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.

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