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Jan 2015 · 237
south
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
I slash myself to recreate the map of shortcuts your mind blanks on.  under sky, some doctor induces the angel our mother became.  two boys, while still in our underwear, are witnessed putting their heads together without knowing it is okay to be so by any father whose madness works from home.  hell, the baby with its ears could be saying look at this ******* flower.
Jan 2015 · 286
sightings
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
****, 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.
Jan 2015 · 353
was
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Jan 2015 · 255
lone actor
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
and she was nice to her kids not because she loved them but because not a single one of them was predicted to reach an age high enough to become an only child.  and she held on to coat hangers and to memories of pressing outlet covers into place.  and she lynched dolls claiming they’d be lanterns for god when god got brave enough to move again.  and what went on without her went on to cheat death or her brother out of his massacre.
Jan 2015 · 228
fates
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
the man lost his voice threatening to smack my mouth off.  the woman unplugged the tv.  in its own way, the game was on.  it was the night jesus went from being indifferent to being abstract.  the night someone’s dog let the ear of another from its mouth .  as for the baby on our doorstep, the same someone brought it food.
Jan 2015 · 175
pop songs
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
my mother she applies a silence to her lips.  I don’t hear her go but can see that she is gone.  my brother falls asleep trying to remember the last time someone carried a tune.  the movie of his life is left by yours.
Jan 2015 · 209
catenae
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
I am at the tail end of being but a child.  aloud, ghost sounds to me like guest.  the dog looks to be eating its paws with its hands and will do so until my hands are gone.  influenced by the simple living of trauma, mother’s handwriting emerges to document itself.  brother he is on the dreamy side of becoming the product of a his-and-hers overactive realism.  in his own words, father is moved by one thing and by what went on in it.  a shadow picking up litter, I love him both.
Jan 2015 · 204
violent ends
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
but for this letter, the word is silent.

you are not yet
my maker.

his observations
exhibit
decline.  hers

display
animals
that forgive.

everything buried
is buried
in god.

the brain
as it designs
a plotless
thing.
Jan 2015 · 232
masters
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Jan 2015 · 220
yes
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
yes
I pocket the white root of my enemy’s fantasy and bribe my father with money for a lottery ticket.  I hear god say yes it will be the god of all.  it’s a good day and on such my mother swallows her brother’s morning cigarette and tries to get someone to kiss her neck.  on such my sister wonders deep down if her doll is wearing enough lotion.  I think to flee but know fleeing looks on paper too much like what it is.  the skull is the grave of the brain, the skull is the boat…  if other houses catch fire it’s because ours is done burning.
Jan 2015 · 170
christ, kid
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
I have gone without god to see the hands of my hands.  

I tell you they were there.  

I tell you
I am the same
distance
from

my eyes.  

christ, kid.  

the present
alone
takes three
ghosts.
Jan 2015 · 348
the mice
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Jan 2015 · 319
race
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Jan 2015 · 1.9k
intelligence
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Jan 2015 · 245
signal
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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
Jan 2015 · 282
future quiet
Barton D Smock Jan 2015
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.
Dec 2014 · 318
yearly
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 333
spirit nerve
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 1.2k
gate
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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
Dec 2014 · 192
vernal
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god
Dec 2014 · 419
the visits
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 178
boy and gun
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.
Dec 2014 · 396
godless
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
godless
balloon
animal
Dec 2014 · 342
earthen
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 501
metanoia
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 295
closings
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 272
ins
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
ins
night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic
Dec 2014 · 316
longing
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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)
Dec 2014 · 241
area
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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)
Dec 2014 · 309
barbaric terminology
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 606
knees
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 278
recordings
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 276
prior psalm
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 164
piecemeal
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
it was your
or my
week
with god.

we took turns having a healed leg, a crush

on the same
boy.
Dec 2014 · 97
untitled (v)
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming
Dec 2014 · 500
anterior
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 177
untitled (iv)
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 332
clear heads
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 175
nuclei
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 411
protest
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 268
bubble
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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
****.
Dec 2014 · 921
untitled (iii)
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 932
untitled (ii)
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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
Dec 2014 · 198
untitled
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 425
end psalm
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 253
the partial year
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
Dec 2014 · 338
crossing over my brother
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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)
Dec 2014 · 294
the straight and narrow
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

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

donor
Dec 2014 · 238
ruin
Barton D Smock Dec 2014
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.
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