sacrifice 5
I’ve been trying to leave heaven but my body tastes like a photo I took in Baltimore Ohio of a groundhog’s skull
and my blood is still in the bowl of a dog sleeping on earth.
Before death dies does it see every lived thing
I’m in the accident
but I’m in the car first
It’s hard when your parents know there’s a god.
Babies think other babies are screaming.
Any last silence
sacrifice 4
If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.
sacrifice 3
God
a mere
flare
Creation’s
signal
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing
sacrifice 2
Two dreams: I was crying in a horse about death. The horse had branches for bones and had never been awake. I was in the horse because Jesus had seen my wrists. Suicide gets a stickman into heaven. A mother keeps earaches in her palm.
Letter 041525
Dear Ethel Cain
I might be dying. It is rude to care for oneself when your kids make from children bombs that bomb. It’s not hard to be drunk. My blue mother lives on motherhood while worshiping in miniature the sleep of the lonely bear bought by our most eccentric celebrity. I’m not okay. I have to drive to work when at home my son is sick and my other sons aren’t. If I die, people will stop looking at me right away. My brothers aren’t on their knees with this. Dear star my abusers used puppies to touch my blood in black and white. You can’t deport a witch. A miracle. My nakedness shrinks death with a folk song about angels protesting permanence. The lie reached heaven and that dude set himself on fire to burn god with Palestine. Jesus rose but the rest kept their graves on earth. The minotaur fell out of love with a horse. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder. Lightning left the moon to think on thunder.
sacrifice 1
Heaven lasts as long as the dreams you show up in on earth. Dying is the insufficient décor of an offscreen world. Mary had a stalker.
When found by my children, I am the most lost of all fathers. Sex sounds like crying to someone crying. I want to drink with nothing in my stomach and talk to no one about art. I still have only five words for what my hands can do. In Ohio, either the box is the church or the pup is the church. In Ohio, animals think fire is the last supper of the afterlife. Look, I tire of both angel and ghost but of angel first. Younger I thought the bible had been written by my uncles. The fish is holy and the bread boring and unending. Caress the scales downward. By my uncles against their will.
Letter 041125
Dear Ethel Cain
Mom cracks an egg and says she is no longer holding onto the fingerprint of god. My brothers look at me as if they know how to erase my eyes. There is a problem in this poem that only a poem can solve. Death is death because it couldn’t sleep in heaven. Stones here are thrown because a stone can’t eat more than one bird. We listen to our fathers argue over whether or not ghosts are angels that are sexually active. Then to the same tooth for nine months. By the time we’re assaulted, we’ve not been uniquely suicidal. Echoes learn the wrong language.
If there is
no god
I hope
there’s not
One is born
with one’s
own language
kingsoftrain 