You can never skip an opportunity to call yourself that
Because you’re your ma’s son:
Didn’t get caught up in the tool shed
Got spiked through with the hooked art of repeating yourself instead

Should I feel insulted then
That these cracked, digited fringes
These rejects of your diminutive anatomy
Are how you love me?

You love me with the unvoiced, unexplained idiocy
Of fingers that make Mexican waves
To one particular song
And lure mine to come dancing too

You love me with the whorls where you keep your DNA
Counting the concaves in my skeleton:
Explore them, soothe them
Wonder if you made them

And I think you fear that
If you ceased to trace me as I grew –
A carpenter sifting through the age rings in my spine –
I’d only feel the dislocating vagueness
Of an absence too menial to be mourned.

“Cack-handed”
But I remember different:
I remember your hands like leather,
All heated and scratchy from your pockets,
Unhooking the problems from my mouth.
And how the weather’d teethed on them,
Gnawed away chunks down around the cuticles
Until they were dry and scarred like February –
February getting lost in its own bleak cavernousness

They stir the rag in the shoe polish,
And the burnt spoon in the bean tin.

I used to try to pinch them
But my nails were too soft
And your palms too crusted
But when they tell me “thick-skinned”
I shake my head and think
“No, beautifully cack-handed”

Prayers are no meditations for your begging.
Pretending you're embedded in God’s will,
Aside salvation: The eternal momentum to
Chant a meaning; his second-hand revelations!
To bear witness the next three digited centuries.  
And what if the burst of colors was in my head,
From the crowns walked a plank to confess
A halfpiece of bread, and a wine-full of blood
In your heart. What knees pristine, uncalloused!
As if uncrucifixed to the privilege of delusions.

A heathen! Me?
You're mistaken, my brother.
He is definitive in my eyes! And upon my words,
Our Father sees me as he sees you.
But I see you not as Our Father does.

For when you're lost then, do you seize deceit?
Because the latter excuses were amiss
of validations from other Holy spirits?
Or is it, you're paltrier of a servant unrequited
By God’s manifestation of an ant,
Born inside an indecisive man: crying—begging.
Fate and God and spirits and fortunes,
Whatever fits your pocket, fits with lies.
Lies that begged to know a little paradise.
It's all abstract! A profound persuasion within.
Numbers ruined the origins of your skin?
You don't know? Where's your resolution then?
If one beseechs one more trivial permission,
When does the life of purity begin?
And if one doubts his God,
Is he not permitted to sin?