he is reading
a hardback
the corner of which
borrows
his eye
when she knuckles
him from
behind

     because
her voice
is changing.  his eye
returns
and with it
the voice
he thought he’d lost
to adulthood-

     lover  
to his father’s
hearing.

I am the weakest person my brothers don’t know. I go with them under a blanket we won’t all come out of. hell of a word, hovercraft, but not a sucker for meaning. god torches the bathroom then speaks farmhouse to the father of the accident that never happened. I have a tooth or two knocked in by a footprint. a tick I call dust.

where is bird

bird
hospital

do zombie
young

ever
crawl

the cruelty
of the nightmare
is not that it surrounds you
with the hallmarks
of your fear
but that
in the infancy
of your terror
it banishes you
to populate
yourself
in a bed
some have seen
you rise from
     and walk.

i.

the ghost
suddenly aware
of sleep

goes on
to be
the same size
awake.

ii.

will never bite.  never ask
someone
taller  

to bend
the branch
down.

iii.

as far as hands go, these are very large.

grandeur

had brought the well outta ground the muscled men and she came upon them when they had split into teams and were rolling it and had not yet become competitive. the hands of her gone infant came back to her to see these men heave back and forth a vanishing. of her many fathers one had said ‘the deep train went even deeper and I could not wake’. he had said it to excuse his one day feat of linking unadorned toilet paper rolls to stretch a rat’s mile. her stomach had yet to go down and she was comforted by such literal remnants as thinking of the last place you had it.

libel

two white boys come outta shack each with a wrist one left one right being ****** at the mouth. their laughing I wouldn’t say manic but still not righted. like certain bible stories seem to tumble outta that book it’s the same with their eyes and ears. their heads each one shrunk so as to be united. I want to say here at least a ****** knows what it’s mocking. I only know one of’em and only as far as this thing being passed and told that he ain’t a foster but he was born in a pan and taken from the offices of the parent company his father got laid from. you think that’s the joke but had I not said white you’d have thought they were anyway. here come two girls grisly with month and I never seen two boys so quick to put down the shack they come from.

prayer

I like it best when my girl is pregnant because I get the sympathies. on her hand, she likes me drunk. at any one time, I can remember seven of our eight kids. this means of course one gets left home but also that not a one gets left grocery. I’d tell you their names but then I’d have to split this saying into parts. but I can tell you seven are boys. now and again they’ll slip on sister’s dress to **** up my math. a good joke I start with is that they take after their mother and if they take after me it’s with sticks. I change the batteries in the alarms for fire and carbon monoxide every two weeks mostly outta fear that I’ll lose them all and have to recount them to some fireman I went to school with. I don’t know if batteries are cheap or not, I don’t know anything about them, but I know I spend a healthy chunk of my portion to have. wife and I are keeping the ninth at bay the ways we know how. she don’t ask me and I don’t her. one kid a week goes with her to church and it’s up to me to remember who in my charge caught a fish the week previous. but I’m not wrong with god; no book is the bible, I believe that. at cemetery by which I am lack whelmed: I wish I had his memory.

nativity

wonder they ever told him grown, that black foster, how he'd been at three years dropped manger while crying for the congregates. straw in everything. back a throat, bottom a shoe. pop said he just about caught himself afire at work, straw sticking out his pocket. pop unable to split work clothes from churched. some wanted to resurrect a fuss about color; don’t go resurrecting a fuss and waved his hand he did that pastor ingénue. heard then I the word negress and after its saying the sayers looked about as if she would appear. this was our town after god and many were still making their own. this answers how the black foster needn’t audition. the gold I brought was soft on my thumbs and the flakes stayed in my nails weeks after. pop could tell for that time what I’d been touching so I’d cover when I could. we were quite a pair in our fooleries what with his straw and my gold. he stopped going on about the blacks and I was able to skip school with your sister the ****** mary. the town was never up for nightmares or for dreaming so I kept your share to myself until now how you seen mary fingered by a man with seven. heard him saying it's okay baby, this one's asleep.

holy ghost!

