kingsoftrain

A skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven. My brothers don’t remember being taken by aliens, but still believe that god is serious about studying who misses us. My dad has a single idea much like a pregnancy test has none. I dream in twos. The unraised wolf, the worshiped stork. I want a better world, or to get food poisoning from hunger. I hope my son has one friend as harmless as an ear.

father making book covers in the nude

his longhand moving in the veins of a giant

his name an ant sleeping in the center of a band-aid

what if the end stops coming

a crow is not a star

the eyes know nothing
but know it first

loss is the salt of now

I miss the radio being off
even when
it’s off.

Forty baseballs going dark.

I lost someone
and lost their death.

Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.

In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.

As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church

–

I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep

–

No animals were created in the making of this harm

Do as nothingness has done

and cover
that scar
with god

–

There is a room

that knows
where you die

The television is always this close to placing the perfect image on the grave of its grave. The children love loss, or anything they find twice. Never both. It’s as if I am trying to remember what kept me up at night before I was born. The baby cries but cannot weep. The cat has this look mom calls changing ghosts and then there’s less and less cat to forget. I have misspelled a word more often than you’ve died. Are you gone, or nowhere?