I woke up in the tree again

the house itself
had left
run
once more
the crucifixion
on tv

father held the infant
its brain
concocting

slow motion
for widows

I lost it
like a child
loses
a bee

the dot of my life

the kids
they are calling
the girl
my mother
an oyster

-

all elbows
they are calling
them
my privates

what I think
are teeth

-

what I know of bees
can fit
in the bee
my brothers
lose

-

lost

god

is the beast we believe has power
over
the dog
that answers
to bloodbath

the name
of a child’s
fish.  

(I can only speak for my daughter)

how

when her hand
to her
appears

a white man
gets a typewriter.

trained
to be homesick
the animals
disappeared.  dad advised

we get out
the way
of frost, let it get

to what it’s got
to chew.

we stayed inside mostly and hollered
loud enough
for mailmen
to hear

nicknames
like little
baby
bathwater
my favorite

from the year
god’s voice
changed.

my brother the mud wrestler wants to know if we’re any closer to finding our father.  I examine the droppings and say someone is feeding you in your sleep.

if the poor could keep to themselves, they’d have superheroes.  hey man, hey beast, them aliens already know what it means to be human.  abduction is the fingerprint of loneliness.  

-

what I teach my blood is grow up.  I put everything I had into ruin.  watch as my mother becomes your mother trying to be two people god can use to carry tug-of-war from a fossil.

-

my dream house is language.  you say it to my face how there are beheadings that have made a wish.  before my son was a giant, he’d somersault.  cigarette in mouth he would.

my brother calls a stoplight the math brain of god.  my best friend bites the apple that once controlled the minds of sheep.  scenes from your childhood bring back mine.  her memory is all she can think about.

we do not know the exact day our son stopped aging.

by age
I mean
he has seen
the ghost
he’s envisioned.

–

by doctors I mean anyone we see on purpose.

by money I mean the money we made
in those years
that didn’t
move.

–

at forty
cutting oneself
with oneself
is not
****.

–

three years in, our daughter lies about what she is eating. asks

that we read to her
as she has
forgotten.

when pregnant, she says she has something to tell us.

–

I am not the life I wanted.

–

by tell I mean she says nothing.

–

we recognize the toy soldier as the last gift

meant our son
was normal.

–

the soldier has gotten older
and is obviously
sick. from the same set

we look for the medic.

–

no.

–

I take the soldier in my hands then pass him, alien bird, to my wife. he coughs once and tries to raise his hand but the weight of the gun is too much. my wife says: how sweet.

this night, our old bodies, our coughing soldier on the nightstand. we kiss and the sounds come from our teeth. I think about the tooth fairy, about not being rich. how we can afford

but probably not find
a coffin
that small.

not a place we can go to have my grandmother tell you again how my uncle is born with a tooth.  where slavery just a star watched and watching and **** just a rainbow bent to its work.  where young we are shaken like gifts and we want people and the emptiness of people put to death.  where grey flutes.  where milk is in our blood and ghost letting.  where hope is ugly but don’t tell it.  where a man moves over a woman so that she is equal and equally ransacked of travel.  where in a field this far away one can go out of body and claim finders keepers.  where a bottle as we are speaking makes it to a baby full of pills.

for Kazim Ali*


two sons
share a pencil
then trade
ghost plate
for alien
stomach

i.

his hands looked as if they’d been born inside a tree.  his **** as if god had thought twice about burning the entire stick.  who am I kidding.  find that ******* tree and have its baby.

ii.

my body was so hot the stretcher caught fire outside the pig pink temple.

iii.

what’s left of the human wall are the feet of the human wall

says mother
to the family
of the secret
wig.

naked I have cleaned the story of my own drowning

-

father leaves his raincloud

mother
her trapdoor

-

sometimes when my brother is near an apple

a body-bag
fit for a mouse
changes
color

from Eating the Animal Back to Life [ poems July 2015 ]

collection is available here:  http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

currently, Lulu is offering a 20% discount on all print books with coupon code of SPENDLESS20



[in the beginning]

wear a cheap mask
to bed.

kid, your mama

she can’t
touch a baby
without touching
a baby

that’s hers.  

small brain,
I have less
to wash.
 
