the stones
die
and turn
ghost.

I ask them
to mention
my throwing
arm.

traditionally, one sings
when around
water.

     I walked early-

two to four weeks
before my mother
began

her lifelong
affair / with baseball.

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.

Running behind it
I went far,
Far than myself
Then, far from myself
I was to be near it,
And if I could run it back
I would humbly do it.

As

the strings
of a viola,
I am

like an
oscillator,
resonant

with
nervous
energy:

do...

te-- le--

so fa me re do--;

As

a marble
dropped
onto

a piano's
keys, my
pulse, with

anxious
accelerando
strikes:

pitch...

pitch, pitch

now, now

now now now

Stop.

Now, she is a ghost
as your grandfather would be
had he lived in such a time one exists,
the Air Force veteran sort of pilot
and green blankets for feet,
looking ready to lie, mermaid fin.

Ghosts are such glassy things,
fragile. They are almost always
shattering for some reason.

Or another, picking roses upon
sheaths and tufts of a garden home,
these thorns appear more complicated
than the ones down south,
more intricate or something so.

As she floats upon the wormbeds,
a daisy blossoms like teacups
sat in a line of a dozen knives, to ****
her once more: the foul columns.

This can be a myth,
had it not been an empty ivy vine
choking her heart and making her a
sheet, she glitters near invisible
and must be upstairs with
your grandfather’s veteran friends:

and know, yes, the crystal is real
but ghosts do not exist
until far beyond their death.

a skinny boy with long hair
mid
koan

leaves me
his imagination.

     my mother
     shaving her head
     with a lollipop.