on the weekend, we will go to a play.
some will bring their children.
the play will change many lives.
at intermission, I will want to leave.
you will lead the hand of the man
sitting next to you
to my ankle. he will use
the weight of his chin, the lullaby
of his baby lolled head.
I will not be able to hold
the brief kiss of my knees.

to see his hand
you will lift my skirt
from behind. I will ask
that you
be furious.

amnesia occurs as often as god.  we speak as one to one who puts a value on value.  we assign an indirect loneliness to pregnancy and present ourselves to prison populations as a way to avoid hitting the pregnant.  like you, I become my own pillow when back in the school days of my tornado.  yes I place myself in a song and you place the song.  reading remains a new form of plagiarism.  I am super psyched about the babies.  I don’t want to mess up their traumatic bonding.  hypervigilance is a thing.  like you, I know I’m close to what I’m ghost of.

how the saying
of nada
tamed
my mother’s
tongue
as in

being nothing
your father
has
nada

and my sisters and I
would momentarily
wild ourselves
verbatim
to bang
on a thing
with a thing
until father

in the a.m. and late with poverty
would enter what there was
to enter

     and how flush
he would be
with fiction

from the second level of a parking garage
we drop baseballs
in hopes of hitting
the discolored
mattress
we pulled
like a magician’s
tablecloth
out
from under
the sleeping
man
who by all accounts
is still asleep
abandoned fully
to ****
dreams
where one or two
of us
will find him
and spoon
his eyes
to ask them
what more
could they
meet
but for now
what metaphor
thinks we are
is game

xmas 19--

my profanity withers her tongue.

his deserters
bayonet
the alien
grape.

awake and watching his bird feeder

he’s died
and envies death.

in life
he drew
what didn’t arrive
and did not
draw
the line
rumored
to separate
the heavy drunk
from the unaware
sober.

he was part
openly
gay
and joked
if he left
a will
it would be
god’s.

was it the dog
fixed
its little
house?

mom, keep your magic.

memory is a funeral-

attend
in my absence.

a sort of
human
grief

in the dog’s
mouth-

a stick man’s arm, or leg, or crutch.
something

from the world of sticks.

for David Smith*

as I wait for what this painting reminds me of, a stickman with a short straw works my mother’s head injury into his teleplay of snowfall and crow.  asleep, you must be in the ambulance outside my father’s church.

boy is, when sad, what father

dusts off
and coins
anew

(this was your mother’s)

qualifier-

(your mother is a lemon
god’s lemon
tows)

but back
to scarecrow, as in

scarecrow lucid, the formless

boy with knife
in lacking
wield

slouching
before a blank
television, his missing

tooth

false

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.

[in no language]

does echo
have a word
for dream

[bring meat]

in becoming less alone, the beasts have begun to care what I do with my body. this thing I save

it crawls on water.

[snakeskin]

by the time god gives you a daughter
he’s already met
the one person
in the crowd
he can make
disappear.

older now, sadder

I admire
love.

[her faith]**

motion detectors
on the loss
of imagination

the dream
aware
of its fame

the toy exile of a lightning storm

the scene

anti
pastoral, deadpan

crow
in mom’s
blue streak

dolls
moved
by what
she ate

lives in Columbus, Ohio, with a white wife and four white children.  one of his kids cannot chew gum.  in *** his body consents to stave off yours.  the lion’s share of his self esteem comes from automated payment reminders.  most recently his stepfather passed away.  before you read this latter part to your mother, remember who you were.  links forthcoming.

at thirteen years of age she began seeing single.  I report this from my own dream of becoming a priest.  as her father, I can prove her first twelve years were skillfully copied by boys and girls alike.  as her mother, I am so so lonely.

the part of a boy
that is most like
a dishrag
from the last
supper

the laundromat
where one
gives birth
to a ball
of sleep
or learns
to somersault

the handicap space
where on
your bike
you breathe…

the flower, the grave, the clown
car’s

driver / her nose

the call
to blood

the shadows men think we are

we take
as lovers.

