a dusty toad gives my father fits.
my sisters run through cobwebs.

I pluck ticks from our dog and put them to my ear.
I think of my blood in dog years.

     it is good to be old.

to step once and smallish away
from bare backs and on them the spiders.

pictures
before and after
of nothing.

morality ****.

brushstroke, breast, blackmail.

     a dressing down
of ******
beings.

when set, the alarm
disappears.  

dear kid, not twice
did I lose
myself
during.

dear ******, it was hardest
to keep
with me
the word

degenerative.    

she once sent a car
for her son’s
carseat.  the car

was so
mad.

an orphan in and out of homes connected only by sleep.

a quiet nine months.  

your brother in the cab of a snowplow.  

a clear plastic fork carried up
     your mother’s bare calf.

sister cursing the power company.  sister spinning
     with her palm
          the ceiling fan.  her body lifted

          into the arms of the father

you’ve always had.

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span.  it was there he pummeled his pregnancy.  I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all.  I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of.  up until then, I was sad her whole life.

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

I say things above my son when he is underwater.  I say things in a rage.  I pretend I am nearby the brother I am closest to.  he would forgive me.  my body has always been outdated.  my son’s body is plinked.  not unlike a piano beside which siblings hug.  there is a sorrow I’ve forgotten.  not unlike the recording equipment one leaves in a dream.  it is a stretch, the tornado siren momentarily belonging to a church bell.  more of one that my son is a cracked bullhorn.  ghost town debris.

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.
for my distance from him, I am disallowed
any inquiry that would flower.
he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god
at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.
I am holding my son nostalgically. was my tooth would ache
and his tooth would ache
and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

father sees the doll in a striptease window.

mother touches the doll
with kid gloves
that fit.

brother hears the doll
brushing the teeth
of its newer
version.

the doll’s feet stick out
from under a hotel bed
marooned
in the ceiling’s
mirror.

thinking the doll has vomited
sister gags.

heartbeat is god has a drum.  footprint is they held her down to comb the beach.  handful is the blowing of bubbles into falling ash.  bloodwork is the soft biting the soft on the subway.  body type is baby.  see:  commonly evacuated cities.  eye is eyewear for the beheld.  mouth is you’re good with your mouth.  soul is god doesn’t.

nose to nose, my hands under his armpits and his hands soft and missing.
his legs holding onto his feet and the river or the rug pulling away.
I haven’t looked at anyone like this.

if somewhere a knife slips in and out of consciousness, I don’t care.
it will not be news.

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

made not
into a fisher
of men
my father
pushed off
in the little boat
of his wound-

so filled
the weeping bowl
of my mouth.

i.

god’s little narc
  
ii.

god’s little narc
tossing a rattle

iii.

god’s little narc
tossing a rattle
at a fish tank

the father is a one-man show
of seasonal darkness.

the mother is clockwork.

the child is the child born
wearing
a tight
shirt.

the loaf of bread is the hot heart of nightfall.

the cut is a city
attracted
to a blood drive.  the blood drive

is god’s treehouse.

strip baseball

I was never allowed
to see your arms

where so many birds
had been

jeopardy**

I am pushing a bike uphill, my brother
is pushing
a wheeled
horse-

we are late for the birth of my sister’s doll.
for the tea that protects us.

a *****
cradled
like a baby’s
broken
arm
and expertly
wrapped
in crime scene
tape…

hell why not
give privacy
to a salt
lick

a runway model
in a cornfield

/ the stone a short film on snowfall

the kid shakes salt from his palm onto a dead mouse.  his girlfriend’s cat slicks itself as if its spot as a pillow in hell has been filled.  I can’t see the look on your face but my imitation comforts me.  I once lived nearby but had a dog and moved to be closer to it.  

    yesterday, the kid’s father sold me a mirror.  said I would have second thoughts.

the windows
of my pastor’s
home

I thought them
spotless

his wife brought me lemonade
and washrags

then sat with him
inside

have self-published a new full-length collection, 115 pages, title of Misreckon, in three parts: god had an earache / wrong about my brother / misreckon. book preview on site is the book entire.

