I lost you before I lost you. your stickmen were free of anxiety. they left a church to the potbellied ghost of your muscle. their word for tree was branch. what god couldn’t finish they called wind. baby an air that stopped breathing.

/ the unique stagger
animals
in Ohio
have

/ a god
slow to pray
for the magician’s
loss / the fog’s

blood

he divvies sorrow.
     beats

son, daughter, son.

he takes a long look inside himself.

beats

son,                , son.

as a boy
I am not sad
to be sledding
alone-

the count
of my uphill
steps

coveted
by counts
lost

I believe my mother when she says we are here to forget the girl god was trying to impress. that we are to follow starvation to its wrongly named foods. that breads are condemned

birds. scissors the writer’s churchbell.

for all I know it’s your father’s job to come home too sober to lift your mother’s fingers from the piano keys.  I fell asleep on a heater vent once and with my acne won a phantom game of tic tac toe.  when people ask me my name and I tell them they ask my whole and I tell them I have only a middle.  my own father was a figure others cut from their work.  my mother was made of money.  if being provided for is the same as being loved we’d all be christian.  by people I mean whole sections of the population.

I am looking for the man whose life flashed before my eyes.  I am writing as my father.  we don’t love god.  we cure him.  after brushing away the bubbles of a bath so perfect I am horrified at the baldness of your baby brother.  it’s everywhere.  you shrug and keep at your ear of corn as if it’s about to set itself on fire.  you are the same way with *****.  these are your words.  when I’m angry I can feel my hair growing.  when I’m angry I cut it.  I write for women.  it is like the glittering peacefulness of a snowglobe you drained as a boy to water a toy soldier’s horse.  this quiet doesn’t need a white male, but it helps.

cutting your **** off is not something you fail at.  when I ask you where it’s at you will first be sad to have a mouth at all and second say legend has it.  my thinking is trying to think in a helicopter.  you climb a tree to drop a rifle from it.  I have so many real friends and I call them my gay odds.  and so many dreams that these waking hours pass only to embellish them.  if there is one thing it is Elliott Smith the name of a hungry deer.

he repeats I will always be ugly.  lately, I’ve been really into my blood.  or maybe

ugliness
subsides.  

     and so it occurs to our ugly counterpart

     as a fan blows
     a small
     sock
     nowhere

how his sister    
had two
faces-

both (had work done)

on a baby’s
brief
nose

the flashlight works if you shake it.  this tree is the tree you should use.  every other home is broken.  every other window has in it my house arrested father.  the dog run off, the dog come back.  back with a beauty I will bed to babysit my brother.  the crow is empty.  a plaything, a part of the show.  crow can be blindfold, camera.  can censor among other things an exposed breast.  the fence wasn’t here when we got here so it’s not here now.  an uncle says there is a dog only he can hear.  will say anything to get laid.  in all fairness I’ve failed more than once to insert myself into the loneliness of my person.

free home
to a good dog
other

signs
quite neighborly
side by side

as emptied
drive-in

cars-

pop away, corn-

care
in the world, pop away.

eat
as often
as a squirrel
mad
for the ghost
of a nesting
doll

this repeatable body, these monologues for echo

–

suicide’s mother, parole’s father…

–

snow a cemetery with mascot christ

I refuse it.  

this that says
it is the boredom
of boys
beats

a cow.

not even to death.

     will accept
on sight
the boredom
of girls
this that projects
a bovine
delirium.

will accept the exotic anxiety of my workaday father

as his cigarette falls
into the fibers
of a broom
made shovel.

fascinated
by the ear

children
I’ll not

kiss

her plane is in the air.  she is showing late signs of believing she’s left an octopus in the oven.  the man she is with knows nothing about paper.  on the ground, in awe of the bee stings on a sister’s bare back, a brother carries orphanhood to term.  everything I touch belongs to the same alarm clock.

I have two heads because only one can float away.

     I suspect the male landlords were petitioned
by the same
nightmare
fetus.

collateral healing, look it up.

I miss pregnancy
on my own.

pictures
before and after
of nothing.

morality ****.

brushstroke, breast, blackmail.

     a dressing down
of ******
beings.

when set, the alarm
disappears.  

dear kid, not twice
did I lose
myself
during.

dear ******, it was hardest
to keep
with me
the word

degenerative.    

she once sent a car
for her son’s
carseat.  the car

was so
mad.

when on hold

she draw a mean

mini

jesus

after punching me in the stomach
my brother
would put his hands
behind his back
and ask
the fish
in the bowl
under my shirt
to forgive
little miss
handcuffs
for making
god

in the closet across from the delivery room, a janitor disguised as a hospital janitor sits on an upside down bucket under which he’s trapped what might be the world’s slowest rat.  in his mind he is attempting to clean his mother’s body while supplies last.  his hands are curled like the receivers of certain phones con artists used back in the day to convince people they could talk only to ghosts.  the young and personable volunteer assigned to the hand he doesn’t answer is speaking so softly the man leans forward.

