( edits, deletions, very old, WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY, a failure, but, 2017

WE BROUGHT HOME THE WRONG DYING BABY

I trade it for a microscope that can see ghosts. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. An eel collapses at the thought of a play being performed in a stone 

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury

~~~

Mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth. I pray for things I know will happen. For your stickmen to share a toothache.

~~~

The darkness has many stomachs and we’ve no one to tell my son he’s lonely.

~~~

The mouth is born after eating a blindfold. Name everything.

~~~

Entries from the dictionary owned by the first angel to be bitten by a mosquito:

Valley: 
a girl with a marble who answers to overdose

Pulpit: 
a rooster ghosted by an elevator

Subculture: 
in my years with the poor, I wrote nothing down

Alpenglow: 
the scalp will baby its grief

~~~

The clapping boy from the cult of thunder rolls his wheelchair over a doll in a mask then touches noses with the last rocking horse while putting two words together

like ghost
and exodus

for the second coming of a handcuffed animal

~~~

Picking flowers for my shadow, the boy loves no one. Everything I touch remembers being my hand. The world has ended, or started early. God’s heartbeat. Sound’s watermark.

~~~

overtook no cigarette. surprised no sleep. keyed the car

of a minor
toymaker.

radar is getting possessive.

~~~

Three times she says the word brain to her stomach's blue mirror while scoring sight's wardrobe of rags in earworm's dream

~~~

there’s a comb
in my narrative, a goldfish

coming to
in a beheaded
angel