after many nights spent praying to my mom, gender was my only option.  by some miraculous failure of successive thought, I watched as I vanished before I could become the living proof I needed to circumvent nostalgia.  does god still control himself in front of children?  you made a robot from the parts of a peeping tom.

mid-cigarette
my sister
remembers
to smoke.

god hops
in place
on one foot.

most of our health
is rabbit
health.

not for nothing
the look on your face

boy

when you’ve nowhere
to put a baby.  

also,
the drawings that didn’t make the bible.

in our own way of toying
with the disappeared

we name
weekly
a new

inside animal.  

that something comes when called
separates

the lonely
from the missing.  if it matters to god

let it matter
to god
the eraser
of lightning.  in this Ohio

one is always a day behind being destroyed by the past.

the path of least woman.

not even
my kind

of violence.

father’s faith needs some time alone.

she’s had work done.  

the headaches
are real.

from ear to god-bitten ear
you
are poison.

in my youth
I was quiet.

there, I said it.

the food is not a dream
but here it comes.

the saint of the poolside ***** twister brings a syringe to a puppet show where his father is busy not meaning all women.  brother is showing me around the space he promises will be a kick in the *****.  I am waiting to donate blood to little baby bear hug when I hear we share a mother.

the farming out
of absence.  the broken

hand
of the android’s
pianist.  the silo

that invented
sickness.  

the brains of operation cemetery.

the lizard’s
tail
that returned
with a fingernail.

the demon
with a head
for ice.

that suicide
be
a medical
procedure

for the layman
in
you. that evac

be exodus.

when her mouth arrives, it arrives in pain.  what gets around to my brother is that after her fire was dipped in hell she tried to drown her trigger finger.  I make a mental list of the oddest things that stick to my body.  my hands come from two camps of how to count the devil’s teeth.  food is the voice of god but it goes right through me.

it is not suicide to bomb god’s shadow.  I am the dot my father calls button.  my son’s mind would’ve given oxygen too many places to go.  his body happened overnight.

a baby screams because it doesn’t know that anything is wrong.  

the wind has no past.  

when my brother kicks, my mother says

hands off
he’s getting
a haircut.

after seeing god, my brother climbed a tree and wouldn’t come down.  he thought himself serious but then had to ****.  I took off my pants and made him swear.  it was dark or no one looked.

-

I carry the larger-than-child child up steps smaller than my feet.

-

in grade school, a particular person would ask me what my hair was made of.  over time, I have come to call that person people.  

-

on the day I hit my head and start to walk, my son swallows the harm there isn’t in letting god talk.    

-

the cat is all the instruction one needs to **** it.  perfect, it seems to care that suicide is traceable.

beaten
as it was
beyond
anonymity
it had
no choice
but to hear
from birth
whose face
it had.

mother is down to almost nothing.  recognition

is not
so fast.

the prodigal son of simplicity

-

the pill popper’s
demographic

-

the mouth
as it keeps
the face
from parting

-

the canyon
of where
not
to snort
the ashes
of risen
sheep

-

paper
and the cup
it’s being

the better part
of isolation

fact checking
his father’s
loneliness

from The Women You Take From Your Brother (Aug 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21988530.html



taunts

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.



in the rain

the woman she is holding an umbrella over the man she is yelling at.  the man he is blowing into the bowl he’s made of his hands.  a boy sits at their feet with his back to us and is bringing what we can guess is a toy to his mouth.  you joke he is laboring to light a cigarette.  in the rain.  



locals

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. 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.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.  



portals

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.



wartime

my friend approaches the microphone with a grocery bag on his head.  I don’t know how this will turn out.  not long ago he ran over a fourteen year old girl minutes after she vandalized a stop sign.  my friend has lived everyday since and everyday previous with the fact she survived.  I phoned his wife recently but she had already left him for what he calls a microcosm.  I am hopeful I can love what he’s done with his hair.  he sent me this flower for mine.



catholicon

into the wood
a man
whose daughter’s
hair
is a ghost
fighting a ghost
for her head.

whose daughter
has not slept.

such cures
the town
talks.

put the sick
every morning
on a different
porch.

use
the same
nail.

if one is awake
**** a crow
or *****
a stop sign.



empty imagery

i.

Adam had no memory of his first wife.  as created, he would look at Eve all day and feel nothing.

ii.

the vacation house was found to be owned by another family.  in it, my mother resisted arrest.      

iii.

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left.  he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

iv.

God created the world because he couldn’t do it on his own.  ah, note to self, *******.  person is place.  I might’ve killed a man had I not been poking holes in a poem by Barton Smock.  

v.