[fishing hand]

a demon with three days to live is given to my father’s body.  in this, father finds luck to be neutral.  mother is a good explosion, brother is a bad.  when the dust settles, sister can see the baby in her stomach.  it is my belief and it is also god’s that our food is the food we forgot to poison.  to pray, I am left with little more than an animal’s halo and two representations of what you were not seriously clawed by.  in your sleep, you move me into mine.  a finger shows itself to the back of my throat.


[themes for star]

in a small attic
a boy
on all fours
being weakened
by a spider’s
dream
is putting
an ear
to the roof
of his sister’s
dollhouse.  for making

the wrong
sounds
for animals
poor sister
was lowered
into the baby
you were born
to lift
by two
scarecrows
you’d think
were separated
at death
for the way
they don’t
carry on.


[race]

says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.

says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.

says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.


[cope]

no one goes to the crazyhouse
for having a hand
that repeats
itself.

in a new place
my brother
does one
of two
things:

masturbates
or says
déjà vu.  

if he didn’t tell me
I wouldn’t know
I’ve slapped myself
awake.

one of us
then one of us
will die.

within the beating
there were smaller
beatings  

-

delirium, the haunted sandbox

-

in his, my brother could taste the rib of a mosquito

in mine, I could taste
my voice

-

them kids had time to fetch

other kids
there was

no hell

sister
she yanked
her finger
from the dream
of a dollhouse
telescope
and went on
to preach

-

(Cain is a girl’s name)

-

death
it wants
your son
it wants
the patience
violence
has

when out
of ideas
she cuts
my hair

-

a man who’s been forgiven
has no past

-

my healer
is the main squeeze
of her god’s
pastoral
depravity

-

the plane is coming back

-

at my mother’s cough

the bombings
continue

-

father
retains
his orphan
clout, I lose

-

sight

-

of my hands
that they’ll know

-

what to do

nudes
from the circus
of harm
grab
the evolved
handle
of my father’s
apocalypse
and though
I call it easy
what I’ve gone
on the doll ****
I can’t help
but bride
up
a storm
giving oral
to a corncob
from fixation’s
honeymoon

[baptism]

the home’s weekend janitor placing ball caps on the elderly.
something is said, and he is fired.
his kids recall the egg he’d make of his hand.  the delicate knock
of his joke.  their hair, or something in it, weeping.


[******]

father offers, no, we are bodies trapped in people.

he was known to be monstrous when inside a vandalized church.

if gay, he’d ask
does anyone ask
if you
were born?

yesterday, she was identified by her dentist.
she was recalled as a hunger pain.

man is a rumor
started by god.


[bread]

the baby is white guilt. is walking early.
is outside picking stones to give to loved ones.

Jesus is a moment of peace
on a skateboard.

the fish are five thousand
isolated incidents.

vandalism is vandalism.

the numb hands of a child
go rolling after
crayons.

this is you, beside a flower, in front of a mountain.
your eyes are so big

and the bread
so quiet.


[a.]

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.  


[catharses]

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.          

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.


[loyalties]

the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.


[vasectomy]

I open out from another’s dream. I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it. my female wife- this much is the same. I’ve been here before. nothing happens. she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news. this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building. the heat that gets to others is god.

~


poems above were taken from books available here:  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

as intended
we do not
immediately
know
it’s a mock
resurrection.

our fathers do not suffer
magicians
lightly
and hoard
blindfolds
as if they are low
on photographs
of women.

our mascot pig
is a ****** elephant.

a palm reader
with mouths
to feed
does
my mother’s
nails.  I overhear

I love
babies
but god
they live
so long.

-

my brothers will tell you
I avoid

capitalization

eating
in front of others

threesomes

-

who was it
asked

-

from whose memory were you erased?

(today only, 30% off all print books with coupon code OCTFLASH30)

from father, footrace, fistfight (selected poems, Barton Smock, June 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/father-footrace-fistfight/paperback/product-21672373.html


[the minimal class]

I orbit
the idea
of an animal
not thinking
of itself.

to err
is hunger.


[cipher]

aware of my body
as if my body
is on a raft.

a creaky deceit
I call
rafting in the ****.

    last night in a very safe garage
I promised a friend
I’d mention
the moon
in the period following
my last
idea.

my body eats me.
god dangles the body of my son
in front of my son’s
next
memory.

some are born
born-again.

    current trends include cloning.
the first person to recall dying
will be held aloft.


[patience]

the black market is a state of mind.  I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.  my worry walks me three miles where I meet a woman trying to sell a book in a graveyard.  I trade her the memory of our previous trade for the book she tells me is shy.  my other possession is a neglected baby.


