Pain's crushed wilderness
for god
fed to
a bird
Do not love me. Wear, suddenly, clothes. Restore on a lake of ice the groundhog to its ghost. Moan my fingerprint through a drughouse stork. Flee the young museum or the youngest that turns you on. Eventually there will be a church and your balls will drop. It’s a joke, of course. Not quite insect art. But def a tornado’s bones.
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.
Stoked to have some work, excerpts from my book Wasp, gasp. (Incunabula 2023), over at Anvil Tongue today. Thanks to Daniel Garraun, who keeps up with my work sometimes better than I, and all good thoughts to those included in the issue.
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.
kingsoftrain 