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  he says he feels horrible in the back of his head and wants me to take a look.  he says I don’t know what darkness is.  before I can play doctor he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  the outline of the story is off site.  in the opening scene brother recalls that a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.
 
vi.

the head itself was an afterthought.  had god not allowed the soul to come up for air, beauty would have been spared our invention.

vii.

a single mother is a twofold mirage.  please argue above her quietly.  her legs collapse.  her child comes first.

viii.

your sister is the only person I’ve recorded to have been born without a gift.  I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal.  the size of which escapes me.

ix.

I am aware a sparrow exists.  not in a spiritual vacuum.  people are another hell.  

x.

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here.  at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet.  to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

outside the garage door
of a cement building
I break no bread
with the silence
of my nose

what a clown

-

the wound’s depth
leads me
to believe
in a part
of my father’s
leg
I didn’t know
I had

-

mother’s pain
is other
pets, the devil

is the devil
forever

-

this egg on my face
is from the eye
of yours
that hatched

I used my nearest
sister
to strike
my brother
who’d wasted
the last tooth
of his horse
meant
for a slingshot
on a meal

for a scarecrow

-

the power
to mother
went out

-

father
compared
puppets

-

our heaven of socks and string

a broken raccoon
in the black hair
of a toppled
trash can.  god

saying
the tie
goes
to the eardrum.

father and the stick he swears by.

mother
braless
unplugging
an iron.  the washer of the foot

that will touch
one bag
of an erased

home run.  and.  the soft

anorexic
the washer
of the anxious
gay.

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

from self-published collection Misreckon (December 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html




respite

history is a timeline of appetite. I have rubber bands at the ready for when my mother yawns. I cover my baby brother like a grenade. he was born without the potential for further muscle tone. father calls what I do context. I appear like a bruise into a delayed game of hot potato. my sister’s hands are an oven mitt’s dream. I know you’re a hitchhiker and your girlfriend a cannibal but here we **** our thumbs.


ward

the zero courage
it takes
to be
in pain.  or to be

for that matter

born.  it has devoured

by now
my son’s
vow
of silence.  but he had

didn’t he

a moment
while the animal

ate.


clear heads

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.


fascinations of the upright

above
a ramshackle
transmitter

is my father’s
bright
mind.  

the angel’s mouth is a mouth to feed.

a man
packs a baby
in snow.


shitstorm

he beats the mother and calls it practice. the washer breaks and he throws the clothes into a full tub and stomps on them while smoking a cigarette. he provokes my image to send him back to his rightful nose. my thick skull is high on my spit.



debut

the mechanics of the beheading begin in isolation.

exiled from what it bumps into, a form
aches
for scarecrow.  

     my mother’s dream doesn’t burn.




skip

the boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar. his mother is somewhere a girl set to play the moon in her school’s version of talent night. his sister is giving birth so calmly her midwife is a male blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold I wore to fish. his brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke.


nuclei

my mother as a young woman once attempted

in the car of the train her father took to work

to eat her hands.

it was a story she put an end to
but not before
I lost a tooth
putting my baby
brother’s
feet
in my mouth
to keep
them warm.

my brother as a baby
was far
too small.  one might say
he had the brain

of a snake.

wrapped in a sheet from my mother’s bed, I make my way to the outhouse to show my brother there is a future in smuggling the skin of god.  my father is scraping leaves into an empty pool and the earth with a rake.  if death speaks briefly, I am in two places that cannot exist without exposure.  gone long, it spoke once on the loss of loss.

dad loses a brother while drawing a straight line for a haunted circle

-

I tell
two jokes
well

in the shadow
I’m in

-

no one replaces my father like my father

it is god’s job to keep the world flat.  I stand on a wheelchair to change a light bulb while my brother goes down a hill on the sled sister disappeared from.  my parents are the bread and body of arguing sweetly.  they eat only when there is more food than can be thrown away.  I am hoping the sled does for my brother the nothing it did for me.

the blood
the spiritual
eyesore
of the woman’s
body
mirror

-

here is what it said, it said
I think
I have
a mother
whose hands
he tells
apart

-

christ I’m close to my face

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

from the double vision of a dead parent’s dream shiner
to reflections
on the body
art

of departure,

long live possession.

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.

when what we thought
had entered
our father
left

we used him
as an alarm

god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones

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.



safeguards

I call this piece

the hotel room
that left
your father.

a hammer is a good bid, an unmarked
bottle of cologne
is better.

your mother stopped in
to let me know
my high school
mile time

was threatened.

she said she would’ve come sooner
but she had to work
a fork
from her thigh.

the disabled are born liars
but lie
only once.  




turnout

before the parade
I carried with me
a trombone
and entered
the high
corn-

what I played
there

was mournful
after
the fact-

a tune
for no one, for a tree’s

late
cat


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.        