she is a location
policed
by a trauma
that never
returns.

that’s a mouthful
on a first
date
but she is far
from photographing

roadkill.

still, she hears
it said
in sister
and in health…

she starts with a boy
who becomes a clown
getting
his pilot’s
license
on borrowed
time

and she loves
god is your
airstrip.

she knows it
by number
the single
highway
truck
that doesn’t
come.

her father is just
as she imagines-

a man
not making
siren
sounds
pulled over
by the man
who is.

an owl
with an owlish
disease
***** with
a bat

as an altogether
different
angel

swallows
her mother
like a sword.

hell has lost her mind

but tries again
its troubled
flashlight.

my mother and father cower under the kitchen table and my brothers are dead.  my father has clammed up since asking me to tell him something he can take to his grave.  this last week I’ve mastered placing my ear on the table in such a way I hear what I am supposed to do.  impossible things that are no longer terrible.  dispatches from a simpler region.  for example, hack your roommate’s youtube account.  also, poison the non-pregnant.  my baby sister laughs with me when I say some of these aloud.  she believes the table is possessed by the devil’s ghost.  her beliefs are clear and specific.  the ghost thinks itself the actual devil, and will need a good amount of therapy.

a bare clothesline
the lull
between
opposing
one-eared
beggars  

-

when in
a backyard
pool
we’re dry
inside
trees  

-

     **** & abridged
I cross
from paint
can
to cement
block
on a stolen
plank

from a local
high dive

-

     ****, brother

it’s your best
work

before asking
to be levitated
the masters
made themselves
invisible.

it was my mother
told me this
while pretending
to read
my future
copy
of how
to make
a medicinal
strength
boy

and it was my mother
who wondered
aloud
if interrupting
the voice of god
was possible.

it was my father who said
laziness
in all things
and for
so saying
was crowned
the shepherd
of time.

I yell at my stories
and my children

tremble
but brave me
like one
braves
a chair
one knows

will break.

you were born asleep
and your mind
reached a place
where you had
no hands-

your first memory
is of being aware
that someone
beat you to them.

when given
an alphabet
to recite
you count
as predicted
by your father’s
future.

I have known men
to kick babies
with no more thought
than setting them
to stun.

invent nothing.

words end
but end
on a word.

a lame barn swallow in the heart of its master’s black typewriter.

     blocking a dog’s door
a television lost to lightning.

a modified radar bought by the ****** it locates.

footsteps
approaching a tightrope.

that first kick
in the oblivious
******.

30% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of LULU30

my newest thing is called ‘four’-  it is not a whole creature but a combination of my last four publications.  clever title.  I am sorry it’s 12.00-  I am always sorry.  it is available on Lulu, along with others.

and, some poems, from:

~

(---)

a palm reader
with mouths
to feed
does
my mother’s
nails.  I overhear

I love
babies
but god
they live
so long.

-

my brothers will tell you
I avoid

capitalization

eating
in front of others

threesomes

-

who was it
asked

-

from whose memory were you erased?

~

[warm body]

her nightmare
from the era
of hibernation
revolves around
a baseball
made
by her husband
from the cobwebs
found
soaking
in the mouths
of babes

(mouths)

dry
from dreaming
of the sponge
bathed
by god
in the egg
of a spotless
crow

~

[fathers]

to see a stone
as ruin’s
pursuit
of aftermath

one must share
this dream
  
of arriving
on earth

to pray

~

[prose]

god was created to remember everything. so says the rock to the tooth starting small.

-

there is a gallery of unfinished work and a space for the baby to crawl through.

-

her feet stick out of the mirror she’s been using to give birth.

-

lost: frostbite. lost: space suit.

will work
for feeding
tube.

-

holy asthma
holy

crossbones

-

old hat
this human
head.