I will cut myself, Horror Film. will fidget my nethers a last time. maybe make the snow an angel with a third leg. which means I have gone outside. maybe my father will happen by you and put his beers together. but I will be gone. into the woods dragging my feet so some will think it took two to take me. I will whip branches about me and generally scuffle so the some will better convince the left. my poverty will be confirmed by your presence on videocassette. my father will hold you aloft and your tongue will droop above the depths of his hair. my father will claim a vengeance he owes on and the some and the left will follow him over the states of my angel and into the woods. when they find me I will say I had an in body experience; that the two men nearby sleep and it’s what we’re walking in.

haptics

little he knows that in holding them hoppers until they spit and before they go wing he is making hitch the upcome carriage of his *****. his future nudes are backtracking and the gravity of this has been diagnosed as your emphysema. he is your, nothing more, son. he will rub your back and worry his thumbs orphan. oh thumb; toe six. the way you deeply stand arms folded he sometimes thinks you have been replaced by a statue of his mother. it is then he remembers the fence his father built and the collective plank his father carried under his arm. you want life to be good again; your son’s low hand and the pups it could feed.

verbal abuse*

she has brought with her a shoplifted teddy bear. on a good night her age is seventeen. two days ago the voices in her head moved to her mouth. she has seven teeth that remain quiet. she fears so much how this third day will go. she has been told, and she believes, I am only in her mind. but there she is, at the sitting rock where we met, the rock I told her I could see things in. unprepared for her faith, I am unclothed. I am glad she has the bear and glad for my part in her having it.

spiders

we got some kind of plague in our toilets mama.*  that’s my dad calling her mama, my mom. that’s him declaring another plague. week don’t stop until a plague has been pieced together by this man so named Paff Snull on the subscription stubs of any number of unread magazines mom uses to swat dramatically at imaginary flies and wasps and locusts depending on the week. this time though I’m ******* because when dad cracks his knees and ***** himself to fetch mama from silence, I look in the toilet up and it’s true and in the toilet down and it’s more. spiders grey and black and off white. with our low water pressure, spiders having a ball. mom and dad they get tents and tell me twice to get inside mine once it’s on the front lawn. I get told things twice because I was born thick and I haven’t the heart to tell them that after the first saying the saying of it is diminished. I mumble to myself in corners, sure, but it’s the same mumbling. our dog gets a separate tent and I sneak into it when dog allows. seven nights so far outta three weeks I haven’t. mom says it’s because of my acne dog don’t recognize me sometimes. ******* bit the meatsy of my right hand a month ago and my handwriting got so neat I was sent from school for cheating. it’s most of my summer and the house is still spidery. the dog has gone to the river to drink and seems okay with it. mom, dad, and I **** in the backyard in shifts. mom ain’t swatting anything, she doesn’t have to on account of the spiders. when right now I mess up my shift I find myself next to dad and he’s just some guy telling me them glass-full people got the joke on them because the water is contaminated. he’s so happy it makes me think I’m the devil to be grinning so big. long wasn’t the reign of Paff Snull.

the free kittens and then just the one.
how I tried
not to run
out of people.

how I kicked
in a town
famous
for two things

     a quilt and a lake.

how before I could throw it in the lake
     the stone became a drop of water.

these are not without image, but I did see them.

     the miscarried child in a graduated medicine cup-
how I almost poured mouthwash there.

in one car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three.  in another, my sister takes photos of her dog.  dying is a chew toy.  be as unmoved as your attackers.

