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

smearing mud on her **** to cool the baby.

trying
to burn
dirt.

like a scar, some father
reciting
the same
verse.

if his ears can hear one thing
how does he know it’s god
how does she know
there are two

mother is in the zone.  is writing a birth scene for a specific kind of person.  she has this window she’s named god’s narrow.  my only job is to leave my father alone.  I am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it’s a boy when I share it with my brother.  it keeps getting sick from being around other kids my age.  when I catch a snake I tell it satan had to worry about being you first.  I hear almost nothing because I want the voice to be perfect.  it will say I had, quite by accident, become evil or it will say finish your bathwater.

i.

the only nightmare my parents remember me having was immediately traced to my prolonged exposure to a select group of schoolchildren I’d bloodied for how they spoke to god.

ii.

the bus rides lasted long enough for me to cultivate the belief that no being is brought into the world.

iii.

drought’s teacher paddled me into reciting a prayer from a ghost town’s chalkboard.

iv.

father protected me by saying there’s a word for how you feel.  he was a writer because asemic writing had yet to occur in the randomly evil.  abuse was a star.

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.

a rattlesnake is my kind of dog.  it takes a phrase like this for my father to start talking.  his hammer misses his finger and hits a nail.  **** gets done.  his many wives run into each other so he can hear them being deaf.  if the dog becomes ill, my father has it all worked out how I’ll have to explain to some know nothing the right way to put it down.  sleep is satan without god.

I can trigger
shame
in my sleep
the beauty
I’m made
to return.

mothers compare notes on hostage etiquette. fathers break bread over the disputed anniversary of god’s body language. brothers in bear costumes collapse. sisters convince matching tattoos to befriend the same fingerprint. you hold your baby. want me to drop mine.

in awe
of my father
being
in awe
is habit

forming.  I want

invisible
beast
my fingernails

back

for the error
of the foot
the feet
are punished.

the ears
call
but nothing
answers.

one hand
is a hand, the other

the hand’s
map.

the second machine
though equally
godless

deepens

our understanding
of the first. mother

under

the dinner table
that doubled
as the operating.

I am half
the survivor
I ate for.  

I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.  

my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking

of all the things that had turned into her hands.  

communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.

at birth, your life flashes before your eyes.  you have a brother and with him think that if one could record the exact moment of your mother’s dying, her death will disappear.  the drink in your glass is made from the skin that couldn’t bring itself to be your mouth.  some of it is crying but most of it is putting the word **** in its place.  out of necessity you create a crow that you might be warned of its crow-like replacement.  your hands stick to what they know.

you strike me as an invasive listener.  I love your body.  loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes.  does this make me look alone?  like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone?  my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with.  horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare.  earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant.  if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

our impossible guest, the inventor of vicarious living

mom would start in on god so fiercely that we became preoccupied with doors.  we got to saying and I’m taking the baby with me at the close of anything said with passion.  by the time our speaking allowed for speaking parts, you’d think a cameraman had asked to use the bathroom.  father had his moments.  being thin is an adventure.  this egg has given me an idea for a different kind of chicken.  

agewise, I was closer to my parents than most of the kids I knew of.

once
while being
tickled
and once
when god
was painting
my blood

I let
the itch
be

I thought
I’d abused
myself

seek poverty for the instant nostalgia it provides

natal homing makes me ***

make your cry to the lord of obnoxious minimalism.  

*****
all you want
underwater.  nothing leaves

the imagination.

though the man says
it’s all
****
in the fire pit

he holds
in disbelief
the sadness
of two
*****.  dog is as dog does

to the dying
of its language.

there’s the god I remember.

I’m fasting
for two.

I named you once before you were born and once after.  your room was blue for so long.  you’d kick and I’d press my thumb to your father’s wrist.  my hand is still wet from putting jesus as a baby beneath a nervous goldfish.  I know what happens to people like me.

