by simply watching 'don't call me crazy'
with regards to mental health... a bbc3 documentary.

i find a few pointers, apart from the fact that i've learned
English to a standard that i could
be misjudged as a native, what with african psychiatrists
   and the history of England as  a postcolonial nation...
     the problems of premature depression
and other divergences from the "norm"
  (or is that a tu-dum tss... "the norm"?
i never know how to tell the joke a proper
way, so many jokes are mothered
by punctuation, i don't know
how many there are that aren't) -
so aside from that... the fact that i'm
faking being British... if you have any grievances
against me: you'd better me Ukranian
or Lithuanian... otherwise? *******.
yes, i know the Poles did terrible things,
Vlad wasn't the only person ready to
do sadistic **** on people by impaling them
on sharpened-wooden poles...
   and you thought the crucifix was bad...
but oh look... the artists inserted a peddle-stool
so he could stand while on the cross...
rather than actually: hang from it.
talk about a woman faking an ******.
then again: he was all kissy-kissy with
a centurion having cured the ravaging libido
of his "demon possessed" daughter who
had a hot bagel flirt under her skirt for him...
or as i say: **** a prostitutes
           **** for an extra ten quid: the sigma
of how many ***** that thing has seen
turns your tongue into a dagger...
that's where i have seen my salvation:
   not in the eucharist or degrading symbols
of a godly stature.
       no, the point is:
this misapprehension of where the origin of
thinking resides...
  the true materialists posit the origin of thought
in the brain... but, honey-bee, the brain
is preoccupied with its materialistic responsibilities...
to shoot adrenaline when bungee jumping...
why think it isn't already preoccupied with anything
but thought? the brain doesn't think
no more than the heart might... or your *******
wetted or your phallus becoming *****...
there's no point in ascribing thought to the brain,
even if you abstract the source of thinking
toward the brain as a *mind,
     the suggestion parallels what the brain does,
and what the brain isn't...
   as with the notion of god...
          ridiculous for most people:
or also ridiculous when man is taught to stress
his "individuality"...
                               both seem on equal footing
to be considered phantoms, but the individual is
more of a phantom than god...
                             and as Diogenes of Sinope found out:
you'll find god and the Archimedean eureka
quicker than finding an honest man -
who takes a candle at noon into a market square?
     ah: that famous lunacy...
but in the beginning the word was with god,
       yes, because when we started we only said ooh ooh!
and made those frightening monkey faces to
war off evil spirits and the Arabic third eye, evil.
   Darwinism created historical fiction...
           a bit like science fiction, but instead of looking
forward, historical fiction is looking back,
toward a time when people struggled against
the elements, and had no sense of having to think
given their actual pentagram equilibrium was tuned
into what was around them...
                   the senses could never deviate from
the world of shouting down a cave and hearing echo,
it's only when thought emerged and conceived words
   that the dubiousness of simple musing:
chicken or egg first? created auxiliary sense perceptions...
   we have left the sensual world...
           for we have "enriched" our lives with
thinking, the byproduct of which is what scared me
about this bbc3 documentary... that all mental
illness stems from allow thought to automate itself...
      in other words having no moral compass...
in other words: not having read a single book
   and learned a process of equating thinking with
narrating... as a sensible option to what others tend
to do (the innovators), and allow narration to be a void...
into which they pour all their thinking to
fill that void... with, say, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb...
Isaac Newton and gravity...
it's just scary that people can allow automated thinking,
     made even more evident that counters
the punitive transgender pronoun scenario
   that only focuses on the pronouns: he, it, she.
these youngsters in the documentary are dealing with
submitting to a pronoun focus of: i, it, you.
                      in some vague sense of a religiosity,
that they cannot allow cogito ergo sum into their minds,
a possessiveness of body, that later translates
into an identification with the mind: which is -
well, if you're going to posit the origin of thinking
in your brain, which isn't even there - you mind
as well posit the mind, seeing how the soul
