the lost baby
for a moment
is doom’s
afterlife.

I don’t think I can be kind anymore.

alone time
is patience
as melodrama.  the second coming

of my father’s belief
is a memory
that talks to itself
while saying
don’t make of me
a habit.

dear godless koan,
my wheelchair has an ashtray.

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.

by the time a god brings itself to bury the legless creature that in its death rises to the top of the aquarium’s dream, there are already so many things fish and fish-like, there and not, scoring

for proof
of god…

the grave of my grave is thought

suicide
writes of you
in third
person

–

if played too long
hide and seek
becomes hide
and hide

–

I crawl in one ear
and you
the other
as the name
of the insect
escapes

god

–

our love of dolphins…

a cigarette ****
misses its mark, the largest
head
the child’s
ever
had…

the shut-ins
meet their food
halfway

the angels
burn only
the books
they’ve time
to read

it snows, churchbell

snows
on the crippled glow
of an Ohio
cemetery
where later
I’ll brush
a white hand
from the arm
of a stone
cross

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

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


jeopardy

I am pushing a bike uphill, my brother
is pushing
a wheeled
horse-

we are late for the birth of my sister’s doll.
for the tea that protects us.
 
sort of grief

a sort of
human
grief

in the dog’s
mouth-

a stick man’s arm, or leg, or crutch.
something

from the world of sticks.
 
in an open field

where one can more easily
picture
the struck man
as a boy
obsessed
with walking
 

loss of the family dog

be alone.  enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress
window shopping
for a red.  

know

     that in between heaven and hell, there is war.  hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell.  hell sleeps more than your sister in love.  heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.  

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.    

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

I am the photo my visions take.

high
on memorization
the mother
has to believe
in god
for god
to have
a safe
word.

the boy is dirt and noise. is hindsight’s
gospel.

loneliness, meet maker.

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

I can hear your ears

a small fire
in the room
with all
the pigs.

a school
without
a shooting.

I can’t make heads or tails of your fervor.  I can’t make body.  I put a hole in my father and through it watch my mother eat her weight in god.  I want what my siblings have.  each other, game shows, memory.  indigenous amnesia.

to jump
the dream
of audience
that buried
my father’s
rib

I stand

on an operating table
in a circus
tent
and invite

my mother
to believe
all earthquakes
belong
to satan
and not

to the devil
my sister
was
when high
on the body, its boneless

forgetting

the give in my tooth makes me think my father has two left hands.

the give
in my brother’s
brings me
to the tree
that took
his last.  to that day

he sang
god is glove
to the hose
that broke
my mother.  I am at the end of my blood.  

there’s a rareness

to him
not many
see.

I am born
back to back…

god removes the mirror from my mother’s mirage

zookeeper reads obituary

was the fruit
made them want
teeth

I’m here for the music  

-

you can keep
your baby
I’m here
for the swing

-

I write
on the days
my son
is sick

-

if heard

I overhear

there was more
to him
in the womb

-

no dream is strong enough to put a hospital
on the map

-

in heaven

the past
is the present
that left
for earth

I feel nothing
for her
but also
nothing
but-

she is
then
a writer, partial

to now, and to now’s

book.

is
then
prayer, loyal
to the past
most

current, to the believer

who contacts
touch.

as I search
the mirror
for the size
of god’s
fingernail, a hair
of mine
goes grey

your son’s disorder
is used
by some
to draw
a straight line, a sleeping
circle…

-

my soul is eating all my food

-

agenesis
of what
of nostalgia’s

panic

sister
she bleeds
in the bath
thinking
we’ve finally
run out
of water.

of the cheering
mothers, my mean
***
mother
wants to be alone
with the two
it took
to cut a baby
in half.

myself
I take it on the nose
the baseball
my father
doesn’t
crush.

the woman who doesn’t believe in light
can fix your mouth

-

I have no double
to love
my triple

-

the man with no teeth
borrows
a ladder

while my mother
swims
in the lake
where my father
learned
to coexist
with his ability
to be
alone,

to which
my father
brought
the seashell
his father
coined
the ocean’s
bible,

I sleep
the sleep
of my hair
not the sleep
of its brush

I am too wrapped up in my own stomach
to visit the mother
who worships

mine

the nonfiction section in my father’s library of sleep
is faith

-

mother comes to me in a dream to tell me she’s thinking of pulling out

-

epilepsy isn’t something you can see.  clearly, it’s the snake
one tries to give it to

-

when people are gone, they’ve gone to ask

brother masturbates with an almost invisible dedication.

mother
yells
from the river

that all rain
is highway
robbery.  

while reciting
proverbs
for mitochondria
I pass the time
wearing
my father’s
shoes

for the footsteps
in his head.

