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.
It’s hard not to want
the premeditated
yesterday
of it all
The brief health of your son’s
dream-seen mouse
The toy’s
eye
pinned
to its memory
of being
removed
Every cigarette
god’s
little suitcase
The finished half of a field
broken bottle
by
~~~~~
OCCASION I
I am on the train that will take me to my brother and he is on the train that will bring him to me. He has only just seen the great bird I’ve envisioned since birth. I make myself in his image and use his inside voice to describe the bird. My train arrives early. Once off, I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it. I pace. A woman asks me if I have a light and I say sharply no. I apologize to the woman and explain how nervous I am to meet my brother this way. She says she understands. She says she’ll probably see god before she sees her sister. I offer her my cigarette and she takes it with her. My bird is getting smaller and I don’t know who to blame.
~~~~~
OCCASION II
To rename fish from the lobby window of a submerged hotel. To let the water from a mother’s body but not before telling her that god lives in me so 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 listening for the never arriving marble of grief and to drown while pulling imagery from those years spent on land openly preparing the eaten, subliminal beast.
~~~~~
ANNIHILATIVES
I.
as drawn, the boy’s
alien and cow
evoke rescue
dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine
go on, birth
take silence
from a baby
II.
dream: a contortionist on a stretcher
bulimics
at a tortoise
crossing
III.
you drive a clown car into a crowd
it is how you mourn
the accidental burning
of a doll’s
body-sock
and this I understand
as a city
kind of thing
as a way to eat
darkness
among friends
darkness
from a stomach
a way to lose
blood’s password
yourself
in bread
IV.
the present happens at different times. fetus, comma, tadpole. surgery, please tell this mask
my face went down on nothingness.
V.
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream: a mummy obsessed with what doves eat
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream:
dream: sock puppets on oxygen
VI.
the brainwashed and the blindfolded will then switch children
and you will spend a year
a year
at least
throwing a slipper
at a farm machine
dream: grief a mile
grave
an inch…
you won’t eat much
and your eyesight
will trade its crow
for a bar of soap
your father will fake his death
to distract
room service
from his country
roots
and an insect
inside a stick
will die
and the stick
will live
VII.
the first murdered woman was not killed by her sister.
stop me
if you’ve
not heard
VIII.
this dream again where no one likes me
the overeater I sleep for
~~~~~
~~~~~
DRIFT MUSICS
You won’t
drink it
but ask
anyway
for a glass
of milk.
Vigil.
That bone you broke
while swimming.
~~~~~
ENTRIES FOR ORIGIN
my roommate’s father lives with a puking man I call future in a skipped year rewatching a tv show about what poor people film
~~~~~
MEDITATION
Summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine. Say it with me this was not that summer. As a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.
~~~~~
DOCTRINES
Dropped on its head for saying footprint, the baby begins its work of collecting only those sounds it can scare. Its father mothers otherness as one who watches a film to make the world worse. Its brother hunchback and sister backstroke are viewed as two stomachs waiting for hunger to dry. Because my mouth is empty, I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path. For one, I have never been completely covered in bruises. Also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge. Instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.
~~~~~
I’m happy that this is all there is, even if it’s not.
Forgetting is the sooner life.
kingsoftrain 