when father heard
it said
that god
reads only
to children

he began
talking to himself
behind
his mother’s
back.

a poor person
sad
about pillows, a stick person

sad
for a match.

the child you won’t have because the child hates surprises.  the story, your mother’s, of the pillow that struggled like an owl.  the werewolf, humble, and afraid of clowns.  the ramblings of a newborn.  the twin boys of Cain.

for Franz Wright, late*

~

the hand
I don’t wash
has never
been touched.

is the last
woman
on earth
pregnant?

the children are burning
yet

my son
is not enough
to fill
your nose.

I saw god
he was crawling
away
from a clean
diaper.  it would be my only regret

to miss
the encore
of death.

I saw today a moth so large it could probably replace what it was your dad hit with his car.  the size of things lately has me putting babies on the shoulders of those behind this groundhog-eating craze.  I’ve moved back in with mother.  I’m waiting for her to know.  high note:  they’re okay, my tormentors, they’re not surprised I’m ugly.  my brother still believes his tongue is proof he was once made to swallow an extension cord.  because of what happened, I’ll never be different.

it is not my job
anymore
to keep
the television
quiet, give

bunny ears
to someone
bleeding

-

take your time, snake, this egg
will return
your belly

mark my words, wrist

-

with god
as my impression

mark

insomnia  

-

the mood was very ******, the mother invented

***
to scare
the kids, the mother

drank
cologne

-

I keep having the same baby

it comes
with a dream

I am differently
afraid
of each
cigarette

-

thematically, father hopes

to operate
on a clown

-

compared
to his

my hunger
is having
a flashback

-

wheelchair, oh

to its dog
door
bliss

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

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.

(on February 5th, I am planning to send hard copies of my newest publication earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from to those willing to read it and to those willing to either say something about it or keep quiet.  if you are one of the first five individuals to send me a message with an address of where you’d like to receive it, I’ll include you as one of the individuals on the February 5th  mailing.)  

here are some poems from the book:

-

[from the book of waiting]

what is it
dissolves
in the mother’s
foreseeable
presence?

faith
a flashback
god
is having.

-

[voice]

*** as something that has an end.

evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.

I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority.  post-harm

pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.

-

[trick blood]

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth. the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet. the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention. the silence my mother kept quiet for. the second afterlife of a single breast.

-

[male music]

in the creek of tomato silence
where my father saw
what it was
god
could not eat
there lives
a tiny whale
fooled
by emptiness

to see a stone
as ruin’s
pursuit
of aftermath

one must share
this dream
  
of arriving
on earth

to pray

if the unwrapping
of your mother’s
head wound
coincides
with
a tornado
sighting
chances are
you’ve heard
a crop duster
burn
in the dream
of a weary
crow

(someone won this collection via a Goodreads giveaway and posted how much they hated it on Tumblr because Tumblr is not attached to their name.  also, I assume, because they hated it.  my name is Barton Smock.  I, too, am a coward.)

~

[earshot]

you were a white male and I was a white male and we were young and even if one put us together we were young.  our idea was to give winter gloves to those whose teeth chattered and we knew the sound had come to us both.  we mowed lawns all summer and mugged a drunk **** who sat reading love notes after baling hay.  we bought the gloves and held them until winter but by then we were not friends and song was the retroactive vocal of a father’s forgetting.  we divvied the gloves in a sad scene no mother would countrify.  

~

[eulogy]

when stalking
the unmanned
spotlight
of your own
death, drink

heavily

with
your takers / you

are nowhere’s
only
sponsor

~

[not monstrous]

a group of boys beats my son for beating my daughter.  when I carry my kids, my kids relax.  the group of boys are uneducated and think god has promoted a number of them to shave me.  my ***** looks as if left by an angel to grow alone after not being placed on an infant.  there is nothing to be said but one of the boys mutters away that he is set to star in the film version of your father’s suicide and that if all goes well he’ll **** himself for real.

~

[tract]

the television in front of my murderous father is the city his house misses.  further coverage is dedicated to a new unharmed person from a race of desert people whose mother materialized without feeling.  as my brothers cross shadows in the brightness of kitchen, I join in spirit the manhunt for the victim who’s made off with the right to disappear.  

~

[incubation period]

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  

~

[non-event]

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.          
~

[locals]

the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  her pain is god’s.  

~

[monster]

I want to sit around and do nothing and I want to have a handful of kids that sit around and do nothing.  I will call myself the end of god and ask women inappropriate questions by way of populating obituaries with written code.  you will want to argue and I will have to get up and we will try together to save the child I crushed parts of.  the face of the child will be our slideshow.