is argued against primarily through our mortal condition.
   is the eye the window to the soul?
  and the brain merely a paraphrasing of that statement?
perhaps...
              but i wouldn't be too worried
             as Walter Benjamin was about art in the age
of mechanical reproduction... i'd be worried
that art is bound to the morgue of psychiatric institutions...
that art is not a term that suggest the origins of
   such ailments:
due the original lack of it in such places:
  but that that it was never there... and that finding
art can be therapeutic is why art can be scolded
               and establishment art is nothing more
than the pinnacle of us, having abused words,
waging fewer and fewer words, can't produce
    a work of beauty... merely a work that occupies
a space.
                art = space...
          that's the statement these days...
being oversaturated with scientific assurances has created
this insurgence of over-competence or making
art not art in a sense timelessness, as in Dante's
comedy isn't equal to space,
            but that it's equal to timelessness...
    or a statue by Donatello...
                          these days art = space...
because it's not going to be timeless... it was once
the iconoclasm in metaphor of: the lion of Judea...
          Lucifer as the morning star...
                         it will not be timeless because it
has been reduced to the establishment's aesthetic
of tracey emins' unmade bed... or
       damien hirst's the physical impossibility
of death in the mind of someone living -
i never said these things aren't art... some people
said cubism would never be art compared to
surrealism... but shove a triangle into Pythagoras'
head and you get some sort of mathematics...
              it's based on that principle...
what wouldn't work in the case of hirst would be
to put a cancerous tumour into a plastic cage...
people would associate it as some sort of atomist
representation of a nanometre worth's of some
larger thing... i do appreciate the fact that big
art works... it needs so much face to embody
the fact that you are to think about it...
                         and not to have a **** over it:
it's art that's anti-arousal and more and more
and more about how to juxtapose it in your mind,
always to abstract the brain as the mind
   and to never appreciate the idea of having
to source thinking as solely endemic to the brain...
the brain is busy, the heart is busy...
            we have perpetuated an outer-body
experience throughout our time since the time when
we first acquired the phonos of thought...
                 and it is a peculiar "sound", thought...
a dance memorable to actually having a hope in
possessing a soul... even after all sturdy things
shrink into the obsolete, and even vegetable.
but the piece i'm referring to?
     kinda paradoxical... given that a shark would
probably eat you... but then again counter-paradoxical
given the fact that most shark-attacks
     make the shark refrain from eating you,
but merely nibbling on you and leaving you alive
albeit nibbled on... maned... with scars...
so i get the part where the shark is in fact:
an impossible death to conceive... only for the lucky few.
  apart from the fact that the shark is caged
like a prehistoric mosquito lodged in amber...
              woodland gold, amber...
  that's the literal interpretation...
                                 but it's still a moving piece,
modern art isn't crap at all... it's just something you
don't get an ******* over...
            take any still life and apply a cognitively
based chemical reaction: stimulate a narrative...
in that famous phrasing, connect the: dot dot dot(s).
    become, in that almost ridiculous sense:
     a Sherlock Holmes... but all that died was about
a minute's worth of your attention...
this is what's fuelling revising a need for television,
big static things... my personal favourite?
that Tate Modern installation by richard holt -
hand on heart: about 3 times...
              i felt like a mosquito drawn into that:
ah the bright shiny light... 180º and a glass ceiling...
that's all it was...
                   art in the age of mechanical reproduction
has to almost ridicule man, or at least ridicule
the idea that he can become an individual,
    as was the ridicule of man that he could become
a god...
               sooner or later any attempt at individualism
becomes trendy, vogue, and magnetises and
monetises a need to mimic, replicate... one punk today:
20,000 punks tomorrow...
       /
           but that sort of mincing is mostly associated
by the bewilderment of our own success...
                           it's almost like a we're engaging with
a sabotage process: deliberately trying to undermine