this is Max.  the Max I know when I am escorting into the city nobody you’re close to.  Max is a replica of a doll I donated to a shelter for the baby robots that wandered in and out of a world I was young enough to change.  Max is here because here I can tend to the unrecognizable things that have assumed the forms their inventor failed.

there are people doing what you do.  houses make a difference.  the age of a bedroom where touching.  where tickled I am against the will of my belly.  am engine and am weight.  am might as well be

feather in the tread of still

a fighting shoe.  of the only pair I torture.  make with me on the powerless boat of night.  drop my jaw to match the microphone of hunger.  

it rolls like a flashlight.

clap for your mother; she eats.

slightly, move that bible.

half your father's eye; allow.

put, in the paper, that you will sell:  dinner bell.

put that it is real, real as
weighing less
when you die.

for christmas, write a letter
to your sister

in jail
for ****-  ridiculous.

a woman
in muddy underclothes
looking at all things
starless

feels frog bone
nudge
the base of her skull
as her friends
wade, dive
and wrongly
mourn-

it’s only her costume
in the water.

it will become the small talk
of Halloween
2013

and vanquish
the split apart
three year old
apportioned
to any phrasing

of the inmate
on the Ohio row
who on the day
of execution
dressed himself
as a God
easier found
than vein

inside a wall, like a sponge, moves god.
when my hand moves, my hand is upon him.

my son was born, part of my palm, in his brain.
many walk into a room, and recover.

when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

want told

you swift
you lovely (you)
were book

    want see
gunwoman
mid-stride
stopped

by man invisible
     man with
tape measure

     want god
flimsy and sudden
to collapse
but first
to press

     illustration
of button

want art
upstaged
by upset

toys

under the cover
of white sheets

from the docked
and burning
boat

our children
downhill

     (like rabbits
      from a recently
      humbled

      tree)

      leave us
when we
drink

externally,  I believe in masks.  pull at my ******* when I have them.  pull old man.  you are my soul.  happiness is the impossibility of incidental sadness.  tell happiness to child one through child four.  too many tear too tamely at the face no goddess dies in.  a time honored receiver is disappointingly brilliantly a sponge

living off
your mother’s hand.

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

-

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

-

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.

-

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.  

-

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.

-

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

-

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

-

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.

-

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

-

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.

I live in a world where saying something is preferred. After selecting poems from my previous fourteen full length collections and placing them in my recent The Women You Take From Your Brother, there was bound to be some wreckage. My newest collection, Choice Echo, is that wreckage. I’m behind it, and bound for aftermath. Self published, 141 pages.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/choice-echo/paperback/product-21852599.html


sample poems, from:

forgeries

permanence is upon us.

one who paces.

predator
that I never took
for god.

-

on the inside
the predator
I attacked
personally

became the world
where the window
into the world
of hazing
opened.

-

in infancy
I possessed
a belonging.


humanitarian pause

not as common
is the dream
stuck
in the man.

not all wounds
report back.

I’d look for my father
if I knew where
to begin.

with my mother
it’s like my mother never happened.

I am the man whose missing woman
was bedridden
first.

I depend on my safety.
I worship a sleep that worships.

my brother feels no pain. a characteristic
he blames
on my sister’s
begging
to be interrogated.

not on speaking terms with a former self,
the dream is god.

on a bare back
some white
from the wall
I was painting.

-

go through me.

-

the itch a home has
after asking
the home
to widen its search
for fly.

-

it snows when it snows.

absentia, angel.

-

blood, palm print, basketball.

-

father, mother, sister, brother, god, dog, *****.

-

I swing sometimes a stolen bat.

-

the children moan
and mimic.

-

give home a fly
it takes
a spider.

-

happiness
having to think
for itself
is wilderness.

the lost baby
for a moment
is doom’s
afterlife.

I don’t think I can be kind anymore.

alone time
is patience
as melodrama.  the second coming

of my father’s belief
is a memory
that talks to itself
while saying
don’t make of me
a habit.

dear godless koan,
my wheelchair has an ashtray.

