THE BLOOD
YOU DON’T SEE
IS FAKE

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-blood-you-dont-see-is-fake/paperback/product-21206799.html;jsessionid=6D1872B449D8B58E2A7F503E518273FD­

new and selected poems / Barton Smock / September 2013

from self published collections:

mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels

all available at

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

at thirty seven, I’m not far behind my wrists.  I am aware I put a certain strain on my sons.  I say to stones I’ve skipped my share of stones.  where fascinated, I am frightened.  the story of the foot that fell asleep then broke.  of the vanished schoolgirl on the wrong bus, beaten and pulled under seat after seat, taking with her

     that perfect weight.

conduit of bliss

with a phobia
of narcolepsy

-

walking

as if hacked
by a definitely
clever

****     newly enrolled

in a course
on private
speaking

-

my brother

-

who staged
his after life

you step off.  if you’re lucky, a dog.  if you’re not, a cat lady who worries all cats are alone.  you step off.  every mile or so stopping to bribe your subconscious.  food is an issue until it dissolves on your tongue.  *** an egg that weighs lightly.  here and there a job but not a single one odd.  

egg shells on the floor of heaven.  I am quiet but nobody listens.

there’s a monster
at the beginning
of this book
on aversion
therapy

this book I read
to myself
under god
that I might note
ahead of time

the diminishing returns
of a son’s
departure

it is harder for my son
to tell me something
through my son
than for me to believe
in the vicarious
angel
stutter.  

     his disease
has nowhere
to go.

after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed

     in full view
of the elderly.

provided they have gestural transportation

a second class
on image crafting
is held     off site.

a cyclist avoids a dog
but takes out
a table
of garage sale
figurines
as a drought
pamphleteer
reprimands
a child
for *******
on a hose.

     I haunt my faith.

according to my father
my father
isn’t alive     my father
eavesdrops.

except for talking
he’s been silent
until

in pictures of her
as a young woman
his mother
is dead.

I think I’m in hiding.


of two men, both go to hell.


I was given a glimpse of the dumb glance.


violence is a nothingness.


god has one hand.  one eye.  and one son he takes back.


     you take retrieval so personally I am sent again to start a war but I’m early.


some of you were children first.


to whom it may scar,
I drew a flower without a stem and it sealed your belly.


terrifying
idea based
ideas.

god went from wall to wall unaware he was god disguised as a graffiti artist.  renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.  the homeless are tattoos that remove themselves.  I guard the outlying cross and go through the motions again of nailing to it the same madman.  my only tool is comfort.  in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not.

the black market is a state of mind.  I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.  my worry walks me three miles where I meet a woman trying to sell a book in a graveyard.  I trade her the memory of our previous trade for the book she tells me is shy.  my other possession is a neglected baby.

father was visited one night by his terrible stomach long enough for it to mumble no one has to know I’m here.  his brothers were all red sheep.  his daughter from his first two marriages has since gone on to assess accident vehicles.  when I was a boy I’d tell her one breast didn’t like the other.  she’d cry.  twirl a baton.  her baby brother would call to her from the front lawn and I’d have to go under her bed for the window ladder because she was wearing a skirt.  her mother was said to be able to floss with cobwebs.  her mother entered my thoughts with video game controllers that had taken the brunt of nosebleeds.  everyone was soft or painting books in an after hours library.  afflicted with hush, my father ventures wholeheartedly into the phrase it’s all ***** in a sandbox while aware of the baton as anomaly.  poems provide the mediocre privacy of poems.

I orbit
the idea
of an animal
not thinking
of itself.

to err
is hunger.

the wife of the man about to be wheeled in has asked for my loneliness.

only when
fully realized
by grief’s
main sorrow
that some
were children.

I have two heads because only one can float away.

     I suspect the male landlords were petitioned
by the same
nightmare
fetus.

collateral healing, look it up.