ourselves by staging a variety of "anti-social" endeavours
we promised ourselves upon a belief in the "individual"...
      modern pieces of art debunk that myth,
it's that modern art pieces require so much space that
gave them the most adaptation prowess over, say,
a puritan's concept of art, as in a Turner painting...
           classical art can be put into a Florentine market
square and be passed by quiet casually,
because it provides an assurance - it forbids engaging
in an iconoclastic vigil, it's an assurance of the past
and how golden it was... but a modern sculpture
in a busy place where many people congregate
without first allowing it the asylum of an art gallery
and people will treat it as a chance to hone on it,
vandalise it, or steal it and sell it from scrap metal...
       modern art requires an asylum to be accepted,
an art gallery is an asylum where people with
good intentions enter and leave appreciating something
that, to the pleb, would get a rotten egg thrown at it.
    and as with regards to how i phrased something
earlier? how philosophy talks of the logos
     that doesn't see the phonos: or the dichotomy
between actual sound, and sound ascribed a
optically-phonetic disparity encryption:
deepened by a self-styled aesthetic of the "ruling elites"...
          and in the beginning the word was with god...
we're merely licking the toes of such a possibility...
         and just you try to bypass the orthodoxy of
encoding sounds with queer spelling...
                     you, in a sense, learn two-languages
with every single one you learn...
   how to say it and how to write it...
                              and then there the how you hear it
and how sometimes you hear different lyrics to
the ones sang...
                         a bit like the Chinese,
who, upon reading the English translation were
bothersome to get rich quickly after seeing
too many matchsticks in ideogram translated as merely
Li Po; i'd too go bananas and become frustrated
and retaliated by getting to Einsteinian grips with
the mathematical alphabet that bore Li Po... i.e. 1, 0
through to 9.
      ah yes... philosophy that doesn't appreciate
grammatical words, or in that sense credible for a biologist
not necessitating a genus to ease any argument,
to actually further it... or to play ping-pong...
   grammatical words are equivalent to the subconscious
given we tend to write some a sense of fluidity...
the unconscious? schematics akin to triangles...
  "images" or rather shapes...
                             beginning with Δ: isosceles...
later varied to the Γ triangle of Pythagoras...
          and as far as we got, a respectability to
not conjure up a square as worthy of encoding a sound...
nearest being the H... and that turned out to
be much ha ha ha.
                   still... i can't come to grips with these teenagers
in the bbc3 documentary talking about
automated thinking! i'm not denying it, i'm not
doubting it... it's just a question:
          how could such a pronoun muddle come about
that you discourage ownership of all your mental
activity? and instead leave a rampant kindred of an
abandoned snail's shell body to wreck havoc?
   it's almost like a a want to refuse to use words...
or encode words... rarely are people told
that the eyes are used as encoding organs...
                   but that the tongue knows no filters...
what the eye ingests... the tongue sometimes can't
digest... and vice-versus... that what the eyes digest
the tongue can't ingest: hence the rebellion
against contrary political ambitions -
   the ears? well: the ears are allocated the heart as
a partner... the tongue and eyes are entwined...
but the ears are allocated the heart...
                     you tend to feel words more than
hear them... because by the time the tongue
represses combining itself with the eyes to
that elevation of thought... your body becomes
autocratically synchronised to a sort of music
of heightened of unanimous response...
             well, it's not exactly a fetish watching such
documentaries.. iconoclasm in metaphor...
  i swear i wrote this before... how philosophy avoids
grammatical genuses... and how all too
ambivalent poetically equivalent nouns and verbs
are to hide our imperfections that precipitate from
art... iconoclasm / anamorphosis in metaphors...
                         camaïeu in allegory...
                   divisionism in pun...
                                       chiaroscuro in imagery...
gestural abstraction in onomatopoeia...
                     just some examples, and none necessarily
     convincing - as ever... this is my excuse
for i am always bound to say language is Alcatraz
   and my escape from Alcatraz is bound to metaphors,
fo