[sequestration]

a person goes dark.  night shifts disappear.  a lone panic capsizes the anatomically correct.  men fill up on mouthwash.  men float.  women bite their tongues in half before they can say women and children.  insomnia becomes more than the over-hyped novelization of insomnia.  a boy draws a cutlass in a broom closet and is told he can’t sleep.  I begin to want more from a diagnosis.  a kite being flown in hell by a son gone pro.

my wordless
my disabled

he was licked
at birth
by a deer

-

as a writer, the writer
wrote to me
****

-

writers

-

have you ever
tried to give

a stomachache


-

to a shadow?

-

it is not all graph

not all

grief, not worth

-

one’s salt

-

to speak
for any
content

that demands
form

the spider has seven legs no longer in the raccoon’s ear

-

god is from another planet

the animals
out of earshot
come back
as phones.

you have a son
who like your father
holds a mirror
up

to some
nobody’s

paranoia, a daughter

who steps on crickets
as part
of god’s plan.

the wax baby
isn’t my thing
but appetite
is.

licking its wounds it is still an animal.

what does it mourn?

the lack reach of my tongue?

me / me I have

lost my sense of a peopled earth.

a sucker
for anything
can’t come back
to haunt her
my mother

like a genie
rubbing
for no
luck
the arms
of my father’s
electric
chair

is aging

as it had not been afforded the opportunity to go mad, we called it woman.  its baby wasn’t getting any older.  our plan was to use its house blindness to burn the oven but its baby got underfoot and its dog whistled our cat to a boil.  my guess is we were trying to be men without blood.  everything we hungered for began to taste the same.

[the omens]

to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb

whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce

crow

whispers

in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming

[you]

are now’s
nostalgia


[bridge]

god has gathered the disabled to make his case against reincarnation

-

unable to sleep, I become an alcoholic

-

I prefer
like my father
my insects

noncommittal

-

insomnia is the insect my scar becomes

-

noggin, mouth-hole, skinflick

-

a ghost
when I study
angels


[wolf, wolf, god]

her plane is in the air.  she is showing late signs of believing she’s left an octopus in the oven.  the man she is with knows nothing about paper.  on the ground, in awe of the bee stings on a sister’s bare back, a brother carries orphanhood to term.  everything I touch belongs to the same alarm clock.    


[bygone]

I started smoking in my early thirties because I missed my brothers.  because a train is the only thing I can act like I’ve seen before.  because a claw opened and a child dropped.  because unhurt the child was a girl and injured it was a boy made of being touched.  because giant birds were ****** to give other people rain.  because all hail, as all do, location.  because riot then riot envy.  because bright spot became a cloth in a police car.  because I can’t sleep and couldn’t without thinking of sleep as a copy of a copy.  because lost the baby wasn’t getting any younger.  because nightlight and tadpole, mom and dad.


[nigh]

don’t talk to babies. write. write to be the first one there. the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth. walk once a week into the wrong bathroom. worry. bump around the house at night, noisemaker. a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard. pull. pull from your habit forming past. be the bomb god’s yet to wear. surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty. open your mouth then look at your son. call it photography. if spotted, be a monster.

[indwell]*

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.    

~          

from *Drone & Chickenhouse
84 pages, poems, Barton Smock, Oct 2015, 6.00

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html

soon
is a baby
studied
by the scholars
of now
who
in their prime
predicted
that jesus
would be
in the scarecrow’s
future
the darkest
bird

downloading
the horror movie
that shows
your *****
takes
a long time
in the city.

others
are a grief
I came alive
to miss.

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

we couldn’t get a horse because we had this one dog would fake sick.  had this nurse would sleep with her shoes on.  I don’t know how many of us there were.  I had more fevers than god had footprints to follow.  had an insect to offer worry.  we were poor and perfect when pretending to be.  father had a hat that remembered our names and mother a kite she called the birthday of a ghost.  I wanted to be a girl but my sorrow was too southern.  had a sister and she asked her baby what do angels have.  I never saw for myself the ransom note from hell we couldn’t touch.  parts came in pairs so both would answer.

wherein
the white soup
of thought
that could not
sustain
the brainless
pilot
of paper
airplanes
was drawn
from my son’s
unheard
ear
might memory
attend
foresight
the church
of loss

the loneliness
that schoolwork
provides

is god

his body
is your body

has nothing
to leave

a newborn wants to be a hand.  

there’s the dream I have of heaven
and the dream
god lets me
bring.  

my boy
has a crow
for a backpack.

