Take the money and run

The emptiness,
It filled the void.

The silence,
It filled my mind.

I feel that nothingness
Can be something too.

It is a catalyst to
Creation.

A development in the mind
That extracts the most inner inkling
And transforms it into your grandest idea.

Maybe silence seems like a handicap to you,
But to me it is a

Shingled roofing caves in quick, the wallpaper all peeled back
The devil walks these halls
The sinner paints them black

It's been a long time coming, the end to all our ends
The night covers misguided deeds
The moonlight shadow bends

To which do I owe the honor, the joy or haunting dreams?
The guardian stands upright
The sunlight through it streams

I used to laugh at my mother
when she told me that I'd go crazy
from reading all of those books and that
I'd lose my mind trying to get my PhD
attempting to unclothe the universe.
Now I wonder why she didn't laugh at me
and my ignorant smugness and speeches
as I struggle to piece my sanity back together
from the countless blows of all this learning
which has failed to make me whole.

~

[On mother, father, god, dog, *****]

what if the eyes in the back of my head

hallucinate

what if
the eyes in the back of my head

during surgery

during

a haircut

~

[On foreclosure]

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I
am rowing

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat

~

[On the past]

my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow

full view
of the aging

marksman

~

[On phobia]

as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug  

~

[On the need for a watchlist]

if one can talk of it, one is most likely not poor.  we called you to life to give you a name.  god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress he could see through.  a short history of heaven made its way to hell to have its location shared.  your mother developed a stutter.  your fake cry took on a depth of meaning made us dip

(psalm
for satellite)

into your brother.

~

[On paternity]

as his mother has heard only yesterday how he was born to some nobody that everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear.  as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream of putting a cricket on the witness stand.

~

[On my son having little to no vision]

I am on count eight of ten-

ten, the future.

I call you raindrop,
your hiding place

water

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor

~

[On decompression]

the zombie movie about buzzards.  the hours that go undetected in the parents of forty-eight special needs children.  

~

[On lore]

I have two dreams of running into the newly pregnant late bloomer.  in the first and most recurrent, I am operating a remote control car I’ve lost while worrying about a brother’s closeness to a certain pilot.  in the second, my mother is talking lights out to nostalgia’s previous owner who agrees with her that the roofs of buildings need to be smaller.  in both, I get the sense my father has already hit the pop fly under which he collapsed muttering baseball, baseball, ghost of a baseball.

~

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[On writing]

my sense of place is a person.  *** is odd,

right?  this thing that auditions

for what it has.

I wonder how I let sadness crash me like the cruel waves
as I sank wrecked, unsearched.