Dear Ethel Cain

I feel my death has passed away. That the golden comprehension of my shirtless youth has become touched out of its mind and into a code for unfinished nakedness. My god a scarecrow stuffed with snakeskin and my scarecrow a fetus trying to curl itself to life. I don’t think any of us are here. The pain of being is the pain of not having been. What a ******* thought. There are children who know the sky is a color made to scream at blue. And they die not because they are little.

God thought I was a dream.
I’ll love you in heaven.
I didn’t read
All of your poems.
They didn’t change my life.
God told me in a dream
That angels
Throw eyeballs
At scarecrows.
I get weird
Born
And ******.
I am afraid of my children
And my children are afraid
Of their friends.
I wrote in my head a song
I wanted to hear.
Owl, whale, crow
Is the only
Order.
Writing about god doesn’t mean you’re smart.
Barton you can’t
Use
Like that
The animals.
Word choice
Is a hoax.
As far as last lines,

Roll that tiny spider
Into a cigarette
For years.

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow

Dear Ethel Cain

My belly drew circles around me. A scarecrow with cancer made peace with paradise in a cornfield of melancholy. My parents fell asleep but neither one before the other. Some bad kids formed a church then left it so they could pour glue down a rabbit hole. A short period of drunkenness found a mistake in a star. I didn't know how many rabbits to pray for, so I just prayed for one.

The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.

TRY, RUIN

I put all my knowing in the hands of the known
thinking things wiser would **** me in peace
the roots of my going expanding alone
where drinking sings finer to pill popping beasts

you placed all the growing in a garden so burned
a leaving built into your still lover’s teeth
the pace of your smoking so slowly relearned
our drinking spilled into the pillcrusher’s feast

oh bombs made in heaven too perfect to drop
  I still think the angels are ******* with god
the mirror a creature that image resists
  unmoved by the seeing of its own basilisk

I worship too quickly.
My gods think they’re still alive.
Am I the world my children worry over.
Am I the worry.
My job is a soap fattened in hell.
I send my brothers songs sung by women
In the language of my voice.
I didn’t drink until I missed being sick.
I love my father in a way only my sons will understand.
I love my mother shhhhh.
Being quiet is the childhood of silence.
Hear underwater
Touch
Starve.
Or be
With sightseeing
The lord
Of your phone.
I’m sorry if that was your body.

red the last leaf
clipped undone

and swept
across my path

what will bend
will bend

what will break
will break

scrapescrapescrape sings
the god of all things

and then her silence says
bend

and then her silence says
break

and then her silence says

Look at what god was given. What did you do with your last silence. You sharpened yourself in a whale and let your baby die in an owl. Yourself has no world in this place. None of my cousins are dead but I'll never see them again. My sickest son has no hell. Have no hell.

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.