“There is no time for comedy;
every stone regains hope and dies immediately.”* - Frank Lima

sleep,
the clueless angel of a working elevator…

(father likes to say
a cricket
in a stone
is not
trapped)

meal of the orphan
part orphan

the doll and the dummy wore for god a wire.  she had a dog whistle and she a ****.  my fist grew faster than my mouth.  your dad was asking a ghost looking for its head how to hold a baby.  thunder what it remembered.  your mom the palmreader with a broken wrist was pumping milk…

being alone never hurt anybody.  I ask online about a coat hanger.  in person about a stork.  symbolism is dead.  it’s not that kind of garden.

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

the ten commandments

the blues

my sister’s hair

rubber thumbs

/ bedtime
for the bathed
foot, for the bee

we started

they wanna put my teeth on a billboard. mom doesn’t care.  cremate the moon.

infant, the sooner
than expected
search
for god.

I have this baby I’m not afraid to use.

you pretend to shoot
and I’ll pretend
to fall. we’ll make a day

of never talking.

the missing crow of thorns.

poverty a calendar we pay for monthly. birth a loudmouth.  my other yacht is a crow.

animal then man then woman. god was the god of grief. one saltwater thing to another

why
a garden?

–

shadow

you unusable
rag

my closest frat brother looks at the toad and says frog *******.  tackles me.  fact:  there is a certain kind of toad that by staying still can **** a drug dog.  in this country, a man can sell doves from the back of a white van.  a man can run out of doves.  my ghost is obsessed with caterpillars.  it doesn’t matter what you say.  they found that woman.

we’ve had trouble conceiving an ugly child.  the stray will come back when it wants to play dead.  name the third mother in Solomon’s nightmare.  places I’ll never be

I’ll vanish
from

“Everyone you see
lives somewhere.
How is this done?”* - Franz Wright

I am wearing a bomb and she is wearing a bomb.  we are going to the same empty place.

hunger is a clock devoured by worship

the rabbit hole
burdens
abyss

mid polygraph, I lose
the baby

/ the loneliness
of its food

the ******, day one:  I have every photo I’ve ever been in.  mom is a wreck.  her and the dogcatcher keep mailing each other the same knife.  death worries it will be made to visit the ghost it promoted.  dad lets christ use the oven.  I can’t get over this idea I have.  an entire language to mask a word.

the boy
in another
language
pays
attention

light
marks again
its territory

grief beds sorrow, sorrow’s
eggs
mostly
hatch

dream only
of discovered
things

I am with my wife and son and we are drinking from the shell of a turtle a soup the locals use to dilute a rain’s grief. I kind of know that something bad is going to happen to both twins.  my wife is looking for a wheelchair and then for a place to hide it.  my son is saying grace in the only spot he’ll ever be.  some of his white pills turn blue as a laugh track denies three times the thunder’s loss.

/ barn etiquette. a rabbit a volcano’s dove.

I pretended once to lose my memory-

the same day

you

the ****’s failure to stay awake in a laundromat.  the suicide of the copycat toddler.  nine types of catfish.  a worm’s tongue.  god’s last name.  the orphan’s timekiller.

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured.  moon of the blind.

to the man whose face can do things mine cannot, I give my son.  

silence has no creator.  pictures

of god
don’t sell.

gender,

a ****** woman
for every
crucified
man / nostalgia,

a baby
undetected
by the mother
we see

acolytes of the short leash, light

has more
to say
than god / think of me

angel
as a hand
from a haunted
house

the untouchable redness
of certain
rabbits

the sunburnt scar on a fisherman’s arm

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

by the time the robots believe in god, some of us want to be here. Misty keeps ripping her clothes off to make us think she’s cutting herself. I am not in love with her.

–

my son
his stomach
is a nightmare

–

Misty says making it hard is like pulling ticks from an owl. Misty says it is up to us to find the woman carrying the statue of her frozen brother.

