Oh school of fish, this way to shadow's wedding. Oh heartless deer, hornless train. Oh son Who entered too early the long illness of the world Whose dreams could burn a spotlight We are this close always if not to god's bones then to the missile that holds them. All play as boys freeze tag to sadden birds.
( note ) People will steal absence before conceding that what is there is for everyone. If we were vacant, previously, what does that hold for the future of nothing left? * UNTITLED I have my pipe and you your cigarette each our bone with a raindrop in it our grandfathers are dead are still dead and we’re near a water a water that is really a circle afraid of stick figures some of which I still draw their invisible zeroes kissing in a thunderstorm that god can’t remember * AFTERNOTES / age three inside of my arm there is a dark cloud that longs to live in a fingertip. age seven I am told there is a cloud but darkness belongs to my arm. age eight I forget which arm and ask no one. age now god uses a mother’s grief to eat the tail of a ghost. age then the angel of insect discipline has more newborns than teacups and blows on the bird-rolled dice. whole bodies fall asleep playing dead. // Worm got itself worm hearing sound beg god for a shadow. Hold tight I guess what glows with desertion. They never ran did they them trains I was pretty on? (I miss you telling me who to miss) /// it had to happen your birth for us to know how much of our breathing was changed by a mask stay small, leaf dying is death’s way of asking to be buried does it hurt that we visit your dog * THE YEAR OUR SON THOUGHT WE LOVED HIM lasted longer than most dogs but there was this one stray we saw often it had one abandoned healthy eye inside of which our belongings were small enough to have * THE YEAR OUR SON SPOTTED DEER ON THE MOON it made some sense then to cut our past in half *
In my dream jaw my dreamboat’s jawbone In my flood a sober seesaw In crows a kind of waiting meant to receive the balloons of the strangled In a film ghosting a film, In the church of rolling our own In mannequins where small things kneel that are living In jigsaws of the crucifixion and in the ideas my veins give to lightning In Ohio in my left hand what is elsewhere lost in a broken rabbit In the city the building thinks god will jump In the nothing nothing leaves
So that god would get to hear music, they made god. - My hair leaves me in a cornfield. - Every angel came from a sleep that tried to reach a star.
to hold my weightless creator
The velvet crows seeming to swim in the river as it's filmed. The missed meal eaten in half by presence. The skeleton dragged from anatomy class by the recent angel of your mother's broken arm. And touch, of course. Still hurt that taste was first.
I don't know yet what to think. Your stories of empty babies. I liked the few that ended early and it did make me sad, the snowball fight beneath a boneless moon. One is never too old for god, I suppose. I did not for very long love the daughter born to fake her pregnancies but again I am short with love. Sudden death is for beginners.
The dream wakes up before I'm over. Some private sea discontinues the shape of my mother. A drop of blood doesn't explode but one day might. Every chicken is now or was the two-handed loneliness of a birth-skipped god.
Saturday I wait to care for my still sleeping brother as a tennis ball sighs its dog back and forth on a television screen. Who can sleep, with all this care? Patience is a midwestern agony. It doesn’t last, but death can’t watch.
I wrote, just there, of a mother whose hair was a ghost fighting a ghost for her head. How easy, to lose a poem. A ghost, a head, a ghost. A boneless brother in a shrinking bathtub. How easy to leave out the wind, because it’s only the wind. With its one memory and then its one.
kingsoftrain 