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.

she can see the beginnings of a boy in her husband’s abandoned poem.  a skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven.  god is in the air.  her daughter is taking a pregnancy test to prove one can get food poisoning from hunger.  

all I seem to lose is ghost fat.

when reassigned, the man
oblivious to his current privacy  
calls on his few belongings
to become
the well trained animals
of his previous
transience
and is carried
sleeping
by them

to a place
far, not far

with two questions
for magic

light as an itch
in the body
of a god

whose assassin son
owns only
what he can store
as regret
in the animal
mind

Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on

my father
he was in
this poem

yesterday
so deeply
that I-  ****.

they repo
even
dark.

a deformed salesman
with dog

worries
that maybe
god
has burned
again
her paw

on the cauldron
of rubber
hands, worries

more
that god
will publish

mother’s
books, the two

on gestural
dieting

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.

dear line break,
sleep
is a hoax.

the color of my skin
represents
the time
I’ve been given
to meditate
on my blackness.

in retrospect, we belong
on earth.

the son of an archivist
and the son of a librarian
meet in a shop
where both
step in
to resolve an argument
over

a nesting doll
before pursuing
separately
the same
arsonist.

all angels want to be the angel
known as the man
who smuggled
into heaven
the sacred
text.

I write nothing my tutor can’t read.

no babies, yet, in the newly funded baby jail.  

a pair of baby handcuffs, though, shiny as two ideas.

as for baby prisons
they are still a thing
of the past.  

with any
Ohio luck
you’ll spot a garage sale cashier
sitting in a small
electric chair.

I left quietly
the pet store
of haunted animals.

a drifter preaching polyamory
took mental note
of my appearance.

a man was my father.

SHUTEYE

IN THE LAND
OF THE SACRED
COMMONER

& other poems

110 pages, 7.00

self published and available today on Lulu

(book preview on site is book entire)

~

some poems, from:

~

{untitled}

the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

-

I want your work to matter.

~

{keep}

the laziness animals have, that kind of panicked longing…

and brevity, the faith
of insects

-

my shadow, of course, afraid of its borrowed blood

-

that barn
in the middle of nowhere’s haunted eyesight

-

the invisible
after-hours
birth, and the woman

who keeps the baby
despite
its perfection

-

this quiet in the redneck’s
library
of forgiveness, this thunder…

-

the agony of the boomerang’s maker

~

{******}

the cigarette
the worrier’s
flashlight

the past
a widow…

deserted childhood, electric eel.

if poor
put mouth
where mouth
is

~

{untitled}

the baby contorts as if it might become a chair

its mother is saying

wind
I will pray
for you

-

its father is fashioning

from some god’s
idea
of a stripper
pole

a dollhouse

totem

-

the baby itself is nonsense

its head
bruised
by a rattle
would brain

a parrot

depictions of reentry, parts i thru iii, were published at FORAGE poetry journal on WordPress...please check them out.


~

depictions of reentry** (iv)

/ the tadpole torching my stomach in the museum of the heartless alligator

/ the spider the star in suicide’s eye

/ the crow in the devil’s purse

~

depictions of reentry (v)

/ you can work here for nine months

/ it’s not like riding a bike
it’s more
like kneeling
in the center
of a stickman’s
nightmare

/ never you mind
the bloated
baby’s
yellow
tooth

/ at least the sick

they confuse
death

~

depictions of reentry (vi)

night terror, the handwriting
of imago’s
child…

/ resurrection, a memoir

~

depictions of reentry (vii)

/ the hands and the crushed mind they crawl from

/ god of the briefly ugly

/ the homeless child of nostalgia’s native

/ graveyard
our game
of telephone

~

depictions of reentry (viii)

we laugh about them now

scarecrows
the stepchildren
of apocalypse…

pregnancy as suicide prevention.

be wowed
by stuff
on earth.

