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.

The present is the language god uses to tell the future there’s no present.

To swim is to let John the Baptist draw on your body.

Touch is the hand’s trapdoor.

Dear Ethel Cain

Maybe I will come up with a song about my dying body that everyone except my brothers will sing to the same American bomb. Maybe then my mother will maybe then my father into the image designed by the non-working eye of god. And I won’t be touched in a bathroom and my cousins will outlive heaven in a patiently violent world of surrendering angels who surrender to themselves because their mirrors saw a sheep under an icicle and joined the suicide cult of sameness that went on to become the alcoholic white space that created heaven from nothing more than a nothing that added itself to a hell built on any toddler’s belief in offing oneself to get a nap. Gaze is a sec away from Gaza.

sacrifice 8

Gaze
Is a lost
Film
Filmed
In the seen
Abyss
As memorized
By a mother’s
Basilisk
Star
I don’t
Say after
Life
Around rabbits
Cigarettes
Give the dead
Roots
Made of smoke
Gaze is the unnamed
Limb of sight
Time a pause
God takes
In the post
Angel
Tantrum
Of a carpenter
Ghosting the ghost
Garden yield
Of his father’s
Pawprint moon
Loss
Has bones
All of them
Found
Fact
After sobbing
Fact

Dear Ethel Cain

I heard a song just now and my stomach wept weeping still. I started a band but we all had pianos. Frogs showed their throats to owls stuck looking away. You told me your opposite loved god for making jesus attracted to nothing. After is a place in the wristcutter’s belly.

sacrifice 7

I want all hounds to sleep through their death. I hate grief, but not for the reason you think. I am less weird.

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.