tell them they are nothing more than the lot the dream surrenders.  that gender is god’s eyepatch.  child abuse has its own race.  that dead or alive, god has never been sick.  to stop acting as if they were born tomorrow.

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.

it grows overnight too big for its bed.  in dream it hammers at the nail’s head still hidden in the infant’s palm.  when mistaken it is mistaken for the hand it stings with a fastball.  it is all man to the boy with a frisbee.  on land it has a dog that growls in gentle code at the untouched bowls of dogs underwater.  traces of it can be found in the model glue scraped from the space shuttle that depresses your ghost.

I bring his shoes
in from the yard
and ask my wife

is father
here  

-

my son
is a sound
that tells me
beauty
is a sound
that tells me
nothing

-

god hounds
my perfectly
childless
and too
permissive
brother
whose first
word
was password

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

spot
for god

the *** machine has begun to breathe on her own.  father ***** a brown bruise into mother’s half of my cigarette.  I could be doing a handstand in a prison yard or watching as my cell is turned upside down.  brother uncurls a finger from his made fist so deliberately I know he means it to be a hard-on.  I crush my eyes with my eyes and try to remember the name my son gave to the loose tooth we hung together from a doorknob.  was my son told me the puppets need our hair.

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

the recent absence
of nothing.

godless
balloon
animal

she removes a bruise-colored diaper.  autopilot.  on foot, she passes a bike her bike has beaten.  the spatial awareness of a previous male has her wanting to buy batteries for toys your son has buried.  below, in city, in a silent film’s ambulance, her son expires.  she collapses on the wrong side of satan’s ear.  on hand, her father’s body in a hammock is god’s arm in a sling.  her mother’s last memory is second to none.  is of a baby being the size of a bullet.

we meet in a neutral space to exchange the boy we didn’t for the girl we did. I still feel as if I’m on the inside of something pretty. it is always on the eve of this deletion, at the end of my dual research, that I forgo the deeper waters for god’s raindrop. here, again, it falls to my thumb to rub toothpaste from the toenail she couldn’t

with me
looking

reach.

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.

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic

for Gen*

it was not art but is was my son agreeing to draw a picture of a man with an itch.  it was not exceptionally large but it was enough to clothe a scribble in my mother’s diary.  it was not lost but it was lost on me how the very baby I used as the window of my window seat was able to stiffen at the sight of unrolled dough.  it was not for nothing but it is

now.

(to see her crippled from pointing
to the sadness in her hand)

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)

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.

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.

our father was on the hook for his mother’s failed symbolism.  our god slipped into character but not before we gave thanks.  we ate as a unit.  we kissed, or agreed that kissing was second only to swallowing.  we grew in secret a garden of hair.  going online was rare.  we feared satan but only as much as we feared tattoo removal.  in the end, you thought more of us than our subconscious ringleader.

have self-published a new full-length collection, 115 pages, title of Misreckon, in three parts: god had an earache / wrong about my brother / misreckon. book preview on site is the book entire.

it is, here:

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

sample poems

site

I lasso the calf just before it makes the ocean.

overhead, a helicopter
from my past
spins.

my son says
to himself
this isn’t
your father’s
sandcastle.

luck is the stone
that marks
the dream.  dream

the stone
that marks
the dead.


how the still recall the poor

when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent. for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut. I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood. instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company. mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach. apocalypse came and came. the act was the act’s debut.


men hermetic

the crow
the fine print
of nowhere.

the bomb shelter
the rumored locale
of a mother’s
laundry room.

the bare cross
the teething
toy
a baby
bypasses
for the neck
of the woman
waiting
for her junk
to fall.

the mare
the anxious
bike.

the second thought of our hastily created christ was to encourage the brutalization of magicians, most of which we corralled into footage of women having out-of-body boredom.  the sons we had not killed came out of hiding and we scratched them openly behind the ears and gave quarters to the fathers of the sons we had.  like yours, my mother started a grief sharing group to bring me the glimpse I starred in.  animal shaming was passed like a torch above rabbits and dogs.

it was your
or my
week
with god.

we took turns having a healed leg, a crush

on the same
boy.

I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming

three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find.  a bit of my mother

is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan

directions.  a drug dog

on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower

of lost
men.

and god, feeling

left out,
cornered
the present
and waited
for back-up.

Adam was Eve’s great lie.

I eat
on purpose.

the son of my enemy
has an overdeveloped
sense
of absence
and hates
all cows.

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.

