I was suicidal for years in my mother’s field of melancholy jellyfish. Our past changes the *** of the wrong person. Even time believes it’s god’s addiction to time.

is there maybe
a way
to come back
from my living

a rare
disorder
wrapped
in a cigarette

safe
sad

a skin cell
dead
to the face
of god
an angel

designed
by an angel
a baby
walking

too early
an egg
cracked
in a star
please

can we put
in our arms, that

(something small
(that walked

AI ruins reincarnation. I have tried to be seen as blue without the choking. My son looks for his won body. His own. *** breaks three lightbulbs in the chickenhouse. I first thought an ******* meant something was trying to get in. I stayed up nights longing for the swimmer’s re-kissed ears. Is your mom happy? A ghost knows where it is by snowfall and by crushed cigarette. My dad was crying and I had to pretend I hadn’t sat on the arm of the couch weird. My son bites his arm then presses a button on his speech device that erases the words from a prayer uttered in a time machine. I didn’t **** myself bc I never did.

Two wasps spooning in puberty’s microscopic dream

A newborn’s eye as a moth
of blood

Glass of milk
afraid of god

Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.

Churchbell, fetus, ceiling fan. A frog hops out of my brother’s dream and lives instantly. Seven men pull a child in all different directions out of a car perfectly owned by their wrecked father. If you don’t sleep, your body will remain too crooked to crucify. Many of my poems are not called 'cleaning my son’s back'. Here we are.

I come to in the middle of eating. I am making a sound that drags an ear through the stomach of an angel. My sons catch fish with silence. My daughter sings them to a cricket left in a human mirror. By the time our loneliness reaches god, we’ve been created.

for Andrei Tarkovsky

It takes three ghosts to end the present. Outside it smells like not touching you. I don’t go anywhere without my bomb. There’s no place on earth on earth. I don’t take photographs I can look at. My body has never been a body to your quieter mother. I drink myself into walking. Three ghosts eat the mouth of an angel from the back of the very spider that called god with a handprint into hand’s only dream. There a tooth, and trainsets. Inside the movie there are two rules. We’re alone. You can’t miss it. Don’t look at photographs that answer to image.

I watch with my son a slasher film and we become unknown at the same time in our revelation that the poor would time travel to the exact place of their exit might they be more creatively poor. I am furious still that attraction in Eden began to matter. My brother hates the human body for what a machine can do. I don’t think my angel knows I’ve died. Don’t think my brother.

My brother can’t get that dog injured by fireworks to leave the church. He has me try different names on the dog but I don’t think it likes being called. The dog isn’t ours, of course. Hard to know if that goes for the whole dog. I dream I write a book that can track sadness. God has been the same since eating plastic.

An ambulance filling with doll bones hits a dog made of the wrong echo. A swimmer’s skull leaves itself to the math of passing through god. A tattoo artist, who once longed to show roadkill to a star, peels in the moonlight the white apples of tortured stickmen. Bringing them back won’t bring them back. The angels knew for three days where Jesus would be. Faked amnesia thinking they’d stop.

Might a man come across the man he’s imagined, the man creates god.

My son, born sick, isn’t always.

A machine in the ghosted and are these yes the agreed upon animals. Error prone infant, my mistake is gone forever. My favorite action movie is classism and ours is a silent one about god forgetting to save her progress. I thought it would be the eating that would be hard to devour. Obsession is a border. Sometimes when I babysit apocalypse you die behind death's back.

Time thought there’d be fewer of us

blue hair crying
in your wrist

Know, unreachable
scar,  

the dress
rehearsals
for touch
run late

A crushed moth in my mother’s throat is dreaming of a red lightbulb. The silence of our hair is too much. I say to brother break the same finger seven times you’ll hear a churchbell. Eyesight changes what seeing owns.

A minotaur, a unicorn, and an angel walk into a bar. Stay terrified. Your feet will bare themselves to abandoned rabbits.

a wasp drops into jesus.

Anything you do to my mother
you do
to my mother.

Eclipse, the painter’s toothache.
My uncle

cuts hair wants to go to space and says

Nothing ever became art that had even only
once
ruined
the hand.

Hell had already a garden.

All we see
we’ve watched.

a color
terrified
of waiting
mistaken
for the color
of waiting

The people started naming their bodies

Birth never gets its person. The title of this poem was once Babies no one can lift and the churches that hide them. I keep thinking of that flood, and how it had to have killed children blissed out on breathing and how it had to have betrayed those animals drunk on a quieter water. Ah drink, ah brothers, a toast: To the life I spent on my impossible disappearance. A thought everyone will end up having is god watched me die the longest. They don’t’ have a sister. A comb with her hair.