it is, here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html

sample poems

site

I lasso the calf just before it makes the ocean.

overhead, a helicopter
from my past
spins.

my son says
to himself
this isn’t
your father’s
sandcastle.

luck is the stone
that marks
the dream.  dream

the stone
that marks
the dead.


how the still recall the poor

when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent. for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut. I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood. instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company. mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach. apocalypse came and came. the act was the act’s debut.


men hermetic

the crow
the fine print
of nowhere.

the bomb shelter
the rumored locale
of a mother’s
laundry room.

the bare cross
the teething
toy
a baby
bypasses
for the neck
of the woman
waiting
for her junk
to fall.

the mare
the anxious
bike.

while his children sleep, the father spins three bowls onto the kitchen table and waits for each to still.  he circles the table as a shell shocked circus dog.  from a box he is scooping handfuls of dry cereal into the bowls when he is informed by a memory how it’s happened that the milk is gone.  gone since the morning before last because a fourth bowl was needed.  his three children can now be heard upstairs shoving each other under the run of the shower.  minutes later three boys wrapped in towels watch as their father gags himself into convulsions on the love seat.  of the three, it’s my towel mother removes to swipe the sick from his mouth.  I get my father a glass of water.  something I’ve done before.  

looking back, I can see the empty bowls.  ahead, the outsourced eating.

I ask the mother if she feels abandoned.  she tells me her favorite teacher had a bible in the back of his head.  I ask for the teacher’s name.  she says it’s not something she returns to.  she calls me child, the little orphan gay, to the brim with unicorns and suffering.  in fact she quotes my pain in this very notebook.  I was left only by what happens.  that bible stopped a bullet.

a man
whose face
seems
newly
paroled

switching
a pebble
one hand
to another

beside
a telephone pole
beneath

a pair
of sneakers
strung
on a wire-

     parked cars
they have him

surrounded

before it is a child
it is a ******* noise
in the muffled witchery
of a blanketed woman
who fakes sleep
beneath a pew
in a plain church.

being awake
is to be
what nothing
comes after.

I fake my mother.

my first non self-published work is available at **** Press...I can't post a link here, so you'll have to search it.  (a chapbook titled Infant Cinema)  

am asking that you help it do some work for the press.  it's six dollars.  

some reviews:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.

~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.

~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

i.

an aerial view

of parked
white

vans

parked
impossibly

close

ii.

a hinterland
boy

packs snow
into his mother’s mouth
to keep it
open

iii.

only a snake
uses
the jawbone
of a snake

~ son in bathwater ~

nose to nose, my hands under his armpits and his hands soft and missing. his legs holding onto his feet and the river or the rug pulling away. I haven’t looked at anyone like this. if somewhere a knife slips in and out of consciousness, I don’t care. it will not be news.

~ a diaspora ~

don’t worry, because here is worry:

a stone in a grounded bird’s nest.

it is easy to say, I guess. to come up with
the fed multitudes.

hell is to be in two places at once that are both hell.
see above.

see below:

shade of stone, kind of bird. knowing, here is knowing:

the poor write good.

~ harlequin ~

as a father I audition alone for the part the mother does not get.
to my audition, I carry two eggs. I break them on my chest.

cancer, family, but mostly cancer.
in the cardboard forest, my daughter picks up a wand.

