par for the quiet.

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect.  she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other.  both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen.  sister gags and it makes him think about gagging.  now no more, these were the heart of the note.

I pour soup into my father’s mouth so he can find his teeth.  when he passes out I tell the carolers he’s gone to the city for a blindfold.  my girlfriend likes it when I send people away.  I was born there.

I orbit
the idea
of an animal
not thinking
of itself.

to err
is hunger.

to see the stalks keep needle at the child’s mid morn journey
to scarecrow

is enough. my fist leaves me like a coffee cup

set down. even the scissors

are ghosted.

I can dream my son’s weight in birdseed

bird
the swimmer’s
bread

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.