he is born without stones in his hands.  she waits with him outside the mother.  the mother is their belief her history supports.  speech is a passing back and forth of names dogs don’t have.  before they desired stones, they’d egg the front of my jeans.  the pair

I wore.

I go into the garage
just before bed
and overturn
what is my version
of a rowboat.

by morning
the man on top of me
is made of dirt.

her mask is not god
but godlike
in that it has
no ears.

it is behind us, now,

the telling

that had
god
being sentenced
to heaven
for tracking
his own
paranoia.  

it is with her, now,

the little
bundle

blessing
of nerves.

up ahead
the women
are bathing
the stray
that bathed
a bullet.

it is lost, now,

the black egg
once rolled
by an unattended
populace  
to the front

of a parade
where
as a boy
I dressed as a bird, tore off

my beak
to smoke.

after the standoff, god calls me a rookie.

the injured
disperse
to form
a language
I don’t
speak.

belief
becomes a remark
I make
to a mirror.  my hymn

critiques
the immortal’s
wardrobe.  

I am alone.  my son
is from the future
his illness
promotes.

brother was fury ****** around by a pair of eyes.

god
the unsuccessfully
tortured
contortionist / was road.

bedroom was the trunk of a repossessed car.  mother
was not a single
speed bump.

hotels
were dry
land.  hotels

protested

abandonment.

silence was the liquid diet
of an orphan
whose insides

glowed
with traces
of paint
found only

in river.

father was the light that as a boy he was left in.
that as a boy
I predicted
in small amounts

by blinking.

I wake my children until there are three of them.

I see god so I can say I’ve seen god
without
his gas mask.

on leave from pregnancy,
my wife
admires
how well
I project
concealment.

our baby
slept
coiled
in the bucket
we saved
from the well.

my knowledge of dolphins
includes
how long
their offspring
can survive
in a tank
of my father’s
blood.

I once thought
my ****
was sobbing.

so did you.

when on hold

she draw a mean

mini

jesus

pictures
before and after
of nothing.

morality ****.

brushstroke, breast, blackmail.

     a dressing down
of ******
beings.

when set, the alarm
disappears.  

dear kid, not twice
did I lose
myself
during.

dear ******, it was hardest
to keep
with me
the word

degenerative.    

she once sent a car
for her son’s
carseat.  the car

was so
mad.

the wounded cursive of the boy who thinks himself chicken

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary.  a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.  the animal gets between my son and my son’s imaginary friend.  the root of its insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.  god’s gone when the story starts.  to war, to war.

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.

when it comes to humoring
me
by name
my memories
draw a blank.

I had a daughter
and three
sons.

my hands
could’ve been
the hands
of an umpire.

in the untouched church
of suicide
was the untouched
church
of *******.

it’s like seeing
a television
on tv.  the comedians

and their failed
sisters.

do your thoughts
still take
the temperature
of god?

I live in a world where saying something is preferred. After selecting poems from my previous fourteen full length collections and placing them in my recent The Women You Take From Your Brother, there was bound to be some wreckage. My newest collection, Choice Echo, is that wreckage. I’m behind it, and bound for aftermath. Self published, 141 pages.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/choice-echo/paperback/product-21852599.html


sample poems, from:

forgeries

permanence is upon us.

one who paces.

predator
that I never took
for god.

-

on the inside
the predator
I attacked
personally

became the world
where the window
into the world
of hazing
opened.

-

in infancy
I possessed
a belonging.


humanitarian pause

not as common
is the dream
stuck
in the man.

not all wounds
report back.

I’d look for my father
if I knew where
to begin.

with my mother
it’s like my mother never happened.

I am the man whose missing woman
was bedridden
first.

I depend on my safety.
I worship a sleep that worships.

my brother feels no pain. a characteristic
he blames
on my sister’s
begging
to be interrogated.

not on speaking terms with a former self,
the dream is god.

exit music for stop-motion departures.

a son
a dying breed
of circle.

can light
perfect
a shadow?

the less said about god’s addiction to brevity

as heard
by the angel
of birth

the only vandal
the town
has

has just
welcomed
into the world

a baby’s
broken
ankle.

the people of the town
though not diverse

rejoice.

the wind
tortures
with a trash bag
its shadow.

the vandal’s dog
allows
a darker animal
to nose its way
between the knees
of nothing
clipped
to a clothesline.

god is the sighting
such tantrums
begin.

pregnant, she was killed during a game of hide and seek.  a man passing through popped the trunk of his car going over a pothole.  disparate images of war took root in the photographic amnesia of crows.  brother smuggled a pillow into the meeting of the minds.  never much to look at, mother made a skirt from the executioner’s mask.

