before god knew it
man needed a mind

to move a band-aid
with.

for you,

the baby
disappointed
in itself.

for me,

3-D glasses
the mask
makers

lose.

he dresses plainly and drives a car beaten up by a lovely in-his-prime salesman.  he draws disability to repair the memory he has of enlarging the vacation photos you delete.  he gets paid to be no one.  there are days that are not the day his check is short.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbhgB9GVnM0

increasingly violent.  I have this image.  it is broken.  physical.  like a being.  ask your mother.  practice.  not on your mother.  she will feel left out.  let her be.  like a mirror.  I have this image.  it’s blinded and has been since the moment it was.  I have this father.  builds to nothing.  builds and builds.  I have this friend you’re the uncle of.  shakes his right leg as if his foot is stuck in a bucket.  there’s no bucket.  he’s all yours.

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.  I tried to make it last.  the fathers were hungry and oblivious.  they had left their voices outside before telling me they’d need them.  I worried they could sense I was pretending not to know.  I loved equally the horse and the horse we ran out of.

we’re at that point in the conversation where someone is called someone to protect someone’s identity.  we’re in a sparsely populated room where last time I checked you were having a party attended by people who believe people **** people.  I am currently the sobriety story you beat into your kids until the neighbors take them away to a toy train that circles someone’s sister who is convulsing on the carpet to free her braces.  your dee-jay brother is being a **** to everyone but me.  his song makes me sad the rest of my days which are also the rest of my snow days.

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I don’t have what I have.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  my eyes are male and impossibly warring.  I am trying to talk to you as a child who was read to.  I have seen only the future my parents memorized.  I can see her nodding off at the controls of my sleep chamber.

peace and quiet haunt each other.  there’s a hole in my soup.  no disease is rare.  no son.  god taps me on both shoulders because they are his.  my father is the soundman who fails to establish his mother’s voice.  my mother is seconds into sobbing when she disappears without it.  the tv show is very kind.  the old man dreams his wife is young again and she dreams he is strong.  the cemetery may remember death but needs told.  the hallway is nothing more than the hallway of a particular nursing home.  light throws itself like a voice into the deeply peculiar where I touch myself when I clap.  a ghost pokes itself in the eye that undressed you.

in a decaying spaceship

where the writer of mindless violence          
has been herself

something horrible
like something
you’ve seen

could happen
to a clothed baby

but
based on past history

hasn’t

and the baby
used
is used sparingly

and the baby not used
gives little thought
to its hands
which speak

prettily
about thumbsucking
to publicly
murdered
angels

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.

you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there.  you post the photos while your dog barks.  you doze on a hot day.  your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog.  your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing.  you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car.  the car is not yours.  your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.

it is hard not to do what I’m accused of. have self published a collection of poems, most recent, titled ‘we stole not the same bread’. don’t mean to implicate. it’s 105 pages. link below.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/we-stole-not-the-same-bread/paperback/product-21626878.html

the man slaps himself
so hard
I am sure
the mirror’s memory
is for show.

god is god because he continues to believe
he willed himself into being.

my boy drags his feet.

rest the eyes
above ground.

I am in the saddest grocery
waiting with my mother
for the happiest
bike repair
to open.

the head deformed
is what the head
would want.

insects have imaginary insects.

if you listen lightly
the lit match
becomes a match
again.

you were ahead of your time and I was distant.

strangers have more grief than candy.

the doll learned it would be buried
with its clothes on
the moment
mother
used her inside voice.

I thank god in my sleep
for respecting
my privacy.

a reading from the book
of letting the dog
dig in the yard
you take it from:

have your father’s eyes
looked at
by your smartest
child.  have

boys.

father is cheating death or cheating resurrection.

this is my first video of a mother daughter divorce dance.

easier to leave a baby than a note from god.

I am at the movies to see one.

spasms even the smallest spasms in the very small, oh.

it is in our DNA to progress, oh.

he is hard to lift.

what could’ve been is not heaven to what isn’t.

here is a beginning:  were it not for trace elements of mirroring,

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

I try to make a fist but my hand is still being made inside the winter glove my nearby father lost.  

I do not go after the boy who’s called me a little ***** for wearing my mother’s Sunday heels.  

I have one of those accidents I am never far from having.

I sit in the bath and wait for my brother who is tall enough to turn the showerhead away.

by my reaction, the water is either too cold or too hot.

you are here for your own protection.

I know
to be disabled
is to live
introduced.

I mother
the way I mother
my hands.

I do this
in the city
of retroactive
imaginings.