The artist evokes his tormented psyche

Through gestural abstraction
a systematic colorfield emerges
The blurring of dreamworld and reality

All pretensions dissolve
But…
Critics still criticize
Snobs still scoff
   the creative will still drink and drug themselves the death.

whichever way the wind blows
that’s where my dreams escape me

They transform to Queens of Hearts and Princesses of utter

Royal

Baroque

Beauty
Bygone
Be Gone
my heart must resist

I will not be controlled by the guild
Caravaggio kept painting until he got killed
Went insane like most artists
Couldn’t stop before he got his fill

Just last night I caught gender
waltzing with *** in an entirely gestural affair.
I hailed them both to come join the rest of the party
but they were quite content dancing there
while the well dressed men and women ignored their spectacle.

Perhaps they did not remember their previous performances
that cast them into exclusion,
because their bodies were so entwined with such fluidity,
their parts swirled the whole of them into a state
of being only Picasso could understand.

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.

~ youth ~

holding a baby
as if she’d
had it thrown at her
my mother
came out of the museum-

it had stopped raining
it had also
stopped
snowing

and people
were giving me
money
 
~ to message ~

to be somewhere without a book on my person. hard word this, hard word that, for the never arriving marble of grief. to rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel. to let the water from my mother’s body but not before telling her god lives in me as long as my son is outside. to have nothing but the mewing compositions of rooftop strays to keep me from becoming the devil your pen pal was fed to. to die well. die punctuated. by imagery the drowning cull from years on land spent openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.

~ disburden ~

god went from wall to wall unaware he was god disguised as a graffiti artist.  renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  the homeless are tattoos that remove themselves.  I guard the outlying cross and go through the motions again of nailing to it the same madman.  my only tool is comfort.  in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.

~ apace ~

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.


~ clotheshorse ~

     a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.


~

from - father, footrace, fistfight -  (June 2014)

from ~The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake~ selected poems (September 2013)

[multitudes]

oh, here they are.  the interested persons we will find later.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus.  if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane.  if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch.  in memory alone I am alone.

[another ****]

in such times, it is constantly 2am.  a friend pulls carefully at your ear.  a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb.  you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential.  because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen.  your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked.  this is done in secret.  what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago.  when things were the same.      

[word of the devil’s death]

     my mother and father cower under the kitchen table and my brothers are dead.  my father has clammed up since asking me to tell him something he can take to his grave.  this last week I’ve mastered placing my ear on the table in such a way I hear what I am supposed to do.  impossible things that are no longer terrible.  dispatches from a simpler region.  for example, hack your roommate’s youtube account.  also, poison the non-pregnant.  my baby sister laughs with me when I say some of these aloud.  she believes the table is possessed by the devil’s ghost.  her beliefs are clear and specific.  the ghost thinks itself the actual devil, and will need a good amount of therapy.                    

[men statuesque]

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

[steganography]

every day is a scar’s birthday.  this is how I am able to start most of your sentences.  I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out.  on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified.  the termites fled your blood.  a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick.  the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness.  your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright.  for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries.  a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.


[the wave]

we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet.  we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks.  the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others.  we limp beside any creature that limps.  the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other.  our father is two mathematicians who argue.  our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave.  our guesses mean little because they are facts.  at school we are voted on and kissable.  if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket.  details belong to god.      

[fixture]

