the dove went
from Noah’s hands

over white cats
and driftwood

to a second
meaner
dove

I’m sorry.  I don’t know what’s gone out of me.  I look around and for every person I see with a first name I am charged to produce a method.  I bore the devil.  I do the opposite of shooting anything that moves.  I need an arm like I need a distant memory.  most of my blessings can’t afford a disguise.  on a scale from one to ten I cry.

20% off all print books on Lulu through the 18th with coupon code of LULU20

also, I have three remaining signed copies of my chapbook [infant*cinema], published by **** Press-  will send for free to anyone interested in writing a review- make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

~

some poems, recent and from available collections:

[asker]

I’d put something
in my mouth
and my nose
would bleed
and mom
would press
my ribs
and know
like that
the name
of the boy
buried
a horseshoe

-

return is a drug

hunger
a choice

-

and the lord said one of these animals is a writing machine
and the lord

he turned
the woman’s
shadow
into a garbage
bag

and the man’s
into water

-

sister dragged onto some dance floor
a scarecrow

-

pregnant / is what you get

if memory
remembers
to eat

~

[plain sight]

a hearse emerging from the shadow of a school bus

/ a mother
trying
to return
a baptized
mannequin

/ that poorly
lit
bait shop
star

~

[example]

after leaving its memory to the hibernating bear, the insect died.  I don’t know what story you’re trying to tell.  the angel has three fathers.  the angel was born to blackmail a ghost.  this bald ******* thinks I need shown how to chew my fingernails.  the mask is my elevator and the pig my coffin.  I have a sister was made to make an egg disappear.  a father who’d shave to give the thing in the stomach time to plan its escape.  the angel vomits into a pink wheelbarrow.  shows affection.    

~

[residua]

the hymn

in all its
cephalic
worry

has me thinking
bathrobe
while saying

statue / why

always
this dream
I join
others

to find
a small
body / death

had a spoiled
child

~

[distant]

the child you won’t have because the child hates surprises. the story, your mother’s, of the pillow that struggled like an owl. the werewolf, humble, and afraid of clowns. the ramblings of a newborn. the twin boys of Cain.

i.

in a letter to my son:

     there is only so much knowledge I can stand.

in his letter back:

     I was finally able to draw a mouth.  I drew first a box, then lied.

ii.

a gutted refrigerator rocks in a junkyard.

either the door has jammed, or she

is pregnant.


iii.

when silent prayer came into fashion
my daughter said her first word
and told me
what it was.

iv.

anecdotally,

they were Mr. and Mrs. Nothing

and eloped.

we draw god’s attention away from what we’re having by showing a short film shot by your youth in which a godlike figure creates the world’s first womanizer.  we kiss and our kiss goes from being medically fragile to being medically nuanced.  instead of paying our water bill, we fill the tub with sugar and wait open-mouthed for what can dig its own grave.

I am looking for the man whose life flashed before my eyes.  I am writing as my father.  we don’t love god.  we cure him.  after brushing away the bubbles of a bath so perfect I am horrified at the baldness of your baby brother.  it’s everywhere.  you shrug and keep at your ear of corn as if it’s about to set itself on fire.  you are the same way with *****.  these are your words.  when I’m angry I can feel my hair growing.  when I’m angry I cut it.  I write for women.  it is like the glittering peacefulness of a snowglobe you drained as a boy to water a toy soldier’s horse.  this quiet doesn’t need a white male, but it helps.

my friend is a cemetery.  his broken fingers are testaments to the boredom of wind.  do you write to yourself in prison?  your kid cannot scribble.  he tries and it makes him fierce.  I make heads or tails of him no matter.  your mother came to me in a bowling ball.  whispered about the dryer opening and out came a burning in your sister’s ear.  things are tense.  your father still cleans the sounds you make.

a certain house, constructed, to be empty.  

a postponed
staring
contest.

a suicide bomber at the start of this sentence.

     hunger
controlled
by a select
many.
      
my mother’s biological decoy.

me, reading from my self-published collection 'Choice Echo'.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuqCv_ey1-0

sample poem from collection:

fantasy

the cyclops dies having never heard you recite the last two letters of the alphabet. it’s 1983 and you’re all of seven. hearing beautifully gets you slapped for hearing things. you kick your frog legs on a swing going nowhere and try to touch your mind with your forehead. from a stolen bicycle you quote future passages written by a lover half your age. your pity has the lifespan of a voodoo doll. sound is the word of man god disobeys.

the saint of the poolside ***** twister brings a syringe to a puppet show where his father is busy not meaning all women.  brother is showing me around the space he promises will be a kick in the *****.  I am waiting to donate blood to little baby bear hug when I hear we share a mother.

