[baptism]

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.


[******]

father offers, no, we are bodies trapped in people.

he was known to be monstrous when inside a vandalized church.

if gay, he’d ask
does anyone ask
if you
were born?

yesterday, she was identified by her dentist.
she was recalled as a hunger pain.

man is a rumor
started by god.


[bread]

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.


[a.]

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.  


[catharses]

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.          

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.


[loyalties]

the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.


[vasectomy]

I open out from another’s dream. I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it. my female wife- this much is the same. I’ve been here before. nothing happens. she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news. this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building. the heat that gets to others is god.

~


poems above were taken from books available here:  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad