brother is convinced his ear muffs will any minute play music.  mother like a bible is made of books.  I am not in a movie and I am not in the movie based on this beating.  I am tall for my church.  when I look jesus in the eye he thinks I am his cross.  father packs gospel snow in a gospel plant.  father sends his love in a spraycan he lifts with his mind.  mother’s breast, I forget which, is still to me an untouched baseball.  when an actual baseball presents itself I avoid my fingers.  sister is the tactile learner of the bunch.  I stitch her drug dolls.

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

I am looking for the phone no one hears. the phone I use to call people I want to hang up on. my son has not yet become the size he wants to be when he’s with me. I hope he has friends. I hope his friends know that to be taken by aliens means god is serious about studying who misses you. I don’t believe in god nor in those given a shorter time to think on death.

when the trailer
became haunted

we split up.

mom got the bed, dad got the couch.

I the television
which had both.

the question
of where
evil
resides

has not been
knowingly
posed
to the man
locked in a room
with nothing more
than a small rock.

in an open field
of no aberrations
a woman
goes into labor
for god.

most men will throw the rock
before using it
for pleasure.

age is a factor
to age
groups.

to the garden I cannot see-

pain as my witness
I go.

the feeling
we’d not
been here
before

-

doom’s little hiccup

-

my brother
dead serious
that we pronounce it

hick
gnosis

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

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

i.

to the greater sadness
and to the lesser
for agreeing
to meet
at the mall
where as kids
you and I
became
separated-

I
having seen
a boy
I thought
was you
and you
a boy
who wasn’t

ii.

to the daughter
who writes
with  

when she can find it

an invisible
pen

    stories
for her mother
who moves
in and out
of sight

for her father
when he’s not

looking

worried he is becoming one person
the boy with cloth scissors
escapes the watchful eye
of the puppeteer’s
child

and proceeds
unmolested
to the most
active

imagination

     his sister’s
before she was
expelled

from self-published collection Abandonesque (December 2013)

available on Lulu.

abstract qualities

above me many characters frequent my father. they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth. I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times. in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss. in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun. moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body. when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me. I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold. I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there. when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

dear infant

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

trades

a baby appears onstage in a kick drum. the more I think of time travel the more it can do. when I ask about the fresh blood you say I should see the ear muffs. you say they are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot and stared at to avoid the sight of your father the walking anthill. my privates move in my sleep. my privates are outside the governance of worship. you can have me from the waist up. my ******* are alone. the devil shares a history with god. in Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card.

expertise

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay. I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child. eat snow, understanding.

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

forte

addiction did not transform into prose.
familiarity did not breed.

it was not cold, it was heartbreaking.
it was hearing

my blanket needs a blanket.

it was billed as frostbite
with a beautiful write-up
in the archive

of I cannot
move my eyes.

it was not my imagination.

the baby was a city.
it lost us.

talisman

I think it’s a tuning fork. I convince myself and speak to it. the boy with me says it looks like a ******-up cross. says imagine jesus got to heaven and was still part human just imagine. the boy would be ****** if he were him. next his mother is off her rocker and so on and soon the boy is muffled by where he’s hiding. I’m okay with it. I need some peace and scratching. that’s my father’s, peace and scratching. he’d set a shoebox with a live rat in it next to him whether he had one or not. gotta corner that thought. I look about, the boy has either shut up or died or is living quietly afar. I sit on three stacked tires and fear a moment for my ***. I brave what might still be a tuning fork. I poke with it the place I was male then caress. rain on the roof of my home makes the roof look like a lake. one magic possum after another gives me depth. I snap out. the boy is circling me, he’s been struck by lightning, is in fact still being struck. his hard-on looks to last.

forms

in the end, she was a pair of beautiful hands and he was mostly a heavy head. in the beginning, she fed him too eagerly and wore a short dress of one color. his own hands were hearing things and she’d put them on his ears. he was either an unknown writer or a bill collector. he scripted for her the last lovely times of the empress of bullish desperation. as a young fathoming she knew him constantly. I’ve ghosted for them since I can remember but am open to the possibility I haven’t. touch is not touch but is where it’s hidden.

the inspection

my son helps me open my fist.
he rolls up my sleeves.

Christ is still dead.
my mom doesn’t smoke.

abandonesque

what can god read to make him feel more human? then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing. I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering. then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs. point wildly. it’s not a shame beauty ******-up. I look sometimes like a different baby.

always crow

the boy keeps quiet about his room. his toys gather for bully scenes. his toys even have a graveyard. when one goes missing, he believes in an angel. his mother hides her applause from his father like a tracking device. the three live together at different times in a pre-existing broken home with two chimneys. forest the boy thinks is the forgotten back of a forest creature. when in the room he is quiet about, the boy grooms each wall to be a window for one day and for when that one day comes. my girlfriend grieves in public to tell me how his mother and father were not long ago so lovely and so accused. he was the only boy who couldn’t see a crow without seeing through it. could be he’s the blood in her voicebox.