~

[light touch]

she imagined herself pregnant.  she fell behind her best years which became predictions.  she asked me about the men in my friendships.  candle-makers, a few with toddlers

a football
knocks over.    

~

[straw piece]

I was an entire baby and then a picture of me as a baby.  I had as part of the **** shaming process a mother wheeled in and out of the sun.  here is a boy with a red brick looking for an anthill.  here he was brushing from a woman’s bare back a piece of straw and here it is sticking to my leg.  in the barn the eater of stones is missing the privacy of an outhouse.  I lie to her face and then to nostalgia’s outlook.  I lose blood to the mosquito known for the collapse of my favorite cow.

~

[insult stage]

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly alongside a finger he or she must choose.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** cobwebs while waiting for something you’ll do nothing with.  the cutting of the fingers to scale.

~

[stirrings]

being operated on
helps me sleep.

I was your age
when nothing
had been done.

the turtle in my father’s backpack,
the turtle loose
on a moving
school bus.

gods
from a previous
marriage.

I crawled into my mother’s bed
and waited
for my nose to bleed.

you find the cut
like you find
where your daughter
is cut.

a sister ties
knot after knot
and opens
a window
only to *****
in a downstairs bathroom
from a fear
of heights.

[premises]

he is cheating
resurrection.

his baby is a baby
in that it tries
to leave

a note
for god.

his mother lets it go
on the roof
of a hospital
about the kids
she saw
*******
in a grocery
cart.  

proof

yearns.

~

[root]

I left quietly
the pet store
of haunted animals.

a drifter preaching polyamory
took mental note
of my appearance.

a man was my father.

~

[outer life]

they’d say his head was hard because it was too small for god to kiss.  when he’d come into town, he’d leave with children we’d not seen except on posters.  his welcome mat was a napkin spotted with blood from a Q-tip.  save for the tiny matter of Jesus, our parents gave him little to do.

~

[the bridge]

let me not pray
for this man
who captured
on film

for the last time
in its environment
god’s bed.  let me not

be consumed
by this man’s return
to the inexact art
of home.  let me obsess

instead
over a portrait
of myself
trapped
by aging, let me grow

to my waist
my hair
might it burn
might I then

to the accumulation
of sight
and sight’s
potential

bow

~

[captions]

underling animals
in times
of quake /

slight
swellings

in brain
of maybe
one mole

bottled
now
for sea /

if on a baby
your hands
would be

so cute

but as
an adult

you glove them /

world as wheelchair
the wheelchair
from which

god rose /


as sporadic
surges
switch on

the sink’s
disposal

pull thorns
from the rabbits
you dream

~

[I saw my youngest brother born]

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

~

[the small]

I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent.  listening to his radio was a long way off.  you sat early.  you called me mother before I was ready.  if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream.  I looked at stars and you were a toddler.  our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned.  he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of ****** abuse.  you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.    

~

[cure]

the dark, the ocean.

I have two reasons to believe god
has not stopped creating.

-

our father
had this phrase

all in good time
psychic

-

my anger has gone the way of the milkman.

his doomed child
with her piece of chalk.

~

[bait]

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

~

[how to live in the country dark]

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick, let

her blind
mongrel
lick
your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

~
[irrevocably child]

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone  

~

[tell it to my brother]

a widow
with three hands
has ten
doomed
acquaintances.

god’s tacklebox is too light
to carry.

think of it as your ascent into feminine indifference.

think of your son as the incurable
made
thing

on the factory floor
of my son’s
use.

a male mime
bites into
a bar of soap…

***
is a bruise
in a blizzard

~

[mendicant]

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

~

[crystal]

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

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.

the field
where father
sold
from a grounded
helicopter

a fog
machine

to one
whose pregnancy
had not
ended / the field

where brother
found
in a ******
a piece
of chalk / the field

sorta
field

like

with its puppies
and its trash / yeah

there is something to be said
I don’t know what
to echo’s
first

love / the dizzy

spells
of deer

purgatory
the map lover’s
heaven

-

tea time
and your doll
has no
belly button

-

is your blood clot
still

a cloud

god was created to remember everything.  so says the rock to the tooth starting small.

-

there is a gallery of unfinished work and a space for the baby to crawl through.

-

her feet stick out of the mirror she’s been using to give birth.

-

lost:  frostbite.  lost:  space suit.

will work
for feeding
tube.