I salt
with memory
a deer
and am told

lose
the deer.

what figure my father has
bends for the beauty
not of word but of word
unsaid.

as for intended use,
there are two ways
to stone
a raindrop.

some would argue
from hell
for recognition
of non
survivor’s
guilt, and from earth

for mothered

figures…

if I am still in one piece
is up
to you

-

as for ****, avoid

her
and / or
her

-

if above
some hobo
a soft
nightmare
hangs

in the balance…

I left quietly
the pet store
of haunted animals.

a drifter preaching polyamory
took mental note
of my appearance.

a man was my father.

a mother’s motivational silence
speaks to a jesus
who at this point
has been alive
longer than he lived

-

I am of two beasts
when put in the mind
of my brain’s mirror

-

while doing the same thing
day in and day out
my father suffered
various indignities
commonly associated
with babies
and naked women

-

it is childish
how much time
she thinks I have
to touch everything
in the store

-

no offense
to your proactive
vacationing

but this

this, is dying

for Russell Edson*

whose name
escapes me
has paraphrased

death

death
is as big
as a house

time and god trade barbs clothed in genericide.  metaphor’s child is a condensed version of what the kids these days call *******.  younger, my pain was outdated but had its own phone.  I meet my parents.  I begin to act like my son.  I leave myself to marry what is mourned to how it grieves.  older, I go alone at night to where I am worried.  like existence, I overstate my daughter’s angelic disability.  my wife hears what is heard by one who flits from mirror to mirror.  I lose a black wallet.  I pray.  sky for the dollhouse, amen.

before asking
to be levitated
the masters
made themselves
invisible.

it was my mother
told me this
while pretending
to read
my future
copy
of how
to make
a medicinal
strength
boy

and it was my mother
who wondered
aloud
if interrupting
the voice of god
was possible.

it was my father who said
laziness
in all things
and for
so saying
was crowned
the shepherd
of time.

I yell at my stories
and my children

tremble
but brave me
like one
braves
a chair
one knows

will break.

they’d say his head was hard because it was too small for god to kiss.  when he’d come into town, he’d leave with children we’d not seen except on  posters.  his welcome mat was a napkin spotted with blood from a Q-tip.  save for the tiny matter of Jesus, our parents gave him little to do.

I had
all year
one
idea

-

the infant is forever in the infancy of immediate hearsay

-

I was online / had a nosebleed  

-

I was with your mother when she safely evacuated
many

from nothing’s
installation

-

you may

in event
of god

instill in my sons

the all
clear

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

I know his-
and my son, his own-
strength.

there is no breaking of bread, no beauty
the eye
can carry.

maybe
when you visit
we are away
on heaviness.

god
in that
children’s book
was given
to rising
early- so much prayer- just three

families
in the world
when one prayed
he hear
only
theirs.

healing is not a story the limping enter.  

who writes about death
writes
to return
the trespass.

I saw his mouth.
I thought he’d ripped.

I am three pages into the most honest letter I’ve ever composed to a brother when I realize I’ve been writing with my finger.  I tell my daughter it isn’t crying if you’re drinking.  she’s asleep.  it’s there she hears a piano.  sees a typewriter.

I will do my best to remember in order these the prayers satan has returned to the adult me...

(please help me to absorb the paranoia of my uncle who
after putting a clear piece of tape on his belly button

drinks
too much)

(please make her hair fall out)

(invisibility)

(tell god but take your time)

(a secret brother.  a brother I can beat on.)

(power over girls I want nothing to do with)

(a job my mom can turn down)

(muscles that make me high)

(pain in the useless privates of my guardian angel)

(the best birdhouse)

(a grandfather or a frog, or both, with teeth)

(a nativity scene built around a piece of spat out gum)

(comic book with ******* scarecrow)

(a baby sister
to radio
my mother’s
coma)

(messenger stones)

(a double
where my hands
can sleep)

(the last dropper
of dinosaur
woe)

(Eve whose ears have amnesia)

(you, from my past)

my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower.  

at home,
my mother
puts a clean shirt
on the bed
and jumps
from her death.  

the brother  
you are most
tired of

taunts
a cat
trapped
in a phone booth.  

my son is sick.  

the moon landing
was reenacted.

who knows how these things start.  some animalistic girl with the air of donation sits beneath the kind of playground slide could convince nowhere of a middle while two boys with cardboard swords keep each of us from the ladder unless we allow her to bite us on the arm.  pretty soon we’re in math class showing each other how many times we went down and pretty soon our younger siblings are smacked or hungry or puckered from being bathed.  some of us run out of room while some of us have two good legs.  some of us pull at our mothers as if all prayed out of playmates.  the girl goes weeks without god before giving in.  her swordsmen move on to pocket knives and loitering.  you see her in the food court of the mall sitting with her wheelchair bound father and brother and tell us there’s no magic that pushes them both.