if man’s interpretation of god leads man to interpret man, we are lost.  my neighbor is crying.  that’s not her house.

hand-powered     for John Paul

we are without shirts.  our ribs, unshared.  

     you lift a mud flap to recall small stones
from a frog’s belly.  


light     for Noah

you write quickly in the dark.

we know better
than to love
the room.


advice for a kind of passage*     *for Jacob

invent only
what you
remember

a dog, plainly.  noses water bowl to mid-yard.  to the spot.  exact it will rain.  rain soonly.  a word the town uses.  (sit) one yells from a slowly passing go-cart.  someone's mother.  I often think for.

my babysitter’s best friend pins me to the floor with her knees and makes me say the word *** to my *** brother who’s still facing the corner he was put in for kissing a mirror.  in heaven, you don’t have a mouth.  the man who said he’d hurt before letting pain get stuck with a woman

is dying.

as this poem

was being written

     written

     a word that stops

     long of being

     sufficient

another poem

was being read

and by its end

was about

my brother


-

if you need to contact me

I would be moderately happy
to know

-

the poem being read
predicted a lake
surrounded by death-

in fact
it is something
it still
predicts

-

result:  one in three brothers betrays the fourth

-

my son may never  walk
but when he kicks on his back
these are what we call

his bicycle legs

zookeeper reads obituary

we will have to attend
one of the weaker
dogfights
with

this baby, we will

have to slick
the baby
back

with blood, then maybe

it will slip
into the hidden
state
of those
surviving

on the recognition
you deserve
as a father
a swimmer

wants

dearest ear,
god is not my fault.

I can hear the worm’s message,
the anthill’s thunder.

revelation comes
once a week
to come out

of its coma.  between us,

my ****** belongs to me.

it was
before it met me

a town

/ it is now

both babies, it be

alone, it be

the number
of times
god

went missing / it does not be

what is touching
what arouses
acolytes

of narrative
****** / I spill

milk
and you

treat me
like I’ve stepped
on a stick / revelation

was the lord’s
idea / wasn’t

to have animal

devour
animal / until / it’s too pretty

what you’re putting
on paper

/ I get my food

from food, time
from the grace period
given

to clones /  a man

with bad posture
the posture
of an infant

dreams

the apples
in the house
have been
turned off / the darkness

of being eaten
once

it is hard for the nostalgic to forgive. I was raised on awareness and reincarnation. I remember, doghouse, the dollmaker’s tornado. and how to clear for my drunkest brother a mousetrap from a mountain path. believing, as a hostage would, in the taker’s amnesia.

my father carries a prop wall into a god honest prison scene.  my mother is there with chalk.  in character, her face washes over her face.

-

I am survived by my medically fragile son.  the story of my death is told to me by his future wife.                    

-

demesne.  a word from dream number three.

he repeats I will always be ugly.  lately, I’ve been really into my blood.  or maybe

ugliness
subsides.  

     and so it occurs to our ugly counterpart

     as a fan blows
     a small
     sock
     nowhere

how his sister    
had two
faces-

both (had work done)

on a baby’s
brief
nose

it reads and feels nothing. a reminder’s footnote.

memory forgets its hermit father

& painters
go bald.

a mother says little.

each cigarette
has its own
language, this match

the pen
of the afterlife.

give prognosis its non-crying baby.

he has been hours
out there
under handing
the baseball

     catching it
bare

and wincing-

his father

him left, him right

don’t know

hats.

I am in danger of not becoming a statistic.  my heaven is a long line of people standing beside each other and stepping forward in succession to say let there be light.  touch is my sense of touch applying for a transfer.  I have lost my wife to the smallest darkness.  it tells her to surround a baby’s bottle.  my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.  a water fountain from a ghost town.

/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing.  how big is your family and who wears the mouth?  is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****?  that your mom had no baby tired of being born?  that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?  

/ year nine:  your birthday spider is put on film for biting.  your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

strays
in orange
bless
the brains
they bless
the trash…

-

what nothing
you haven’t
seen

-

the hand-me-down
travel
sickness
that cocoons
in some
what cottons
to others

-

dryness
the money
of angels

if one can be taught
to stand on one leg
correctly

and to hop tenderly
one footed
past a stone

let the student
be my son

     be at the stone

of my father’s grave

empty imagery

erasure poems write me from prison.  I read them aloud in front of the mirror in my mother’s bathroom.  a terrible mirror.  I don’t know how my mother does it.  she must have a good idea how she really looks.  


empty imagery

I can’t tell if I’ve been thinking of my father all the time or if I’ve become lax in my selection.  I am trying to reach him about the car.  on paper, it’s totaled.  the dog in the backseat surprised me.  very solemnly I was informed the dog seemed pretty beat up before.

      
empty imagery**

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 father
who observes
the brain

parenthetically

as a period
of fasting,

the sister
of extra
letters  (the mortal

of the story), and the mother

who keeps me
sober  (cook with hands

you want to eat)

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.