I saw
my son’s
muscle
spinning
in the web
of a spiderless
god.

it seemed
only fair...

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.

I took shape
at the sound
of my father’s
whistle-

when well
rested
my mother
was the sense
god
left me-

here is how
I stole
mail:  I pulled my little brother

in a wagon
in broad
daylight.

here is what I know:

you’re not hungry
if you can’t recall
the last time
you ate.

a man dialing his palm
with a knife
from atop
a moving
train
may have
the aesthetic
dignity

you’re looking for
but it’s not
something
the anointed

confess

what small apologies
to my father
my children

are.  headless father

his many acts
of embodiment

     his book of two
quotes:

money
doesn’t know
you don’t
have it

you can buy

sadness

the imposing figure read silently from a magazine of immature fictions.

an amulet predicted itself grey.

a symptom presented my sister to a non-speaking heroine who by all accounts had been only mildly *****.

a boy, having recently written to the head of the household about dirt clods being mysteriously removed from the backs of toy trucks, could be heard sizzling as he dissolved into the memory of his father’s cooking.

a trophy room made trophy sense.

in bed with the animal, after choice cuts of echo, the man calls on the peace of having a third wish.  at a sleepover, his son falls from a top bunk.  as he waits for his bones to return unbroken, the boy imagines he is paralyzed.  the  paralyzed boy with the ******* of a woman.

now father
I scale
your mountain

like an apparition

while mother
gathers
what might
shorten

the prayer
my safety
accompanies

to an image-based
business
model

introduced
by the one
god

hopped-up
on ghost

adrenaline

a bunny my brother hadn’t fed began elsewhere in the opening line of a friend’s memoir.  I ran with a lollipop in my mouth toward my father who could sell a shovel to a mermaid.  my mother ****** her thumb and so taught by example how to become invisible to god.  your son slept while you were spotted looking through a widow’s viewfinder at each of the three places he’d wished into being.  a child-torn child made room in a body bag.  drugged my elbows.

the main character is removed from god’s existential drama and placed in a prop coffin referred to by a majority of the extras as a scarecrow’s outhouse where he is put to sleep by his hands that when put together become the coordinates of our assault on the secrecy embedded in the *** life of angels.

is the twin bed I go to hell to make

said if I let him
touch my breast
he’d put his palm
flat on the road
let me run my bike
over his hand

said I could
think about it
didn’t say

it would be
all

-

my sister backed out
of teaching me
to kiss

she told me
don’t worry
as one cannot destroy
or be destroyed by

the aftermath

-

someone
in the film we’re watching
turns off
the whole room

little boy

the boy
all
of eleven
years

pauses
somewhere inside
his eleventh
cigarette
to say

earthly life
is god’s way
of telling time
and

as a father
who exists
only
to the kids
of others
I ask him
the whereabouts
of his
but hell

I know
before he tells me
the *******’s

with
my mother
writing ****
for his boy
to say
to girls

death is not coming, sister.  brother, death has come and gone.  though a strong sentence may effectively convey the deprogrammed whim of one born to be all brain, poverty has no more a puppet for these strings than you’ve a doll to force feed.  I remember a woman who misread my closest as my closet

grief.  do you still have that mutt?  its messengers mourn the naught they deliver.

return trips offered
for body.

some, we separate
long
after birth.

fourth baby
the first
errant.

surveyor of train car interiors.

job creation
as healer’s
refuge.

godmother
in a borrowed
copter hat.

the boy we call
egg mouth
who frees
his sister.

our meaninglessly
oral

talks.

for the unreal
attentions
of my male
competitors
I created
a woman
based solely
on my mother
patient
zero
of perceived
consent

in the only finished scene
of my father’s
documented
seizure

a tin woman
eats a cricket
before a paltry
congregation
of children
hired
in spirit
to distinguish
an aerobic

from a cerebral

doom

a man
home
after exposing
himself
to children
of late
life
blindness, the man

we bike to
while able-

the suicide
of a different
man, a changed

man-

the two men
briefly
neighbors

both refusing

for the non
emerging
newborn

my mother’s
failed
cake.

in a childhood
some child
had

as if late
in locking
the gates
of the orphanage

as if drunk
on a long
history
of being average
in isolation

as if auditioning
for one
of four
sounds
a baby
simultaneously

makes
like
not exactly
this:

stork poor radio drama)

the father
pitches himself
to a scribbling
god

whose image
left little
else

on doctor’s orders, the girl forgets herself by allowing the water to turn her baby brother into a prune.  mother tells father that god has spoken and that the man in the house is not a cop.  the girl has seventeen sisters to which the man has brought the seventeen boys from town voted most likely to have teeth a year from now.  the mark has begun to fade like parents after ***.

sister stood on a rocking chair
blowing kisses
to brother

who *******
was using
as a surfboard

a mirror
that made him look
like an egg-

the two
like two
sounds
listening

could hear

father
walking on his hands
in the attic

and mother
nailing
her extra
pair

I led the babysitter
to where I thought
her child
was.  