I start my sentences
like this:

the thing is.

thing is
my son
like yours
is dying.  thing is

I was told
by god
to be a man.

I love you all.

I love
but start a fight
with someone
I’ve never met
over what
a *******

poverty

no one
talks to
not
in years.

one must apple boldly in a cornfield of rust.

baby clotheshorse
eats baby
litmus.  

taste
keeps my tongue
in the dark.

the abuse
continued
it was almost
slapstick

he looked
at a plate

clean, hell’s radar

strays
in orange
bless
the brains
they bless
the trash…

-

what nothing
you haven’t
seen

-

the hand-me-down
travel
sickness
that cocoons
in some
what cottons
to others

-

dryness
the money
of angels

sadness
has only
the followers
it takes
from melancholy.  a dog

a dot
of a dog
see it
master
the secret
farm.

he drops a knife in her lap and calls her a butcher.  it is beyond cute

the way his stomach
becomes
a third
fist.  her cigarette

is a portal
takes her
to the baby
can ****

the air
from a room.

as long as others
have food
there is grief
to imagine

loss goes unnoticed.  

I made for you
a scarecrow
from the textbook
violence
of a midwestern
poltergeist
as lightning
took a step
from the baby
I crawled
beside.

be
not memorably
young.

infant boy, god gave your body all the bone it can hide.

bite me
when your teeth
are hot.

the contact high I get from sleep.  an illness

that comes
and goes.

the language
I use
to warn
my voice

from ~The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake~ selected poems (September 2013)

[multitudes]

oh, here they are.  the interested persons we will find later.  for now, this field.  my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus.  if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane.  if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch.  in memory alone I am alone.

[another ****]

in such times, it is constantly 2am.  a friend pulls carefully at your ear.  a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb.  you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential.  because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen.  your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked.  this is done in secret.  what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago.  when things were the same.      

[word of the devil’s death]

     my mother and father cower under the kitchen table and my brothers are dead.  my father has clammed up since asking me to tell him something he can take to his grave.  this last week I’ve mastered placing my ear on the table in such a way I hear what I am supposed to do.  impossible things that are no longer terrible.  dispatches from a simpler region.  for example, hack your roommate’s youtube account.  also, poison the non-pregnant.  my baby sister laughs with me when I say some of these aloud.  she believes the table is possessed by the devil’s ghost.  her beliefs are clear and specific.  the ghost thinks itself the actual devil, and will need a good amount of therapy.                    

[men statuesque]

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

[steganography]

every day is a scar’s birthday.  this is how I am able to start most of your sentences.  I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out.  on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified.  the termites fled your blood.  a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick.  the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness.  your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright.  for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries.  a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.


[the wave]

we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet.  we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks.  the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others.  we limp beside any creature that limps.  the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other.  our father is two mathematicians who argue.  our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave.  our guesses mean little because they are facts.  at school we are voted on and kissable.  if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket.  details belong to god.      

[fixture]

dying of young age, your brother nurses at the breast of the stage hand’s version of a mother.  the stage hand is off arguing with a lamp on the impossibility of attracting moths.  beside a tall cake, a groom with lockjaw and a stiff neck has to take life’s high point on faith.  if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb.  and then it was.      

~~~~~~~~~~

from ~father, footrace, fistfight~ selected poems (June 2014)

[future stabbings]

you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there. you post the photos while your dog barks. you doze on a hot day. your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog. your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing. you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car. the car is not yours. your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

[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.

[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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from ~Eating the Animal Back to Life~ full length poetry collection (July 2015)

[uppers]

god gets ******-up about which hair to harm on your head. in some, this goes on for years. I have a lucky razor, a father who’s blind in one hand, and a suicidal thought that scares me to death in front of cops. my last meal came to me on a toothbrush.

[themes for orphan]

you will never be
a virus

-

the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named

-

*******
as the seizure
had
by hologram

-

the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down


[accession]

starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.

water
is nothing’s
blood.

the childish
babies
of loss
older
than we’ve ever
been

the quiet woman mothers a silence gone rogue

and names
her kid
to death

if I had an animal
I’d poke it awake
father
and cut myself
in front
of your mother’s
dream