word gets around
the schoolyard
pretty quick
that my father
drove his body
off a cliff
so god
would have a nail
hot enough
to touch.  

I have a tooth
can make it
snow.

the anxious god of my brother’s mirror

said
to me

trees
don’t grow
on trees.

it can’t all be nonsense.  

shoes are being made
for the born.

no one
was fooled
by your
suicide.  more and more

I am more
alone
than the baby

machine.  we touch

touch
via

I play my father as a man terrified I’ll return

no trick to being poor.  

the beauty of our entire football team
sleeping
with the same

person

equals
that of mother
saying
that she can feel
god’s head
touching
every hair
on hers.  I can hear

my dreams
over

the soundman’s
perfect
fly
bursting
in my brother’s
ear.  never

did I have
an idea

come
to me.

I wouldn’t worry.  I myself didn’t walk until I’d put everything on the floor in my mouth.  even then, my right leg would sometimes fill with my left.  dad would warn me about bumping my head and mom would remind me to make him hungry.  anyway, I told your kid I don’t know how to read but the truth is reading makes me want to see two women fight.  I blame my brother.  some people have the attention span of satan.

to slow the scarring of god, the man spits into a can plucked from the river that washed his hair.

to hasten

the woman
shaves
her mirror’s
head.

you’re part of a story you don’t have to tell.

the animals that took your feet are dead now.

my boy
pushed your boy
into something
we thought
we’d outgrow.  

mittens on

it’s time
to eat.

stick people
their hands
are lonely
at the same
time

-

in my son’s stomach
is something
from your seashell
collection

no matter how much I touch him
he’ll be touched
more, it is not real

-

but it is
the christ
balloon

from The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (poems, barton smock, September 2013)

[wilderness mantra]

sister Cain falls in love with me through her brother.  
     I physically blame her with both hands.  

she has left my brother’s lips  
on the lord.  

I try to kiss her at a baseball game
but am drunk
and kiss instead
my male
abuser.  

violence begins with me.  


[NICU]

in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.  

~

from father, footrace, fistfight (poems, barton smock, June 2014)


[object permanence]

rabbit
named
vertigo


[my son the ******]

online I find instructions on how to make my own scarecrow. I wake my sister and have her put on her pajamas while I take the overcoat my father is using for a blanket. when we’re an error of a mile from home I have to push the ATV with my sister on it. she is crying about flooding and I’m telling her what the scarecrow will look like. she wants it to have a cape. because my son isn’t born yet, there’s not much to like.


[orison]

gaze upon our father
create a woman
and suddenly

know
to leave us


[collapse]

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

~

from The Women You Take From Your Brother (poems, barton smock, August 2014)


[weaponry]

after passing many dogs
with more skin
than fur, that seem to be
the starving men
of my dreams
if the starving men
of my dreams
had been brought
to the same place
to die
if that place
were me,

the man who sold
my brother
a gun

goes

as a father
praying over
a solitary
son

to his knees
in front
of a larger cage
and I see
the smallest elephant
and I keep
seeing it
as if I’m the only
one who can
though I know
it’s there, the sound it makes

like nothing sick, nothing animal-

I am not the brother
I’m the size of.


[spoils]

a distraction that doesn’t explode. I’d say children but nostalgia is still a child. head, I need a volunteer. god’s reply in the form of a sext. a brick taken for a sponge by a bout of sleepwalking in someone I can shower.


[flatfoot]

the missing man’s yo yo
between the hours
of this and that a.m.
was no doubt cared for
by meadow mice
our estimate would be
by all of them
what a service
they’ve provided
we would advise

forget the tree, the tire swing, and with these mice

forget the man

~

from Misreckon (poems, barton smock, December 2014)


[end psalm]

god had an earache and I heard thunder. I learned to shrink into the smallness of my brain. I associated money with my father’s funny bone. my mother with the dual church of hide and seek. I went on to have a son with special needs. he cried once. cried milk.


[form psalm]

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore. the animal gets between my son and my son’s imaginary friend. the root of its insomnia is not man but the fear of personification. god’s gone when the story starts. to war, to war.


[inquiry psalm]

when it comes to humoring
me
by name
my memories
draw a blank.