I miss pregnancy
on my own.

circa having visions of my mother while she was in the room

she began seeing things that weren’t there.  at one point I had three mothers taking shifts scraping the fur from my tongue.  a soothsayer with a cold spider was brought in and told me not to worry about him running low.  I read a book mother had written based on a mistake my father had made in a dream.  I was unclear as to the owner of the dream.  the book didn’t whisk me away but promised to.  unless you’re being touched, touch is inconsistent.  you’re on the loveliest couch.  you hope as I do none are healed.  one of my mother’s bodies is freezing when I am a coat.

father makes a wound in hard ground.  may your body be with you.  father treats my most pale hand as if it’s a painter’s brush.  in what was dubbed the guest house craze we lost artist before artist.  father shuns the collective statement.  without my boy I come upon a red horse mirrored in calm by a white bull.  valley nonsense.  the boy didn’t suffer.

you will have to trust that my parents entered the world after a long absence and that they brought with them no appetite large enough to entertain a child whose sole skill was to avoid being eaten.  to continue beyond this point requires a lax diet of forgiveness.  I cannot guarantee there won’t be those who will call to you from underwater, fatso.  or from trees bowing to your weight.  parents are the dark times we know of.

I am not well liked.  no human will admit.  having a kid puts ***** on a scarecrow.  what happens after Christ stays during.  a dog’s mouth runs into my mouth and I am alerted to my preferential treatment.  phase one puts a headlight in a deer.  phase two will be there I promise I tremble.  a bad shadow of a bare tree by artist.  naked down it like a fire pole on a day I toured children.  the womb depends on where the mother points it.  she can’t just end up in heaven.

a discarded oven
in a driveway
its door
open.

for weeks, it has been
like that.

the bald woman won’t leave her house
in her car
because the oven
is too precious.

it saved her hair from keeping her up at night.
her hair was eaten by the cat
now lazing
on its rack.

if she wasn’t a looker
you can iron
my hands.

an imaginary pet
in the thoughts
of its previous
owner.

the left hand
the afterlife
of the right.

a muscle disorder
in a sponge
sized
infant.

the *****’s paper feet.

by his friends
my uncle was known
as uncle
****
because he curled the word
as if his mouth
came before it
and waited.

he took me to a meeting once
because he wanted me to have
real coffee.

he winked as if to say
I know a paper cup
when I hold
a paper
cup.

he said as if to say
*******
it’s not like you’re watching
someone else
live your life
it’s like you’re someone else
not helping.

uncle **** didn’t believe in oversleeping.  
he believed in making a blindfold
for the blind.

I was at my best
letting him think
he gave me
my first
cigarette.

everything you’ve heard was read by me.

our host fears nothing more than he fears the rodeo.  he is drunk and rubbing his plain face with a coarse sponge.  he thinks the presentation of blood on his cheekbones is proof of clown make-up.  I side with the group labeling him as harmless.  those in the disagreeable group lock themselves away in our host’s bathroom.  though the group is small, its two most vocal members have been struggling with their weight and a third is quietly pregnant.  I take it upon myself to worry about the amount of air the group has.  when the door is unsurprisingly jammed, I keep calm and remove my shoes just as what looks like rust water floods from beneath the door and carries them behind me to where the host is not dancing after all but stomping his bare feet alternately square on a hamster.  my best friend of three days wants to save the hamster but cannot believe the short length of its tail.  I try to explain that I am not helpless.  that I am steeped in tradition and was formerly employed as the guy who chews down the fingernails of professional bull riders.

     the thing about ****** is that you haven’t done it until you’ve done it with me.  
**** is a harsh word for relocation.

when the note was partially read
on-air
we thought
in unison

hell

I could’ve written
that.

by now I’ve done everything I’m innocent of.

that’s either an angel
or it’s your mom
doing a hand stand
in nothing
but white
knee highs.

cloaked in drug use we were not led to believe, the twins
were spared.

though a first born
god doubts
his recollection.

there are two kinds of men.
one is your father
who says

there are two kinds of men in the world.
the man who marks the door
and the back-up
he has to live with.

of the three tenses
only the future
can regenerate.

but for the tongue
the mouth would be
forgotten.

