He broke his babysitter's arm over cookies.
A cat and mouse are on the television.
He watches, as I watch him--

hair and skin blanched as milk, feet dangling
carelessly off the couch as if this should be a Saturday
morning with a bowl of cereal sitting in his lap.

Under this lighting, I cannot understand how
or even why darting blood would surge
up to his face through tunnels, soft muscles

and germs, these blind birds smashing into the back
of his cheeks to be absorbed as blush
through the chalk of his skin

as he grabs her arm in rage,
standing on this toes, twisting and pulling until
it breaks in his baby-fat hand.

On the television screen the cat hides
from the mouse under a hat, a dog's paw, lettuce
in a sandwich and the boy laughs.

And I know that this picture is wrong,
that this has to be crayon drawn and pulled
over my eyes, a curtain of polychromatic smoke.

He stands in front of the television to tell me
about a joke he heard and his new group home with
counselors and friends with the same behavioral tendencies.

He meticulously crawls his fingers over the furniture,
the way he did to his puppy before he kicked him
across the room with his grass-stained shoes,

or hit himself with his own puffed-up fist,
wrapped a string around his neck, tangling up skin
to look as blue as a hellish heaven.  

Behind him the mouse is laughing at the cat,
small as his paw cascading a long shadow across
the mountainous lumps of gray, trembling fur.

His pixilated eyes watch eagerly as the cat changes
into a hunk of cheese then to a lustrous apple,
and then into a black void that causes

the white’s of his eyes to grow thin, red rivers
as a broken heart thumps madly out of muscle
to the fur of his chest.

Before Taylor leaves I tell him to be good. "Ok," he says
with such radical sugar in his voice that it’s hard to
imagine that he, like the mouse, could ever

unleash a hardening expression, a fierce scowl
that says he’s unable to control his skeleton, the way
the mouse moves toward the sucking blackness

spiraling him inside of himself, absolved of his fur
and walls that hammer and push together,
until he has to crush claw to stucco and bone.