notes on the saints (i)
younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick. now older, I am not a private person. I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands. if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion. there’s a shit son in all of us.
~
notes on the saints (ii)
in madness, explain a chair to the ocean. read by the glow of the unborn. scrape.
/ I am not close to any named animal. I flicker
in two
lost
minds.
~
notes on the saints (iii)
a crookedness within a white cat. a naked boy on crutches. a girl in a pink jumpsuit jogging in place beside a man rolling a tire. all of this says I’ve witnessed my father by himself on a child’s swing sucking two unlit cigarettes. we don’t exist until god begins to worry. our neighbor is an old woman with a gun. she is afraid her color will suddenly change. when she chases my father home I understand the riddle of his cigarettes. around him I pretend to be asleep. I hear him watering a rag and wait for him to press it to my nose and tell me my dreams are bleeding. when a kitten, the head of our white cat would stick to the refrigerator door.
~
notes on the saints (iv)
not a mark on her body was admissible. visibility should have no viewing hours. the angels need pictures of the poor. first blush, we had her as someone’s muse.
my handwriting suffered. my cursive began to match a popular suicide note.
can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double
~
shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJXt4Gn0ZA
infant*cinema:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxbbGliwhl0
~
[a son and a vision]
my pupils conserve blood for the dotting of your thighs. Tuesday we’ll try to find the vein that proves motherhood. as you were, madness. this is the time it takes to pull an arm hair from the weak suck of one’s inner ant. this the whale my son fills with sand.
/ the beach belongs to a dreamless mule. the stages of grief omit grief.
the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.
–
my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.
night terror, the handwriting
of imago’s
child…
/ resurrection, a memoir
/ you can work here for nine months
/ it’s not like riding a bike
it’s more
like kneeling
in the center
of a stickman’s
nightmare
/ never you mind
the bloated
baby’s
yellow
tooth
/ at least the sick
they confuse
death
/ the tadpole torching my stomach in the museum of the heartless alligator
/ the spider the star in suicide’s eye
/ the crow in the devil’s purse
more same, more edits:
[strictures]
father arrived
with a convincing
deafness
in one ear
and a broken pair
of handcuffs
he’d named
the left hand
of god-
mother had called him from sleep
with a birthmark
my mouth
~
[steganography]
every day is a scar’s birthday. this is how I am able to start most of your sentences. I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out. on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified. the termites fled your blood. a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick. the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness. your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright. for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries. a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.
~
[unlikeness]
not much happened. after I was born, father stood outside of a church and watched mother go in. before I was born, they had eleven cigarettes between them and smoked maybe nine.
not much happened. my brothers joined me on a bike ride. we made visors of our hands and squinted into the sun. we looked for a hill. we stopped to watch a boy being pulled into a house by a spotted arm.
the loneliest thing I’ve done is buy a hammer.
~
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kingsoftrain 