kingsoftrain

my son’s many imaginary deaths have to happen daily as he goes from bath to bed as a bruise as a faded god wrongly recalling the color blue and he laughs and we scrape our worry across our shallow knowing and the sound it makes invents a term for the sound it makes and he laughs and is deeper than we can go and our touch leaves us and does not report back and we say please don’t please tell him

Captions like kite, with killed kitten. Saying synapse as swanwasp. My son dies in the same mind I use to prepare for his body. I internalize the slurring of swanwasp. Form, take a swimmer.

The mother says she is between twins. Half-life, hard-on. Harmer, Ohio, sexual. Factories of fishhooks that modify loneliness.   

A ghost in the word gone. The word gone has a ghost in it. A cat circles a crushed beer can three times, plays dead. Cats don’t do that. Either you skip stones or let a baseball carry darkness. I love so much my sleep is a muscle. I love so much my sleep is a bone. I’ll drink until god wants to feel that again.

Church, comet, centipede. God saves his son’s hair. The sun closes our baby’s mouth. Psychic, cyclops, cyclist. Our son loses his voice on a boat. No one is born for years. 

birthplace 73

I fall asleep to the kids naming toothaches underwater. The poets I don’t hear from are teaching each other how to die. You do your best impression of the ghost that god killed for knowing which animals can see the future. It’s not a great impression. My kids are alive more often than not. I won’t forget there’s too much time.    

birthplace 72

The aching swan of a father’s stork. The tiptoe blood of a mother’s wasp. We paint for context our privates blue. Touch wrists to sadden our mouths. I still go outside to say any small thing. Our dolls have the same limp.

birthplace 71

I have my pipe and my pictures of the crucifixion. My brother says rabbit, rabbit above a frog. My brother is dead, but only on the moon. The frog is dead all over.

birthplace 70

Nostalgia
an emptied
spider, Death

a breadcrumb
suspended
in a ghost, Ghost

ghost

birthplace 69

God is man’s yearning for a complexity that god cannot recreate. My teeth were fine and the afterlife was doing its thing. I said I wouldn’t say god then made my brother mutter kinder thunder until my killer’s mother kicked her prayed-for stutter. I said god god the moon is dead. Puberty came from its haunted blue mud. A cigarette, a toy. The lost rib of joy.