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Barton D Smock Oct 2024
SECOND MACHINE

I watch movies naked and lightning tattoos god into becoming an addict.  

BELONGING MACHINE

God
up late
with silent
babies
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
God died doing math in a nightmare. Not everyone was able to hide the body. Men without mothers bit themselves thinking it would lead to nakedness. Angels did the same but thought nothing. Fire chased an empty bus past the cemetery of the three things I couldn’t name. Into a small life of startled handguns, people in photos were born. Gameshows, I said plainly, above a hole the ground touches for being hungry.
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.  

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
I smoke a joint.
Lean
on a horse.

See
a ghost
see
my brother.

Death regrets
thinking
on death. Some

lose babies
to weather
to avoid
violence. Our baby talk

mutes

field recordings
of creatures
taming god.

In a bored
country
ambulance, a shoemaker

guesses
your OnlyFans

password.
Cracks an egg
on the knee
of an angel.
Barton D Smock Oct 2024
I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.
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