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.

there is no light in the darkness
that is not a worried man.

I can tell you nothing you know.

my sons are two.  my sons play faith.

under my wife I am a shadow of joy.

-  

(over which I smuggle the thoughts of my acquaintances)

one-way bridge.

-

my hands are weak or would not be called hands.

when mother collapsed
god had a plan.  it included
the double life
of my father’s

ankles.

-

some I sanction, some I don’t.
some are **** creative.

suicides leftward of the unlit life.

-

I put my fist in your purse and leave it there and you let me.
we mass produce

eye contact.

we are both small, about love, about to bang
our heads
on the poor.

I can’t write about angels when I’m drunk.  my father’s blood

dries
on the hand
of a mannequin
in a shop
I no longer
own.  the drugs I take

I take only
when brother
has a bike.

the angels I refer to

refer
to my mother’s
bib.

(someone won this collection via a Goodreads giveaway and posted how much they hated it on Tumblr because Tumblr is not attached to their name.  also, I assume, because they hated it.  my name is Barton Smock.  I, too, am a coward.)

~

[earshot]

you were a white male and I was a white male and we were young and even if one put us together we were young.  our idea was to give winter gloves to those whose teeth chattered and we knew the sound had come to us both.  we mowed lawns all summer and mugged a drunk **** who sat reading love notes after baling hay.  we bought the gloves and held them until winter but by then we were not friends and song was the retroactive vocal of a father’s forgetting.  we divvied the gloves in a sad scene no mother would countrify.  

~

[eulogy]

when stalking
the unmanned
spotlight
of your own
death, drink

heavily

with
your takers / you

are nowhere’s
only
sponsor

~

[not monstrous]

a group of boys beats my son for beating my daughter.  when I carry my kids, my kids relax.  the group of boys are uneducated and think god has promoted a number of them to shave me.  my ***** looks 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 that he is set to star in the film version of your father’s suicide and that if all goes well he’ll **** himself for real.

~

[tract]

the television in front of my murderous father is the city his house misses.  further coverage is dedicated to a new unharmed person from a race of desert people whose mother materialized without feeling.  as my brothers cross shadows in the brightness of kitchen, I join in spirit the manhunt for the victim who’s made off with the right to disappear.  

~

[incubation period]

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  

~

[non-event]

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.          
~

[locals]

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.  her pain is god’s.  

~

[monster]

I want to sit around and do nothing and I want to have a handful of kids that sit around and do nothing.  I will call myself the end of god and ask women inappropriate questions by way of populating obituaries with written code.  you will want to argue and I will have to get up and we will try together to save the child I crushed parts of.  the face of the child will be our slideshow.

~

[light touch]

she imagined herself pregnant.  she fell behind her best years which became predictions.  she asked me about the men in my friendships.  candle-makers, a few with toddlers

a football
knocks over.    

~

[straw piece]

I was an entire baby and then a picture of me as a baby.  I had as part of the **** shaming process a mother wheeled in and out of the sun.  here is a boy with a red brick looking for an anthill.  here he was brushing from a woman’s bare back a piece of straw and here it is sticking to my leg.  in the barn the eater of stones is missing the privacy of an outhouse.  I lie to her face and then to nostalgia’s outlook.  I lose blood to the mosquito known for the collapse of my favorite cow.

~

[insult stage]

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly alongside a finger he or she must choose.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** cobwebs while waiting for something you’ll do nothing with.  the cutting of the fingers to scale.

~

[stirrings]

being operated on
helps me sleep.

I was your age
when nothing
had been done.

the turtle in my father’s backpack,
the turtle loose
on a moving
school bus.

gods
from a previous
marriage.