I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent.  listening to his radio was a long way off.  you sat early.  you called me mother before I was ready.  if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream.  I looked at stars and you were a toddler.  our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned.  he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of ****** abuse.  you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.

we’re here to ****** the head of the boy who put a clown’s red nose on the girl playing jesus for stopped traffic.  if I spoke your language, I would tell you.

you haven’t touched your food.  

the soul has windows
it doesn’t need.  

failure to thrive
has come to mean
the growing
you do
at night.  

when jailed
I thought of nothing
but my cell
and I thought of my cell
as a crib
without a heaven.  

your mother’s dark hair
is hard to swallow.  

I am secretly happy
that you’ve taken
an egg

for each day of your life

to a doll
so doll
can sleep.  

as your mother, I often follow
a black
ball of yarn

into the lake
of how
you remember.

terrified
of baby
chatter

attack dogs
are asked
to understand

english.

a candle burns
for a father’s
restraint.

on tv
the gentle
******’s

sense
of taste.

a widow
with three hands
has ten
doomed
acquaintances.

god’s tacklebox is too light
to carry.

think of it as your ascent into feminine indifference.

think of your son as the incurable
made
thing

on the factory floor
of my son’s
use.

a male mime
bites into
a bar of soap…

***
is a bruise
in a blizzard

I read some poems badly and in bad light, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR3w2eHYE5Q



from 12.9.13


messianic allure

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord. political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness. my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station. do animals wait? several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist. I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear. as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose. any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

as my sister
inspects
her *******
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

ageism

mob mentality
of the boys
you were



faith

in these
the footprints
of a left-handed
boy



doubt

unicorn sickness

as so

rumored



gentility

duster
of my father’s
bookmark

identified

by her picture
day
invite



final resting place**

god already underway

I possess my son to ask into his heart a milkman based on comprehension.  

I am father whose mind drifts for dear life.  

I have a bowl
for the parts of me
don’t work.  bowl gets full
I get a dog
for a day.

when day is done
day becomes a meditation
on dog’s
whereabouts.

I obsess to maturity my daughter who is the bliss
the brainless
hammer
finds.

busy as a blood trail
it is still my mother
passing only
the time

in violence
not sudden.

the nothing
that’s out there
I keep
to myself.

my talk talks me down.
my kids laugh

in sweet tooth and funny bone.

I am not god’s father figure
but bring anyway
a nervous energy
to my own
birth scene.

it is pretty how one manages
to populate
a personal hell

and it is too pretty
to base an image
on the diary

soaked but drying

in a little house
with a kicked-in door.

some have a story and some think
the having
avoids
the generalizing
others do

to clear space
for space.

for a hobby I’d say
be stunned
by the baby
before
it inherits
separation

anxiety.

     once, beneath a storm, be a ghost.

as the elevator operator
who cut
my grandmother’s
umbilical cord

was dying
in a stairwell

my son
ate
without assistance

any word is the memory I have of it.

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

a dog is not barking.  father, no mystery.  mother is telling a woman that what the woman has is a child of god.  I’m in my room like the sort of thing exists in certain parts.  ****, doghouse catalogues, the animal that saw god finish.  my real friend has imaginary muscle control.  I want to touch him but am not sure how much my fingertips have.  my brother’s sanity is how a baseball bat makes it onto a crowded subway.  in the dream, my father irons my mother’s back with his palms and his palms are scarred.  in my friend there are magnets.

I read some poems here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbOMbDoccyg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY5_boQYfJk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiqLUwP68oA


and this is from 8.8.08 - published online at Juked.com-


day makers

when from the well
the call
came to me

I shot once
into the air
and left the horse
to hang
in the barn.

said goodbye
town that I know.

little black feathers
on little black ants
     better
that this also be
goodbye.  

I saw many things
wrong
as a child.  

the way the living
not the dead
would turn.
 
the night
pared from the wall

a thin thing
over the thin mouth
of my sister.

I thought it all
a circus
sorrowed
but a circus
still.

now I watch
a barn
being raised
and want nothing
for the swallow
on my arm.

a human word

is ****

and human
to go
when called.

I wanted the space
between the skin
and the fruit.