For the time beingan ampersand is a boyclutching his kneesto his chest as art.On high, the god of formwears a face on each wrist.Only a god can take and givetime, but the one in front ofthe gun lasts forever.The boy is parenthesis,his shoulders curved,the huddled wings of a bird.The boy’s arms are too shortto box with god. He breaks down-beats of sweat in his sleep.If life is music, the rest is noise,this earth a museum of dead boyswalking. The god has a finger tohis lips. He wakes to the boytaking selfies with The Scream.The boy knows a picturewill only last longer.Frequent warnings readStorage almost full across hisscreen so self-portraits heoutsources to the cloud.As I Lay Dying sits in his bookbag. The page dog-eared that hasthe sentence: My mother is a fish.     *** Right nowthe commais a lobe.From afar the god clutcheshis head, in an effortto cover missing ears.The redbone boy was airborne.As we speak, he bleeds in the street.The backpack has landed as parachute.The god yowls watercolors,the way the sky weepsoranges in lung-shapedsegments of grief:quarter, half, a whole.A bullet is a form of punctuation.From a distance it appearsthe boy is fucking up commas.Roger that.The god of variables — a-bridged & for-lorn, dribbles mercyon the mother ofthe slain.The boy’s headphones skipdown the sidewalk in the handsof another mother’s child.The skeletal god’s got bars.A rib cage full of tally markscollection plates in memoryof chicken-scratched bones.The writing on god’s wallwas formerly known as art.     *** The boy’s chest has becomea focal point. It rests inhis mother’s arms, a still life painting.The god is MIA.The boy’s mother repeats her prayersagain, & again, & again, & again, & again.Repetition leads to the longing for a god,for a sound as signal, for the absence of a noteor limb. Think of the bo(d)y as con artist.The boy’s mother knows a period issomething missed. She knows objectscan disappear behind a god’s backbut that doesn’t mean they are gone.She holds the boy’s crackedphone in her hands, as if it werethe whole world.A boy is what he leaves behind.What a mother struggles to forgether muscles store as memory.