I lost my legs.  

they went slowly, as if
I’d taken
a hoof
to the chest
underwater.

I swear
her father
brushed my lips
with the ******
of a bottle
while his wife

held back.

alas, children are not
the most
economical
memory.

male is to female
as gender
is

to genre.

I like to think of your house
as a treehouse
and imagine

the tree.

ask me only
what I’ve done
in the short life
of god.

ask me about my mother.

ask me
if it removed
my fingerprint
from a fish.

ask my why a disease
with the ability
to travel
travels
from one present
to the next.

ask me to procure
oral
input
for the boy
whose mouth
won’t move.

ask me if meat
keeps
its sorrow.

ask me
if I’m
a day
old
which angel
discovered
fire.

ask me why your mother
would feel
in her words
like an ambulance.

ask me what I see.

a man on horseback
casting a line.

a plea
addressed
to the non
readers
of said
poem
to leave
its writer
alone

she began to drool
and removed
her shirt.  she was still
growling
when her face
returned.

I was nightmarishly poor.

     in her thirteenth year, she met her double.  in her fourteenth
she recovered
from no more
than two
illnesses.

she assured her acquired stutter
it was just
an old
friend
of god’s
come to collect
a hair
sample.

fragile
as in
opaque, she leapt
from a balcony
over which
I’d pretended
to flick
cigarettes.    

I ate dry cereal in the dark and thought of spiders.  she called me ****.  I called her toes
air quotes.

she was involved
as a passenger
in a car
accident
on three
consecutive
days.

she predicted herself
saying

the world isn’t after me
I am

after which

I couldn’t
win a fish
that would die.

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

the bawling
gift
apple

muffled by a pillow
stolen
from some
honeymoon
destination
for third

wheels- the penny

in the horse
father hurries
me from…

a brother wets the bed

is reminded
of age, the number

of kissable
girls-

in another life, he has
this one

there is no
imagining
of his
surprise

for Meg Pokrass*

before we knew what was going on, we knew the myth of what was happening and followed suit.  my kids told me I was taking their childhood.  I told them it was the long hair of their mother made me do things.  she thought she was seeing another man until that same man lowered her into my arms.  we think of him when we pray because when we pray we’ve all a job.

i.

a child’s edition of your father.  in which

the unused
scarecrow

is found
hiding
the *****

mags, the cigarettes

of a sister’s worry, and other

inanimate
markers

of accounting, meant to be

traded
for fireworks, for fat frogs
not given
to snake…

that is, had the boy
lived
to unsee

the water
he didn’t
make…

ii.

(my handle on death)
is holding
a book.

an overfilled
pauper’s
grave / transcends
its archaic

reference
to belly.  all mothers

are single.

she kneels
and she kiss

grasshopper

she fight
to be

fluent
in longstanding

interruptions

she father
the skirted
issue

she make for mother
no baby
but tends
an entry
in

its travelogue

she not wear
anything
under
her clothes, tells me

she pray

to headcase

we proceed
as in recess
of mourning

outward
of the brief
city-

longing is a pup, a kit, a word
the stupid have
for infant
ape-

we constellate
in godless silence
only to form

our tragic
figure’s
jawbone-

it may be
there’s no future
immune

to the draw
of evacuation-

but sway

beneath the high
empty

crib

because god
knocked herself
so silly
I became

pregnant
with a praying
child.  it entered my story

to tell me another

of bomb
removal
and nervous

energy…

I cowered early.  my mother received one leaf per nakedness.  in my youth, I was touched into being a mold of the unborn.  I was said to be overheard and I was said to be with mother.  I was spotted by a spoonful of milk being fought over by those I slipped from to watch tv in the smallest museum of childcare.  when I am most alone I count backward for my newest boy and for god’s limited son.  soon is a heaven of affordable pills.  comfort is knowing all my boys have eaten late.  yesterday gives birth to a pecking order.