mother of the hour-
I have
no clue
which.

-

dodgeball, no one sad.

-

praying mantis
eating blood
from a bowl
of dreams.

-

toy phone
imprisoned

why, toy phone, has wheels
ask

your father.  

-

here somewhere
my nose.

you were born on the losing side of an argument so great it nearly cut your mother in half.  to his knowledge, he shook you once, became your father and a hider of the rattled hand.  when I wanted to drink, I watched you not sleep, and carried you to sounds I could not make.  we each had one eye that believed in god.  what eye you had made artifact of light itself.  light’s longing.

the longer
I grieve

the more

the dark, the ocean.

I have two reasons to believe god
has not stopped creating.

-

our father
had this phrase

all in good time
psychic

and this other

you’ve got
the dropsies

-

I bring these borrowed hands
to shelve
your books.

you seem touched.

-

my anger has gone the way of the milkman.

his doomed child
with her piece of chalk.

...had to put aside
for the moment
that the sick
angel
was in fact
an angel

it needed immediate attention

it said god would know
he’d helped it

not someone
you want
happy

good for
not much-

dear father I am your son the lesser of two unreliable narrators-

(do continue)

good for
a shadow’s
shade

and for your mother
who wanted this

haunted
by you

bird

I still
kind of
have…

peace
was found
in the backseat
of a cop car
where no one
was held
outside
a closed
thrift store.

when faced
with being
left behind

passed over
wins out.

I’d go fishing
if I knew
where I’d gone.

would drive, dog walk, divine

would these
our mothers

were it not
for sudden
bouts
of lucidness.

again
an illegal
pair
of dogs
has diagnosed
dad
with doll’s
ankle.

the movers

take the table
leave the cloth.  please

love our baby
like the man
they didn’t
send.

my sadness ran off
with some guy-

well ****
it wouldn’t be
would it

depression

if one could find it
in a baby.

it doesn’t kick
but you can
if you love me
make its brain
purr.

them dead, them mothers
sang
by song.

I’d answer
the phone
when it doesn’t
ring
but on
film…

I’d save the drive-in

from children
indians
and sound

sometimes you see the dog
when dog
was wild

and father
with that straw

trying to take
all
the air

and on the dog’s back
a village
or two
burning…

seeing is yeah

useless

how I still bring water
to the stomping grounds
of jesus
on a walk, say,

for son

I pour soup into my father’s mouth so he can find his teeth.  when he passes out I tell the carolers he’s gone to the city for a blindfold.  my girlfriend likes it when I send people away.  I was born there.

maybe he begs into megaphone
too quietly
for sign
from man.

-  

I am in the room that sold everything.

-

you who said
it’s not sad.  it’s money.

as you are sworn
to silence
by the man
your father
skips lunch
to feed

it is okay
to drift
between

(stay with me)

brother
suicide
and brother
note

the twins
of an only

sorrow

on city bus she pretends she is riding her back pain.  there are phrases without mouths people try for.  bouncing baby boy.  preggo.  his body is here but his mind is gone.  she is privately obnoxious in the world’s tiniest museum of logic where she is first a scrapbooking orphan created by the emergency broadcast system and second a mascot assigned to one fleeing ballerina.  her thinking companion licks ice from Ohio license plates.  shares her soft spot for headgear.

my son’s body
is as believable
as my mind
before god-

the autopsy
he couldn’t
perform

footage
of evil
things

whose people
are sometimes

asleep

-

father, footrace, fistfight

-

uphill
you’re such

a yo-yo

-

the bike
no bones
is beauty

he wasn’t put here
to beat you
in front
of any
fool
reminds him
of that woman
who wished herself
into a fly.

he has been more than open with you
about it
about
his reincarnation

how he happened
to be the first
to know it.

you keep it all in, bring your mother
noises

from field
so she can determine

which ear
works…

word association
is a thing
of the future.

be the property of your blood.

-accident-

because
when mine
stopped
your sadness
was still
moving

-


I will be posting on a youtube channel weekly, give or take, of myself reading poems of mine and perhaps others I admire. This is the first video. It is small and unkempt and precursor to more of the same. I don’t give shaving tips. I don’t modify. Link as such is below.

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

the two skeletons it takes to lift a coat hanger.  the ***** it takes for them to introduce it as an ultrasound.  the excitement you don’t share.  the bone fragment that opens your brother’s eye.  the haunted tourist who never arrives.  who will adopt nothing because nothing is small when compared to the crucified whose toe almost touches the paper shredder we couldn’t move.  mountain storm.  moaning tent of rehab.  eating your hands when a phone call is a phone call away.

where do we go when we live

do aliens
have shadows-

inquiries
I field
from the child.

it rained in Eden.
this leaf is most like
a burned
hand.

put my good hand over the sun

be bright with absence

track the path
of a bullet
by swallowing
the small bug
meant to flee

with eaten
shade

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage.  we have been writing in unison instead of eating.  our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  we are dying in two of our mother’s arms.  our mother is elsewhere repeating after the man who does our stunts.

as a boy, I envied the vague.  a man at my father’s table told this tale of a rabbit struggling beneath the belly of a dead dog.  not wanting to see the rabbit, I covered my eyes.  that night, my sister put me to bed and let her boyfriend sing me to sleep on the phone.  I never ran away from home because my dream of doing so seemed more like a memory.  when mother tells us she is looking at a picture of our father

we know it is any picture has him in it.

let me not pray for the man who, when young, had ambition and traveled the short distance to heaven in hopes of capturing on film for the last time in its environment

god’s bed.

who returned home obsessed with becoming consumed by the inexact art of self-portraiture and was soon so beautifully trapped by aging that he grew his hair to his waist

where it was set on fire as he stood to bow before the accumulation of sight and sight’s potential.