On having a secret mother

the boy is lacing up his right shoe
when he sees
the string
tied
to his middle
finger
and wonders
how asleep he was
when it happened-

(being forgotten
is a lot like
being forgotten
by) harm, that purple balloon

lowered into
then surrounded
by

the inactive
construction site
of the world




On suicide

you are further than I
in your worship
of the slow
vehicle
that carries
praise
back and forth
from appearing
to reappearing

god (how else)
to bully

what would
wipe you
clean
of body

language…
 
On foreclosure

any chance, no,
of improving
upon
my impression
of god.

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat.

wheelbarrows, wagons.

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

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

no cats
on cat
island.


On libido

the previous verse was a poor man’s bible.  like wildfire a fondness for appropriate discipline spreads.  one scarecrow means practice, two scarecrows mean parentage.  a third is your father’s failed garden of baby teeth.  is, by definition, is.  I are

motherless.  what mother doesn’t know doesn’t worry.  many spiders came on the wind and a few were swept into mouths briefly opened by age. what made woman did not make the disappearing girl.  flashing back to a scene that’s not there or forward to one dependent on space, pain arrives

in memoriam.  


On memory*

for all the showing, one would think the only things born were eyes.

when lord
says
or lords
say

this is the body

I tend  
in unison
to trail
behind
my voice

as if

I could make my own
remember
the anesthesia
it underwent

to intervene.





On devastation

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise


On the past

my death a warped photograph of a former awe, 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
in sight of
the aging

marksman
I’ve given
a sporting chance
 


On supervision

you may have been a child
projecting a maze
or an adult
memorizing
the hollowness
of things.

in a condensed version
of poverty’s
obstacle course
I still hold the hammer
that works for a mirror…

with dog or with dogs, we were presented
as two examples
of how to be
family.

I love me a farm machine
and the week
you knock yourself into.

(a silo
saddens
a drunk)


On phobia

before the brat kid
can repeat

this is not
the television
my father
writes for, it is my understanding

that such a child
belongs
to the itch
to have a child
disappear.  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.
odd imagery ensued.

a prisoner gave birth in the yard of your mouth.

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
for which I developed
a stutter
application.  things began to click

on you
and when that
didn’t work

your fake cry
took on
a depth

of meaning
made us dip

(into
your brother)


On paternity

as his mother heard yesterday he was born to some nobody 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 to put a cricket on the witness stand.



On contact

talk early, walk late.  

eat
for food.

hold kitten
like a rifle, your father’s head

to god.

call my / with your

premie.



On looting

we move the cemetery to confirm there is nothing outside of this town.  the ******* remains a two man show.  leash laws are for dogs and angels.  our doctor has a touch of deer worry.  exercise is for the birds.  god is the pitter patter of imagined feet.  our fathers double over in bathrooms from the shame of not calling out for paper.  our mothers have done the math.  by now, most kids have eaten a popsicle alone in a church.  I’m in it for the stick.



On my father being gay

a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark



On having little to no vision

the amount of thought
given to locating
the secret
mind.

I am on count eight
of ten-

ten, the future.

I call your hiding place
water.

-

of course you dream of falling-

those toys
are the toys
of god’s
children.

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor.

-

let there be
all

the light.

 

On decompression

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours
that go
undetected
in the parents
of special
needs
children.  

the civilian
birthday suit, the war

footage.





On the expected delays**

in this place
paid for
by another
country’s
melancholy

two dreams
of being
run into
by a newly
pregnant
late

bloomer

are had
by the one
man
we share

like a comb
to forget
whose hair
was first

we borrowed clothes
from the body.  food

wouldn’t fit
in our mouths

mother claimed

because

the woman knows she isn’t the one her angel wants.  god says we can do this all day.  I chase the car until it runs out of batteries.  mother needs little.  an extra night to sleep on the loss.

shake a broom
at the sky
then make
the ocean
watch

-

have a kid
in the next

life

-

to a highly
visible
other

become

attached

-

marry
and ruin
sight
unseen

kidnapped
I come
as advertised
before god
in the spitting
image
of mother.  

unharmed
on earth  
is a form
I do not
take after.

not for the disabled saint
of benevolent trauma
is there a thin line
between birth and death.

I mow the lawn like I’m trying to avoid a spotlight.

trauma
is an imperfect
inherited
circle
run
around a wheelchair
by a youth
knows

that even the devil
has the first half
of his life.