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

before the suicide, it is just a note
my brother leaves

on the made
side
of our mother’s
bed.

once you are absent, your absence
is long.

the young couple think as one
of a baby’s name
in the shower
and emerge
famished-

in heaven on earth every animal will be eaten by god.

the baby’s appetite for its birth is jaw-dropping.  in store for god, we have nothing in the house.

the home’s weekend janitor placing ball caps on the elderly.
something is said, and he is fired.
his kids recall the egg he’d make of his hand.  the delicate knock
of his joke.  their hair, or something in it, weeping.

while my mother
swims
in the lake
where my father
learned
to coexist
with his ability
to be
alone,

to which
my father
brought
the seashell
his father
coined
the ocean’s
bible,

I sleep
the sleep
of my hair
not the sleep
of its brush

stupid
but as a kid
he feared
whatever
he didn’t
eat
would know
he left it
outside

–

hey kid
that man
there
he took a pill
to make
himself
smaller
but it only worked
on his hands
now his wife
has to give
the baby
its bottle

–

try missing
god

each twin
slower
than the last, she spits

over my dead body

baby
after baby
out.

as news
of the massacre
spreads, the young
call it
mother

by word of mouth.

red words
on a page
in Exodus.

the yielding
bird red

in paintings
grandfather
gave.

glass
in grandmother
breathing.

     her hands
how they
would fuss

bow ties
to the palms
of jesus.

mother’s
yarn
too tight

on my finger.

visiting my brother’s neck.

girl death / has boy / acne

(I’m here for you
like I’m here
for cigarettes)

I sleep the wink
that’s yours.  angels

can’t have
ideas.

many times
when I lifted you
I did so
thinking
you
were a cloth
I’d folded
for god’s
swollen
eye.

many times
I pinched you
so hard
you fell
asleep.

in all scenarios
god promised
me

the world
would not end
if he talked

about

your weight.

the moment he thinks surely he’s the man about to read something beautiful he’s tied loosely to a chair by his father who calls him time.  his mother measures again the kitchen and again it is small but no other room can set a trap for a cage.  the meek speaking of a fork is a radio in the thenar space of his right hand.

I lead my cousin’s hand to the belly of a sleeping schoolgirl.  the belly is six months out and could survive a mouthful of prose.  cousin has kids of her own.  cousin prefers the word listless to the word unborn.  the schoolgirl reminds my cousin of someone I knew.  a bodyguard.  a bodyguard as far as school age bodyguards go.  the recall puts me beneath a porch at age fourteen

     giving birth to something boneless.  I am trying to hear it explode in the present.  I ask the lord’s television to lure my cousin from the scene.  I ask the lord for custody of any tornado

warning
scrolling under
a muted
cartoon.

angel: I know

my son’s
disease
is lower
than pork, that suicide

means god
has a say
in how
we’re prepared…

also, that above
the lake
in which
my father
sees

a strange
fish
there flies

a burning
bird

I want to drink and watch a clean body enter clear water  

-

I have prayed naked
over
an insect, have lost

mother
to her gift
of not talking

to animals…

-

the ****** believes
loneliness
can be
exaggerated, dear

spider:  I swaddled

in blankets
so many
babies

as surgery
is to god

there’s a mattress on the side of the road that everyone pulls over to jump on. hell, some get half a mile down and come back having thrown their shoes out the window.  others go all the way home to get their unattended children or oldest relation.  some of the cars seem to be auditioning for destitute

rucksack
clowns.  also hell I saw recently a two person bike with no one on it give over and rest on the mattress.  my worst thoughts you beat with a broom.

we borrowed clothes
from the body.  food

wouldn’t fit
in our mouths

mother claimed

because

I’m here for the music  

-

you can keep
your baby
I’m here
for the swing

-

I write
on the days
my son
is sick

-

if heard

I overhear

there was more
to him
in the womb

-

no dream is strong enough to put a hospital
on the map

-

in heaven

the past
is the present
that left
for earth

I led the babysitter
to where I thought
her child
was.  

I lost my legs.  

they went slowly, as if
I’d taken
a hoof
to the chest
underwater.

I swear
her father
brushed my lips
with the ******
of a bottle
while his wife

held back.

alas, children are not
the most
economical
memory.

male is to female
as gender
is

to genre.

