kingsoftrain

Moods for believable midwestern symbols:

When we realize that water cannot take us to where water lives, every television in Ohio stops what it’s doing to wash a ghost. Our friendless baby calls no one. I am not kind, but put my body between mine and yours.

Lying to the basilisk:

You spoke to me through an egg for so long that the back of my neck changed moons. If I think hard enough, I can still see your mother putting in her mouth the glove her god treated like a baby’s hand. I cook a mirror. I cook for an orphan made of sleep. Will our breath always be the bone that didn’t make it into the wing of thirst? If it’s a boy, pick for an alien a flower. Dogs forget their human year.

~

THE YEAR OUR SON THOUGHT HIS BELLY BUTTON WAS GOING TO EAT HIM

was a fast year, a goldfish

trapped
in a doorknob
kind

of year, our daughter

cut her heels
on the bottom
of a pool

that was there

~

THE YEAR OUR SON THOUGHT HARD ON NOTHING ON A FARM MACHINE

I bought myself a nailgun
telling the people
at church

it was for
a movie, also

a child
in hell
asked

to tie
my shoe, and a neighbor

brought it up
the baby
inside

the baby

~

THE YEAR OUR SON ATE ONLY MEALS PREPARED BY INSOMNIACS

was the same
possible
year
he tried

to kill himself
because I couldn’t
stop him

but back
to the insomniacs

they weren’t

family

~

THE YEAR OUR SON SPOTTED DEER ON THE MOON

it made
some sense
then
to cut
our past
in half

~

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

~

Time won’t be poor forever:

the child of a former smoker
makes
for frog
a cup
of her hands
no matter
that no
frog comes
nor frog
like it

Moods for neurology:

snake that can fetch a bone can mourn lightning

As time moonlights as indoctrination’s sole souvenir, hunger and sleep have again been separated by death. Let us say a movie was for years being made about my church. I did nothing. I sat with my mother between bathtubs and faded in and out of child. And children. Both needing the before of that first bear.

While counting the same sheep, one of us will die. It’s okay. One baby eats another baby’s message to god. I still don’t know how to write. Babies are like that everywhere. Dad had this tattoo I couldn’t see of a simple fish and that’s why your mom not really but maybe taught herself how to keep her eyes open underwater. My simple is not your simple. I fell asleep once on a lost arm and I hear it sometimes in piano music. We’ve all been old.

Moods for the outgoing:

Poverty’s extra owl.

This painting
not called
Jesus
and his last
birthmark.

A broken
his and hers
umbrella.

Two birds, two stones.

A god whose parents meet.