the boy was shirtless, was pocket knife
and pentagram.

where I’m from
this is how
we
go naked.

to attract other houses
my mother stays in bed
all day
claiming upright
she is fat.

awake, I visit
the white limo
in the white
limo’s
dream.

the boy lured my daughter
into being born.  I wrapped him

in a towel
and buried him
beneath
my brother
who had it

coming.

to erase hell
from the window
washer’s
memory

father mustn’t

hurt
one by one
the poor.

daughter, you reached
your age
and your brother
reached his-

instead of kissing
a nearby head
I became
a kind of writing, a television

inside of which
a cigarette
signaled

to someone
I couldn’t place

that he or she
return
the bar

of soap, the short

life-

I bathed whatever creature
you could get
your hands on

whether it be
your brother

or not, before

or after
abuse-

I beheaded the parents
of thoughtless

children
in this
I was early

girl death / has boy / acne

(I’m here for you
like I’m here
for cigarettes)

I sleep the wink
that’s yours.  angels

can’t have
ideas.

he trades his doll for her doll’s eviction story.  

I bring them tea
and hope
I have a son

I don’t know about.  

-

I was born to believe
I was born
because I’d set
my mom
on fire.

-

you call *******
on the body
belonging
to one
whose inheritance
of sorrow
can be traced
in origin
to a future

event
a father
attends
as god’s

plus one.

he invents
the last thing
his boy
touched.

in divorce, we are called
husband and wife
not mother
and father.

in reality, the horror movies
I’m addicted to
need me.

your life
is always
over.

babies

gone
that were never

here, this

is the worst
we can do

in both
worlds, this

is nothing, the nothing

that nothing’s

crayon

draws on

in record
setting
heat

to hearten
the chalk

outline

of a mother’s
body, the mother

like mother’s
husband’s
coat

big

to you, my name is matter.  

I shoot randomly
into a universal bed-

giver
of the tattoo
some kid

becomes.

hate crime
thinks
too highly
of itself.  

my thing
for names
extends
to children.

sadness
in something
my brother
ate-

retrace them all

the found
poems

it is terrible, here, where the impossible
can be done.  do not read slowly
those books
on apocalypse.

I am my own ghost.  I am not all there.

you
are my closest
grief.

the dead triplets     harmonize

-

it is the mattress
speaks to
the massaging
of imagery  

it is the mattress / mother was
from / wait

     yanked from
like a spine

-

I *****
but keep
praying

I am not hoarse
I am trying to catch
god’s
throat

-

     evanesce

is father’s
favorite
or second

favorite
word, he says we have to share

the smallest opposite
of resurrection

-

they glow     eating a hole

they attract

my son
created
for me
a world
I wasn’t
in.

in world, no person
was named
that had not done
an act of note
good
or bad.

very few  
cold
standing outside
fancy restaurants
as most
were on phone
trying to make
a reservation.

the world presented
its problems, and one of them
became mine.

I took it by the hand
to bite
what was Timothy’s
finger.

the room is no longer
the sick
relative
room.  

our guest is discovered to be a lack of absence.  

here and there,
astronauts prefer
uncalled
to earthbound.  

it wasn’t until I was reincarnated that I began eating animals.

I knock on a baby’s head, a light knock,
the someone home
will need
your voyage.  

lakeside, we forgive
the lone thought
as if the thought
is as alone
as the one
underwater
who

     visible only
to the orphan
form
chain-smoking
beside her clothes

does not
repeatedly
surface.

being
that you know
how my mind
works,

revelation
is suspect.

one needn’t have a baby to leave it alone.

better to brush
the combs
from my hair.

dogs don’t run off, dogs find
the twins of other dogs
and are
home.

I heard the couch was dragged
outside
with sister
on it.

this from one
who smokes
in her sleep.

I couldn’t sleep without first notifying you of my whereabouts.  

they tell me my son
is my school-age
son.  

they tell me his health belongs to a sketch artist.  

     animals of the poor, it is not my life to give.

your sadness ran as a midday special on nailgun accidents in my area.

if I stay in one place, my mother will die of sleep.

ideally, it’s the image I have of realism.

self

is what I hold
when holding
that

thought

-

as I await
the cyclical
study
of your

poverty

have this friend
says
he’s still
inside

the dryer
had me

burned

-

I have seen
already
my mother
before

she dies

-

because the thing
is a thing
made of wood
father

as if he’s not held
a crowbar

enters

as if
it’s god’s
dark

the night

-

it is mom
the sound
mom

hears

-

if you could take
one paw

from my dog
and replace it

with a hand

which paw, whose hand…

as I go
in
one ear
and out
the same

my brother’s kid
comes to
in the mind
of a beast
that
like any
beast

exists
as its own
memoir
of unreported

sightings
made
to chart
god

by sound

to god

god is
to some

some bread, some snow.