-

holy asthma
holy

crossbones

-

old hat
this human
head.

ago, we buried something here that has kept us calm.  my father lived in a beat-up car and over time he became its radio.  some kids from town came once to push the car and my father got out to help.  one of the kids was my mother when my mother could still see what others could not.  her favorite sound remains that of a severed head banging around in a time machine.  so many kids went missing here that couples make more on the spot.  the animals try but have so far kept god going.

you’re dying
when someone
closer
dies

father
son
I saw them ****
out of hunger
the angel
could prepare
angel

-

it is wholly birdlike
the thought
that brings oil
to god

-

the sleeping alien
is not without
its headless
astronaut  (the first thing

-

one sees
hallucinates

to stuff our faces or to knit the same hat for the unseen gargoyle of our still life or better yet to give legs to the rugburn it takes to find a newborn’s nose

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.

while being whipped
by the woman
who taught him
to mark
only
the people
he could hurt
a person
with, the boy

recreates himself
as one
giving birth
to a unicorn
beside
that horse
oblivion
or family
of horses
eating

from the straw
the stork
became

a ghost on the sincerity of fear

a sleepwalker
on hibernation

god on faith, acolyte
to wheelchair

a listener to a mime
of the yawn
that tricks
grief

toothpicks

babies

a closeness
to captain
birdbrain

hard-on
amputee

toys

it was
before it met me

a town

/ it is now

both babies, it be

alone, it be

the number
of times
god

went missing / it does not be

what is touching
what arouses
acolytes

of narrative
****** / I spill

milk
and you

treat me
like I’ve stepped
on a stick / revelation

was the lord’s
idea / wasn’t

to have animal

devour
animal / until / it’s too pretty

what you’re putting
on paper

/ I get my food

from food, time
from the grace period
given

to clones /  a man

with bad posture
the posture
of an infant

dreams

the apples
in the house
have been
turned off / the darkness

of being eaten
once

the food bowl
of a baby boy
is the nest
of a fool’s
bird  

~

something smaller
than my brother
has been killed

there’s no body for the soul to go into.  as a murderer can better tell you where the survivors are, a baby can worship its mouth.  I hear coughing when I’m about to be gentle.

~

dream enters the girl I’ve decided to have.  you know her mother as the doctor of my impostor.  as the one who said the battery is real.

~

I abandon my cane like a robot that wants to climb a tree.  there’s a mattress that’s not the river she pulled it from.

christ is a boy armless in christ.  eats his corn

his teardrop
corn.  

thinks he’s been given
by *******
the power
to spy
on a fish.  thinks god

is part
food.  hears

from a demon
touched
by snowfall

that the boat
is real

but first
starve a crow
that is blind.

days after **** is celebrated for having

no

anniversary / mom

stops looking
at her feet

~

days before I keep it from my ghost that I am in the wrong

person / dad

tells me that if I concentrate hard enough I can get god’s fingers stuck in a bowling ball

as our rescuer, god could not go with us into hiding.  how many times must I accept my heart let alone stop my brother’s?  your father is ****** through a straw into a spaceship summoned by your inability to dream.  your mother, on paper, lives under a tooth.  I can hear my guts scrape against the baby whose melancholy is brought on by the loneliness of my health.  the world is mostly weather.  we associate in shifts our sister’s body with the inside of a furniture store where nothing screams

you.

how to grieve, how to startle
an echo.

the map is desired that maps the afterlife.

my only (is for a hope)
that bores
god.  

by now
my son
knows more.

~

[On mother, father, god, dog, *****]

what if the eyes in the back of my head

hallucinate

what if
the eyes in the back of my head

during surgery

during

a haircut

~

[On foreclosure]

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I
am rowing

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat

~

[On the past]

my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow

full view
of the aging

marksman

~

[On phobia]

as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug  

~

[On the need for a watchlist]

if one can talk of it, one is most likely not poor.  we called you to life to give you a name.  god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress he could see through.  a short history of heaven made its way to hell to have its location shared.  your mother developed a stutter.  your fake cry took on a depth of meaning made us dip

(psalm
for satellite)

into your brother.

~

[On paternity]

as his mother has heard only yesterday how he was born to some nobody that everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear.  as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream of putting a cricket on the witness stand.

~

[On my son having little to no vision]

I am on count eight of ten-

ten, the future.

I call you raindrop,
your hiding place

water

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor

~

[On decompression]

the zombie movie about buzzards.  the hours that go undetected in the parents of forty-eight special needs children.  

~

[On lore]

I have two dreams of running into the newly pregnant late bloomer.  in the first and most recurrent, I am operating a remote control car I’ve lost while worrying about a brother’s closeness to a certain pilot.  in the second, my mother is talking lights out to nostalgia’s previous owner who agrees with her that the roofs of buildings need to be smaller.  in both, I get the sense my father has already hit the pop fly under which he collapsed muttering baseball, baseball, ghost of a baseball.