I give the rat my dollhouse at night.  our basement has a disease.  my brother brings a flashlight to dinner.  mother says poor devil to the poor devil she can’t stop eating.  I have my own language that in hindsight is an age gap.  I am so heavy.  I jump and water gets out of my way.  between you and me, sister sees me coming and throws herself on the trapdoor we’ve made a game of rolling eggs over.  father shares a hat with god like there’ll be something in it.

it is beyond me
why you’d want
to be more
than your illness.

where does one go
when gone
three days?

when I think about you

I don’t

extramural (i)

as he prepared to leave my world to the memory of a man addicted to god, my father was stung by a bee.  this matters.  bees carried the scent of absence.  bees spoke to mother.  mother was the woman it took two like my father to make.  mother swallowed to bruise the body of any dropped thing sounding itself out in a nightmare had by children new to infancy.  mother swallowed and called it singing.  there will be a god.  this matters.  perfect, now, the nothing you say.            



extramural (ii)

as acne commits my face to a memory of scripture, god worries that man’s silence is a pox upon both the crow and the crow.  on good authority, the cyclops is blind in one eye.  you were tortured, yes, but nothing stands out.  my living hand performs for my dying.  imagine my father’s dismay at the realization yours had of having done this autopsy before.            



extramural (iii)

the fireplace is on drugs. get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

-

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold. jesus-on-a-stick. the crown of thorns, extra. I close my eyes. I dare the brain. the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

-

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful. I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams

dreams only

-

everything happened in 1985. words don’t mean. numbers mean. tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

-

the wind is asleep. it sleeps outside.



extramural (iv)

uncle has been all day figuring the teeth of his that will never touch. he has this riddle he calls code for what to get the man who has nothing. if I can get him to stop biting his wrists I might be able to chalk something won’t need moved. when I was born, I was small enough to fit in most mouths. uncle is not the tiniest bit mad. he holds babies only when they are hungry and he is not. those with angels think those without are selfish.



extramural (v)*

the people are looking for something that tells them what to show. my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees. at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends. a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth. grief is a good listener.

pain is under the impression it’s on the move.

the brain
a fire
that cannot
spread.

in a world of non-competitive
seizing
I show my son
how to waste
his hand
on the hand
signal

that called away
vandalism’s

angel.

I didn’t know I was naked until I had somewhere to be.

can one get pregnant from being pregnant?

Alien’s heaven

poems

Barton Smock
June 2015
 

 
pilot light

baby, baby talk, and pilot light.

kitchens everywhere,
god is alone.
 
no brain

father smokes to make something disappear. he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected. when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil. mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears. terrify no one your childhood knows.
 
son

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.      
 
knees

visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke.  leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad.  my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays.  sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.        
 
yearly

our collective identity is a sick child. some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless. people are for others. are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from. the child prays. the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination. we pray. we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost. I trace a finger to put my finger on. the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once. nothing in the world is the world.
 
boy and gun

it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.  
 
vernal

when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god
 
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.
 
area

somewhere, the mostly boy body pretends to be explored.  we are not we.  my mother ruins a sketch of my mother.  my father smokes two packs a day because online he was called prematurely haunted.  the name of your existence

is

priest retires to make umbrella for jack-in-the-box.  (her bus

is rain)
 
barbaric terms

each twin
slower
than the last, she spits

over my dead body

baby
after baby
out.

as news
of the massacre
spreads, the young
call it mother
by word

of mouth.
 
longing*     *for Gen

the baby boy stiffens at the sight of unrolled dough.  we say he is pointing the way to god.  crippled by the sadness in her hand, his mother keeps a claw mark like one keeps diary.
 
closings

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures
using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.
 
ins

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic
 
bloodless     for Noah

my brother was blinded by a crow.

I’d tell you the story
but know
you hate it.