–

a. act like a baby, not an indian
b. eat the way eating was born

in more
than two
nightmares
now
I’ve been
towel dried
by a father
whose baby
was given
a brick
for sounding
/ scrapegoat

this word
at mirror’s
grave

the water here, brother, is flat. drinkable when it weeps.

what you hear is a mom moving her baby.

god / you can switch
him off
like a bug
in a coffin.

I saw yesterday
your daughter’s
eyesight.

I saw today something using its gums
to open a briefcase
and something else
its teeth
to crack
a beetle.

a smallness
that skips
a brain

a stuffed creature from god’s cage

-

sickness, the second person to forget my dream

mom in the hospital is asking a half-lost boy if he knows about the band-aid keeping her skull together. the boy is afraid and I get that. her hands are confused or small or both. I give the boy a cigarette but yank it back when I see he’s been here before. could god maybe leave a thing untouched. behind us a mummy with one ear

still visible

is crawling with parents to a place.

if touch can end its own pregnancy

if it was
in fact
the strawman’s
earthquake
during which
I gave
as instructed
birth
to what
would repair
lightning

then yes

beware
the wary
dog

(ix)

at a therapy session
for those
unable
to dream
I am handcuffed
to my mother
whose imaginary
lover
has lice

a baby born with a wig
rattles on
about sleep

death’s eyepatch

(x)

on these bikes these boys are beautiful

/ passing men under spell of god, the order

maybe dissolved

of the bent
cigarette

/ I will not miss art

five-thousand fathers
to burn
a fish

but ease, but hunger

a girl putting all her pain in a turtle
or in anything
lifted
from the hood
of her sister’s
coat

/ a firecracker
read
by a bone

(xi)

what a ghost knows about giving birth
powers on
a mechanical bull

father says there is nothing
like it
in Ohio
this giving

god

to a jack-in-the-box

there is a word my mom makes
from a word
she can’t

/ orbituary

/ brings it all
home

(xii)

the human dream

god’s attempt at a short story

the animal
works

miracles

/ the elephant
in its ruin
takes up
for whale

yeah, it rains here
rains
glue

adult diapers
are fishhook
rare…

/ tell your sister
nothing happened
to mine

(xiii)

imagine how long god must’ve been left alone to be named after the first person whose name he said. how hungry the mother to swallow hair.  how bored her baby to remember.  how small the television that spitballed hell.  hidden the horse to keep its church.  black the water to transport fish.

(xiv)

the black eye
given
to the moth-catcher’s
most attractive
child…

what a woman predicts
becomes false

subtraction
the plus side
of trauma

her mother’s
babied
past

I went through a period of sticking things in my ear. not too far except this one time mom said it sounded human but also like all sound had lost its memory.

being poor is a myth.

myth
a fact
with self
esteem.

a father was running circles around a baby.

a collarless dog fetching a grounded kite

trauma’s original boredom

the search parties
wind and blood

a tacklebox in a prison yard

a wasp
from scarecrow’s
childhood, also

nostalgia

the forgetful native
indigenous
to absence

I watched television for three hours then went outside for what seemed like three more.

I’ve been feeding the kid in different areas of the house.

falling asleep is forgetting to eat.

the naked mailman
he didn’t die
after all.

the church has begun to remember the world.  

melancholy has its own mosquito.

yesterday, the kid wheeled himself in front of the fan and opened his mouth.

things burn where they land.

I wasn’t born but have to see for myself.

