~

[On mother, father, god, dog, *****]

what if the eyes in the back of my head

hallucinate

what if
the eyes in the back of my head

during surgery

during

a haircut

~

[On foreclosure]

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I
am rowing

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat

~

[On the past]

my life

four children
drinking water
from glasses placed on either side
of my sleep-

it is on these nights
when I am sick
that I become the sound of my ears
softening
my mind’s
thoughtless position
on time, that I am ably

here, ably slow

full view
of the aging

marksman

~

[On phobia]

as I refuse

(to enter
the ocean)

I’m pretty sure god has put my death in a bug  

~

[On the need for a watchlist]

if one can talk of it, one is most likely not poor.  we called you to life to give you a name.  god became the man men wanted to be.  god wore a dress he could see through.  a short history of heaven made its way to hell to have its location shared.  your mother developed a stutter.  your fake cry took on a depth of meaning made us dip

(psalm
for satellite)

into your brother.

~

[On paternity]

as his mother has heard only yesterday how he was born to some nobody that everyone can describe, she instructs her barber to slide a lit cigarette behind her ear.  as unimportant as the barber is, his pencil makes a subtle change in her dream of putting a cricket on the witness stand.

~

[On my son having little to no vision]

I am on count eight of ten-

ten, the future.

I call you raindrop,
your hiding place

water

-

staring contest-

the only child and the twin, then

the lonely
victor

~

[On decompression]

the zombie movie about buzzards.  the hours that go undetected in the parents of forty-eight special needs children.  

~

[On lore]

I have two dreams of running into the newly pregnant late bloomer.  in the first and most recurrent, I am operating a remote control car I’ve lost while worrying about a brother’s closeness to a certain pilot.  in the second, my mother is talking lights out to nostalgia’s previous owner who agrees with her that the roofs of buildings need to be smaller.  in both, I get the sense my father has already hit the pop fly under which he collapsed muttering baseball, baseball, ghost of a baseball.

~

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

~

[On contact]

hold kitten
like a rifle.  pop

a paper sack
at your father’s

ear.  ah, your father

who was made to kneel

for two
maybe three
things

(god, shrapnel) a flying saucer

from the wreckage of his church

~

[On writing]

my sense of place is a person.  *** is odd,

right?  this thing that auditions

for what it has.

old
pencil-****
in the church
of the outhouse
tattoo / birth,

its suicide
vest / seashell

on turtle’s

grave / my shadow /

its table
set
with noise

most babies here are born without a trigger finger.  

but some
get through.

not for the disabled saint
of benevolent trauma
is there a thin line
between birth and death.

I mow the lawn like I’m trying to avoid a spotlight.

trauma
is an imperfect
inherited
circle
run
around a wheelchair
by a youth
knows

that even the devil
has the first half
of his life.

in his shorter
life
the father
accepts
a remembered
total
of two
persons:

the dry humper of the drowned.  

the maker
of astronaut
oars.

time and god trade barbs clothed in genericide.  metaphor’s child is a condensed version of what the kids these days call *******.  younger, my pain was outdated but had its own phone.  I meet my parents.  I begin to act like my son.  I leave myself to marry what is mourned to how it grieves.  older, I go alone at night to where I am worried.  like existence, I overstate my daughter’s angelic disability.  my wife hears what is heard by one who flits from mirror to mirror.  I lose a black wallet.  I pray.  sky for the dollhouse, amen.

we indeed
are deaf
from going
****

the floor is writing on the earth

it is better
than having
roaches

childbirth
comes to
in a bat
dying
in a pillowcase
for what
the weeping
flightplan
of a drunk
stork…

what tree cannot reach
mother scratches
with a broom

in creek bed acoustics    
one can hear    
an altercation
between two men
on a bridge.

when the lesser man
falls     he does not bounce.

one might think the man’s wallet
is a fish     on its side.

the guts of the fish
reveal two thumbs
of two young boys
each on a separate path
with money

for fast food
though none
to remove it.

the following self-published, full-length poetry collections of mine are available at

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


in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels, August 2013, 9.00

-

think ******* nothing on a farm machine, Oct 2013, 10.00

-

abandonesque, Dec 2013, 10.00

-

Stork Blood, Feb 2014, 9.00

-

town crier, March 2014, 8.50

-

We stole not the same bread, May 2014, 9.00

-

PLEA, July 2014, 8.25



if you’re interested in receiving any collection of mine via PDF, please send me a request at bartonsmock@yahoo.com and I’ll send promptly.