*******.

brother’s darkroom
became
the crow’s.
 
breathing spells

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail. told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born. I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good. had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.
 
intelligence

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window. sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.
 
disability jargon

i.

when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees

ii.

homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to

iii.

eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self
 
concord

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.    
 
altar

the baby is too light.  its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break.  its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach.  some of the boys bail.  some don’t.  the mother’s nickname doubles as her real.  the baby is not called bricks.


 
zero

when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill.  years go by and I am zero.  the number arrested for suicide.        



 
basics

because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub.  something slides from his belly and becomes wedged.  his dream business goes under even in dream.  he makes eyes at CPR manikins.  his son, his life, pushes for legs.
 
preparedness

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.
 
outlet

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

 
viewership

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.


 
pressure

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.        
 
high

mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.

father, I can’t bury
my face.

in lieu    
of the lord’s
dog, raise

the lord’s
bone.
 
the mice

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect. she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other. both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen. sister gags and it makes him think about gagging. now no more, these were the heart of the note.
 
signal

as my face
will one day
correct
my body
I expose

the elements
to my
ugliness  

-

my son is my search

history

-

headlights
when headlights
emerge
emerge
from a period
of non
worship

-

(wave your arms
long enough
you’ll have sticks
for arms)

-

they don’t  
happen
in my
lifetime
the terrible
things
I’ve done  
 
observance

when drought came
to my brother
I left
for the city
where I found myself
blanketing
manhole covers
with my coat
for women
who gathered
on rooftops
with men
whose daughters
had been killed
for jumping
rope
 
peril

I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.

take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.

I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.

stay small, future.  

persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.      
 
no devil

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world. hell was always the preparing of hell.
 
inseparable

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.      
 
masters

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist. I am alone. I am brief stay of bullet. god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process. when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside. I miss mom. gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.
 
was

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.
 
gauze

the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew.  her insomnia
has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill.  her milky eyed

-

husband
revs a tow truck
to death
in a heavy fog.  it is possible, humanly

-

possible

-

there’s nothing
to see here.  that her god

-

is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s
spirit

-

animal.  
 
image

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire
 
godless

godless
balloon
animal
 
root effects     for Miles J. Bell

like he’s laying
yellow
on his road
out of grief
brother
takes a drag
and keeps it
until his head
is underwater
is what they call
with apples.

his eyes
have always been
two poverties
unexplored.  he is old, alien’s

heaven
he is old
but not before
he knows it.
 
the alien wept but was not heard weeping

not all
drones
dream
of you

I use the dream to ask god about the dream I keep having.  my son falls down the stairs while holding a baby girl.  I am too late but not too late to **** the blood from his toes because his arms are broken.  the baby is nowhere to be found and I have no one to contact.  my son is going in and out of sleep and I tell myself this is the end of my outsider status.  I’d start my day but god needs more time.

alone
I can cover
two handprints.

the rooms my father enters are bugged.

mother is dumb from pretending
to hit her head.

talking is hell.  hell belongs
to a little
devil

that shrinks.

you throw a cell phone at a dog, okay.
pick up the phone
and find
the dog.

let god think
he sees
our puppets.

i.

the ghost
suddenly aware
of sleep

goes on
to be
the same size
awake.

ii.

will never bite.  never ask
someone
taller  

to bend
the branch
down.

iii.

as far as hands go, these are very large.

memory proves god
in that it proves
god
is lazy.  

she oversees bathroom breaks for the crucified.  

I was born without a twin.

it gets so you can’t throw a rock without having a baby.  not all of us talk this way but you have to hand something to the ones that do.  I’ve seen voodoo dolls with more personality.  had my mother’s god been my father’s, I would’ve gone blind from staring at my birth.

I enter with my small life to profile the impressions you did of my brother.  these kids, they cough in photos.  as for her, her father’s voice could up and speak at a moment’s notice.  I move the gun daily.  if my head wasn’t glued on, I’d have lost my ears to the hive mind of ghost forgiveness.  my brother liked to play leap frog.  **** art.  we live too long.

with a kid for each hiding spot, father thanks god while mother takes a head count.  I am back from the fair with a rendering of how I will look to my ******.  my brother is already in position and has contorted himself in a manner he thinks will convince me he can shrink his ears.  my sister is nowhere a bumblebee can’t find.  our puppy picks a new favorite because it bruises easily.  numbers game or no numbers game, loneliness is coming.

I am made mostly of trying to find my way back to bread

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.

violence
is the only body
that takes a lifetime
to bruise.  

I know this guy
so to speak
calls his ****
god’s shortcut.