to a recovering aesthete
such as yourself

god
is an occupational
hazard.  to collectors

of inexperience

such as
the virgins
god, as subconscious

measure, created-

god is the vague
self-involvement
the mind
for body

devours.  to the parents

I brought upon
myself

god
is what
appears.

boy is, when sad, what father

dusts off
and coins
anew

(this was your mother’s)

qualifier-

(your mother is a lemon
god’s lemon
tows)

but back
to scarecrow, as in

scarecrow lucid, the formless

boy with knife
in lacking
wield

slouching
before a blank
television, his missing

tooth

false

if it’s no trouble,

I was
to my infancy

everything

outside the dream, this anger.  

the kids are happily
the kids.  they think

to paint
the ****
mama
with snow
one must
more quickly

create.  I am here

to pin my sadness
on

its applicant.  when first

I was poked
in the ribs
how hard
I was poked
in the ribs
didn’t matter.

on the day
you were, I felt
I’d been born
far enough
away
to bring you
this moment.

it existed, briefly, as a fly.  as my want to be
not on the wall
overhearing

from my son’s brain
all about
the five, six
months without

disorders
of muscle, and cell, and.  the five, six

months
an insectless
time
of the word
****…

terminology is exactly this fog.  is knowing
he will not be lost, but will
be referred to
as here.

talk early, walk late.  

eat
for food.

hold kitten
like a rifle, your father’s head

to god.

call my / with your

premie.

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.

after sharing her son’s birth story, the woman comments on the oddness of hearing it aloud.  she closes by saying all words are her last.  she is at least as old as the brother I’m told I have.  when told, I believe the one speaking is speaking to the room I’m in that’s been entered by the likes of me as into a place where a manuscript has just been finished.  I continue my brother as a distraction in the form of a man trying to erase a cigarette burn from the arm of a typist.  man makes the sound I have on my person that both my parents made.  instead of taking her medication, the woman imagines herself homeless in a part of town she’s passed while having ***.

either I draw
from memory
my son
nuzzling
the only animal
he’s seen
or slap
my right
cheek, mosquito,
to make
a mirror.

the breast
the mother
is able
to keep.

the healthcare.

the train
lazily
unassigned

to freight or passenger.

the repressed memory
I think I have
of my oversexed
split

personality.  that I verbally assault

with my better
puppet

hand.

we will have to attend
one of the weaker
dogfights
with

this baby, we will

have to slick
the baby
back

with blood, then maybe

it will slip
into the hidden
state
of those
surviving

on the recognition
you deserve
as a father
a swimmer

wants

have recently self-published a comprehensive selected work taken from the fourteen full-length, also self-published, collections of mine from years 2007-2014.  the book has a title, the women you take from your brother, and is 351 pages.  a PDF of the work will be sent to any making such a request of me at email bartonsmock@yahoo.com

link to the work is below, book preview is book entire:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21758824.html

it includes work from the following publications-

the paper dolls have been cutting your hair
Grief Of Arm
Angel Scene
mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels
think ******* nothing on a farm machine
abandonesque
Stork Blood
town crier
We stole not the same bread
PLEA

sample poems:


lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.


the gospel

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.


jesus on the cross

my sister is sometimes obese.  she has mild heart attacks in cramped third floor apartments.  she gets beaten by schoolmates who impersonate hospital staff.  I am always going to see her it seems when she is in someone else’s bed.  it is to this thought she has recently clung.

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)

I snap out of dropping
my mother
on her head
while the young man
looks at his feet
as two dreams
of being
run into
by the newly pregnant
late bloomer
his father
warned him about
after filling
his backpack
in this place
paid for
by another
country’s
melancholy
where next

we share

a comb
forget
whose hair
was first
and refuse

to be sorry
for the baby
having gotten
its grandparents
down
for a nap

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.

my disabled son won’t have a disabled child.

for comfort, I have
this baby
being carried
prematurely
in the hand
of one
hoping to enter
an underway
snowball fight.

my hangover
imagines
again

a future for those I want dead.

the following self-published, full-length poetry collections of mine are available at

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad


in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels, August 2013, 9.00

-

think ******* nothing on a farm machine, Oct 2013, 10.00

-

abandonesque, Dec 2013, 10.00

-

Stork Blood, Feb 2014, 9.00

-

town crier, March 2014, 8.50

-

We stole not the same bread, May 2014, 9.00

-

PLEA, July 2014, 8.25



if you’re interested in receiving any collection of mine via PDF, please send me a request at bartonsmock@yahoo.com and I’ll send promptly.