Weirdly gentle pictures of my sons

Found by a woman so strange
She strangely

Cannot die
From being

Who is the angel for the angel of death

We are pain’s first memory

They were alive
when he left

A man kissing a man behind the ear
behind a tree
no god made

A thumbprint above the front door
of the house of a hand
surgeon’s bread
making child

The frozen pea
in angel’s wrist

they are spam and were yesterday and will be tomorrow and god will keep loving you because she is dumb anyway you're dumber than god is what I'm saying

The comb
born
too early

How long the hair cries

You've been killed and they are eating
the body of your son.

What time
can do
with a crumb.

The fiction of the ambulance ate the prose outta christ

I’ve never been alone for three days without calling
creature
creature

Ghost
hates
the wild

I was very angry at the noise that made god

the eyes
in a sad
race
a game
of godless
tag

bodies don’t last long
in heaven
a study
was done
the circumcised
smoke
too fast
I don’t
love data
these babies
letting god
take shape

Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

Kids toss an egg as high as they can

Run, or don’t

Distance makes touch in the skull of an angel

Beheads god in front of a star

Poetry didn’t save us
And we weren’t smart

Emptiness uses the unfed to see time.

The angel of dearth
Is the dead
Twin.

A comma is in a bird.

Thunder forgets
its god.

Television, our widowed star.

I’m in all of my dreams.

Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who's lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.

There is always a mosquito on my wrist

I learned
so early
that belief
became a cat
checking
my pulse

I thought of something
the other day
mom

I don’t know if it happened
A little girl
got sick

swallowing
band-aids

That’s a weird way
for the body
to get out

of communion

I made that joke where
ever
one with
the nostalgia
of goldfish
was everyone
left

That girl was on tv
getting tickled
by a man who wanted
to still
be in Eden

Mom I saw the car
No person
it said
plainly
is here

Some boy
next
if not
for time

angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock

Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.

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A couple short poems from the collection to convince one of nothing:

A CIGARETTE IS A STAR DE-AGED BY GOD

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

ANGELS WANT BODIES THEY CAN LEAVE

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

I don't sleep anymore.
I can almost see
god seeing
a child.
My stomach remembers every olive.
I have two phones
but no favorite.

An arm cast
in a long
heaven
raises
not from birth
a hand

100 bodies
learn to count

The mirror remains an unfaithful marker
of those Ohioans
presently addicted
to the speedy
sameness
of decay

Re-hungered

a needle
boils
its nearness
to the doll’s
backbone

A cornfield made of rain

A ruined ghost
showing the palms
of my mother’s
hands
to infants
ecstatic
with eyesight

The low miracle’s most vanished
pleasure carried to its invisible end

My unreachable
mother, new

and unreachable.

All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched

by the last
butterfly’s
moment…

I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.

I bring wine to the table but also my will to place the blood piano on the front lawn and play it for the vomiting passersby. Touch writes the unreadable bible on privacy. Fill a baseball with the stop sign’s blood. One death is hard to process do you think Death has a story about a particular life? In the afterlife of your gone-ness I am de-blued by shock. I write stuff like that because I can’t write more than three times with my wrist. I know you’re tired of me carving belief into the face of god but please **** the golden poet who knows we can’t eat food. Howl non-starlike into the flash of the eye-prone before. Dear addict ask image what god did only once.

I’ve put my hands on my brothers hoping they will want to equally die. In the dream it was me checking on me to see if I was faking sleep. You can change the mirror’s past with the face of god. In the dream they find ice in my stomach and shatter notions of conception concerning dying glass angels. **** my aunt again I dare you. Eden had to be super small.

gesture 7

Loneliness spreads into regions of sleep never before undiscovered

When I say my son is dead you can’t say if he is or isn’t

In a field of handpicked *** follow not the glow of a sobbing fingernail

Recognize time when I see it

In the movie hidden by me watching god

In the movie hidden by me watching, god gets in the ambulance ever time

In the movie hidden by my watching

Their poor happiness

The child running after a wild tire they’re poor

Poor acne the handwriting it becomes

Angel acne a bone popping out of an echo in the ghost of my soul

The handwriting it becomes when put by the handless

On that tire gone

God of hands

gesture 6

enough
about me
these gaps
in your grief

gesture 5, in three failures

I let a kid punch me in the stomach might my brothers ride their bikes down a hill and later I let two kids pull me out of a bathroom stall might a bike upside down in my dead sister’s room stay upside down in the photo of that room held up by my living sister who claims it can doctor god

~

Death keeps time by the far amen of the face. You have to be very still in your clothes or they won’t last. God is two dead creatures looking at each other.

~

What doesn’t happen in the current dream

stays
in the next.

I roll my own wasps.

Curled in a junkyard tire, the sibling christ blesses oil spots real or no

Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on