I can’t reach my hands.

from self-published collection Abandonesque (December 2013)

available on Lulu.

abstract qualities

above me many characters frequent my father. they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth. I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times. in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss. in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun. moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body. when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me. I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold. I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there. when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

dear infant

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

trades

a baby appears onstage in a kick drum. the more I think of time travel the more it can do. when I ask about the fresh blood you say I should see the ear muffs. you say they are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot and stared at to avoid the sight of your father the walking anthill. my privates move in my sleep. my privates are outside the governance of worship. you can have me from the waist up. my ******* are alone. the devil shares a history with god. in Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card.

expertise

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay. I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child. eat snow, understanding.

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

forte

addiction did not transform into prose.
familiarity did not breed.

it was not cold, it was heartbreaking.
it was hearing

my blanket needs a blanket.

it was billed as frostbite
with a beautiful write-up
in the archive

of I cannot
move my eyes.

it was not my imagination.

the baby was a city.
it lost us.

talisman

I think it’s a tuning fork. I convince myself and speak to it. the boy with me says it looks like a ******-up cross. says imagine jesus got to heaven and was still part human just imagine. the boy would be ****** if he were him. next his mother is off her rocker and so on and soon the boy is muffled by where he’s hiding. I’m okay with it. I need some peace and scratching. that’s my father’s, peace and scratching. he’d set a shoebox with a live rat in it next to him whether he had one or not. gotta corner that thought. I look about, the boy has either shut up or died or is living quietly afar. I sit on three stacked tires and fear a moment for my ***. I brave what might still be a tuning fork. I poke with it the place I was male then caress. rain on the roof of my home makes the roof look like a lake. one magic possum after another gives me depth. I snap out. the boy is circling me, he’s been struck by lightning, is in fact still being struck. his hard-on looks to last.

forms

in the end, she was a pair of beautiful hands and he was mostly a heavy head. in the beginning, she fed him too eagerly and wore a short dress of one color. his own hands were hearing things and she’d put them on his ears. he was either an unknown writer or a bill collector. he scripted for her the last lovely times of the empress of bullish desperation. as a young fathoming she knew him constantly. I’ve ghosted for them since I can remember but am open to the possibility I haven’t. touch is not touch but is where it’s hidden.

the inspection

my son helps me open my fist.
he rolls up my sleeves.

Christ is still dead.
my mom doesn’t smoke.

abandonesque

what can god read to make him feel more human? then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing. I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering. then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs. point wildly. it’s not a shame beauty ******-up. I look sometimes like a different baby.

always crow

the boy keeps quiet about his room. his toys gather for bully scenes. his toys even have a graveyard. when one goes missing, he believes in an angel. his mother hides her applause from his father like a tracking device. the three live together at different times in a pre-existing broken home with two chimneys. forest the boy thinks is the forgotten back of a forest creature. when in the room he is quiet about, the boy grooms each wall to be a window for one day and for when that one day comes. my girlfriend grieves in public to tell me how his mother and father were not long ago so lovely and so accused. he was the only boy who couldn’t see a crow without seeing through it. could be he’s the blood in her voicebox.

father kicks me under the table
for biting
early.

a ghost hears thunder.

my dog dies
and I take
its place.

because he could be anyone
I use my dad
to get laid.

christ had two sons
his daughter
ate.

two girls replace two boys and continue the good work of making a ******* sandwich.  

I become a woman to watch my mother die.

father
he jumps
less and less
rope.

things come in three raccoons
to rearrange
a rabbit.  

a baby avoids the plague
like a first
word
amen.

brother gives hell to my sense of place.

the narrative that haunts my flood story never has two words for the sticks I rub together.

the mother treats her mouth like a net she’s failed to eat through.

no one is talking to the pregnant angel who can’t ****.

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.

brother builds a time machine from trigger warning ****.  brother puts his little earthquake to bed.  brother swears on god’s jawbone he’ll pinch a baby from a pouch of tobacco.  move for move, I match our mother’s stillness.  my eating acts alone.  a symbol for leaving a mark.

if the **** thing is a boy, let it have a knot in its stomach.  if it’s not one twin, it’s another.  if a girl, find a woman who’s been to nothing and back.  

bring me a fat tick from the dog of baptism.  owl from the hair of god.