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick

let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

having heard, for example, be quiet your mother’s coma is trying to sleep.  having folded like undiscovered pregnancies into verbatim.  having had *** that is not the writhing one does, one by one, in dream.  this crowing about voice.  echo’s elusive scar.  voice a sort of god taming.  extreme sport of the conceptually stunned.  comma.  god the sentence fails to recover.

I am asked on voicemail if I want to get weird. The message is a week old. I had already a weird week. I don’t know if the invitation still stands. I don’t know if calling this person back would be weird. I call and get voicemail. I ask if the weirdness is still available to be gotten. It is important to me that the identity of the requestor is known only to me. This is why: the requestor is presently dead. That, you can know. Also, that said person died the day of the first message about the weirdness. I recognize this as my life, or more correctly, as a thing my life includes.

musical chairs

telephone

these must’ve been
the first games
of the poor

he’s with his ten year old son
at the mall

they buy a leash
for a dog
they can only

describe

I’ve petitioned my brother’s death to become a delayed reaction to his memory of faking it, consoled my sister who on a good day counts to three, and started The Language School of Jesus Christ.

take or take
6pm

having just
gotten
glasses

I left
father’s
body mirror
to mother
and comb

and set off
for the aptly
named
Hill

armed with
a science book
and shielded
by my own
oblivion

and there
every bit
white
as weary
I sat
as I thought
would sit
the black man
I so wanted
to be
with British
accent

and there
a sanely placed
forklift
seemed okay

abandoned
oh
that I saw

a too strong woman
hop down

her wrongness
a nothing
though from
I ran

town crier

poems March 2014
99 pages
pocketbook style publication
8.50

preview of book is book entire on lulu site. the spine of said book has title. front cover, back cover, are purposely blank.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/town-crier/paperback/product-21548368.html

---

Talent is a mime on a mountaintop said he who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon.  He had said previously other things but this was the first to which my mother caught me listening.  She took my ear and me with it outside and shoved two cigarettes she’d been smoking in my mouth and told me to chew.  When I did not she worked my jaw herself until the tip of my tongue bled enough to give her pause.  Neither one of us cried and the cigarettes were salvageable.  The morning speaker then joined us obviously hoping for a drag.  The moment my mother hated him passed and she told him what hope was.  

He who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon would not often be seen by my mother.  He and I were late in our waking and she’d be out gathering types of dead bird from the bases of cornstalks.  I’d sit in my highchair and watch him shirtless as he prepared the tools of my art.  The hairs on his back would grow before my eyes and need bitten at the follicle.  He would turn and put his finger in the garbage disposal and pretend it was on.  On was something he never turned it because he said a mantis lived there and what would bite his follicles.  I wouldn’t be hungry then which was good for my show.  He would laugh at the misery of my scooping arms and be full of it and tired and he would ask me to rub his belly while he went to the couch on his back.  His belly the single most reason to keep him said mother.  I’d put my ear to it to feel myself kick and never did stir him from sleep.  Pretty early in this routine some of his belly hair started to grow in my ear and my dreams from then always had a banquet in their midsection.

Careful with my dreams.  Mother said they are kittens and one can bite too hard.  It is like her being stubborn and only calling me boy when most called me boy and girl in equal measure.  Sometimes when boy got the lion’s share I’d long to nurse and have to slap the ******* sound out of my teeth.  For saner things I’d walk the dog with a dog in it.  I had names for both and both were names I would’ve called my brother had I been born.  I once found a sipped at wine glass on the roof of the pharmacy mother later burned with lit stalks.  When the turkey buzzards skittered themselves nightly across the horizontal track of my looking for god I’d imagine my brother skinny enough to fit in the parched tube of his swallow.