dying of young age, your brother nurses at the breast of the stage hand’s version of a mother.  the stage hand is off arguing with a lamp on the impossibility of attracting moths.  beside a tall cake, a groom with lockjaw and a stiff neck has to take life’s high point on faith.  if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb.  and then it was.      

~~~~~~~~~~

from ~father, footrace, fistfight~ selected poems (June 2014)

[future stabbings]

you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there. you post the photos while your dog barks. you doze on a hot day. your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog. your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing. you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car. the car is not yours. your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

[crystal]

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

[mendicant]

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from ~Eating the Animal Back to Life~ full length poetry collection (July 2015)

[uppers]

god gets ******-up about which hair to harm on your head. in some, this goes on for years. I have a lucky razor, a father who’s blind in one hand, and a suicidal thought that scares me to death in front of cops. my last meal came to me on a toothbrush.

[themes for orphan]

you will never be
a virus

-

the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named

-

*******
as the seizure
had
by hologram

-

the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down


[accession]

starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.

water
is nothing’s
blood.

They loosed the moorings from Cala Cogone prematurely, when the tide seemed to be lifting over the separate lumps in the dews of the hailstorms, and on the head of the Cyclops distancing itself from its corporeal organism. On a lavish and romantic day, they went to Genoa, to continue with their travel logistics to Piacenza. During the displacement Etréstles was contemptuous in the prow under the Shemesh that seemed to be a fearsome specimen, before an embroidered intestinal being stirred in his own dream, perhaps more longed for than a dual itinerary. While they slept, at the helm Etréstles argued ringing dressed in his black cyclamen tunic, the comrades were also sleeping with their rhapsodic physiognomic dreams, coloring mutinous gestural jaspers, on some faded signs that were deteriorating.

A chimera of Etréstles: “His off-center memory of him ..., was still in Izzana, the capers rumbed through the pathetic clouds over the gray tulles, and the layers of the sky tried to stop being a reign emeritus for a prince without a crown. The paradisiacal layer "kyklámino stémma", was glimpsed melted in the scattered limestone Nuraxis, turning into sticky aeroliths agglutinated in the deployment of the Conjuration, laying the rye species in the jaws, and on the head of Vernarth himself. As they continued with their abstract journey, they remained to parade with the legal aid in his own mirage. He tells her that: "I see them beyond from where their ceremonies collide, they cross eroding the vanished reason of their itinerancy." They get up and take the ship's moorings and attach them to the neck. Then they all cooperate to walk along the edge of a tracontero's sooty ship, moving them all barefoot…, waking up at once! Vernarth, try to wake them up, shake them off, but they don't wake up. And when he tried to evade him from sleep, he saw that he had the ropes on his neck, along with two Unicorns who were escorting him and looking at the infinity of the uni-****** between them tied to infinity itself, supporting that Genoa was already coming in front of its antlers. The others began to wake up and ate reclined, almost without any desire to rasp the cover full of self-sliding and unctuous linen, which allowed them to pass each one their own aperitif from Apollo's head, surrounding them in their cohorts inclusively, being semi dissipated and rolling down the hatch cover. Etréstles transferred the dream to Vernarth, once he went to his bedroom to rest before they touched the roadstead. At the foot of the homonymous promontory, 36 km from Genoa; Portofino could be seen, close to some spiral planks that floated in their hydro form, with Apollo's eyes narrowed and circumscribed in the radius of his orbital process, with submerged herrings that frolicked from Apollo's zygomatic, and in the regional natural garden of Portofino. They found different entrance gates through San Rocco, Portofino Vetta, and Nozaregoino, entering with the agaves on the way with different levels of accessibility and auriferous perspective escape. The path traveled from northwest to southwest on the same promontory that was hidden, communing with all beauty the Mediterranean vegetation, with its beautiful pine forests, and bluish scrubs in the waters of the Mediterranean, filling them with itching lungs, and especially in the offshoots of the Kardiá , silencing the peaceful companions by the suggestive Natural adonis in the indigo abyssal eyes.