I had a daughter
and three
sons.

my hands
could’ve been
the hands
of an umpire.

in the untouched church
of suicide
was the untouched
church
of *******.

it’s like seeing
a television
on tv. the comedians
and their failed
sisters.

do your thoughts
still take
the temperature
of god?

~

from Eating the Animal Back to Life (poems, barton smock, July 2015)


[sandbox]

even with her fingers in her ears, she can hear the toy horse whipped. if we don’t have food, we can’t pray. my father was hired for his quickness, his hands

to salt
the rain. grief is a guard dog from the permanent circus.


[sightings]  

****, kid, your poems.  I took a page from your father’s thesaurus and played scrabble with god.  I came back knowing your name as code for omission.  your mother didn’t break a chair over my back because the chair didn’t break.  I worked it off in a building from the wrong twin city.  after that, my homeless jailer became your brother’s landlord.  your brother he played citizen’s parole to my arrest.  borrowed my hat on account it wasn’t full of money.  like most men, we were in love.  he had a note he’d written that would appear before a big fight it said don’t let my suicide beat you to death.


[ones]

the book is a mourning vessel for what its reader stands to lose. I have a father for every type of silence.

in this context, we are rednecks for free association.  we worship the male witness of the bone burying dog.  we wander from working televisions to say amen and to call it typical the baby’s behavior.  god is a perfectionist.  fasting a weight class.  we have each of us a bad hand briefly that drops a baseball.  our bald spots pass as bite marks beneath squirrels in the priesthood of sleep.  there’s meat but we’ve had better.

brother drinks water enough to shock the devil.  on the inside, he’s all doll.  I shake him for show might our sisters travel in pairs.  I used to talk but had to close my mouth when the soft spot on his head kept my mother from her toes.  it’s the second stone that really lands.

I am at my skinniest
asleep

it wasn’t my dog
put the rabbit
shot
from its mouth
back
in its mouth
but

I was lonely
from seeing

things

I made for an action figure a family tree.  my mother came apart in the doctor’s hands.  my smallness entered the smallness of my god.  a side effect of ****** recognition.

a spider can take its home to heaven

-

it is my goal
to be sicker

than my son  

-

have the baby
trying
to be had

tonight, I stole two beers from my brother

two gods
whose vexations
share
a city

I am still not sure
what I’ve requested

asylum
or sanctuary

I don’t pray

I read a book to see a man do nothing

to see a man do nothing to a woman
I volunteer
for sleep
studies
and read
this back

to the lord

speech itself is a failed translation

dreaming is a farm

a mother
makes it as far
as mailbox

bear
to fish
there’s water
in the water

is, today’s mousetrap
tomorrow’s

shoe

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.

not one thing
has the devil
made a satellite
do

god’s gift to god is all boy.  is doomed to repeat melancholy in real time.  is punching his *******.  is trying your hand at territorial absence.  is not feeling it on the day of the mime’s vigil.  is bombed.  is local.  is thought to have opened the book of sticks.  is not swallowing.  is eating from the angel’s dream the only fish that can stop at nothing.

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

(available on Lulu)

duologue

we’ll start here, turtle.

this is what I say to the grey thing I’ve been talking to.

the only buffer between engagement & constant engagement
is life
during wartime.

I conceive of a dropper
but hold it empty
above my eye.

because it is the one word without a beginning

suffering
because it is the one word without a beginning
is not limited
by its
vocabulary.

we wanted a sophisticated god
but in immediate
unison
called it
god.

this is the grey cream
that gives her privacy.

I am drawn to a sort of journalism
by association, a campestral formlessness
attached
for example
to the term

carpet bombing.

how is death, here? in an orange ball of yarn

she is not ahead of?

she has to stop, turtle.

to declaw an electrocuted kitten
she didn’t
electrocute.



isochronal character

the theme of this person-to-be is footprint.  for years I hated my figure and for years I went undetected.  I had female heroes both sad and sad reboots.  for a fee one told me I was fleeting.  the fee included the thumbtack moon my heel had liberated from a schoolchild’s diorama.  we come as babies so none can ask us what we remember.  the theme of this person-as-is

is mouthpiece.  her red phone has been tapped by those my blood is filming.


impossible beast

the whole town was in the parade. the newer babies had a float to themselves. at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father. I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory. somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire. I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness. my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart. she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

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.

blood starts in the nose.

my body is on other things.