-here is a poem from in the asylum we'd sun ourselves with angels:



men statuesque

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

I woke up in the tree again

the house itself
had left
run
once more
the crucifixion
on tv

father held the infant
its brain
concocting

slow motion
for widows

I have been avoiding your paintings.  your paintings blindfold me.  I see what I don’t.  a puppy addicted to its tongue.  a heaven not of this world.  stillness turns my stomach.  outside the womb.

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.

insomnia
is the stone
I move
from the hand
that forgets it
to the hand
that remembers
nothing.

sleep’s
reactionary
phobia
of loss
comes to me
in a dream.

the distance from you to me
is still
god.  to what

your sight
has touched
I appear
visible.

as recalled, my childhood
has very little
on the illness
it took
to process

yours.

as acne commits my face to a memory of scripture, god worries that man’s silence is a pox upon both the crow and the crow.  on good authority, the cyclops is blind in one eye.  you were tortured, yes, but nothing stands out.  my living hand performs for my dying.  imagine my father’s dismay at the realization yours had of having done this autopsy before.

BURNINGS

~

church

entering the body after a stroke

~

milk

my shadow made of grass

~

cow

dumbly regarding another’s art

-

radio

grandpa cursing outside
then inside
the barn

~

crow

we don’t use the crow

~

owl

pillow for which the night has long been looking

~

yawn

moaning
into mother
my father’s

swimmer’s
ear

~

high-dive

or a very private room

~

***

two
as if they fear
a third

~

suicide

might I record
this moment?

~

divination

found alone in a ******* *******

~

angels

mystique
that surrounds
a small town
search party

~

blood

******* from the reader of my palm

~

drone

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

~

chthonic

a prayer asking god to brush your teeth

where I wrote

the most startling entry in my mother’s diary

when she was not the greatest
source of pain / in the household

she pulled her own hair

he built a church
from the nothing
around it.

-

not all
have a disabled child
to write about.

-

he built a church
from the nothing
around it.

brother calls late tomorrow and leaves a cut off message on the machine.  earlier today he left to you his temporary cure for the ailment iteration.  the depth of your sister’s bible remains too much for your dog’s mouth which is something you’d forgotten until now.  now being not the best critic.  the bible itself is wrapped beautifully in your mother whose hands are still broken by recent events.  events that evoke transcription.

she scrubs at a dinner plate with a clump of hair and tells her boy she is not balding.  the most harmful part of her satisfactory conclusion is the offhand detail of how her brain no longer needs a straw.  the boy squeezes himself shut.  his father is a phrase he can recount.  in my coffin I am a withered leg.  he envisions a christmas tree no bigger than a toddler’s crutch and a cow nudging a deer awake with its nose.  sleeping deer, I would eat the babies but fear I’ll have nothing to eat.  either god is distant or has an increasing phobia of the next moment.  three people

are one
hearing two

sob.

for Jake, for Amy, for those who know*

in the beginning,

his mother and father
were there
to be
the parents
he’d lost.

his first tooth
anchored
a ghost
within

shouting distance
of the boat
named

for ghost.  he amassed

a useless
vocabulary

that nonetheless
included
the word

amidst.  when women  

and children
waged war
for the men
who’d agreed
on the drug
god
would take, he burned

etymology’s
least favorite

haunt
with a fire
he’d ******
from a sword…  

-

the lives we touch are evil.

go
to a different
hell.

On having a secret mother

the boy is lacing up his right shoe
when he sees
the string
tied
to his middle
finger
and wonders
how asleep he was
when it happened-

(being forgotten
  is a lot like
  being forgotten
  by) harm, that purple balloon

lowered into
then surrounded
by

the inactive
construction site
of the world


On my father being gay

so you know
what it is
you have

(felt,
there is)

an emoticon

at the end
of this
book


On suicide

you are further than I
in your worship
of the slow
vehicle
that carries
praise
back and forth
from appearing
to reappearing

god (how else)
to bully

what would
wipe you
clean
of body

language…


On foreclosure

any chance, no,
of improving
upon
my impression
of god.

noises beneath a bomb or bomb
threat.

wheelbarrows, wagons.

the occasional declawed cat
past which
I make
like I am
rowing.