Vernarth wraps himself in two linen cloaks and a spárgana for Etréstles, then intervenes, eclipsing each of the Unicorns from his uni-******. They frank him with their antlers on their pectoral, loving him with the subtle hint of attachment that is born from a primal genesis. His gesture softened the expectation that crowned the Empire of his cohort, with the impetus of Arbela, and in the semi-precious Onyx Crowns in chalcedony ..., lightening the gavels of the semi-precious sleep that awakened them before reaching the shores of Genoa. The land in Genoa, all descend in separate fractions and say goodbye, distantly gesturing their signs and making retro gestures with their hands dressed in the mineral encrusted with their rapacity. The ramblings showed on multiplex-rays at the levels of a growling aura, which instigated them to the enclave's inn among the algae that levitated on the ear tags of the ducks, and of some ruminant bluish unicorns, to reinsert themselves into the world of the adjacent daily chores of the cornucopia. The ship luridly hovered in the indigo bay, where it spurred on the Unicorns that were returning back to Sardinia, positioning itself in the bow bulb and in the stern the other to lighten the sails and return to Izzana.

The Scarabaeidae sing: “The Vernarthian tenor of Kaitelka carried them behind her with another Ballenid, this one carried the Demiurge Ezpatkul, with his prominent Augrum or Gold teeth that turned on the backs of all the borer beetles, delimiting towards a dialectic, and paraphrase of a qualitative satirical, especially in the form of Vernarth's sub-mythological genre. The sacredness of the unicorns was the winner of all the dull fantasies, pretending to raise the rainbow over their senses, delegating them remnant spatiality from the growing infinity. To praise the hypothesis of this whale, she sang native arias and cephalization ultrasounds in Genova, where she continued to harmonize the media in her cranial cavity, and in the muzzles that reached the larger fins, transmitting waves of parapsychological regression towards Vernarth.

A gestural Bad omen upon thy departure,
Wide awake with mistresses in white dresses,
Radically rude nor haunted by hate of fate,
Perjured to be doctors right hand man, thou
Canst bear any more napkins nor feeding skeletons,
Ward of changing faces, daily new files and sheets,
Dwell to witness Groan and roar men, Die of torment,
Terror nor Trauma, Thou Death be thy ally, savior

Nor conciliator, with thee thy flash rest ‘n soul delivery
Unto thy maker, No more garden of life nor a dream land
thy wish not to be, Shall there be any better way to die?
If dost in white dresses be swell’st Mistresses, well beseem
Of Proven quest, Passionate, and delicate, this be no
Army for every Brave men

a deformed salesman
with dog

worries
that maybe
god
has burned
again
her paw

on the cauldron
of rubber
hands, worries

more
that god
will publish

mother’s
books, the two

on gestural
dieting

oh, here they are.  the interested persons we will find later.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus.  if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane.  if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch.  in memory alone I am alone.

[in this life another is you]

father paints an abstract jesus.  my sister bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  my brothers

to keep from crumbling
are sharing
bread.  

-

I draw a violinist.  a dog

at the neck of its owner.

-

in our imaginings
gutted baseballs

became

the skulls of small animals
through which
the wind

called heads.

-

in heaven’s garage
they’ve yet
to make
a horn
that works.

the kids have gone two or three years now without being raised.

the match
unlit
by your tooth
is paradise.    

-

a refrigerator rocks in a junkyard.

either the door has jammed, or she

is pregnant.

-

a cement wall
scraped
in passing
by one
with a stick
is the love
we have
for father

-

depression is a dog whistle.  I miss dinner sounding it out.

-

(when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue)

or bluish

(like a sock in a blue
coat’s
pocket)

-

it is cruel to hang anything above a baby’s crib

-

I can only guess
I was happy
in the womb
with how
my mother
looked

-

the bunk
above mine
I call
deathbed

is

my brother’s-

he has
his own
way
of thinking

showerhead
is spotlight

-

here is a test:  circle
the parts
of a circle

(a sameness)

in the parrots
we care for…

our suicides
fight
for position

-

in the apple
air
of hem
and haw
a pacing
uncle
blank
as a broom
regards
the *******
half
of a doorknob

or

two men
carry a ladder
past a cemetery

one thought
between them

-

this nonfiction
not
what you’d
imagined

-

mother an artifact of paranoia

-

paper
scissors
milk

-

blacktop
pools
at the neck

of a crow.

half eaten
children
limp
home.

an umbrella.  a bra.  a harp.

a street we call satan.  

-

water, make your fist.  hold your breath
in a single
fish.

-

delirious
when the lights
went out
mother
would pull cocoons
from the oven    