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.

describe, in detail,
what it is
that turns
in the hands
of the wonderful
thing
you’re not.

yesterday, he caught
his disabled
son
trying to hit
a wheelchair
with a skipped

rock.  I still go mad

when my feet
touch the earth.

in the room of my adolescence,
my father is hurriedly scanning
the newspaper
as if
it’s the bandage
of a clumsy
arsonist.  by the light
of its burning,
my mother
closes
with a hot
iron
wounds
I wasn’t
there for.  my brothers
are like two
kinds
of darkness,
intuitively

****.  none worry
my wax filled
****.

upright, I display the dead
battery
of my dreams.

daylight
is the bald spot
of my father’s
god.

of late, rumors
have surfaced
in regards
to my mother’s
infamously
pastoral    

aerobics.

how to jack
a scarecrow

off.  how to go

unheard
by the occupant
of an outhouse.

most people are not women, and think
only
in birth

scenes.

afraid of my sons I was born scared / I say sometimes to my friend of few words a few words on how a newborn looks like an undiscovered fish fresh from ghosting the underfunded aquariums of rapes that occur / at some point I’ll tell my daughter we’ve met / my father when he comes comes from another dimension to bear hug our dinner guest who’s arrived in a mirror / mother puts a gun to her foot

the handcuffed man is not two birds.  he says as much on body cam.  his family is one woman howling offsite at those clamoring for an open forum on the etiquette of howling.  his sister desperately wants to ask a question.  her god pauses before speaking.  her god begins with god as my witness.  her hands are done being raised.

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.

I mock blow my brother
who has just put
a snowball
down his pants
after claiming
it
a bar
of soap.

we are as high
as our father
is gay.

if we go in the barn
it’s for the Ohio
breeze
to begin
the joke
it abandons.

our mother is openly sad.

the father
who observes
the brain

parenthetically

as a period
of fasting,

the sister
of extra
letters  (the mortal

of the story), and the mother

who keeps me
sober  (cook with hands

you want to eat)

a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

who swallows
fire
to cremate
god
the *****

donor

in the scene,
I happen upon
an off-duty
cop
whose leg
is pinned
beneath
a vandalized
carousel
horse.

the kid
I carry
on my back
stirs
in my father’s
sleep
and I’m in
my brother’s
tree

again

dropping
the cigarette
that will miss
my mom.  

I’ve started the cry
that can’t
begin.

being ours.  being her memory’s
unsent
reply.

warming his hands above a baby’s crib.

massaging the lame leg of a dog at rest.

accidentally crushing the pack of cigarettes in his right shoe.

I think of god
stopping by
the storage unit
the home
of his son’s
cross
and I try
to remember
for god
the four
digit
code
that he might
better
follow
a different
melancholy
thought-

for example,
how he
will not
in his
lifetime
see

in snow
his footprint

but alas
I am
as unable
to remember
something
I’ve never
known
as I am
unable
to be sick
like my son
is sick, yet

there are times
I pinch
myself
in front
of my kids
as if my body
has its own
family
I’m not allowed
to meet

in the midst of its most moving performance, the house courts a mother’s indifference to the make-believe called to blind its only son.  the old, so serenely full of chaos, are elsewhere.  a father communes with god.  together, they form a placebo of distance.  a room without a mirror attracts a room with.  my brother

(a suicide
watch  
on steroids)

wants his face to leave a mark.

the baby’s appetite for its birth is jaw-dropping.  in store for god, we have nothing in the house.

being born
puts the end
in sight.

within reason, I offer shelter
to bowls
of my father’s
cereal.

mother
she is pained
to the point
of philosophical
pain.

we are
to god
scare

tactics.  and to angels

we are post
war
angels.

we are not sad, yet
there is sadness
in how
we thrice
touch
a rebuked
abstraction.

my son is four
plus
hours
old.

his age in Ferguson, Missouri.

his age in Cleveland, Ohio.

his age
in the church
of a mother’s
palindrome.

-

in life, I obsessed over the volume of an alien language.  luckily,

film
had the presence
of mind
to speak
to my brother’s
body.

-

son

don’t pray.  make.

-

something
that could pass
for a gun.

before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.  he is so happy to have a listener, his microphone could be the ant I lost my voice telling.

the boy
relieving himself
in my front yard
thinks
he’s *******
into three
bowls
of soup.

his blackness
a hole
the earth
refuses.

my neighbor
is a white man
whose toy
phone
works.

what statement
can I make
that isn’t
a cup
of tea
gone
cold, the doll’s

version
of a surrounded
star?

my mother’s pregnancy comes to me in a dream.  the scarecrow that has me diagnose its doctor as having attention deficit disorder is the same scarecrow every time.  the soldier eats her camouflaged meal.

due to
a propensity
in each
to apply
face paint
while disoriented

my father
routinely
changes barbers.

because I believe
in the apocalypse
I swallow cologne
to silence
my blood.

it should be harder
to be happy.

I give you my sister

who has tried to flush
her prosthetic
nose.

the shopkeeper’s wife is named after the town she was taken from.  I work for no one.  when I tell her this, she gives me a gallon of milk she’s reported stolen.  three days pass in a house known for the loudness of its phone.  I meet a stranger in a park of suspects.  bread is the main concern.

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today.  above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having.  we do our jigsaw of darkness.  clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

my father
is like my father
on acid.

mother, she cleans
house
by hanging
a painting
of a floor
in the room
where the floor
exists.

the dog
is an outside
dog
dangerous
to some.

god’s alright
but escalates
quickly.

historically, I am the boy
my presence
requested, the great

stranger
who prolongs
the body
of my birth
and death.

this is Max.  the Max I know when I am escorting into the city nobody you’re close to.  Max is a replica of a doll I donated to a shelter for the baby robots that wandered in and out of a world I was young enough to change.  Max is here because here I can tend to the unrecognizable things that have assumed the forms their inventor failed.