-here is a poem from in the asylum we'd sun ourselves with angels:



men statuesque

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

god’s image has evolved.  at a certain point, you stop growing.  I lift with abandon from my mother’s back-and-forth with her orphaned single-mindedness.  harm comes to my child for some attention.  into poetry alone, the crow is ushered.  it cries unheard in a long take above the consoled baby.  I wave whatever like a shy prophet with a bad back.  you look for the spider while carrying its legs in a tissue.  one black hand is not my imagination.

it’s not special. it’s not even all I have to give. its power is that it reminds me of something I had you safeguard in a dream. because I’m looking at the other fathers, I have to massage my gut feeling you’re looking at them too. so there you are beside the random machine I’ve been force feeding the one phrase that frees it to eat for a year. before you were my daughter you were the fortune teller whose teeth I pulled to find out your mother had a girl.

as any father
quickened
by the specter
of an amazed
god

father
had me ball
the baby
up, had me

find the sweater
his wife
was in, had me

turn
all the water
possible

on…

what differently
father did

was, while there,  

off limits.

-

I heard my brother
ask himself
to stutter, he was

no fake, I heard him

often, I was maybe

the lord they used
to freeze
my mother
open…

-

illumination
is the person
I am not

is the person
others
agree with
thinking    
the person
will change

is like preparing
to receive
a runaway
sis

it wants you to hold it.  it plays dead.  its mother is bombed into her mother’s mind.  I think of what I did to the chicken’s head and how it stopped the chicken.  how I know something I’ve never seen is beautiful.  I can’t make out what my father is pointing at because he believes it’s forgotten the both of us.  I grant my brother his exile of proximity.  for example, no chicken is overwhelmingly chicken.

the attractive couple carry a live lamb to the last place their picnic blanket was not seen on fire.  the lamb taxes their young muscles with every weight gain its mind records.  they point and the lamb shifts but does not fall and it’s their pointing makes me hope they are happy.  the whole scene overwhelms my leg and I ask my closest son to rub at a certain area with his palms.  my failed son, son I am lost on, son I swing

at and miss
who goes on to refer to kites
as fireworks.

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)

heraldic entry (ii)

god is the secret god wants us to keep.  I hold onto my leg because you cannot return without it.  children drop in on women men ******.  this, I share.


heraldic entry (iii)

we junk the stove by not thinking about it.  I hide my gun inside and then find you doing the same.  we survive and believe it’s a sign from television.


heraldic entry (iv)  

the wee sharpshooter is scratching his ear with a sprung mousetrap.  you tell me, listen, when I am not.          


heraldic entry (v)

the healthy son has a sick.  well I’ll be.  of all the implausibly hedonistic, god is the one who didn’t get away.

I am a person away from receiving the baby.  my arms, like yours, end.  my wife is elsewhere as even elsewhere is needy.  my wife hollers into a pillow.  my hands are the many crippling fights over which is echo.

i.

I put two boys to sleep.  before they go, I ask them to picture the person living in my car.  the boys, then,

(to reappear in the adventures of father time limit)

are off.        

ii.

it crosses me that the person in my car is trapped.  is this your car, is this where you put it…

I would have to answer
yes.  

iii.

the night she wasn’t killed
is not unlike
the night
she also
wasn’t

iv.

the night it rained I boiled water in the darkness outside of my mouth.

a mattress slid by, out of reach, and on it

something was whiter or something

glowed.

a non-person interacting with a baby I began.  I am bright
but want to be distance.

inspiring kindness
busies
the kind.

the photo captures nothing
that is not
aftermath.  you can keep

your

to god I tell my secrets.

to be my father
I fight his.

the war, the war, the brother.

the zombie movie
about buzzards.

the hungry enough horse.

the 48 hours in which a ******* dyslexia
goes undetected
in parents of special
needs
children.  the explanation.  the action

words

mixing twice.

the face first exhaustion
brought to bear
by
a behind
the scenes
taste test.  

the cyst on a brother’s knuckle.

the fight, the civilian
birthday suit, and

the civilian
burned
by clothes.  a she

as, just as

deserted.

what we want / to eat / we stuff / into an opened

goat, bury the goat

on a hot day
in sand.

in my father’s body
what  
will burst, will burst
when I
swallow.

the devil has a hand in so many things

god
peeks into its mouth
for fun.

I fashion my sickness after the mother

of all dreams / dreaming / of the same

invasive
procedure.

my own mother

tries to leave
but the bomb
is all
shadow.

I am the part of you
the mother’s pill
reached.

it is why I confess to praying.

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

I relayed the lie I was told about paint drying to my brother.  he put his hands on my shoulders and resumed a sobbing he didn’t start.  I couldn’t see the wheels turning in his head but he could.  he drew for me what I thought was a sketch of god’s little tormentor.  it wasn’t a sketch.  our future interactions were followed.

brother, there’s not a cigarette

on earth
that you
can surprise

we keep missing each other.

I’m no you.

my favorite sport is god.

my father
drops a bomb
referred to
as common
on a place
he makes
famous.

in the dream, I had a baby and left it there.

behind
is the part of my life
you’re in.