tell us
to stop
kicking

-

it was a very strong soap
she’d use

a soap that squealed
against

the skin

her heart  
a hiccup’s
echo

her eyesight the sound of a drill

her eyes
two holes
in a turtle’s
shell

her eyes for seeing

the food in her mouth

-

the sobbing ventriloquist was my idea.  mother and father they were taking turns moving shampoo through my hair as I hummed.  doom was a color.  a mare kneeling on a bed of maroon straw.  miles off, an ambulance driver entered a silent film and tried to buy a garage door opener.    

-

children from abusive studio apartments inherit warehouse jobs from problem immigrants.  a bruise of ***** darkens the front of your jeans.  I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat

of exodus.  in memory alone I am alone.

-

under crow
and flat
on my back
in the loft
of my uncle’s
barn
my shadow
is still
she
who upright
confessed
so loudly
that her heart
flew
into a quiet
sky
as she
collapsed

-

on television
the world’s smallest ghost town.  on a shadow

socks match

-

no longer graveyards, I tend what is everywhere resting.  I crawl like a toothache, long with her death.  the voices move from head to mouth.  

a squirrel on fire.  an act of god.  

I don’t think seeing such things is enough to put

vague
& crow
into one bed.  she is asleep

or fingered
by a man
with seven.      

-

in a country store
a barefoot girl
walks on her heels-

long stride and baby.

the store’s owner
happily shelves
popcorn, gauze

     the thought of his father
doing nothing.

-

beating my clothes
with me
in them
mother
irons
a man
from the moon  

(who giggles in us poorly)

for love

-

if my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends
to the earth
a cornstalk
and lets
fly,

I have to find the mouse
that means
other mice.  

-

wish I could dream away the bad mornings spent cheating on her sadness        

-

illness, assault.

presence
a blank
petition

-

in the end my mother was mostly an ocean dipped into by lightning.  

a mother whose hands were broken by recent events.  events that evoke transcription.

-

assault:

maid
loses cart
to stairwell

-

illness:

a birthmark, a scar, and a tattoo

eating under
a blanket

~

[hospital young]

years back I met god in some nowhere town before I was born to teach symbolism. I know what room I’m in by the tv show my mother’s watching. dear ghost, I hope you like the parrot. from what word did letter come. existence mourns non. grieve on sight.

~

[untitled]

fog overtakes toad
& boys
are born.

ghost yoga. crucifixion.

train is a tunnel
train’s never
seen.

two dead crows- I’m shoeless again.

~

[food (xiii)]

while pacing the hallway of a floor that elevators skip, an amateur eulogist pictures an error-prone barber in a bath of milk who gave as a gift a rocking horse with a bad stomach to a child healing a cobweb for a starless bear.

~

[untitled]

after seeing the girl I have a crush on sign my friend’s arm cast, I spend the weekend jumping out of a tree, trying to land on my left, in the backyard of the last person who knew to hide the head of god. I break nothing but the blood from my nose could fill a football. vandalism starts in the face. it’s dark. I treat my mouth like a scratch.

~

[notes for insect]

I will never know a ghost story

god does not

/

[a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore]

the root of the animal’s insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.

-

when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.

-

grief is the herd my sadness trails.

-

my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.  

-

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  

-

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

-

death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.

-

trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast.

-

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

-

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.

/

[rabbit horns]

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  

-

I saw my youngest brother born.  I saw his mouth.  I thought he’d ripped.

-

the dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. my anger has gone the way of the milkman.  his doomed child with her piece of chalk.

-

it is childish how much time she thinks I have to touch everything in the store.  I am slapped so hard I am sure the mirror’s memory is for show.

-

my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower. at home, my mother puts a clean shirt on the bed and jumps from her death.

-

I am secretly happy that you’ve taken an egg for each day of your life to a doll so doll can sleep.  as your mother, I often follow a black ball of yarn into the lake of how you remember.

-

a male mime bites into a bar of soap…

-

her father is just as she imagines-

a man not making siren sounds pulled over by the man who is.

-

you will know the hoof of satan’s chosen deer by the way it glows when any female announces from the seat of a stilled tractor that she is pregnant.  you will be the age of your mother’s baby bump, older than your father’s knife, and lit by the grape in god’s mouth.

