the future sees itself as a man unable to be forgiven in an Ohio of pawn shops and nakedness

a man enters the dark to say blind is beautiful but he doesn’t die there. the sick child

a dream unable to sleep

[entries for meaning]

/ the past can’t do this anymore

/ the brainwashed narrator of my absence
he will not explain
fog
to snow

/ she will not sleep

with it
that says
word
for word
I am my mother’s
fear
of the male
body

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for children]

remember, it is dark and memory is god painting with the blood of those he would create

death
alerts god
I’m not
photogenic

to it that hawks the mirror’s television, eating is the oldest trick in the book.

the ghost of my clone

/ does death
get the message

most days it would try not to look at its clothes. there was the night it spent at a friend’s house where it puked in the bathroom and spoke to the glass door of a dryer. where it saw it swore a mousetrap catch only the pregnant mice. where it heard from a wall the names of those against making a ******* from a smashed spider.

year baby was the year the strippers fled tanks and were later shot safely from cannons. the year it suspected déjà vu of bringing food to the same stomach.

I am a boy because of the boy who killed my family. she wears a swimsuit designed by a hole.  we eat together these fireworks in the mouth of a frog.  our gargoyles worship food coloring.  our father for a living disguises his mother’s roof.  his mother speaks to the animal animals don’t.

as a word, plot seems artificially unaware of its absence from a book of baby names.

online, abandonment needs a vacation.

/ GOD

comes home to a punching bag in a treehouse. to a breathing machine being fixed by a marsupial. to a son talking himself down from cooking-show fatigue. to a clockmaker’s lab rat

putting a spell
on a boat.

I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers.

before violence can celebrate the sleep that got away,

they will begin to think you’ve lost them. a mirror will go to prison for harboring the invisible cyclops that discovered how to miss the trace nakedness leaves. a rabbit’s foot will pray from inside a crushed hat. and the land will be flat because a hill stopped filming.

dreams my dialect coach never had. birth and the boring outcomes of immediacy. oh grief, the first to mourn the fast learner. it’s your story, but you can’t name it resurrection, your spacecraft, without considering the mortality of your audience. I sleep crooked while watching ugliness. I love my brother like a leg but he brings to choir exit music for nomads. what does god think of the future? we carry the virus that killed our ghost.

I am looking for the mark on my body that will tell me how near I was to you when I fell asleep. we can’t know where touch has been. the third animal to which I pray

was it always
deaf

“you are the secret watching the private act”
– from Citi, by RA Washington

ruins are for playing tricks on the past and god is the mugshot newborns love. hand is smaller than the hand it knows of. I am here for the nudes of the amateur basilisk. look at me when I exist.

you’re not small enough to be alone in the world.

old ghost-brain
gets a bike.

easy on the eyes, her parents
invisible

in the white-haired dream of stroke’s snowfall

–

her other, the apple-diver gone AWOL from the priesthood

her twin, tapped out
of being
born

–

the grey bullfrog
god of her brother’s
swollen
neck

–

what else

a fat kid
hearing
how he won’t
hang himself,

a sleeping bag
puking
on the topmost
stair

i.

a brother
on the roof
with his raft

and the white mouse
his baby
takes
like a bottle

ii.

the coming
of radar’s
crow, the lights

of illegible
ambulance

a letter, silent

dropped by a word
into window’s
bible

–

cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost

search

for earpiece.

–

medusa

her headless
horseman

the point
was to describe
you
to the image.

to go
in sleep
from bear
to bombed
bear.

history doesn’t repeat itself so much as curse the language it just learned. this is their there. escapist fare for those still fleeing. and I thought my hands were loud. one headset per foster home. shadow envies prayer. prayer has lice and ghost

a bathroom for both dreams.

to the man who enters this poem looking for a gun. to the woman whose animals pray. to the giant with a memory like a model airplane. to the boy burying his sister’s ****** nose. to the bottle-fed scarecrow. to the dollmaker on the bridge and to the doll-god of country eggshell. to the possum and to its babies in my brother’s ballcap. to god’s only with god’s disabled. to a shadow’s early work.

killing the firstborn is so yesterday. let’s be lonely. maternity leave for clowns. ant farms on airplanes.

having one word for my voice, I would read to death from the book death borrowed. my armpits were those of a mannequin thrown from a horse. I gave no birth. I ate what I could of the kidnapper’s dream. upside down fish. crippled fish. boatloads of black sheep

puzzled
by the eclipse.

that, or a seven day vigil for the one he destroyed

(xviii)

I am the least, no

I am

–

look what they’ve done
to the lightning, dad

to your scarecrows, mom

–

all the toilets were in the trees
the trees were taller
a flat

bird
how
the ****, roadkill

was on
the moon

(xix)

a chicken with two heads. a burning bush. a cane only a dog could love. a barber whose hair, nevermind. an arm cast bearing the hangman’s faded autograph. invisible milk

and the nothing you bring to my godless poems.

fascinated
by the ear

children
I’ll not

kiss

give death a sign. pumpkin seeds to the weatherman holding his throat.  nostalgia a reason to *******.  a gas mask to goliath.

