kingsoftrain

The deer is an arsonist with bones of golden weeping. The horse is a worried god with two eyes made of salt. Ohio is the attic where my sister would name mountains after mountains no one knew of. The angel is a mistake, seen twice, like a breast or a footprint. Hell is where we pretend the devil is the oldest thing in hell. I write myself cut. Blood says the age of the blood I was born with.

No aliens
after all.

Just us
seeing
if we've died.

My son's
laugh
might
be a seizure.

Some say the crow

some
say buzzard.

The exact
bomb

cannot matter.

I was sad
and had
sad friends.

I made no bread.
Bread was everywhere.

The eating, I called it love.

I called
love

The waiting.

I lost
my drinking
like hair.

Drank in a darkroom
from a floor of milk.

I speak the names of my brothers into the book of bitemarks. I have more arms and they more muscles and they more issues with their legs. I am so poor that my work does all the work. My tongue does nothing. It’s not possible to be obsessed with sex. With death. You’re born with a mask that no one saves. Everything makes god sick. Stop being alone.

i.

I strike a match and my pillow thinks I'm out of teeth.

ii.

An insomniac's rainbow

and
or Jesus

walking
his dog.

iii.

You can't die
from wetting the bed.

In Ohio you can choose the violence you want to see. God is a very long commercial for death. Death gets you nowhere. The slow crawling that my skin fakes keeps my ghost awake. I keep forgetting the future.

There's a place I cannot get to.
It exists
and that's

why.

My ears
changed
with each
child.

Selfishly perhaps I wanted to hear
different
bones.

Death, that puzzle.
No pieces.

Single-use loneliness.

An arsonist's mother
in her birthday suit
ah goodbye
to the last
of the salt.

White bruises.