i.

king of my mouth.  king of my open.  my legs

my cigarette
legs.  

the end of my arms in baby country.  

ii.

the start of my hands

their coat-hook
anxiety.

iii.

here is where the child was killed for being here.

why is a spider
not
a place?

iv.

the future, the uphill
the biked
body

most boats
dream of.

v.  

the future
an evoked
salvaging.

as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return

putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between

asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.  

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark.  I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood.  inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean.  a boy whose mouth

was never
here.  all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

my first non self-published work is available at **** Press...I can't post a link here, so you'll have to search it.  (a chapbook titled Infant Cinema)  

am asking that you help it do some work for the press.  it's six dollars.  

some reviews:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.

~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.

~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.

when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.

this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake

praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured.  if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.

she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing.  how big is your family and who wears the mouth?  is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****?  that your mom had no baby tired of being born?  that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?  

/ year nine:  your birthday spider is put on film for biting.  your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

(-)

church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

(-)

in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.

(-)

this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys.  dirt for my brother.

(-)

and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man.  and we struggle to hear a father verbatim.  and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace.  and a starfish consoles a handprint.

she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

into something from his childhood
a man
is born.  never

far off
what crawls
her way.

nakedness,

give it time
to recover

hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
that birth
built…

–

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double

I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ

not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love

when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

-

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia...

eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair

(-)

the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

-

I want your work to matter.

(-)

subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…

he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet.  he says mouth.  

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag
and your mother
is the outside
world.

I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…

I want to say
it’s uncooked

the body
patience

devours
and say

also
that as
a body

it belongs
to the father
whose nightmare, no...

a peeled
potato, a legless

chicken

it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

-

god’s color has returned

-

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

-

first

and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours

they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

(-)

existence is the wrong inquiry.  I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

a pinkness has always gone on without me.

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my newest, MOON tattoo, is there.

some poems from the work, here:

[least]

there I was

lightweight, eyesore

baby satellite
and baby
drum

imagination’s
dull witness

my hair
prematurely
cat-torture
grey

my person
the length
of a sandbox
shovel

teeth
a tooth, a commandment
from the past
lives

of milk


[harrower]

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

(-)

it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium.  that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.

(-)

poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

beneath the tethered astronaut of his dream

the impossible boy
misses

something small

the human ear, its recent
brush
with whale

/ does the demon
know
I’m the same
clue

memory
has nothing
it remembers
making

-

I’ll know an animal when god sees one

-

the guard
I slept with
gave me
you

-

pain, indicia, Amen

the boy
whose first
computer
was pain

they put something in his food
to make
him drink…

-

one animal
out of how
many

-

marries

-

to avoid
god

the dog moves from sun to shade

its master writes of the beating
a woman
takes

I saw
I can prove it

the size of that tick

does anyone
remind me
to eat

if you can enter the coupon code without hating your life, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books today with said code of HUMPDAY10

~

below are some poems from ‘eating the animal back to life’ (July 2015):


[tautologies]

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

[first appeared]

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

[notes to abuser]

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

[immersion]

your attacker has a history of being baptized. identifies as male. was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father. we shot him not knowing he’d already been. his mother says his stutter is an act. she is what we call empty inside. you look like your father.

[onlookers]

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.                  

[maker]

when I think about you

I don’t

[incarnate]

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

[exposure]

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

[a photographic memory that applies only to acts of eating]

in the oar I broke on my brother’s knee
I found
a human
tooth.

here is a lamb
floating
in the reflection
of a star.

I call this piece

mime
reacts
to roadkill

I guess I was eating
on very little
sleep

sister was here
she pointed to a crow
saying

best tell
that bird
brother

the power’s

out, what it felt like
to her

us laughing

was that god’s
chosen
alternate

had made a stomach
could turn babies
into commas

I want to drink and watch a clean body enter clear water  

-

I have prayed naked
over
an insect, have lost

mother
to her gift
of not talking

to animals…

-

the ****** believes
loneliness
can be
exaggerated, dear

spider:  I swaddled

in blankets
so many
babies

kiss me like I’m not here

like my belly
is

think of blood
as the author
of bruise, of the baby

you’ll not
see
blue

we are
each one of us
the smallest
person
on earth

one is never too old
for god, never

too old
to surveil
the deaf

/ I know from your palm
what your hand
will drop, mother

cooks only
meat, father

is every
nightmare
she has
of her exodus

from apologue

/ having populated

the myth
of ******

the baby is empty

to sleep
on your son’s
insomnia

the man whose blindfold I touched

I said his name
in the dark

he carried me once
on his shoulders
to a cemetery
where as a boy
he’d seen
a turtle

most kids see a mother’s
UFO, a stone

is god’s
giftwrap