Now that I am returning to Shudderkin, the welt left by my larger than life father whipping his belt across the tailbone of Ohio, it is clear to me that what we called a dog was correct only on certain days.  The mongrel keeping pace with my bike, the second name I have for my brother, is not the physical dog a city knows and not country loyal as country wants to, and so makes others, believe.  It is instead more like the talking when one is sped up and words get put together and then are stuck there.  Dog of Shudderkin.  Its tongue does not droop or even wag outside the mouth.  A pinkness has always gone on without me.

pressing
a cigarette
into the double
absence
of what
has become
the snowman’s
mouth
the woman  
begs
for a light…

it is a thing done softly
in a larger movement
of searching
belly-up
the nowhere

that sober
looks funny
alone

in the newest version
of my brother’s
suicide

he says
he’ll be back
with a note

so
perfect

underling animals
in times
of quake-

slight
swellings

in brain
of maybe
one mole

bottled
now
for sea-

if on a baby
your hands
would be

so cute

but as
an adult

you glove them-

world as wheelchair
the wheelchair
from which

god rose-

as sporadic
surges

switch on
the sink’s
disposal

pull thorns
from the rabbits
you dream

I bring
to city
a pen light
that this time
works.

earlier
in mock
fit
I shook
my head
for the blood
in my ear
and listened
to an ant.

her last words
were oil spill
or so I thought.

she went on to say
very daughter-like
poor bird, so small.

I want god overwhelmed.

my boy’s mouth
couldn’t be
anywhere.

the crying

it so
happens

is also
the frayed

mom
who stole

a vacuum
that broke

inside…

-

the crying

the ****
in your ******
stories

I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my ******* kid.

her father quells *******.

ants are quiet.

-

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

-

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall.  sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

a rolling
baseball
is stopped
by a shoeless
father.

clap
if you hate
your handwriting.

the players
are on their knees.

it’s not your nose
it’s not mine
that is broken.

eat ice cream
like an orphan.

you will know
the hoof
of satan’s
chosen
deer
by the way
it glows
when any
female
announces
from the seat
of a stilled
tractor
that she
is pregnant-

you will be the age
of your mother’s
baby bump

older than your father’s
knife

and lit
by the grape
in god’s
mouth

the tree was gone but its shade remained.  he told her the war had a humble middle.  they bathed together in a mattress on top of the shade.  they agreed to avoid the uselessness of their youth by forgiving animals.  she had been a writer.  he would be a bed of one nail.

life outside is either an ice cream truck or a skeletal dog.  both give the boy claim to name them his early snow.  life inside is a tape measure.  there are three spaces he can free in a hurry for not just any xerox machine heaven doesn’t need.  when his mother gets taller she will open a cupboard and in it she will find the spotless knowledge he’s yet to get sick on.  she will find one plate missing.  presently, the moon is no lie and the white men move under god and god is the view from here.  in a secret the boy calls closet he has stashed a bag of basketballs that become fish when his sister gets a mouth on her.

it took her nine months
to crave
being lifted
by baby-

his strength
worried us

and our rage
would not
blind-

I was the first
to remove my belt
the first
to become
dizzy
the only

not laughing
like a *******
girl

open a clock
with your eye

it is not hard
it is not like

choosing
which eye

to travel with
which eye

to leave
for spider

but maybe
you are afraid

I, too
sleep

forget
that nothing
while there

was worn

she is a location
policed
by a trauma
that never
returns.

that’s a mouthful
on a first
date
but she is far
from photographing

roadkill.

still, she hears
it said
in sister
and in health…

she starts with a boy
who becomes a clown
getting
his pilot’s
license
on borrowed
time

and she loves
god is your
airstrip.

she knows it
by number
the single
highway
truck
that doesn’t
come.

her father is just
as she imagines-

a man
not making
siren
sounds
pulled over
by the man
who is.

an owl
with an owlish
disease
***** with
a bat

as an altogether
different
angel

swallows
her mother
like a sword.

hell has lost her mind

but tries again
its troubled
flashlight.

a father at a table
looking at
two blocks.

his hash
mark
mind
suspended above

his image
as it flickers
between

adult supervision
and acts
of resuscitation.

his child
breathing
for blanket.

doctor’s orders
my special hat
is a dark
cloud.

spacing issues
have disappeared.

thin air is a black sheep born without a black kitten’s heart.

tell him
belief
is twice
the distance
abandonment
leaves.

that for baby longhand

a father easily
beautifies
the unburied deep.

i.

a hand towel
over the lid
of any
stubborn
jar-

a mother to a father
or less frequently
a father to a mother
I don’t know why this is
but either way
a gentle admittance

to couple

as if passing beneath
the singing voice
of statue…

ii.

that stage
where a baby
is all
head

she had early on been beaten into one piece.

it was true
the broom
had gotten
taller.

mom said nothing.  mom swept.

new
to his arms
his anxiety

-  

wrongheaded
toddler
goes

for swim

-

outside the prison
some tattoos
and some
hunger

and some dog’s
unique
bark

-

his voodoo doll, its tracking

number

-

forgiveness?

that thing from your past

the girl

again and again
until she is born

-

this, too, we miss

ahead

-

here is how I know
I am harmed:

somehow
there is no door

not even
a room

yet I am
trapped

-

I understand why guys say muscular, fierce.

they think in wolf pups and they think
in dog

whistles.

the roof over his father’s head.

the rain.

the guardian angel
and the imaginary
friend
loving
over the loss
of toy.

his brothers on the roof
playing possum
with a possum.

her.

her and her mother
separated
by a grocery
aisle.

by litany.

his father sleep *******
on a secretly
fed
dog.

crop circles.  eyeglasses.  his monsters
led away
by a group of mimes

the genital
mimes.