battery-powered halo machine

my father is always splitting his soul
into smaller & smaller pieces.
he used to feed the shards to me
in the dark of my bedroom.
he sat in the rocking chair
while i tried to fall asleep. my mouth
a zoo of midnight. 
each piece of him tasted like vinegar & honey. 
he is where i learned to grow back thumbs
after cutting them off.
i've seen him lose whole hands to the machines.
he makes monster batteries in the grey morning
when no one else is even awake. 
i've seen him come home with a severed limb
wrapped in newspaper like
a fresh fish. he gave me a pocket knife
& explained, "you should always watch 
it happen." he didn't believe
in closing your eyes. make the loss real.
once, in the middle of the summer,
he said, "i am going to do it."
he started building. his eyes fell out
& then his teeth. my mother called for him
in the yard like a lost cat. i did not
blow his cover. he hid in the crawl space working. 
i told her, "i don't know where he is." he was trying
to finish a halo machine. he said,
"then we can all glow." i wanted
a halo so badly. to walk around 
& have people see how holy i was.
no one ever saw how holy we were.
instead they saw broken window people. 
people held together by a single fraying stitch.
he never did finish. when he returned 
we had to carry him home
in a trash can. he didn't know 
how to talk. his first words were not
"halo" like we thought they would be.
instead, he said, "battery, battery, battery."