Sometimes, I want to live until I’m old and my skin is like paper.
A breath later, I complain how I can’t hold every good thing
together at once. In college, I had a girlfriend whose breasts
spilled over the space of my hand and it was never upsetting.
I whine and moan when I’m home in Santa Barbara and see
pictures of Reims on Instagram. I talk shit while drinking
champagne in France and my friends are walking beaches
at sunset—beaches I never walk when I’m home, but then,
all at once, it’s the only thing I want. This happens all the time.
I want to sleep late and have a full day. Want to write code—
for money—but still have a mind and heart for poetry later.
I want my friends and their children with me in Paris, in Italy,
wherever I need to live to be happy—which is everywhere.
My father still likes to tell me: things can get worse. He also
likes to say: God is still on the throne. I wonder, quite often,
if things get worse because God makes them worse. Is there
some dimension where things can only get better? Maybe
a universe where we can drink all the champagne we want
but never get too drunk? A timeline where everyone we love
is in our life, together, and Paris is nestled between the ocean
and the Santa Ynez mountains, but somehow still affordable—
and we’re not constantly thinking about some additional thing,
or some other person we need to be happy and the world is
never on fire from war and I get to watch the children of my
friends grow up. A world where even I want to have children.
I could watch them play soccer in the neighborhood plazas.
Have as many beers as I’d like. Smoke all the cigarettes I want
without dying even a little. Do you see? Whatever god built
this world did a shit job. These ciggies are fucking killing me.
I’m drunk in Paris, not very happy, and I don’t want to get so
old my skin is like paper. Where you almost see through it,
see beneath it, in danger of it tearing all the time. I just want
to be old enough to die first. Listen, my love. Let me admit
this one thing. I can’t seem to live in this world on my own.

I live, like most sons do,
         for my father’s approval—
unseen. I live in grass,
         green beneath the boot.

                                       ✭

My father asks to meet him in the desert.
And I find him, in human cosplay—dying
from hunger. I tell him—make some food.
Do the whole “bread from the rocks” trick.
‍He refuses, says—Carry me. Show me the
world before I die. I ask if he can fix the
world—the hunger, violence, and greed?
He laughs, like I’m a child, and tells me
I must take him to Jerusalem. I lay him
down on the temple steps. I ask for help
and look for his friends. When I return,
he is gone. Later, I find him again, calling
me a devil to all his companions. One of
them writing—while snickering to himself.

                                       ✭

In a beginning, the spirit of God moved over the waters,
         moved over the formless deep.

And then, a different beginning, the Missouri Ozarks
         and me born into them. My father,  

who told stories of how he walked an animal trapline 
         for squirrels and rabbits.
What’s a trapline? I asked. In a beginning was the Word
         and the Word was with God.

My father's word to me, constantly, said I was lucky
         to have a roof over my head.

A trapline is a series of traps set to capture animals
         moving through the woods.
I consider my own spirit, once moving free through
         the universe, taken prisoner.
‍

                                       ✭

For my father’s approval
         I live, like most sons do—
unseen. Still green, in
         grass beneath the brute.
‍

                                       ✭

The way my father told it, some railroad tie gangs had machines,
but not his. His was backbreaking work, pulling and driving spikes.

He told me he missed once, the hammer bouncing off the rail back
into his face. New years of January ’79, my father was called to

Kansas City to sweep switches. He met the train at the railroad
yards in Springfield, sleeping all night in the caboose, no heat.

Sweeping switches means you remove debris and snow and frost
from the handle, ensuring the switch can move in both directions—

engaging the locking mechanism. He used a broom, with an end
that chiseled ice, for eight hours in the frigid cold. My father tells

me that I have it easy, considering all the nights he spent like that.
And I try to imagine him asleep on a Greyhound bus, riding back

home the night of my birth. Imagine him just twenty-one and soon
to be a father of a son who would never, not really, appreciate him.

‍

                                       ✭

Little traumas passed on to me,
multiplied by a good measure,
pressed down and shaken together,
running over and free.

I wasn’t allowed to disagree.
He lived above the refrigerator,
an ever present neighbor—
this paddle, this Mr. Woody.

My father liked to threaten me
with the name he carved by router.
Was I a child or a coward
when I couldn’t find words to speak?

With each beating came a hug,
abuse dressed up to look like love.

                                       ✭

Unseen—I live in grass,
         for my father’s approval.
I live, like most sons do—
         neck beneath the boot.