~

[black sites]

we indeed
are deaf
from going
****

the floor is writing on the earth

it is better
than having
roaches

childbirth
comes to
in a bat
dying
in a pillowcase
for what
the weeping
flightplan
of a drunk
stork…

what tree cannot reach
mother scratches
with a broom

~

[cries]

we are
each one of us
the smallest
person
on earth

one is never too old
for god, never

too old
to surveil
the deaf

/ I know from your palm
what your hand
will drop, mother

cooks only
meat, father

is every
nightmare
she has
of her exodus

from apologue

/ having populated

the myth
of ******

the baby is empty

~

(also, in the non self-published realm of credence, **** Press published in April 2016 my chapbook [infant*cinema], which is available on the **** Press site)

I didn’t say it was good

this idea
for a child’s
mask

/ it turns
what I know

the stomach

as the mornings darken, I imagine the paperboy’s mother will soon be joining him. if my wife can stand her, she doesn’t say. what she cannot stand is living here. the paperboy’s ******* mother- what a dilemma. I’ve seen that boy with his fingers in his mouth as if something is there to explain the purple chore of his being. I’ve seen his black teeth. I’ve seen dogs bite his elbow once then leave him alone. I’ve watched his elbow heal a day at a time not once adorned with bandage. seen him crack a dive bird to ground with the rolled up paper of my neighbor. who prayed over the bird and raked it to gutter. whose cat brought the bird to my step, yawned, and dropped it. seen that boy look dumbly at a mosquito on his arm and I’ve seen him let it finish and remain fixed on the spot minutes after. hours even.

before you know it, you’ll create time.

let now
give me hope
for the past

I do a search for images of babies born without ribs and I don’t see what I want. An article scares me in 1983. Saying that thirst is hunger’s blue ghost is the same as wanting thunderstorm to be a strong password. I’m not on fire but my son is sick all the time. In my nightmare of plenty, sea creatures for the skinning of god pretend they’ve kept god young. A dead angel weighs more the more the news of its death is shared. Is this a love song? Sexting in the *** shop, no two phones can cry like me. Vexations pin the ghost spot where you cloned a sighing bee. Touch touches its exile and my stomach slurs like speech. Positionless you dial theft bereft of any thief. Yes and no. Yes and no. The angel is dead. Dead over here.

the boy
is today
a bloodhound
tracking
the lone
acolyte
of his mother’s
handprints.  as another,

he once
led
a horse
to a woman’s
watermark...      

/ give suicide someone to widow

as any father
quickened
by the specter
of an amazed
god

father
had me ball
the baby
up, had me

find the sweater
his wife
was in, had me

turn
all the water
possible

on…

what differently
father did

was, while there,  

off limits.

-

I heard my brother
ask himself
to stutter, he was

no fake, I heard him

often, I was maybe

the lord they used
to freeze
my mother
open…

-

illumination
is the person
I am not

is the person
others
agree with
thinking    
the person
will change

is like preparing
to receive
a runaway
sis

the Ohio storm has avoided god.

my son, his rain rake
are both

out of two
of my hands.

again
this baby
so okay
with dying

/ I was in the outhouse
praying
for deer

a thumbsucker
sold
on the second
coming
of invisibility, or host

of my father’s
most remembered
midwestern

gameshow

/ and my poems
they would not
flower

/ I quoted mom,

two eggs
to make
a phone

fate
will protect
nostalgia

our collective identity is a sick child.  some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless.  people are for others.  are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from.  the child prays.  the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination.  we pray.  we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost.  I trace a finger to put my finger on.  the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once.  nothing in the world is the world.

our mom
to alien
you need
some clothes

/ scoop roadkill, look

marionettes
in the mouth, read

to the healthy
from a pop-up
book

on birthmarks, yeah

we spit
in the dark
let god
fish

I pocket the white root of my enemy’s fantasy and bribe my father with money for a lottery ticket.  I hear god say yes it will be the god of all.  it’s a good day and on such my mother swallows her brother’s morning cigarette and tries to get someone to kiss her neck.  on such my sister wonders deep down if her doll is wearing enough lotion.  I think to flee but know fleeing looks on paper too much like what it is.  the skull is the grave of the brain, the skull is the boat…  if other houses catch fire it’s because ours is done burning.

boys we / had hands / an orange / to softly / pitch

girls they / had oven / mitts / their mothers / missed

dogs would / wait / sometimes / leave

days / like cloth / we’d shed / and meet

his earache
the scorched
zen
of a scarecrow
the man
stands
on one leg
with cigarette
in mouth
and refuses
to lean
on the child
heavy
minivan
seemingly dropped
by god
into this field
to remind him
perhaps
of the lapsed
dental work
that gave
to his famously
unhealthy
son
that terrified
look
which said
I am here
to eat
only that
which was cut
from the cookie
sheet
of hell

are now’s
nostalgia

for my wife*


i.

it's old. this
what have I done, this
dark ship. the crates
steadfast
in their charge
of silence, the ice
bored
and breaking.
we move
in our cabin
bed

shift
our bellies
to stay
the compass
of hurt.

ii.

our new baby
we honor
like a bruise, a slack

blue
puppet
hangs itself

impossibly…

iii.

I say I’m sorry
in three stories
I envision
as three orphans
of wiser
men.

your shoulders remain small.

iv.

…too small
for what
reaches down
to shrug them