(in wheelbarrow)  (in wagon)  otherwise,

no cats
on cat
island.


On libido

the previous verse was a poor man’s bible.  like wildfire a fondness for appropriate discipline spreads.  one scarecrow means practice, two scarecrows mean parentage.  a third is your father’s failed garden of baby teeth.  is, by definition, is.  I are

motherless.  what mother doesn’t know doesn’t worry.  many spiders came on the wind and a few were swept into mouths briefly opened by age. what made woman did not make the disappearing girl.  flashing back to a scene that’s not there or forward to one dependent on space, pain arrives

in memoriam.


On memory*

for all the showing, one would think the only things born were eyes.

when lord
says
or lords
say

this is the body*

I tend  
in unison
to trail
behind
my voice

as if

I could make my own
remember the anesthesia
it underwent

to intervene.

the moment he thinks surely he’s the man about to read something beautiful he’s tied loosely to a chair by his father who calls him time.  his mother measures again the kitchen and again it is small but no other room can set a trap for a cage.  the meek speaking of a fork is a radio in the thenar space of his right hand.

notes on the boy

his sickness is a hotel.  

his health
the failing eyesight
of his father
     the soon to be famous
window washer.

his dream
a documentary
on falling.

     some watch
the room they were in
from the room
they are.

he ended by saying surely it is evil to live.


I have not been stunned by fiction since having hands.  


he started by asking silence to observe the audience.  
he crushed a cocoon under foot because it had no god.  


I have not been beautiful since needing nourishment.  
I have not sinned since taking an active role in my dreams.


he arrived in a white limo.
he applied to his body a lotion of black milk.
he penned in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels.


he cried like a baby he’d seen.
I have not cried like that since being cut in half.


I was not ***** in a field of vision
nor have I been
since refusing the kit.

i.

one crow
watches another.

your father
lifts

the patch on his eye.

as a daughter, you believe your mother
when she says

love only
what lands
what thinks
it can land

on its shadow. love only

the second
crow.

ii.

you are weak
but hold
that man

like a ladder.

midday he filled his house with dogs and burned it.  he entered a nearby car he mistook for abandoned.  he sobbed so loudly my mother had only worry about being seen.  a few of the dogs made the baby pool, emerged, and leaned toward town.  he stopped sobbing for a moment to mock rev the engine and turn the wheel.  my mother banged her forehead twice on the floor of the car.  the man resumed sobbing.  my mother slept like a baby might sleep in a motel room with two televisions.  she thinks he was able to turn one of them off.

I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

slicked
with sadness
a branch.

the skinny
legs
of rain.

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.

i.

in no dream did I see you emerge naked from a lake smoking a cigarette you seemed afraid to touch with your fingers.  in no dream was there a ruined enough tree that could take your ****.  

ii.

we are not doing too many things at once.  we are merely extinct.  god's final act is god's only.  we harp.

two men from church in my father’s house are having coffee.
it’s odd to see them out again-

my mother’s cups.

ask me only
what I’ve done
in the short life
of god.

ask me about my mother.

ask me
if it removed
my fingerprint
from a fish.

ask my why a disease
with the ability
to travel
travels
from one present
to the next.

ask me to procure
oral
input
for the boy
whose mouth
won’t move.

ask me if meat
keeps
its sorrow.

ask me
if I’m
a day
old
which angel
discovered
fire.

ask me why your mother
would feel
in her words
like an ambulance.

ask me what I see.

a man on horseback
casting a line.

the man
makes
of his hand
a lame
spider
for he
understands
as we do
it is important
that a boy
laugh-

this next part
leaves
the poem

     but not before
the boy
uses his tongue
in a way
we will call
grotesque
because

it’s a miracle-

takes three of our men
in turn
else the fly
be swallowed

starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.

water
is nothing’s
blood.

[untitled]

I vandalize the outside of a church in a city designed by men with bad teeth and there I mistake a drop of blood for a penny and begin to last forever

~

[abuse errata]

this mannequin
that we now
deliver
to the oral
loneliness
of circles
died
left-handed

~

[the quiet that comes after a two car accident on a country road]

could strangle
an owl
cast
perhaps
as a mole
listening
to the belly
of a stopped
deer

~

[the men of left field]    

I think / in a past / life / my sense / of touch / was yours

-

mother / ain’t once / lost / while pregnant / a baseball / in the sun

-

thunder / is lightning’s / empty stomach

~

[I see in your newer work]

the propping up of rootless boys and the past changing only what was. your father the spinner of flea market globes. a bat in the barn with the head of a chicken. your mother returning to god the ghost you painted for death. your son wetting the bed. right of owl, left of crow.