dream
is to boy
what taste
is to tongue.

her go-to
word
for hangman
is god.

eat little, not less.

not all of us could be born  

-

the rock

won’t leave
my mouth  

-

mother eats with her hands

(palmistry)

-

makes father
go weak
at the knees

someone is kissing the top of my head.  the garbage disposal is a thunderstorm that’s taken my tooth.  the woman who introduced a kitten to a cat named birdbath is painting my fingernails white while the man she’s admonished for pacing is warning me about using a hand for a pillow.  came all this way

did the raindrop
to highlight
a stone.

i.

grief
is the angel
apprenticed
to coma

ii.

dearest disabled,

we’re not here
long enough
for god
to do
the damage
he needs
to survive

iii.

this rabbit hole
we’ll use it
for the shadow’s
mouth

as children
we adopt
certain forms
of adaptation.

as lovers, always
an item
away
from owning
a pawn shop.

as adults
of parental
age
we become
our parents
those veterans

of apparition
improv.

the father touches down to draw squares for hopscotch.  every photo is a photo of silence.  the mother, for the weird kid in her sunday school class, is sewing one sock puppet to another.  it’s a lonely job but no one has to do it.  the neighbor has just borrowed a hacksaw and, earlier, a box of cake mix.  her brother is the boy all have heard explain how insects are sailboats.  as for the babies, they’ve been put on suicide watch for the actions of a single lookout.  how nearness, love.

from self-published collection The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (poems, Sept 2013)

available on Lulu

auteurs

I am in your house
being you

when the boy
enters my house
with a sack of ash

to tell my wife
he has come
to avoid
a whole

personality

–

my wife is one to believe
she was carried
by child

–

listen,

a baby’s cry is the oral future of what touches the brain

individuation

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span. it was there he pummeled his pregnancy. I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all. I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of. up until then, I was sad her whole life.

stressful events

a father and son argue outside a small town barbershop in windless ten degree weather. inside the shop, which is closed, the barber’s wife is clipping away at a wig. nearby, and quite by accident, an invisible man uncovers a fainting spell before which some will disrobe. namely, women declaring that the eye is always naked. who are these women?, ask my teeth, which are snow.

lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word. a helluva word. I went unborn. a word my mother swallowed. a troublesome word. nervosa sans pretext. my father slept until his sleep became self aware. he paced. then gave me his word. stood over me.

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.

recovery

I fry a single egg
in a pan.

the sound places me
in one of my mother’s
teeth

as it dissolves.

I bring mother
the egg, and she believes
I am the same son
who brought her an egg
yesterday.

she eats the egg
over and over.

her attempted suicide
is not something
I know of. she keeps it to herself

in the person she was.

youth

a jailer
talking through bars
to a ventriloquist.

youth / spent trying to yank a doll
by the ear.

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.

stray dog leaping

the poor are beaten
from the future

they get off work
the day is hot
it’s ungodly

as ungodly as placing a single chair in a garage

the poor get home
the chair remains in the present

the dog
can’t afford to be here
appears mid-scene
in the backyard

the poor imagine
an electric fence
scrounge together
the amount they would pay
to fix it

& smile as they would smile
at the mindless sap
whose job it would be

whose chair it is

orb

the back of my mother’s head was spotted in an Ohio movie theater by a boy whose eyes were covered or maybe closed. I received word secondhand from the boy’s stepfather whose own recollection was marred by the violence he shied from to reach me. in fact, the theater was even possibly a drive-in where the boy remains in the bathroom standing on the toilet to avoid the knowledge he is no longer deaf. like most information regarding my mother, it hasn’t aged well. she’ll set the table at noon for two and drink her coffee and I’ll join her convinced no child dies from its hair being pulled. more secret than my son is his ability to withstand miracles.

earthling

not there when your mother
cries into a poison soaked towel
to a childish god
while kneeling
before the remnant heat
of an open dryer.

not there when your father
by the sound of it
breaks your arm
pressing it into
the shrunken right sleeve
of a shirt that should fit.

not there when your brother
spooked by a deer…

not there when my body
stops the procession

that one might be held in its image.

virtuoso

mommy I am stones. I am in the blacktop river. my veins have been used to unpiss cows. like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are. the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten. they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move. I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed. I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing. if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t. there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped. I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

notes on the saints

younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick. now older, I am not a private person. I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands. if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion. there’s a **** son in all of us.

waiting for dad to burn off.  for mom
to send
in my direction
a phrase
not unlike

keep on
keeping
your ghost
warm.  for brother’s

baby
brother

and
for dog.  for the hand

museum
to open.

for the asker
of this:

who would want
two hours
of a life
back?

decay
is a form
of waiting.