I crawled into my mother’s bed
and waited
for my nose to bleed.

you find the cut
like you find
where your daughter
is cut.

a sister ties
knot after knot
and opens
a window
only to *****
in a downstairs bathroom
from a fear
of heights.

cannot go.  I am covered in ghost.  it is not lamb dust but it does not keep me from being a thought beside the poor lamb.  yesterday will have a party I won’t miss.  your mother your mother.  echolocate.  a book of poems will open to a flat match like what attracts you on its belly.  melancholy heads will roll from the ocean.  my thumbs have each a valley.  I believe this instead of believing I can be identified as lesbian because they are shovels.  I thought my head would ruin the cruel.  ruin then yawn.  ah, I was not long for my mind.  though I say to them unbury my feet my thumbs have each a valley.

back and forth the boys texting about **** and about standing on indian mounds.  think they are gentle because everything is a button.  my lives are both private.  two empty salt shakers I can’t look at.  my father is somewhere saving his breath and ignoring all but one finger.  I too plan to write my last from inside a glass coffin.

in full view
of my family
and the friends
they’ve invited
I am given
the child
who has
everything.

my father’s
brother
bounces
on the low
dive
until his legs
give out.

the child screams
in its sleep
where I beat it
as I would
myself.

my mother
     as previously
     reported
enters into
an arranged
divorce.

in exchange for food.

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

under threat
of lightning

where else

his two right-handed sons bite equally into the legfat of his ambidextrous third.  he photographs all three by closing one eye at a time.  his boys look so real they could be paintings.  his wife makes an odd announcement about dinner.  an announcement that includes

paper plates, her therapist being kind, and the recipe she’s repressed.  

     he thinks on those for a moment.  then on the terrible things he’s sure to reveal.  his palms.  the downward progression of his mother’s push mower.  the scissors he stole to replace the scissors no one used.  the ******* the school bus he’d punched in the back of the head so she wouldn’t see her house burning.  in the back.  of his.

some meals for which I would use the word exquisite; these are some of the meals I had.
online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.
in house, I matched socks and when I could not I became accusatory.
worry was everywhere- I would, here, like to subtract the time I spent in the bathroom
and add to that
choosing an avatar.

what I called a proverb I would tell my children was the proverb of the right hand’s ring finger.
it made them laugh.

in hell, I thought I was in hell. I dreamt not of my wife, but of a grape being rolled by a palm.
gently toward a grape the dream could not see.

as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

the mother is first a toppled statue
and then a runaway
with a pillow
whose father
died
out of context
on the stone steps
of a large library
hours before
it opened
all because
her cotton ball
stopped
beating

a distraction that doesn’t explode.  I’d say children but nostalgia is still a child.  head, I need a volunteer.  god’s reply in the form of a sext.  a brick taken for a sponge by a bout of sleepwalking in someone I can shower.

from The Women You Take From Your Brother (Aug 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21988530.html



taunts

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.



in the rain

the woman she is holding an umbrella over the man she is yelling at.  the man he is blowing into the bowl he’s made of his hands.  a boy sits at their feet with his back to us and is bringing what we can guess is a toy to his mouth.  you joke he is laboring to light a cigarette.  in the rain.  



locals

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.  



portals

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.



wartime

my friend approaches the microphone with a grocery bag on his head.  I don’t know how this will turn out.  not long ago he ran over a fourteen year old girl minutes after she vandalized a stop sign.  my friend has lived everyday since and everyday previous with the fact she survived.  I phoned his wife recently but she had already left him for what he calls a microcosm.  I am hopeful I can love what he’s done with his hair.  he sent me this flower for mine.



catholicon

into the wood
a man
whose daughter’s
hair
is a ghost
fighting a ghost
for her head.

whose daughter
has not slept.

such cures
the town
talks.

put the sick
every morning
on a different
porch.

use
the same
nail.

if one is awake
**** a crow
or *****
a stop sign.



empty imagery

i.

Adam had no memory of his first wife.  as created, he would look at Eve all day and feel nothing.

ii.

the vacation house was found to be owned by another family.  in it, my mother resisted arrest.      

iii.