                                       ✭

O Light Bringer, did Father God get it wrong
when He cast you down to earth? Morning Dawn,

when He said your sin was Pride, named you Satan,
when He gave angels with you slurs for names,

when He stripped them of light to give them darkness,
when Father called them demon; Lucifer, confess—

are the old stories true? You wanted Him to pay
for it? Refused to bow the knee? Chose to take

the time towards perfecting our demise?
Did you invent money? Incite wars? Invite

the billionaire? Demon of Whatever-
Thing-We-Hate-About-Someone-Else was clever.

Tell me, what is the greatest trick you pulled?
I wonder if it's the trick I was told.

                                       ✭

My father used to smile when I was eighteen, when I struck
the walnut wood with maul and axe, everything I had to give,

until finally surrendering for him to finish it. I remember once,
we split some hedge wood, and several bats broke out, flying

from the yellow grains into the yellow sun. My father—he loved
the heat of hedge wood from a stove, how hot it burned, loved

fried eggs and leather boots and his children—quiet. It was hard
to know what we could say and not say without risking the switch.

What we could believe or not believe, what to ask and not ask.
When I could no longer pretend I hadn’t changed from the son

he knew, I drove my Chevy truck down the gravel road until I hit
asphalt. And I kept driving—further east, past our old church—

past the state line. Like some black bat escaping after the world
split open, and I was free, for the first time, to pursue the sun.

‍

                                       ✭

Crawling from the brute,
         I live unseen—  
like most sons do. Hiding
         in trees and fruit.

‍

                                       ✭

Luci says skip Arkansas. Meaning, skip our father
who lives there—and not in Heaven. Meaning, we
don’t need to sit for hours in his house slash barn,
talking about nothing. Don’t need to watch him pet

his dog, or pretend to care when he asks about work
or the weather. Don’t need to let him slip into other
kinds of talk, kinds that light us on fire like the Santa
Ynez mountains in Santa Barbara drought. I don’t

believe it’s climate change, he says, it’s punishment—
for all the laws tolerating homosexuals. And what
will either of us say in response? The both of us
cowards, so—nothing. Luci says skip it. Skip him.

Skip talk about church and sin and what the Bible says.
Meaning, this is the best possible way we can love him—
like the switches he made us choose and cut ourselves
before hitting us—it’s the only way he’s gonna learn.

‍

                                       ✭

O Mephistopheles, do you hear from Him? Does He ever call
and ask about your life? I've been estranged since the fall

from grace with my own father. O Noctifer, my dejected friend,
I’m sorry you feel so alone. Remember on the beach when

we saw the sunset and you whispered Lucifer? You cried—
said the world calls you Satan now. I recall the tide's

slow crash against the beach and how I held you fiercely.
My father also never calls. And the truth is, I think—

Luci, he doesn't give me any thought. He won't set foot
in California, tells me I'm lost and sin covers me like soot.

We're not so different, you and I. My dear Mephistopheles,
the burden of our father's expectations seem the same. Seem

unable to change their ways. I thought—after Job, the games
were finally done. I had hoped—I'm not sure hope remains.

                                       ✭

In grass, among roots,
         I live, unseen.
Most sons do—quiet,
         small, and mute.

                                       ✭

I will not say I speak for God. My words are—my words.
         My heart—my heart.
I look like my father, more as I get older, but I am not
         my father. My words—
are my words and not God’s. When I was young, my heart
         knew that some
words were dangerous—words curious about God’s Word
         and who wrote it,
questioning why it made no sense. God’s words, inerrant,
         said my father—
and my father spoke for God. My father says God loves
         every life but—hates sin.
God’s words, he says. Or my father’s heart. My heart—
         unlike my father’s—
declares his words blasphemous. My words—just my words,
         unspoken for God,
but spoken for my heart—given to me, by God. My heart—
         at last, unafraid to speak.

‍

                                       ✭

Last night, I dreamed about my father—
dreams of the Arkansas horizon, orange

sun cresting over the Ozark ridge, color
drawn on everything. Soft dew glistens

atop fields of grass. My father sitting alone
with his dog, reading his worn out Bible.

It felt like the present. I could smell the air.
He asks me, in the dream, if I know God,

if God is still in my heart. And I tell him no.
I say the truth knowing it’s just a dream.

The Lord God Bird resurrected, I hear
their song in the trees. It’s a dream, so

it can be any song I want. It’s a dream, so
my father says ok—and reaches—to kiss me.