I guess we’d still have to look at it.
the ugly open thing.

I strained my eyes reading in the dark.
pretending to read the bible.

I don’t love words.

currently I’ve convinced myself
that in my tall cup of coffee
a spider
can sense itself
separating.

give me an easy one.

earth on hell
your local
gas station.

I pushed a baby
in a grocery cart
from one spot
to another
and back.

I only just remembered
no one noticed.

**** these white staffs that draw smoke from the body
**** the lost tiny ******-off messiahs they belong to

**** nine pillows
bedding nine sweaty heads
cramped
with housing
worries

     under one is one ******* tooth

I walk with a cane I do not need.  the road I’m on is unnaturally level.  I have what one might call my feet on the ground as I pass a still life with strollers unattended.  ahead of me, two women are fumbling with the beginning stages of their assault on a crippled boy with a phantom brain.  the boy seems to be consoling his ears with the hidden roar of a tank.  old man that I’m not, I hear the babies being put behind me.

my sister is a room god leaves alone.  she hangs a sign on the door I cannot read.  by the time I can, I am watching my younger brother roll his ankle wearing high heels.  at night I hear him swallow repeatedly.  another tooth gone.  a boy with a stick is a boy with a wand.  kids die in their sleep because they are boring.  because they dream of things that can really happen.

sitting on a decorative toilet in her child’s front yard, the mother scrubs her left wrist with a dry toothbrush.  her right wrist squeals to be cut.  there’s a wet spot on the grocery bag she wears on her head and the spot spreads.  her flower print dress is optimistic.  with a crow ever so lightly on his mind, my father writes the address of the electric company on a notecard and slips it into a pocket bible.  he tells me to forget what I’ve seen and I wonder if I get to pick.  my heart feels more like a broken light bulb the more I breathe and goes to my head the less.  beneath the malformed crow my father culls, he gives me the *** talk.  he includes that most crows are manna from hell or holes in the kingdom.

beauty is the beginning of beauty.  a man and a woman wait together for a stripper.  you know the man like an intimate thought.  like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door.  the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides.  the man is aware he’s the devil and this makes him god.  the woman is unaware she’s the devil and this makes it easy.  the stripper is watching a horror film and it makes her want to have a child.  she decorates her home then tries to remember moving a muscle.  the blood you don’t see is fake.

I can see with my heart a mouse tortured by the seedy youth of my disengaged elders.  my hands curl into the great relief of knowing they’ve lived in the stomach.  any walking exiles the feet from their genius.  I see for myself the man with a flower who enters the professional building to announce he’s witnessed the hospital nursery by word of mouth.  those first twins two black eyes god gave an angel.

my brother thinks he owns a small boat.  after an arduous online process, he is able to secure a place in the city.  in the statement I know myself the saddest part is I know myself in a past life.  I provide for my children.  I provide for my children the chance to provide.  let me finish.  madness is not something you tell yourself.  to my father I am the thought that got away and came back.  do not cheer.  let me finish.  

     the poor get bored.

aware of my body
as if my body
is on a raft.

a creaky deceit
I call
rafting in the ****.

     last night in a very safe garage
I promised a friend
I’d mention
the moon
in the period following
my last
idea.

my body eats me.
god dangles the body of my son
in front of my son’s
next
memory.

some are born
born-again.

     current trends include cloning.
the first person to recall dying
will be held aloft.