I don’t know how to feel bad for people no more.  I’m 40 now but grew old near some woods that had in them a creature whose name came outta nowhere.  it brought babies to those close to me to have them raised on stories of missing children and by the one movie we were allowed to watch.  not since stone number three have I been a spitter.

our prayers go only so far
in marking
hypnosis

we say infant when two things at once warn a symbol

we call it bird
what was done
to the bird

we plate crows from black market microwaves

burn a wheelchair
to mow
the lawn

afraid of its shadow in a previous life. the drowning of nothing’s

*******
child.

hunger my contraceptive

blood
my wristwatch

someone to boil
the mannequin’s
pacifier

for Mary Ann*

there are more dolls
than people

remember, daughter, our jack-in-the-box

how it studied
all kinds
of music?

pain is religious
grief
is not

the phantom butcher hides another pregnancy test

–

an egg reminds me to bathe my teeth

death makes two beds

father and son give food a choice

mother mothers moth and math

I count
for a cannibal
brother’s
bugbites

nowhere to go to have stillness removed

I think at night my bones are making glue

did my pain
mention me
at all

not to a hymn of madhouse flies

means:

I don’t have hands and my eyes are trying to kiss.

yester.

a drone’s
love
for a landmine.

the angel
made to sing
the alphabet

the hummingbird’s
wolf-pack

the map my birth destroyed
for trying
to mother
place

-

the swallowing sound my father starved beside

coming he said from a stone

-

mourner at the tomb of insect

the stone’s wait-listed heart

a god with something to prove

the common telescope of a haunted cyclops

a round of leap frog
played in poverty’s
backyard

homicide

grasshopper

the demon ***** a child in the dream of yours where it first appeared  

the mother gets less and less attention for being born

the baby uncrosses its eyes

at a lone ******, I lose hours to the handstand
the occupiers
of my city
worship

proof a mosquito in the gravedigger’s ear

/ my newest self-published collection of poems, [depictions of reentry], is available now on Lulu.

will send for free a hard copy to anyone interested in writing a review – make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

book preview on site is book entire

some poems from it:

[liftoff]

the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.

-

my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.

~

[attic radio]

the fattest baby in the nursing home can’t chew with its eyes open.

it’s a slow day.

looking into the future
a skeleton’s
dog
sees only
sticks.

lightning
marks
the robot’s
church.

~

[meditations on depth]

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

~

[seeing]

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

~

[depictions of reentry (xxi)]

the barn
bat
with the eyes
of a diver’s
shadow…

the dads were all digging
the nudes
were thinking
small

every chair
an electric
chair

in daylight, that motherless grief

~~

/ my first non self-published chapbook, [infant cinema], is available from **** Press.

I currently have three signed copies available for free- make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

excerpt, here:

my child. my diver who wets the bed. my worrier who rescues domestic scenes for animals accused of gaslighting. my swimmer. bather of grasshoppers. my lovely bird alone in an airplane.

~

two things to do on an empty stomach are:  

hold a séance.  

follow the spider’s trail of abandoned birthmarks.  

~

in the video, the young woman is being force-fed cake by a man with a ruined tongue. my mother can’t eat and watch at the same time. your mother is holding me and wondering what happened to this thing. our fathers are veering into the realm of film criticism. where you are depends wholly on my sister’s makeup. god’s parents have no concept of time.

~~

/ also, ending tomorrow, is the goodreads giveaway for my self-published thing, [FOUR], which includes four recent titles of mine in full along with some newer poems.  

some poems from it:

[the many]

as an uncle
can enter
any garage
and sense
the absence
of a nailgun
so
can a holy man
prepare
a meal
in the missing
church

~

[purlieu]

a bruise, a school

of fish.  a caterpillar

crossing

the floor
of hell.  a thought

sick
to a son’s
stomach, a winter

glove
in spider’s
nightmare.          

~

[mouthings]

a brother
dodges
suicide
with a piece
of paper
that doesn’t
work. a mother’s
blood

goes white
at the ink
of amnesia.

bus stop, breastmilk
there was

no me.

at what would god
not
be caught
dead? speaking

is how we talk
to the words
we say.

~

[stratum]

two brothers come to blows over which sister likes fast food more.  a man we want to love is shadowboxing a snowdrift from the parable of touch.  blood is a food group.  I pray to my hair.  call my footwork by name.  take my time

with amnesia.  

baby facts include being born again in the museum you were carried to.