~

[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?

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[On writing]

my sense of place is a person.  *** is odd,

right?  this thing that auditions

for what it has.

my sadness is broken.  my mother sits beside me on the top step as I **** with the laces of shoes I’ve had on for hours.  I am trying to place myself in front of the woman who while holding a bowling ball asked me to **** my cigarette.  mom has been falling asleep in front of a tv turned on by a mind of its own.  I don’t want to be touched.  god for now belongs to the hand that went crooked and circled every date on this month’s calendar.  after eleven guesses I say jesus mom is he gay.  I don’t see how this will become me knowing all along.  my father is a man of many words he can’t pronounce without some stranger getting knocked up on the radio.  there’s nothing in the water, nothing in the air.  I get my people from the store and bring them to a carnival that exists because of food poisoning.  I think my belly button is a cigarette burn that makes me want kids.  I have a brother who will wet the bed well into his ninth year.  I include him here as the brother around for this.

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.

brother is digging barehanded in the backyard a hole for what he hopes is the alien of god’s choice.  as for existence, my mother’s is low on mine.  my father is keeping out of the same sentence any mention of ****** and totem pole.  no one including you cares for my sister’s worry that this no this is the bottom of a rock.  if asked, I will say I was visiting with my arms the museum of rowboats during the regional spike in baptisms we as a family failed to interrupt.

dropped on its head for saying footprint, the baby begins its work of collecting only those sounds it can scare.  its father mothers otherness as one who watches a film to make the world worse.  its brother hunchback and sister backstroke are viewed as two stomachs waiting for hunger to dry.  because my mouth is empty, I talk all the time.

summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine.  say it with me this was not that summer.  as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.

I have an ear for each parent I believe in and a hand for each god I don’t.  I have yet to make a body that doesn’t become bread.  in the process of comprehending the smallness of my twin’s brain, I lost the only friend I could talk to in code.  my son won’t use a spoon as he fears it distracts his food.  the fork is next and the knife, safe.  my daughter is a drunk and also a soup that gives the same nightmare to the mouths of my angel.

it is for my ears that god gave me a stomach full of cotton.  my mother’s fingers are made of bread.  her blood she says is dieting for the blank book of beauty sleep.  I have an inside animal unable to move on from the rained out magic show.  its only joy is to bring me shoelaces.  after building houses, my father shakes himself barefoot in the railroad car of a train his angel plans to swallow.  I have nothing for my throat.

it came into the world itching to have one of your panic attacks.  your father

with his overexposure
to abandonment
called its body

bottled water from the town of torn muscles.

fear was a cigarette case and fear was also a lunchbox.  teeth

were part of a shadow
census
operating
in a flood
of milk.

it cheered horribly.  it cheered and a bug bite became a birthmark.

give me
the gift
of sorrow
the strongman’s
pencil

-

in the purgatory
of spaced out
animals, ****
on the short
straw

-

tell me I’m not surrounded

-

show to my brother
youtube videos
of our mother
sleeping
on her father’s
back

-

say something in my sister’s mouth

-

scrub me
from the shoemaker’s dream
with a rock
the rock
I deserve

how many last words are there?

I don’t mean to suggest
my weapon
is heavy.  

before every meal
a voice tells me
in its best
voice
impression

that some bombs
don’t
go off.  this means eat.  

bait is a bird from a brother’s birdwatching dream.

it is sad like seeing a fetus
in the dark
is sad.

have we failed to water god?

the ****** boy is waiting for it to dry, it

being
the puppet’s
toothbrush.  his lover

a practitioner
of moral sadness

knows the body as a representation
of surgeries none perform
and the future
as historically
inaccurate.  where we’ve met before

I’ve narrowed down
to isolation.  was there I last lost mother

with her hacksaw and chair
dreamily approaching
a tire swing  
as if the human voice

on any land
letting go
of god

could raise
a tree.

to those of yours
who’ve died
I give
my prayer
of being better
in one-on-one
situations.  if god is god,

let me become
the woman
I got
the idea
from.

what is it
dissolves
in the mother’s
foreseeable
presence?

faith
a flashback
god
is having.

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined.  nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave.  the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube.  my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his.  mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost.  I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog.  I have not heard of the spoon that has a past.  something in my stomach wants to see a star.

the babies
team up
on a sad day
for skins.  I am not  

the same person
we were.

knowing
I will soon
go soft
on spiders
my mother
crushes
an egg
to keep it
she says
from choking (father

he brains the head of what god could not squeeze into (brother

invents
a dead
sister
and with her
laments
the loss
of the throwing
arm

that now
predicts
the rain