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.

I was your mother. on television, one could see what other televisions were watching. I tried to tell your father you wanted a bird stuck in a frog’s body. that a sleepy afternoon is the poor man’s insomnia. he hated that I wrote down your thoughts on thoughts. by the time you get them back, you’re someone else.

(for Noah)

I can’t tell my brother how his amnesia has given him a second chance at life.  his kid is a real ****.  so’s mine.  still, there’s not enough here for it to have all been a dream.

the voided twin
created for duplication
trying to eat alone

our food
tastes
the same

its touching
backstory

still intact

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

a disabled
child

and the chance
to destroy
my body

my mother speaks
to those
I silence
in tongues.  confesses

she is not
an animal
person.  when drunk, she knows

to push
to the right
the stroke
ravaged
newborn.  as a word

barren
is a man’s
word.  as a thought

it’s a keeper.  if one asks

where one
beats a dog
I answer

in front of children.  it’s the question

leaves a mark
on the heart.

the words have left me.  as for shaken baby
syndrome, you gave

that ****
to yourself.  

wild goose, reappear

is what I would say
to the wild goose.  

the last copy of mama’s
sacerdotal
memoir

the copy
that makes
sense.

how horrible it must be for god to know he can read.

we’ll take them all,
these animals of disabled children.

the creature
that was to carry
in its belly
the lord’s
second
son

could’ve been
the horse
our mother
steered
into a crowd.  the creature

that was to **** itself
in our father’s
sleep

could’ve been the giraffe
we knew
as crucifixion.

the creature that was to groom
for our
viewing
pleasure

a stone

could’ve been
the ape
that buried
our dog
in television.  the creature

that was
to embody
complete
thought

could’ve been the snake
we bathed
in a bug spray
that would hypnotize
birds.

are now’s
nostalgia

birth mothers
move
the word
of god.  

from this point on, I am not dead.

is this
how I sound
saying
to water
that beneath
a rabid
bat
two sisters
share
a leech?

cairn
is to
the father’s
stomach
what melancholy
is
to sorrow.  would that one’s

non-existence
could be
again.

I am reading
the book
that keeps me
from palm

-

during your pregnancy
an interactive
apathy
prepared
an alternate
witness
for the witness
to eat

-

I liked
your poem
the panther’s
boat

the baby was found, after the fire, alive and well in the oven.  god showed his face until, again, the world made him hungry.  at the time, the painter of babies was a baby herself.  her brother had been dropped long ago by a man reaching for a foul ball.  

the sweet tooth’s bible was putting blood on a napkin.  

you want grief that is a seashell of grief.

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

as my mother took up the inquiry into what had died, I was made god.  father pretended to be my ***** and praised me for putting him in good hands.  my sister gave birth to a very large head.  what’s the first thing a baby does with its body?

I tell my boy
shuddering
at the word
doesn’t mean
he’ll shudder
at the thing
itself.

I make my girl
another’s
homemade
soup.  she is nervous
mostly
about where
my cigarette
is
now.

what is the search term
status
of ****?

I carry the brain that is bomb in a timeless infant.

the future repeats nothing.

mother in mouse slippers sees a rainbow and burns the bread.  ******* rainbow was hunger before someone tried to erase it.  I am not god but I do have insomnia.  mother can do in her madness what most can in sleep.  father hollers at a soldier suffering from memory gain.  I throw baby brother’s rattle over a moving tank.  

count for the dead their black sheep.

language keeps us from understanding the world.

spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male

white
emulation-delayed
male

writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-

infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.

Q: what do crows eat?
A: they don’t.
Q: do they eat stars?

-

a fight with my brother

ends

when it’s my turn
to fake
my life

-

as a language, our food spoils

or mother
makes
the same
dish

-

where does my tongue die?

the bomb
went off
moved
and went off
again
mom

-

at birth
a mouth
is born
mom

-

I keep
popping up
in their pictures
mom