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left.  he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

iv.

God created the world because he couldn’t do it on his own.  ah, note to self, *******.  person is place.  I might’ve killed a man had I not been poking holes in a poem by Barton Smock.  

v.

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  he says he feels horrible in the back of his head and wants me to take a look.  he says I don’t know what darkness is.  before I can play doctor he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  the outline of the story is off site.  in the opening scene brother recalls that a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.
 
vi.

the head itself was an afterthought.  had god not allowed the soul to come up for air, beauty would have been spared our invention.

vii.

a single mother is a twofold mirage.  please argue above her quietly.  her legs collapse.  her child comes first.

viii.

your sister is the only person I’ve recorded to have been born without a gift.  I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal.  the size of which escapes me.

ix.

I am aware a sparrow exists.  not in a spiritual vacuum.  people are another hell.  

x.

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here.  at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet.  to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

a stillborn
is lit
by the three
teeth
since knocked
from its mother
as a life form
hangs itself
in the closet
of a nondescript
sister
spacecraft  
after imperceptibly
meditating
on the adventures
not had
by a golem

she had early on been beaten into one piece.

it was true
the broom
had gotten
taller.

mom said nothing.  mom swept.

before he is out of the city, he takes a cheap umbrella from under the passenger seat and rolls down his window at a stop light.  he motions to the fat woman he thinks only he can see.  she is ugly in all kinds of weather and she is ugly now in the rain.  though wide awake, the thought of her walking is an insomnia that torments him with the restless image of her walking.  before he is out of the city, the woman catches up to him a total of three times.

-

    over the course of a day, the perfect tongue god gave me might cross my mind once.  

my son was put on this earth to worry about his baby brother

not being able
to do anything
about having an itch.

-

after knocking the girl from the bike
I stay in the car.

as for facts, she has six ******* sisters and two middle fingers.

-

as for confession  

I have a kind of claustrophobia
brought on by having a body.

the two play tic-tac-toe by prison correspondence.  the mutual doctor they once met through is now famous for being there when god was in labor.  I love my research when it brings me to my mother’s stone because my mother’s stone is without epitaph and because beside my mother’s stone is one engraved with a phone number which predates what everyone is doing.  I call the number and nothing.  the two unfold a couch into a bed and go their separate ways to check email.  their little devil details the car that didn’t get away.  I want this little devil so badly it murders the actor I look like.  the two stand in front of a movie poster and stand there just as they’ve planned.  a beauty shop closes its doors sending beauticians into a street crowded with beauticians for open carry.  I send Emily to search for Emily when Emily was pretty.

it does what it can
the world
to belong.

I saw a wheelchair
chase
an ambulance.

babies don’t know
they can’t be
alone.

we peopled this.

loneliness
is often..

loneliness is often.

personally, I touched
your food.

I brought a girl by
to see
your lost
hands-

this is when
you washed
a dish.

what one man
can do

is strike
suicide
with awe.

dismiss me, then, from the garden of ease.

pockets are fingerless gloves.

loneliness is nothing without you.
is being reincarnated
as someone
you lived with

who was given
an additional
year
by a tall
pointless

ghost.

seeing my mother
gives me
the swallows.

her sickness is bravery.

she tells the tv
its food
is too close.  stillness

that she’s already
eaten.

our house is surrounded by sticks.

it is not god
gives man
something to bundle, bring inside
and break.  I can ****

and put soap
on my hands.

a lame barn swallow in the heart of its master’s black typewriter.

     blocking a dog’s door
a television lost to lightning.

a modified radar bought by the ****** it locates.

footsteps
approaching a tightrope.

that first kick
in the oblivious
******.

kid has a headache.

has headache above
a toy sailboat
the water for which
is a waste
of water.

headache is trying to see the moon
from the moon.

dad is a reader.  written somewhere
is how a headache
in a child
starts out
small.

kid reports on the water’s
temperature.  it burns.

