(ix)

at a therapy session
for those
unable
to dream
I am handcuffed
to my mother
whose imaginary
lover
has lice

a baby born with a wig
rattles on
about sleep

death’s eyepatch

(x)

on these bikes these boys are beautiful

/ passing men under spell of god, the order

maybe dissolved

of the bent
cigarette

/ I will not miss art

five-thousand fathers
to burn
a fish

but ease, but hunger

a girl putting all her pain in a turtle
or in anything
lifted
from the hood
of her sister’s
coat

/ a firecracker
read
by a bone

(xi)

what a ghost knows about giving birth
powers on
a mechanical bull

father says there is nothing
like it
in Ohio
this giving

god

to a jack-in-the-box

there is a word my mom makes
from a word
she can’t

/ orbituary

/ brings it all
home

(xii)

the human dream

god’s attempt at a short story

the animal
works

miracles

/ the elephant
in its ruin
takes up
for whale

yeah, it rains here
rains
glue

adult diapers
are fishhook
rare…

/ tell your sister
nothing happened
to mine

(xiii)

imagine how long god must’ve been left alone to be named after the first person whose name he said. how hungry the mother to swallow hair.  how bored her baby to remember.  how small the television that spitballed hell.  hidden the horse to keep its church.  black the water to transport fish.

(xiv)

the black eye
given
to the moth-catcher’s
most attractive
child…

what a woman predicts
becomes false

subtraction
the plus side
of trauma

her mother’s
babied
past

mom in the hospital is asking a half-lost boy if he knows about the band-aid keeping her skull together. the boy is afraid and I get that. her hands are confused or small or both. I give the boy a cigarette but yank it back when I see he’s been here before. could god maybe leave a thing untouched. behind us a mummy with one ear

still visible

is crawling with parents to a place.

He smokes. Lips pull thin white clouds of relief into his lungs but when he is done he will head back in to the dark den of machine men. There used to be better days. Now strange alchemy has turned his soft body hard, smooth skin wrinkled, white teeth cracked and yellow, and soul into a mutilated mess. The fence vibrates with his passing frustration as one foot cracks the corner. Would have been a ****** mess if not for the tight steel toed shoes, that add about half a pound a piece. His fatigue weighs so much more. A heaviness stops him at the door. It is like he is walking in a world of gravity set at twice the normal rate. Safety goggles, lunch lady hair net, and ear plugs have become his nighttime uniforms.
“Five hours and twenty-three minutes to go.” He recites like Dustin Hoffman’s rain man.
The mechanical madness beckons him in with a thud da dud, thud da dud, thud da dud.
“At least it is a midnight shift and not a hot summer day shift.” He thinks as he shrugs off the last remnants of his reservations.

there is silence sandwiched between silence
thanks to the sudden cessation of their croaking
as if a plague took them, but it didn't

nor were they sleeping, nor were you,
at 0300 hours--you were between guard towers,
with an M60, and a hunger for sound

though you were picky about your song;
you longed for their familiar cadence, for
their green belched reassurance

that they would lay more eggs in the mire
and tails would grow, the swimmers would
become singers of familiar verse

but you could not wait for a resurrection
you did not know would occur--your duty would end
at dawn, and by then you could be dead deaf

from their silence

Night of no moon. No twinkles. Poet time.
Murk of morning not yet become. Stygian.
Sky of two minds. Janus of covering clouds.
When does when begin? When does then end?
A dash of light tips the balance. Revision.
Syntax of the soul at 4 AM. Garbled images.
Why do bards embrace the darkness? Home?
Shades of past lives stumble in the gloom.
Portals to worlds lived and lost. Open.
Lovers with forgotten names once more whisper.
Friends long in graves stir and grumble.
Every single thing lost names itself found.
A slow sharpening into definition, detail,
becoming what those They insist is real.
   Wake to a world that’s barely now,
   live in a now that’s then. Somehow.

I'm there,
an old portrait hanging on the wall
in need of a good dusting--past worthy
of restoration

passers-by will now and then pause
(more then than now), and wonder what my
two grey eyes saw, what my folded hands held,
what words came from my pursed lips

then came you, all dozen years of you:
maybe you liked old oils; maybe you were bored;
but you stopped, you ate a plump pear
while gazing

you squinted to see the signature
of the one who created me, though somehow
you knew there was but one creator
who gifted all brushes

you read the brass plaque
which summed up my life--three names and
eight digits, the last four a score before you were born
then you closed your young eyes

because you knew mine were closed
despite the painting's vain attempt to keep them open  
and you imagined you were asleep, waiting for a new sun,
or for another curious soul to stroll by

one who would take the time to look
and, like you, wonder, who I was, and why I was draped on this wall,
in this quiet hall, where you stood, pear in hand, finding color,
light, in my untold story

he wept, T.S. Eliot
for he lost a poem he penned
by hand--a piece that called itself
The Waste Land

in which he declared
April was the cruelest month
but he recalled little more, while scavenging
his memory for wily words

though I did not weep with him
I placed a light palm on his shoulder
to tell him I understood, for we all
lamented the loss of verse

phrases that came to us in dreams
lines that licked clean the inside of our skulls
words that repeated themselves, coming and going,
coming and going with each breath