your attacker has a history of being baptized.  identifies as male.  was found hallucinating in a movie theater run by his father.  we shot him not knowing he’d already been.  his mother says his stutter is an act.  she is what we call empty inside.  you look like your father.

occurs most commonly in humble homes

afflicts men and the men they are tortured by

symptoms include a jesus complex that stiffens the limbs
and a weakness that presents itself only in sleep

has been known to create animals from nothing
and to make one believe
that like god

god is not a woman

from  Misreckon (December 2014)

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

untitled (v)

I do worry that this love for all things will keep from you the name of the creature dreaming


cessation psalm

     the less said about god’s addiction to brevity

as heard
by the angel
of birth


entry psalm

I can’t speak
to how
the form
my father’s
form
mimics

is able
to take
from lightning
a licking
while whaling
on the snout
of what
was born
muzzled
then sewn
for safekeeping
into the belly
of a punching
bag…

(I am not
the one
my meditation

needs) violence

is my brother’s
music


inquiry psalm

when it comes to humoring
me
by name
my memories
draw a blank.

I had a daughter
and three
sons.

my hands
could’ve been
the hands
of an umpire.

in the untouched church
of suicide
was the untouched
church
of *******.

it’s like seeing
a television
on tv. the comedians
and their failed
sisters.

do your thoughts
still take
the temperature
of god?

anterior

three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find. a bit of my mother

is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan

directions. a drug dog

on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower

of lost
men.


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.

(today only, 30% off all print books with coupon code OCTFLASH30)

from father, footrace, fistfight (selected poems, Barton Smock, June 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/father-footrace-fistfight/paperback/product-21672373.html


[the minimal class]

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

to err
is hunger.


[cipher]

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

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

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

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

some are born
born-again.

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


[patience]

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


[sequestration]

a person goes dark.  night shifts disappear.  a lone panic capsizes the anatomically correct.  men fill up on mouthwash.  men float.  women bite their tongues in half before they can say women and children.  insomnia becomes more than the over-hyped novelization of insomnia.  a boy draws a cutlass in a broom closet and is told he can’t sleep.  I begin to want more from a diagnosis.  a kite being flown in hell by a son gone pro.

outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood.  inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean.  a boy whose mouth

was never
here.  all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

of a street person
playing a prosthetic leg
like a guitar

has been lost
by hell

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

     the poor get bored.

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect.  she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other.  both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen.  sister gags and it makes him think about gagging.  now no more, these were the heart of the note.

a man my mother knows
only in passing
is reading a library book
in the dugout
of his dead
child’s
home
field
while his wife
rounds the bases
pushing
a stray dog
in a grocery cart.

at the dinner table
father says
we’re fasting
in a world
of spirits.

it is okay that my son’s face goes white.  I am using my son for water.  some of his blood leaves him to become a rooster.  some of his blood hardens in the coffin of his wrist.  some of his blood enters an incantatory narrative.  some of his blood is the body.  some believe the body is drought’s battery.  I am big on bodies.  you might know my father by his spearheading of the ghost indictments.  or by the clock you call love that he called the lifespan of his wife’s pregnant hostage.

I soften
eternity
with hands
on loan.

acquaint myself
with death
by being here
the whole time.

I marry.
I father.

keep my body
equidistant
from kite
and ****.

hide the boy from settled places.

think of the child
the adult
Jesus
how both
could not

imagine.

I was still inside my father when I was asked to talk about his shadow.

he had lost the voice of god.
he hid behind a tree
but my mother
could see his toes.

she dreamt of the day
she’d find them
attached to something
shy.

addiction did not transform into prose.
familiarity did not breed.

it was not cold, it was heartbreaking.
it was hearing

my blanket needs a blanket.

it was billed as frostbite
with a beautiful write-up
in the archive

of I cannot
move my eyes.  

it was not my imagination.

the baby was a city.
it lost us.

to heal her father, she asks me to brush her hair.  she promises that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries go.  the knots in her hair are ungodly.  she says to leave them.  she says she can get any cat to come inside.  ******* is new to me.  I almost announce aloud that I must look often like I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow.

for Meg Pokrass*

before we knew what was going on, we knew the myth of what was happening and followed suit.  my kids told me I was taking their childhood.  I told them it was the long hair of their mother made me do things.  she thought she was seeing another man until that same man lowered her into my arms.  we think of him when we pray because when we pray we’ve all a job.

the inexplicable amount of time a father is gone
disappears.

one is left to re-enter
a mirage of hell
sent from hell.

a mother’s song begins to need
a dot.

dear eggshell belly.  dear mother.  dear church of my father’s owl.  dear Ohio.  dear owl the deaf bee’s church.

[entries for the unmarked]

i.

swimmer was a cornfield baby

ii.

fox clock, always

noon

in the egg thrower’s
aquarium

iii.

playing tag

no blood
allowed

iv.

her bones
disappear
when pups
nurse

[entries for travelogue]

on his belly to **** on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision

/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal

died of different
things

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else