I like to think of your house
as a treehouse
and imagine

the tree.

it’s not special. it’s not even all I have to give. its power is that it reminds me of something I had you safeguard in a dream. because I’m looking at the other fathers, I have to massage my gut feeling you’re looking at them too. so there you are beside the random machine I’ve been force feeding the one phrase that frees it to eat for a year. before you were my daughter you were the fortune teller whose teeth I pulled to find out your mother had a girl.

would die
of ceaseless
immediacy

a mother’s motivational silence
speaks to a jesus
who at this point
has been alive
longer than he lived

-

I am of two beasts
when put in the mind
of my brain’s mirror

-

while doing the same thing
day in and day out
my father suffered
various indignities
commonly associated
with babies
and naked women

-

it is childish
how much time
she thinks I have
to touch everything
in the store

-

no offense
to your proactive
vacationing

but this

this, is dying

the wife of the man about to be wheeled in has asked for my loneliness.

in a country bereft of curfew
part two
of a skit
assembled
by orphans
trades attendance
for the applause
of angels
and skips
the clothesmaker’s
best scene
for another-

a secret favorite
that has Moses
leaving behind
an orange
soccer ball
to be with God
in the sobbing blackness
of an oven.

my son’s creator couldn’t settle on a disguise.
     the top of his skull is more like a wet rag.

your work computer can only deny
so much
****.  

Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.

you are born in a great house and given to a great man.  your birth is the earliest predictor of forward thinking.  your servants spend their days believing the great man’s thoughts of suicide are contagious.  on your fifth birthday, at the age of ten, you are kidnapped by a woman who says the sack is for show.  who says be loud.  you are taken to a river where you meet your brother who seems happiest when holding his breath.  he tells you the woman is your sister but good luck seeing her again.

luck is for the naked.

dear line break,
sleep
is a hoax.

the color of my skin
represents
the time
I’ve been given
to meditate
on my blackness.

in retrospect, we belong
on earth.

the son of an archivist
and the son of a librarian
meet in a shop
where both
step in
to resolve an argument
over

a nesting doll
before pursuing
separately
the same
arsonist.

all angels want to be the angel
known as the man
who smuggled
into heaven
the sacred
text.

I write nothing my tutor can’t read.

before touch has a body, we can see only

the hands of god
how they fumble

loneliness
and imagine

birth
for a family

of small
permissions

so the dream
of my hearing
heard it
said:

the child
arsonist
is dead

and after
his lantern
of illness
dropped

what shape
his common
ear
became

(to record

the noise
of a mountain

boy) of a flame

the burning
stopped

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

sadness
has only
the followers
it takes
from melancholy.  a dog

a dot
of a dog
see it
master
the secret
farm.

dancing
badly
in a small
eye

–

by beehive
what churches
know

in spirit, a grey kitten
curls into
the crystal ball
of an old black man
whose white readership
never materialized.

across town, the man’s first book
is buried beneath a tree    
that was not a tree
when the book was buried.

as a character
in a far death experience
a white woman with a shovel

     her face a storm cloud
above a prison yard
with no prison

adds a bit
of humor.

the doll and the dummy wore for god a wire.  she had a dog whistle and she a ****.  my fist grew faster than my mouth.  your dad was asking a ghost looking for its head how to hold a baby.  thunder what it remembered.  your mom the palmreader with a broken wrist was pumping milk…

in the video about how to give my son
a bath

that’s
him

-

the woman beside me
takes her health with her
wherever

she goes

-

my wife prays
for a boredom
much like
the boredom
of the baby
Jesus
whose hair
my son

lost

is it okay
to rename
a lost
dog?

whose stripes
mimic
prison bars
behind which
a man is on fire.

the man whose blindfold I touched

I said his name
in the dark

he carried me once
on his shoulders
to a cemetery
where as a boy
he’d seen
a turtle

most kids see a mother’s
UFO, a stone

is god’s
giftwrap

that suicide
be
a medical
procedure

for the layman
in
you. that evac

be exodus.

the brother was my age, not a looker.  my parents were nervous and slicked his hair back lovingly.  their hands touched.  I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen.  Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found out he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag.  I went in with Stephen once saying his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed it.  because of this honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them.  the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised.  it didn’t make us any closer.  the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up without having to ****.  it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.    

I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood.  but the brother pulled me to him anyway and I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d spent mourning the loss of Stephen.