(xiv)

/ seen shoving a burnt doll into a book return

the nobody
birth
reminds

(xv)

puppets for dental hygiene

god
the animal
on auto
pilot

(xvi)

the overmedicated bear cub

and the jawbone
from snake’s
nightmare

/ driven by flower

this moving
van
of loss

(xvii)

orphaned by imagery,

the vision
comforts
foresight.

writing
is a non
event.

ghost? my one

for boredom’s
three.

pain had a son whose right hand became the receiver of a jailhouse telephone. whose left remained a seashell. pain’s wife a daughter whose shadow became a puppet when she’d floss.

I was still new
to the angel
when I reached
gloveless
into the deer
for the baby
god
froze

mom looked for a large moth
to stick
with a fork, brother

made to strangle
a coat

the man lives in his car and his children live in a store that’s out of everything. his dog has forgotten how to eat. things are on what any good god would call a collision course. he shows me **** photos he says he can’t look at until he knows for sure that the people in them are somewhere naked. he wants me to work on writing with a sense of place. not me, he says. move grief.

this was in my dream. and this. and she was there and she has two kids, a boy and a girl, and a husband, there he his, who’s killed himself. I kept saying, after every thought, behold. went home with a woman who insisted she was born pregnant. slept like a wolf addicted to car alarms. saw the saddest foodfight.

I imagine it puts a hole in a demon, this combing of underwater things to protect the toenails of painted men. mom is this void the last of its kind?

(iv)

flashcards for women in labor. predictions for memory. sheep.

the hidden breads of snow.

(v)

history is not a person. these are the kids it tried to name.

(vi)

elevator country. the hangings of nothing pregnant. baby knows a shadow that knows a shadow can tell a map what to do. can get a small library to carry books on men eating men in the right bathroom. baby is here for trying to stay. its tongue came out that way, stuck to its nose. a moral choice on behalf of its mother whose water we drank blind.

(vii)

I was having trouble remembering my dreams so I began to see someone who wasn’t. my demeanor was approachable, he said, but cerebral. he said we were in unfamiliar territory. he asked me if I’d mind looking at some pictures he’d forgotten to draw. jokes of the trade, he said. the first few dreams I think were his and were probably so by design. the two scarecrows, witch-hunt and crucifixion, came soon enough but were paired wrongly as husband and wife. their little klutz.

(viii)

I thought it was a movie about dancing and you thought it was a movie about the devil. our feet were warm. remember the alarm? worlds to which none were added.

I wash my own body. put behind me the death of outhouse slapstick. a dog is barking at a tractor. an older dog, wearing sunglasses, lets the baby do whatever. only some of these churches are mine.

notes will be notes from when I was alive. all men, amen. oh infant, teacher of spiders. the future of adult bookstores. yes they are dreams and yes they go to church. lose a finger, it becomes a ghost. a paw and the children think maybe their mom is having a mother. I’ll sleep with anyone. doctors each from the birth of my past. animals denied the policing of crow.

a week ago, sister bled to death on a rocking horse. today is the short memory of our pig farming father and the suicide of the knife-thrower’s surgeon.

the dollhouse needs a second bathroom and those responsible for the film I’m watching have nowhere to hang the astronaut

as violence
might recall

nothing’s
gospel, I wear

a mask
and poke
your baby’s
eye-

forget beauty, ah

/ the description of a monk in the notebook of a nun

memory selects its future and trauma stops to eat. we are in the Ohio of dieting apparitions.  oh, some cigarette made to last.  a buried joystick.

two birthmarks

one
temporary, one

invisible-

when god
was young

it comes up in conversation how his dogs, ******* and ******, were killed during a bout of baby-proofing. biters both; like mirror their mother. she is only god in that we sent her a son. he says this, and also this: the act of swimming is a creature that comes to my knees. we bring him the raccoon. no raccoon, no moon.

angel: I know

my son’s
disease
is lower
than pork, that suicide

means god
has a say
in how
we’re prepared…

also, that above
the lake
in which
my father
sees

a strange
fish
there flies

a burning
bird

rain notes

I go through a whole pack of candy cigarettes while listening to my father shower with his clothes on. the bedroom window is stuck and sister is on the roof. I can’t move. mom is my dream of suicide

skipping
a generation. thunder my gutted church.

model

scarecrow
the shrinking
man’s
nest

–

the ugliness
of horse
corrected
by deer

overture

curfew, pregnancy, dream-

this plan
to stop
talking

secret**

I occur only to the animal that wants to die

the age of my exit wound

the order
in which
we die

I king my scalp with smoke-damaged eggs. a man is here from the church of predictable witness. each sound is worse than the last.

it treats the paintball injuries of contagious dogs. dry-humps to the sobbing of saint visitation. its sister delivers her own snowball in the binoculars of a man with a limp and a finite supply of plastic lawnmowers. I learn about its town from a poster meant to attract what’s never left. this is where I go to look like I’m here.

/ not that I have two birds
but that I ask
for the stone
back

/ nothingness
edited
for space

I think of the wind. how all it can do is ask for mercy. do you know my mom? my sister? my daughter has a pet that disappears when famous. sadness has no opposite.

its child
reenactment

and *******

audition