I make my daughter see an old tree as a flame reaching into the patience of a hill.
I look at my father and commit my face to memory.
I fall on one deaf ear.
I am thirty seven when I want to buy a gun.
I inject my sons with the truth of my mostly childhood placebo.
I disrespect the dead is *******.
I name names that are similar.
I sincerely form.
I follow one person out of every one person touched by the Holocaust.
aren’t you the saddest thing I’ve ever laughed.

dying of young age, your brother nurses at the breast of the stage hand’s version of a mother.  the stage hand is off arguing with a lamp on the impossibility of attracting moths.  beside a tall cake, a groom with lockjaw and a stiff neck has to take life’s high point on faith.  if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb.  and then it was.

the night vet drawn into a field by the pink glow of a housebroken piglet.  when the piglet blows, the vet may want to rethink his face.  forgiveness works alone.  I have never seen an attractive god.

it is not always with me, this burden.  its balefire that is my brother’s body.  I am without him and I am without his power.  I introduce him as my twin, identical, whose power is to disappear when I’m around.  it is like failing to impress you with a metaphor for metaphor.  I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.  imagine being on the same side as metaphor.  a man in pain calls you from a payphone and speaks instead on the joys of a predicted parallelism.  in pain like no other only because pain is treated with a redundancy.  in John like no other.  pain is unlike pain.  a baby is a man’s son and this baby of this man lived three days in a body blessed more and more with lesions like black treetops over which the man could only hover.  I am as angry as any shell company employee.  I have a belief in being Jesus and teaching myself to walk on water

on my hands.  you believe in my brother.  I write him letters when my power is to read.

knowledge
is perfect.

the garden is just a room
without a door     inside of which

the world’s first doorknob

has to be seen     to be fixed.

     try knowing now what you knew then.

ghost,

a sign of sickness.  a brush painting of invisibility’s decay.  a nearly beautiful woman mouthing the words of an abusively future

verbose
partner.

watching a horror film
barefoot
     when the high
priest
of my eight

thoughts    

carries my mind
to a corner
church

the crying in me continues.

I was born called
by your first
hearings.

     the moon is a software I don’t understand.

I created god
before you
created god.

the help, the competition, the help,

the competition.

of a street person
playing a prosthetic leg
like a guitar

has been lost
by hell

to my daughter who thinks me moral

I keep only
the animal
that has bitten
at the legs
not jawed
by the trap

to my sons who wish me home**

    the bread crumbs
were eaten
not by birds
but by a starving
boy
with a lost voice
who’d wandered
from his home
in a delirium
brought on
by a toothache

memory
has all the time in the world.

     just when it’s getting good
the book of Genesis
begins.

I stay for my father’s voice.

three babies are carried from church
for crying, or one baby
for crying
thrice.

     slanted paths
of ash
pass in front
of a screen door
like tiny crows
absolved
of warning.

in house, an old man
places himself as a witness
to the controlled burning
of a wooden
porch swing     and misremembers
his best friend
as his best friend god.

nothing could have prepared her for life in the womb.

not an ear in the shape of god’s mouth

nor a blind hand
in a woolen glove.

you write like a tricycle that hasn’t been touched in thirteen years.*  as an infant, you were no more than a dot denoting an absurdist birth.  adolescence was in the blood left to your mother.  self harm is the gateway wound to pilgrimage.  you can’t say god is everywhere in the presence of god.  factual events have ruined the world.  you are here because hating you is forbidden.

since last
we placed
his madness     on speakerphone

he has observed
over half the population
observing
the lesser
half…

he includes that he swims alone

that his lover works for someone
in the gag order department

that the act of naming     a son
is scarce

he wants to know what he collects.  he prays.  he is blindfolded by the parent he rarely sees.  he is taken on foot to an empty showroom only he can imagine.  he is hugged.  not asked, he goes into detail about his outfit.  parent flips through a notebook.  parent leaves to find a pencil.  outside in a miniature snowstorm another parent throws an egg through the tail end of melancholy.

ice on a wrist
after scrubbing
whole sets
of knives

-

in the bed
of a truck
on a lawn
a throne

-

you were not
born today     so stop
acting out

-

for a gun, unscrew the handle of a water hose.

for a rope, find a rope.

-

brothers     sitting

back to back
in an outside
bath

-

no, no whisper
to speak of    

     they are far off

     they curse

-

any foot
a dead bird

blue

-

     think a finger    
reviving
a finger

puppet

-

think hard    
on nothing
on a farm
machine