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.

it is not uncommon, when placed on its stomach for the first time, for the infant to break a rib.  

man creates the world as something to sleep on.  

some water is trapped underwater.

seeing my mother
gives me
the swallows.

her sickness is bravery.

she tells the tv
its food
is too close.  stillness

that she’s already
eaten.

our house is surrounded by sticks.

it is not god
gives man
something to bundle, bring inside
and break.  I can ****

and put soap
on my hands.

be the abuser you want to victimize.  repeat your father’s compelled evocations.  if fat, absorb your mother’s least favorite hiding place.  if not, borrow your brother’s future.  plan it around a mirror.

it didn’t take long for the frog to become real to those around me.  some would bring it back and pat me on the head and some would laugh when I told them it’d never tried to hop away before.  some would say it was the frog that was depressed and some would pray for the frog I was lucky to have.  when it began to speak, I told myself that’s just how frogs talk.  god came to me sooner than most.  mom joked that he must’ve known I had a frog to get back to.  my sister maintains to this day she had no intention of eating the frog as she was only trying to impress the snake her eyes were made for.  by the time I woke her up, her hunger had ballooned and she leapt at me the odd leap of grief.

as if god had poured oil
on an egg
about to hatch
I was up all night
sleeping
like my mother
before me
whose future
went on
forever
and I saw
again
the temple
of that hellish
artifact
from the first
suicide
yours
inspired

food
prepares
in me
a faith

-

a wasp attends its own crucifixion

-

in an area known for being receptive to memory

the boy
drops
****

-

any advance
on god
please praise
remotely

from* The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (September 2013)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-blood-you-dont-see-is-fake/paperback/product-21966942.html


raiment

we are not here
to enshroud
the myth
of the woman
who swims
naked-

we are here
might our sons
mourn
the stickman’s
belief
     that his wife
went to pieces


praise act

you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.

I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.

you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.

up ahead, we work together.

I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.

our father?

he is made mostly of the words that display my words.


proof

my birdcage was a stuffed bear and my bird was a moth.  oddly the bird protected my sister from knowing she was molested and oddly its cage promised my brother he would again be gay.  oddly only because it was planned.  I was more spelled than born and consented often to being sounded out.  I carried with me a grey blanket that I held like a curtain when asked.  my eyes were peepholes I had to avoid.            


all

     the first time I can recall a teapot whistling in the manner I’d imagined

a teapot
to whistle

     my brother was cutting himself in the tub, gingerly, a test run…

-

the whistling scared the **** out of him, the bejesus

-

being made of nothing allowed brother
to volunteer
in New Orleans
after Katrina

     he opened a few refrigerators

that’s all it took

-

without my brother, I’d be in his words

beside myself

     some ****** eared stranger mucking up a white door
listening
as if to a radio
announcing the missing

     blow up dolls

by name


funereal

as some things incorrectly have wings, we stamp a chicken into the hood of a cop car.  the groundskeeper on break inside the church wonders aloud how much is left of the lord.  a boy not part of our boyhood bikes over to us with his feet he’s named individually show and tell.  the cop chuckles but straightens out when he sees what I’ve made of my hand.  the boy says careful it might stay that way for good.


infant travelogue

mittens on the forepaws of a dead wolf.  

one must be serious
about art
but also
flirty.

I will raise you as my own.  

I will make two parts
of your mother’s
passing.

she will live in childbirth.


notes on the saints (iii)

a crookedness within a white cat.  a naked boy on crutches.  a girl in a pink jumpsuit jogging in place beside a man rolling a tire.  all of this says I’ve witnessed my father by himself on a child’s swing ******* two unlit cigarettes.  we don’t exist until god begins to worry.  our neighbor is an old woman with a gun.  she is afraid her color will suddenly change.  when she chases my father home I understand the riddle of his cigarettes.  around him I pretend to be asleep.  I hear him watering a rag and wait for him to press it to my nose and tell me my dreams are bleeding.  when a kitten, the head of our white cat would stick to the refrigerator door.

prayer
dedicates
for god
his time
to memoir.

fiction is the blood of a short person
spilling from a tall.

I enter again the room of the screaming man
who was screaming
when I left.

silence is par for the quiet.

dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.

says throw a ******* baseball.

-

I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers

-

I was not raised by scarecrows.

had a toy that answered to wolves.

tired of mom touching its food, the baby comes early.  we call this moment the buzzard’s injured adoration of a surplus crow.  

-

last supper, I see only men.

when toothpick young you see a snake go mad with second nature and a sponge dragging your mother through nothing’s data

the farness of heaven is the farness of twin.  a packed theater starts a fire in a factory.  a mother and a father clay themselves as figures put to sleep in a clawfoot tub.  across the board, a boy is crushed after witnessing for the image of the crowd-surfing girl he was made in.  you can’t eat touch.

I show signs of having been alone beside a machine.  I can count on my fingers the fingers I’ve lost.  I am not like a newborn.  my feet are each one smaller than the last as are my meals.  like my father before me, I have a hard time being drawn to what attracts me.  like my mother, I cook for those who’ve gone in and out of the eating disorder condoned by the church of sleep.  like sister, I watch as my brother sets forgiveness as a trap for god.  not every animal I see is an illusion.  my eyes open twice to be flashed by the same short life.  anything I name I give a prime number.  appear to the sick I remember.

your attacker has a history of being baptized.  identifies as male.  was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father.  we shot him not knowing he’d already been.  his mother says his stutter is an act.  she is what we call empty inside.  you look like your father.