rec'd a message today from a person known by another person. another person whose poem I commented on. was told the poem in question was about a real brutality of which the person messaging was at the receiving end of, with the poet being the one giving. person asked me if I would want my wife and kids to know what I support. to all: my existence here is meta, pseudo, simile, and metaphor. any writing I read is done knowing that an avatar is the first lie. I am sorry for all bad things, once removed. but if you need my apology, I can only hope you will one day not be so sad.

good with ropes; the necks, bibles too

of other men.

to the left
he had me tie
a flower.  I used my mother's yarn.  I knew

she would measure, but he'd given me
my second
imaginary

trumpet.

it is on the path of the simpleton
one takes the scarecrow
as Jesus Christ.

it is just a scarecrow.
I drive to it in a minivan
and face it
and fall asleep.

in the dream I am trying to *****.
awake I am still trying.
a man is knocking my window
with a woman’s heel.

touching the earth is madness.

to be completely dishonest

being told how much time a son has left

turns the body to hourglass
and bones to sand

-

rather, I know
my father    
disappeared
from his cell    

     rather, I believe
he was eaten

-

this is the cigarette you’ve heard
spoken about     in other

males.  that females

keep
enjoying.  

it never ends
and it’s not like thinking it does
destroys

male me
male you

-

what is death?

-

     but the second showing
of memory

from the boy

(on the soon to be
exact
date
our poverty
matures)

this ballpark
statement:

I did not ask to be born.

     he wants the names
of those
I’ve told.

i.

leaves that would've been books.

and there a fire trying.

fells an owl
my son
     the upper bill
of its beak.

to night, I say me.

ii.

a paucity of stones
and brothers.

with ink
what once
we made.

houses to bell the wind; my work.

or widow and skinny tree.

the whole town was in the parade.  the newer babies had a float to themselves.  at some point I was shot by a gunman so disoriented he mistook himself for my father.  I swooned as if trying to avoid landing on a board member second-guessing her proposed location for purgatory.  somewhere in the darkness the firehouse caught fire.  I followed my blood but to me it seemed a celebrity’s sadness.  my mother found me in her bed with a part of her heart.  she was bright with the rumor that my sister’s snake-bitten neck had some takers.

we meet in a neutral space to exchange the boy we didn’t for the girl we did. I still feel as if I’m on the inside of something pretty. it is always on the eve of this deletion, at the end of my dual research, that I forgo the deeper waters for god’s raindrop. here, again, it falls to my thumb to rub toothpaste from the toenail she couldn’t

with me
looking

reach.

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.

my mother's jaw

for it
to become
my mother's jaw

for it to fit
both hoof
and hell

had to drop
not in awe
but dead

and demon

as a sack
of sticks
in a hunter's
heart

and for the deer
to free itself
that womb
of glass

had to bridle
its hoof
that human bit
 
with which
it barters
now
and limps

past small men
touching
stick to stick.

I was told by the mayor of promised elevators
a film starring my father
had been restored
to the city
archives-

                 that, so I could get there, the mayor had halted
for one day
the lowering of pianos.

pianos
not one of which
I would spot
on my way.

before the suicide, it is just a note
my brother leaves

on the made
side
of our mother’s
bed.

once you are absent, your absence
is long.

the spotlight
a dog
pushes
with its nose.

not yet death
but death’s
wheelchair.

a revised
stance
on angels
as recognized
by those
one has
not met.

I say star
son says coma.

we are indoors.

shadow?
ditch

scarecrow?
footage

snow?
snows

I am my own worst departure.

my father
a rock
trapped
in the worried dream
of his contortionist
mother.

I am gentle with the baby
though it screams
his face is getting away.

whose face
I want to know
before passing my want
onto a morse code
present in most
blackbirds.

speaking of blackbirds

I hear one has been tapped
to become
the dying parrot
of a priest
who’s fashioned
from a still
moving
train car

this church
that must’ve been
torture.

praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

when as a father
one arrives early

one is lonesome

and given
by no one
the task

of remembering
the empty lot
roped off

and daughter
needing both hands
for the rock

I panic.

a woman with a spotted neck
asks me for a drag
as if I’m hoarding
flashbacks.

is my son still sick?

would amnesia know
it’s outnumbered?

in country
I knelt
openly.

an ant carried an ant
from the shadow
of a mushroom
like luggage.