~

depictions of reentry (ix)

before I got sick
there was a sound
my mother
could make
and a bird
perched
on the arm
of a snowman…

angels, yeah

some
grab their ears
when trapped

~

depictions of reentry (x)

the unlit candle

desertion’s birthday

–

the voice
is not god’s
that experiments
on children

but ask
away

–

the dog we buried
is sometimes
on fire

watched
we think
by our sister’s
cooking

~

depictions of reentry (xi)

and in dreaming
of what to use
for its body
and its blood

the devil
began

to starve / when it snowed
it snowed

on a tooth / this was in

the same
Ohio

where brothers
ruin
now

with hiccups

games
of hide-and-seek

/ anyway, sister said the crow had it coming

and I made this face we called

god
as a boy
tasting
a star…

~

depictions of reentry (xii)

mom needs a jar of jelly to call the priest. try as he might, my brother can’t seem to get his tongue stuck to the oven door. my hands are here to hide the fact I’m wearing gloves. dad snaps three pictures before passing out. the voodoo dolls of my invisible babies have passed each other underground. I am thinking of things you can do.

~

depictions of reentry (xiii)

a suicide
from my past,

a surprise
party
for death…

/ if I lose my voice long enough
will they let me
wear
the mask

~

depictions of reentry (xiv)

the newborn
yawns, reveals

god
to be
a biter

–

I don’t
in my sleep
do anything

let alone
impressions

–

it’s hell on an image

the mirror’s
alibi

~

depictions of reentry (xv)

I went outside and hid god under a rock then went inside and put a pillow over my brother’s face. don’t worry, my brother lived and god grew stronger. in fact, by morning, my mother was so at peace she finished my brother off with a cotton ball. my dad bought a boat and said the older they are the smaller the mouth. people came from a mirror called practice.

~

depictions of reentry (xvi)

with a sock in its mouth

suicide
the birthday
ghost

/ having heard
of the shadow
animal’s
ear
for the hand
puppet’s
collapse /

passes through
a wall
into a room
where a balloon
eating out
a prophet
stops not

to hiss

his mother sleeps with her mouth open.  I have seen him tip an empty beer can above it.  when he has a crush on a girl, he takes me by the shirt and gets in my face as if he could spit me into being.  summer, we get our bird legs (he says, he says) to tiptoe on the tongue of god.  

he writes stories under any tree on its way to lightning.  the stories come from a lake surrounded by gravestones.  if bored with the reader, their text disappears.

my sons
run out
of bread

-

their bodies
think once
is enough

-

are you barn
or missile

silo
sad?

-

I remotely
occur
to a word

as needless
as the plural

of needles

-

going forward, every birth
will be occasion
to *****

a lookout tower

-

my daughter is a cloth
cut from the vanquished
infant
once heard

not crying
in a wildcatter’s
abandoned
idea

of what constitutes
a baby

-

I read to escape the author

in the factory
where one’s job
is to wrestle
the storied
fish

the lunch pails
of the
     existentially
kind of
scared

hold their own
against

the stunningly
migrant
bellies     of the daughters

our boss
denies

and some of us
know our thirst
here

as a baseball
not breaking
a window    

while all of us
stick to knowing

that the world
over

     it’s impossible
for the devil     to sin

the child
saint
of separation
anxiety
eats

so little
that when
he
or she
chews
open

mouthed

a ghost
gets
a birthmark

the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.  

having a baby is a mouthful.  

-

think of yourself as a journal death keeps.

have recently self-published a comprehensive selected work taken from the fourteen full-length, also self-published, collections of mine from years 2007-2014.  the book has a title, the women you take from your brother, and is 351 pages.  a PDF of the work will be sent to any making such a request of me at email bartonsmock@yahoo.com

link to the work is below, book preview is book entire:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21758824.html

it includes work from the following publications-

the paper dolls have been cutting your hair
Grief Of Arm
Angel Scene
mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels
think ******* nothing on a farm machine
abandonesque
Stork Blood
town crier
We stole not the same bread
PLEA

sample poems:


lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.


the gospel

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.


jesus on the cross

my sister is sometimes obese.  she has mild heart attacks in cramped third floor apartments.  she gets beaten by schoolmates who impersonate hospital staff.  I am always going to see her it seems when she is in someone else’s bed.  it is to this thought she has recently clung.

as a ****** on finger becomes a borrowed cigarette,

what we don’t talk about
when we do
pools into mother’s
fat shadow
and / or

pregnancy
glow.

it is enough to know

god will never once

be startled
by an animal

your illness
dreams
a kingdom
it cannot
people

     takes
to sky
and there
meets death.

tell me
they talk.