~ a fear of ~

baby on baby
violence
continues to be
the number one
reason

daycares
across the country
do not report
the imaginary
friends

of illegals

~ my father’s singing voice ~

an abandoned dog
on a weekday
shops its grief
from homeless man
to homeless
woman

under threat
of lightning

where else

~ escapism ~

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette. it lost itself to her. it left me out. I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me. I said lord I thought my life would be sadder. I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized. I hung it on my neck. my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands. food, mostly. it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose. my wife began going out at night. said she did so to hate America. when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed. she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her. yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect. he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself. after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

~ angel scene ~

when on the path
some small
unnamed
creature
senses
the oblivious
coming
of a man

and wishes
in its own
animal way
to be called
into ash
or bush

~ immolation ~

when it burns
in the oven
we call it
crow bread

in our mouth
we call it
wasp
then slap

first our own
then the cheek
closest-

when it does not burn
at all
we check to see
if we are wearing
black socks, if we are standing

on carpet

~ kenning ~

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.

toasting the cameo appearance of my twin sister, I admire the leg of two rather tipsy women.  a soldier stands on a bar stool in such a way his non-soldier friends become sad.  they shake the stool but not for long.  the soldier chides them for giving up.  the leg hops its way outside.  ahead of schedule.

the foster god has done a bang-up job of resembling your father.  I admit.  my eyes are faithless.  a group of boys beat my son for beating my daughter.  when I carry my kids, my kids relax.  I can feel it in my *******.  the group of boys are uneducated and call a ******* the peter’s backpack.  I would laugh but the group’s leader has a razor and looks none too happy god has promoted him to shave me.  when done, my ***** and its carriage look as if left by an angel to grow alone after not being placed on an infant.  there is nothing to be said but one of the boys mutters away.  the leader shares that this boy is set to star in the film version of your father’s suicide and has agreed to **** himself for real.  once gone, I can’t tell if the boys were never here or if they are simply not here now.

we are not here
to enshroud
the myth
of the woman
who swims
naked-

we are here
might our sons
mourn
the stickman’s
belief
     that his wife
went to pieces

in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.  because god is patient, the man has no *****.  the ***** itself is kept in a pine box three times its size while jesus is away.    

when my wife found out she was having a girl she told people she lived alone.

I swear
my guts
darken
dad

as I am in
your spot
looking
at the sea-

mother
insisted
again
on heels

     but has changed
     in other ways-

you must’ve walked
to get to those places
you stood
but it’s the standing
I recall

and the quiet-

the length
of my life
is abnormal

     but goes
     undiscovered

from my mother’s side I had gone to see the happy blood.  I left her there, and she read without me her own lips.  I couldn’t tell if she’d been defeated by the box, its contents, or both.  I passed a bucket on wheels and a mop dragging a man for water.  I felt old; my dress, older.  I stretched the soft loan of my neck into the aisle the boy had made most of on his knees before the slack of his youth spent itself bone and pitched him the lesser length.  his sister or his young mother lifted him by his shorts and tucked his smaller parts with her fingertips as into the private mouths of even smaller fish.  a package of sliced bread fell from a lower shelf and relieved the moment its alien drama.  the boy convulsed as if he’d been allowing now recalled tape measures from the coil of his belly.  my mother yanked me away from the rent of that scene so quickly a star from my nose loosed itself into the ******’s acre, the white of my eye.

you are to receive a photo taken two to six years before your death.
it will arrive by mail in a white envelope.
if you receive a photo in any other colored envelope, it is a fraud.
in the photo, you will be asleep.
if the photo does not reach you within 30 days from the date of this letter
     don’t let it keep you awake.
     in the event your age does not permit an appropriate reception of mail
you will be referred to one of our many sadder departments.

every day is a scar’s birthday*.  this is how I am able to start most of your sentences.  I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out.  on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified.  the termites fled your blood.  a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick.  the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness.  your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright.  for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries.  a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.

[the omens]

to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb

whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce

crow

whispers

in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming

[you]

are now’s
nostalgia


[bridge]

god has gathered the disabled to make his case against reincarnation

-

unable to sleep, I become an alcoholic

-

I prefer
like my father
my insects

noncommittal

-

insomnia is the insect my scar becomes

-

noggin, mouth-hole, skinflick

-

a ghost
when I study
angels


[wolf, wolf, god]

her plane is in the air.  she is showing late signs of believing she’s left an octopus in the oven.  the man she is with knows nothing about paper.  on the ground, in awe of the bee stings on a sister’s bare back, a brother carries orphanhood to term.  everything I touch belongs to the same alarm clock.    