-

I am in the saddest grocery waiting with my mother for the happiest bike repair to open.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

/

[gestural transportation]

in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.  

-

I am quiet but nobody listens.

I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.

-

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly.

-

while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree.  there are egg shells on the floor of heaven.

-

the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his home in a delirium brought on by a toothache.  also, Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.

-

god goes from wall to wall unaware he is god disguised as a graffiti artist.  

renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  

-

in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.  forgiveness works alone.

-

I have never seen an attractive god.

/

[the upper body of the minotaur lost everything]

mother prays for odd things.  like passwords.  and that there be one day a mirror she can warn.  

-

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left. he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

-

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  before I can play doctor, he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  in the opening scene a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.

-

your sister is the only person on record to have been born without a gift. I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal the size of which escapes me.

-

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here. at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet and later to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

-

I know it’s early but I need you to make sure there are no bugs on your father before he goes to work.    

/

[materials (ii)]

nostalgia no longer has a church

if these are your children, I’ve lost years keeping them away from bugs

like her, I’ve never seen her starvations touch

it’s like waiting for god to donate hair

/

[materials (iii)]

I hate baseball but enjoy covering my left hand.

headache
oh pearl
of birth

/

[materials (iv)]

a painting of your whereabouts. the popcorn stoning of your first wheelchair. soft edits. pentagram. spider.

the look of a thing that wants no hands.

/

[materials (v)]

eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.

a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.

/

[materials (vi)]

she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.

/

[materials (vii)]

god twisted her ankle on a toy phone while thinking of the child you love least. mother was passing for an underwater attraction based on the inherited imagery of oblivious angels. photo credit had been done to death.

/

[materials (viii)]

an aversion to sleeping on my stomach.  needing to be alone after eating in front of people.  my father asking in the library for books on Nagasaki.  field trips to indian mounds where bullies would worship my retainer and put mud in my mouth.  my permissive mother and her essays on the grief of a social god.  not understanding how in some films there were women speaking on what was heard in the distance and how in others just men sitting around to surprise satan.  my brother threatening to run away and me showing him how my ghost would look breaking his toys.  sticks from a dogless future.    

/

[childlike boredom]

never be more creative than your abuser.

I’ll bring christ, you

canary

/

[brevities]

the voice of god is the light by which a cricket kills its ghost. grief the chosen dress of our no-show photographer.

/

april (2020)

.day 26..

nice when folks call and chat
though i understand the fear
on answering

my machine kicks in then
lets them talk to it so i can
take my time in
returning things

i phoned him yesterday
he still has little coal
& thinks the coal man
may just have closed
or decided to retire in
all this confusion, so
he may ask a councillor
for help and assitance

then walk up the back ***** to the top
levels where he can see right over to
where i live and wave

we talked about his drawing, neat
and time consuming.

mine is gestural
more immediate

does not matter how we are so long
as it suits us and hurts nobody else

so we carry on day to day
with chores & that keeping busy

when the weather is good we garden
meanwhile dust gathers in the house

while we we dust, the weeds grow in
the garden

i like some weeds
i tell him the names of flowers
how some are poisonous like
monks hood

tintin and snowy were on tv last night
i was too tired to concentrate

wednesday

Picture each day
not as a day, but an idea

printed on
a piece of paper,

put into a hat,
drawn from at random.

That you were to live
your life

scheduled to these ideas;
ideas unheard of by you.

Ideas so unlike you
they became

nothing but gestural,

no option but
to improvise your life...

what would
you do?