I puke sand
into the infant’s
mouth
in low
praise
of the male
form
made

famous

by a statue
that sold
not
for its representation
of a dominant
existence
but for
the delicacy
with which
its creator
handled
the angel’s
*******

on the life of his mother

loneliness
was the spell
he could not
recall

you will not come across the alien I was molested by.

I replaced myself
like the nothing
that happened.

you can
in fact
eat your silence
forever

-

I don’t want my food
to tell a story

-

talk to me
of light, of mother’s

milk, talk

is for the hungry

-

ask my hands

-

it is always dark
in the baby
you’re having
and in the dream

I’m

I am at the truck
getting ice cream
for the overly
nostalgic
girl
who refused
to cut through
the cemetery

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

the father is a one-man show
of seasonal darkness.

the mother is clockwork.

the child is the child born
wearing
a tight
shirt.

the loaf of bread is the hot heart of nightfall.

the cut is a city
attracted
to a blood drive.  the blood drive

is god’s treehouse.

as ahistoric
exit
music

plays

you leave
the beast
in the *****
of its
amnesia

-

themes for prey

-

infant cinema

dreamt
I was ****
on rice
beach

-

dreamt a mother had gone to the desert
for fish

her son’s
fish

could eat
while swimming

-

two martyrs
share a camera
both

call
touch

-

dreamt sleep
was the eye’s
blood

relative

burn the scarecrow
your mother
translates for.

make your daughter
believe
that a ******
is a nobody, that a somebody

does her own
stunts.

hire
grief’s interpreter
on a part-time
basis
to blow
your son
in your son’s
presence.

as a symbol of your absence

disappear.

prayer
as the horn
the car
carries
into
a tornado.  touch

as ventriloquy.

naming
the stillborn
within hail
of the snake
loving
boy
who can psalm
a basketball

to tell god
he swallowed
a thunderstorm
you will need
a seashell

-

I say to the boy
that before
this brain
of his
there were other

brains
the angels
thought
were bugs

-

malnutrition
can close
a wound

-

on the moon, my name is Noah

the babies my father held.

the hell, the world’s
largest.

the parts of the house
that caught fire
in two
moving

vans.  the bully

mother poisoned
in the dreamy
media
of religious

thought.  the daring

suicide, the doubled
god.

give praise
god’s ashes
are still
collected

the evacuated court of my son’s illness.

the blind man’s
missing
eyelid.

the grief, the broth, the reacquired thrift.

the dispersed body.  the hotbeds

of skeletal
trauma.

the dance music as mother’s
chthonian  
darling.

the sorrow method.  the rhythm.

it is okay that my son’s face goes white.  I am using my son for water.  some of his blood leaves him to become a rooster.  some of his blood hardens in the coffin of his wrist.  some of his blood enters an incantatory narrative.  some of his blood is the body.  some believe the body is drought’s battery.  I am big on bodies.  you might know my father by his spearheading of the ghost indictments.  or by the clock you call love that he called the lifespan of his wife’s pregnant hostage.

the lonely man holds that the mouth is god’s mark.  the lonely man announces with a blow dryer my bath bound mother.  years ago, I was caught doing two things and was sentenced while both were speaking.  nowadays, I hear for my father who listens politely to talk of never let a beast be your eyes.

the child
saint
of separation
anxiety
eats

so little
that when
he
or she
chews
open

mouthed

a ghost
gets
a birthmark

god says
you have the soul
of a tapeworm.  

the luck
you’re in
is your father
the kisser
of baseballs.

the sound
in my body
do you think
it’s gone?

I stab my father with a carrot so I can say he lives to the pacifist who broke the television we were called to witness.  I run after my children because they think they are chasing nothing down the street.  god blows two bubbles that become the eyes of a crucified man.  the last arm in the world will be a prosthetic arm made for the toddler who will die in the meat of the dying.  your father has an apple in one hand and a tomato in the other.  everyone is poor.  everyone is responsible for how it is portrayed to the bun in the oven.  the softness we reserve for women has gone to our teeth.

it’s the same in every model.  the cat is first, then the dog, then the baby the cat eats in a dream.  while I can’t speak for his cough, I can say my son doesn’t belong to god.  my fear of water snakes, though vaguely tied to my father’s shaved belly, began with a bike that was given to my brother with no one on it.

no
was my son’s
seventh
word.

I had asked
permission
to record
what I grandly
thought
to be
the rhetoric
of the ****.

my ****** daughter
had grown by then
to say
nearby
that heaven
is the distance
to heaven, and god
uses
too many
birds.

no ear
nor entry
in the diary
of my mouth

ached.

for Brian Dawson*  


god
to me
was any
word
my father
didn’t
know.

profess
to know.