a sucker
for anything
can’t come back
to haunt her
my mother

like a genie
rubbing
for no
luck
the arms
of my father’s
electric
chair

is aging

had I known
they were details…

psalm alas, kid-

I located
for nothing

/ the baby whose worship returns to put hair on your doll’s chest

/ the time your twin broke stick with a woman at the end of her rope

/ the ring-bearer of silence

there is a god but don’t encourage him.  my father means it tenderly.  in his attic a painting of a park scene has in it a woman without feet sitting on a bench.  without feet because his young mind couldn’t settle on them bare.  in the end it seems the wild dog has licked them away.  attic that in a drought of weeping became a basement.  our poverty was given an oar.  my past has a past.

I don’t have very long
says the stone / all sadness

recent

in yours, I find the holiest of permissions.

in mine, slips of paper.  

and in that of this
oft cut
child-

the least of our forgeries.

the mother is first a toppled statue
and then a runaway
with a pillow
whose father
died
out of context
on the stone steps
of a large library
hours before
it opened
all because
her cotton ball
stopped
beating

it is common for the male cannibal to carry the skin of the due child

fasting is a sin and starvation a commandment

orphans are given home movies and edible pillows

language is a head
we bring it cake

a premature
or christ-like
nostalgia
for the mirror
surrounded
by the nothing
I feel

take or take
6pm

having just
gotten
glasses

I left
father’s
body mirror
to mother
and comb

and set off
for the aptly
named
Hill

armed with
a science book
and shielded
by my own
oblivion

and there
every bit
white
as weary
I sat
as I thought
would sit
the black man
I so wanted
to be
with British
accent

and there
a sanely placed
forklift
seemed okay

abandoned
oh
that I saw

a too strong woman
hop down

her wrongness
a nothing
though from
I ran

as a stick figure on a forgotten gurney dreams of one day washing a flower or of drying a wet bird, I run the bath to put the tub to sleep then use my body to bury the water.

it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.

confirmation that Joe is and has been born.  confirmation of the received body.  confirmation of a previous perception we held of the few actively trying to be prophetic.  confirmation the killed have consented to patience and will furthermore die.  confirmation of past with asterisk pending.  future confirmation that in adopting the plainspoken one will reiterate qualifiers designating poverty as a chosen residence.  have visual on verbal capital.  have verbal on holocaust.

any word is the memory I have of it.

a birdwatcher with broken hands, I am the cry of my mother’s body. she climbs the tree she was left in and smokes back the years of breathing underwater. whatever you’ve been through, this poem waited for me to survive.

my son and I are standing.
if our eyes have met, they have forgotten.
behind me, little lambs of worry.
in my son’s eyes.

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

the frog shepherd

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

call out from your place
in tree
so he know
which tree
a tree
for once
foreign
as a bear
cub’s
back

as the hands pray without the diver knowing, I ease my father’s ****** heels into the shallow end of a public pool.  inside your mother, a girl screams like a girl.  at home, my sister kicks herself for getting pregnant.  while beating his brother into the fence, our stock bully gives himself heat stroke and has to out his ***** before it disappears.  

I only have one memory of tugging at my father’s heart.  he checks for his toes, tousles my hair, and damns the lazy fish.

days before comet

I bite my tongue
this close
to a worm

the past doesn’t know what hearing is.  it sounds in sick animals we won’t eat.  father, at the hill’s bottom, waits for a marble.  impossible, but we’ve somehow stopped the spread of presence.  a boy is a moment.  not any but the one before he finds his mother’s **** stash.  alarmist.  satan has one ear weighs nothing.  on eggshells, the future joins the scarecrow’s timid young.  grandfather had a pipe he smoked and a dog he couldn’t beat.  grandfather has a pipe he can’t reach and a black man he means to set upon a woman in a prison yard.  god is a tent for the wounded but ain’t no one come by.

the baby is white guilt.  is walking early.
is outside picking stones to give to loved ones.

Jesus is a moment of peace
on a skateboard.

the fish are five thousand
isolated incidents.

vandalism is vandalism.

the numb hands of a child
go rolling after
crayons.

this is you, beside a flower, in front of a mountain.
your eyes are so big

and the bread
so quiet.

we were five months into the first health of our infant boy

when we learned we’d been in the wrong room
with the wrong paint
happy to have
the wrong kid.

I say this for effect.  
I am god cruel, god brave, god loved.

my wife is god murmur.



there is so much telling in a diagnosis.
poet son, let me explain.

      

     I have a cardboard cutout in the shape of your demon.

you otherwise
have all the space in the world.

teeth

the many memories I have of my mouth

the kind of childhood tag

no one knowing
it

because it could be them

i.

some dog is ******* the ghost-mourned balloon as mother does her thing in the body of big boy bite mark  

ii.

it won’t come back from seeing father go ace on a bag of flour

the crow
if truly
crow

my seven year old son keeps putting his hands in his diaper. evangelist.

worry is no teacher. birth no language and mouth no age.  I tell you there is a comedy passed among the lower whites and I’ve heard them boast of taking blood’s coffin to the grave.  I moonwalk in a poem about violence.  am abused by animals for buying local

from the claustrophobe
her neglected

astronauts

infant, the sooner
than expected
search
for god.

I have this baby I’m not afraid to use.

you pretend to shoot
and I’ll pretend
to fall. we’ll make a day

of never talking.

the missing crow of thorns.

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.  

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail.  told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born.  I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good.  had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.