~

[annotations for son]

a small creature was shot
stumbled
and became
my handwriting.

two of my legs
need god.

~

[sculptural]

a moth attacking the ear of a white horse

[on a family farm
littered
with oar-beaten
scarecrows]

-

baby talk
in a suicide note  

-

sign language, mosh pit, 1991

because you were alone more often than not, I thought you a church.  I attended you with others and they were to report back to me only if you looked up, away, from your book.  you did not.  these others were men and women whose children have found me.  I make it up as I go along.  my records are unreadable.

do not open
until
I am born
this love letter
to the unreadable
child
who spoke
for god
to god
in poem
the lesser
pity

do
tell my brother
if he has not
yet

wrapped himself

in police
tape

that lightning
above a snowplow
puts a creature
on the roof

i.

you can’t stop the man who’s tucked himself away.  like mine, your mother doesn’t lose her voice but disappears when quoted.  give the babies to jesus.  god wants us old.

ii.

I lasted in childhood as long as any who believed a scarecrow got its name for being scared.  though I’d go out like a light, my father never fell asleep on his feet.

my son and I are standing.
if our eyes have met, they have forgotten.
behind me, little lambs of worry.
in my son’s eyes.

being born
puts the end
in sight.

within reason, I offer shelter
to bowls
of my father’s
cereal.

mother
she is pained
to the point
of philosophical
pain.

we are
to god
scare

tactics.  and to angels

we are post
war
angels.

we are not sad, yet
there is sadness
in how
we thrice
touch
a rebuked
abstraction.

we were five months into the first health of our infant boy

when we learned we’d been in the wrong room
with the wrong paint
happy to have
the wrong kid.

I say this for effect.  
I am god cruel, god brave, god loved.

my wife is god murmur.



there is so much telling in a diagnosis.
poet son, let me explain.

      

     I have a cardboard cutout in the shape of your demon.

you otherwise
have all the space in the world.

not all of us could be born  

-

the rock

won’t leave
my mouth  

-

mother eats with her hands

(palmistry)

-

makes father
go weak
at the knees

i.

     allowed myself to be born.

promptly died
for my brother.

defended
on my own terms
interior

design.

ii.

led
one parent
to the lower
of two
police
states…

iii.

…emerged alone.  having sublimated
my son’s
memoirs.

a letter does not reach you.
maybe
you hear
sobbing.  the lady with the dogs

she hung herself.  her bare feet

you cannot
stop seeing.  when she was told

she had a son
his death

mattered less.  you wait in the garage

most days
for your husband
to get out of the car.  it turns over, it dies.  he looks up

much like them dogs
looked up
you think

for the one at the end of the rope.

in bed with the animal, after choice cuts of echo, the man calls on the peace of having a third wish.  at a sleepover, his son falls from a top bunk.  as he waits for his bones to return unbroken, the boy imagines he is paralyzed.  the  paralyzed boy with the ******* of a woman.

the teenage boys
trade punches
after dark
which
if I thump
my chest
my daughter
questions
why not
say
during dark
and so
I thump my chest
and ask her
why she wears
only one skate
that is not
the skate
sails between
two pairs
of tired legs
and rolls
over
spots
of boy blood
each spot
drying
at a different
rate
the skate
carrying nothing
but stillness
if not
into the night
then
on that which
underfoot
disappears

a man goes unmolested into the knowledge of his body.  has one hand had no choice.  puts a doll in a carseat.  makes his boy watch.  a man recoils mid-dream

from a caterpillar.  I am

what I’m
again.

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

here is my uncle
smoking
as he throws
the same small fish
back in the water.

here is the cat
that he cared for
and the neighbors
who put it to sleep.

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

if they were the stories of my adoptive father I have no way of telling.
he told them and forgot.

two brothers I remember in one had built, separately, time machines.  
their sister, though, had been done for a week.
she lost them to anger.

my real father noted the repeated references to god and rolled his good eye.

god, he said, is the mark of a first work.

I had spent years changing them, hoping my brothers
would visit.