[bygone]

I started smoking in my early thirties because I missed my brothers.  because a train is the only thing I can act like I’ve seen before.  because a claw opened and a child dropped.  because unhurt the child was a girl and injured it was a boy made of being touched.  because giant birds were ****** to give other people rain.  because all hail, as all do, location.  because riot then riot envy.  because bright spot became a cloth in a police car.  because I can’t sleep and couldn’t without thinking of sleep as a copy of a copy.  because lost the baby wasn’t getting any younger.  because nightlight and tadpole, mom and dad.


[nigh]

don’t talk to babies. write. write to be the first one there. the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth. walk once a week into the wrong bathroom. worry. bump around the house at night, noisemaker. a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard. pull. pull from your habit forming past. be the bomb god’s yet to wear. surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty. open your mouth then look at your son. call it photography. if spotted, be a monster.

[indwell]*

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.    

~          

from *Drone & Chickenhouse
84 pages, poems, Barton Smock, Oct 2015, 6.00

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html

a bare clothesline
the lull
between
opposing
one-eared
beggars  

-

when in
a backyard
pool
we’re dry
inside
trees  

-

     **** & abridged
I cross
from paint
can
to cement
block
on a stolen
plank

from a local
high dive

-

     ****, brother

it’s your best
work

i.  therapy

please push this toy car.
it is going to the beach.

     in this activity, one makes a flower
from the parts
of a hand.  it is obvious:

people have time.

if I sob, it is so you know
to turn your head.

ii.  daydream  

if art, be sure to place the couple
carefully
on the donkey

     have them pass
a sunned whale

neither see.  

iii.  I can’t make myself cry without you

     I give instruction, I say sad things, I put my ear
to a belly of disparate

pregnancies.

iv.  a therapeutic image of your likeness

( foreign as
  one’s wonderment
  in coming across
  types
  of mitochondrial disorders
  
  or the oral
  beauty
  of reading ahead
       nicking oneself
  on chevrotain )

v.  terminology

mouse
inoculates
deer

a man did nothing
but care
for a moth.

if need be, he’d cup it
to the mouth
of a neighbor’s
horse
gone lame
in its grey
little heart.

I fall asleep
on my hand

my hand
reciprocates

-

a baby
there for me
to take

from that high
chair

floats into
a pig / enters

pig

-

a mother expects to be careful

but is crazed

     it is a very strong soap

she uses

this soap that squeals
against

the skin

-

inside a bubble I scour the bubble

-

[sic]  terrified
god has given me
gifts

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

I was wrong
about the crow
and crow
forgave, still

no s
in psalm

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.

my son’s creator couldn’t settle on a disguise.
     the top of his skull is more like a wet rag.

your work computer can only deny
so much
****.  

Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.

it is fairly safe
in this town
to walk
without concealing
the spray can
found
in father’s
toolshed

-

our love
for the spray can
while not
well documented
runs wrist
and wrist
with celebrity
worry

-

a cement wall
scraped
in passing
by one
with a stick
is the love
we have
for father

-

for mother
we scale back
on pillows
and lie
face down
on blank sheets
of paper
or watch

television

-

most times
we pop
the keys
of a ribbonless
typewriter

the train, son, is very real.

you roar in your mother.

-

it is so loud you cannot hear an angel ****** an angel.

-

the country has a leader. the story is
she has a whiteness

no one can see.

-

I’ve not understood the saying
of weakness. that said, I’ve one for

tunnels. cloche hats. and Africa.

-
 
I broke my arm, I met your mother.

it is of use
that I push
this train.

sister spent the summer making a horror film.
she had begun to show and father was wanting to be sober.
the depth of our poverty knew no mirror. here’s how mom said it:
mirra, mirra. it made us laugh, leave, and come back.

is it real

the woman’s leg
I photographed
using little
else

but my brother’s
nosebleed
and

some straws?

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.