the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

can I miss
my body
with yours
our blood
the loneliest
bone

the mother is not so human as to be beautifully flawed. the mother is too perfect. take her poems. they are good somewhere, but translated. wound comes to me in a headlight. her visions return spineless men

their undrawn
ovals.

i.

to be called forth
from nothing

how perfect

/ no melancholy
is fair
to insect

ii.

would that we could be separated
later
by birth

that we might enjoy
shape

/ the darkness of being remembered

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

a year older than his violence

the over-feeder
of goldfish, the quietest lover
of his voice

would bruise
when his ghost
would blush

I pine more for the being god was thinking about when he made you. visually, the moons of pain. where circled by what. the one-eyed lambs.

I don’t think I was born to see my face. my father looks like he’s about to say nothing. her vocabulary comes and goes.

before touch has a body, we can see only

the hands of god
how they fumble

loneliness
and imagine

birth
for a family

of small
permissions

the day you were born
you were killed
in a dream
where some
were wounded.

I was there / to look / at the sky

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.

angel of the old well
speaks to god
in rabbit, I wish

jack-in-the-box
your films
were longer

thinking for shadow

(all my homes were entered at night)

and then for the crow
hit by the crow
our baseball

had he not been all those years
writing a review
for the last book
in the world
my father
would’ve been
a poet

there are only so many crows
one can see
outside a laundromat
for the drowned, scarless hawks

so maternally nudged
into the travelogue
of my staying

suicide took the person she was named during.

I am old, here. a klutz abstaining from revelation.

bald as any
lover
of maps.

daughter has a language keeps her quiet.

penny
is a pillow
for my father’s
blood.

lamb- every other

I am the light at the end of blood

or blood is my favorite dress

I was a fish. it wasn’t enough.

–

we’re the founders
of absence. off the clock

–

like newborns

before you know it, you’ll create time.

let now
give me hope
for the past

and there I was, sad

my robot
giving hell
to an elevator

and I was forty-one
and still not there
the day that kid
got beat up
for keeping sadness
close

and I was never the poorest
in any room

is this what being poor means or meant

grief
that we can brush at the fossil
of grief

I have no memory that is not a silence we sang in unison

is this a ghost or the future of my teeth

is your dad still a god

I interpret the wrong dream

do you
forget

for you I would covet the broken arm of a snake

in grief’s
heaven

shape is a future fashioned from god’s inability to reflect

–

(she thinks her hair came from an egg. she is not alone.)

–

there’s nothing in the food

was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.

life is a shapelessness to which form describes its pilgrimage

dream a grave dreaming
of a cactus
for nothing’s
crow

the bridge
the broken arm
of god.

the ventriloquist, her immortal canary…

birth the jackpot
hit
by grief. a wiseman

mourning
his third
son.

night is the sound of my father’s adding machine. of mother narrating the life of a stone. lake is my brother’s action figure learning to swim on a full stomach. lake is a bird going from dream to dream as a mouse. hole is anything I bring home that isn’t my body. home from the city where sisters drink in silence to footnotes of future fictions.

inspecting my son
after a fall

the blind
and photogenic

the past disappears to haze the same childhood animal. touch carries non-fiction to belief. earth lands on earth and is somehow loved. there are dolls to skin and there are dolls contagious. any mirror is a fishbowl from hell. she was a good swimmer but was not eaten fast enough. lazily, I remain born.

the microscope god avoids by ******* his thumb

–

dream and blood- their unpainted rooms

–

the deer tipped off by mannequins

–

a zookeeper’s empty mom

two boys at a rest stop

one cowboy, one indian-

also there

a mother’s
burning
car

and the mother herself

flipping open
a pocket knife

oh place, you are not
my first
language
but

it was men
created
machines
that they could tell
those machines
the little
they knew, and it was god

found god, and it was your father

that with his father

while in
their astronaut
poverties

took shyness
from a gun

no knife in the dog of absence. not a scratch on wind’s throat. winged things that belong to the tooth in your shoulder. lipstick. the unhummed ribs of your wrist.

let in them
a thunder, a counter

of breads
and sabbaths, an infant

struck
by owl

upon my double
being seen
I am set
to self
destruct

I am no sadder
than twin, no sadder
than dog…

my wrist
is nothing’s
neck

/ his stomach
attended
like church

what
will I never
see

lost
arachnid, a triangle

drawn
by others-

my legs make me lonely.

dream, put me down.

I try, but can’t make my bed. mom says maybe I’m grief. after coming back to touch me, she wishes herself a bird.

I hope she eats.

–

then

I had a word for marble that wasn’t marble. both were swallowed.

–

thirst is not the same as forgetting to drink. god talks up his handicapped friend.

the first person to use these steps went down these steps. violence is the new past. I see a dove and think god will never know who it was ate his crushed light bulb. I betray my ear. the seashell of the stomach.

some medicines / don’t work / how lonely

–

change diapers

else
you invent
evangelism

–

suicide, all those dates I didn’t

–

formless herself, she makes an image. animals

were the end
of god

dream is a boy dressed as his abuser sizing aquariums for the hand of a spider

the cricket
makes sense
because it looks
like silence

is doll
always
or never
sick

the cause of this grief escapes me and I worry can tunnel breathe. the snake in your love letter sounds real. it takes my belly to things

that are also

pills
minus the pills
given
by shepherd

I don’t know what she saw
in that jar

but she’s been hours

rubbing
my head
with a balloon…

dad switches out the bag on her head
and slips something in my mouth
while saying
mouse
in the dollhouse

I doze for a moment and see a priest
pretend to fall
from a horse, and a stork

act
as it should

I see myself
a form
forged
by a twin, a reincarnation

that perhaps impressed
my photographer
son

[hunger anomalies]

your son
he has
two brains
that’s great
but we’re looking
for water’s
stomach

~

[starvation names its food]

ask the sickest boy what a pig says to the pink phone of god

leave fingerprints for his hand to find

have words
with echo-

he will die
he will not die
laughing

~

[death has too many mothers]

in me like a sympathy pain

is Christ, her language

a fasting
echo

at a time
unlike this

the father
is all
appetite

the chicken, gone
he points

to its ghost…

–

my mouth
is a church, my clock
a Sunday spider

in a dry
toilet

–

(I’m passionate about my grief)

your shadow

dolled up
in the yard

–

cyborg, minotaur

not once
did I watch
them sleep

through the end of October, any monies I receive from the sales of my publicly and/or privately available self-published books will be sent to a poet friend of mine who was injured while clearing debris for others after Hurricane Irma.

as part of the above, I have a privately available self-published collection of selected and new that will exist for two days (10/30 and 10/31) that is titled {soft facts}, 315 pages, $10.00

it is available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)

body

like some use an alias. fingerprints

manna
for hand.

–

I was dreaming I guess
in the face of brevity

–

of god’s glassrabbit ocean

we peck
in the darkroom
at the wrist
of a fish
our body language
proofing
the baby’s
dream

it’s the day after jesus dies and father is a nightmare. I am the right size to change out his cigarette and I’m good at it. people in handcuffs pray over his legs.

father is a dream. a tree you notice in the dark- mom said that. mom says also that an ant’s heart is everywhere. everywhere in the ant.

jesus wants to be human. my brothers lift his body because my brothers do not yet know that neither will want to put it down. I mean to see them off but am rooted in what the future for a moment believes.

mother is not two people but she does go up and down the stairs as if she’s visiting two museums showing the same coffin. for every other step there’s a step that’s not. if my mouth at night is open, she sleeps outside in the ribs of a tree.

your sister is made of money and silence. has nocturia. death on other planets, oh. we're just poor.