we will not be having the grey child.  

word is
it is nothing
if not
an embarrassment
of imagery.  

with god-given whale sounds
it consoles
description.

at one with a lonesome populace

dream small, god…

about death
death
was a baby

what small apologies
to my father
my children

are.  headless father

his many acts
of embodiment

     his book of two
quotes:

money
doesn’t know
you don’t
have it

you can buy

sadness

I was made
to believe
in the making
of the thing
you were made
to see

-

Q:  what is a hand?

A:  my own blood squirting out of a fish

-

it is hard to choose a coffin
when your mother
is clutching
a purse

name the baby
and then
name
what it has.

an optimistic father
who calls
its insomnia

a god
with a god

complex.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJXt4Gn0ZA

you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there.  you post the photos while your dog barks.  you doze on a hot day.  your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog.  your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing.  you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car.  the car is not yours.  your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.

I enter with my small life to profile the impressions you did of my brother.  these kids, they cough in photos.  as for her, her father’s voice could up and speak at a moment’s notice.  I move the gun daily.  if my head wasn’t glued on, I’d have lost my ears to the hive mind of ghost forgiveness.  my brother liked to play leap frog.  **** art.  we live too long.

imagine
your decoy’s
memory

we may not have invented god
but surely     we invented

god’s
silence-

he must
hear us
think

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.

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.

god from a previous marriage.

I wash my own body. put behind me the death of outhouse slapstick. a dog is barking at a tractor. an older dog, wearing sunglasses, lets the baby do whatever. only some of these churches are mine.

after a spell is cast by one using a pseudonym

we start
somewhere.

sacrifice
has its own
unbeatable
consciousness

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

pregnant, she was killed during a game of hide and seek.  a man passing through popped the trunk of his car going over a pothole.  disparate images of war took root in the photographic amnesia of crows.  brother smuggled a pillow into the meeting of the minds.  never much to look at, mother made a skirt from the executioner’s mask.

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

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


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.
 
sort of grief

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.
 
in an open field

where one can more easily
picture
the struck man
as a boy
obsessed
with walking
 

loss of the family dog

be alone.  enter snowfall as a heavy breather in a white dress
window shopping
for a red.  

know

     that in between heaven and hell, there is war.  hell thinks it a nightmare, heaven thinks it hell.  hell sleeps more than your sister in love.  heaven counts warriors and can’t put an angel on why the numbers keep changing.  

as increased chatter is good for morale, call your mother and say you are her appetite.    

scoop the brains of your buddies into a helmet.

sister has her tail

brother
his paints…

satan’s baby can clap underwater

she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…

I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue

that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…

if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…

I have nothing to shake

from death
their doll

death

I shot, one summer, both my hands at my brother.
the tree he climbed was the most realistic tree
he could find
in that city

and I
missed him.

i.

a lifejacket that small

my answer
is no

ii.

no
has one

eye

iii.

god is coming to touch your foot

sometimes
you’re awake
and your son
is awake
and neither
of you
believe
in sickness
the raccoon
mask
of sickness…

no god unkissed, no dirt…

and sleep, sleep
is a priest
whose hilljack
blood
favors
the cult
of the noiseless
ant

as a child
the happy child
had no notion
of a childhood

he knew of ghosts
because things moved
whether he minded them
or not

he was haunted
by visibility

and cared for
in theory
by a woman

nightly moonlighting
as a man

as an uncle
can enter
any garage
and sense
the absence
of a nailgun
so
can a holy man
prepare
a meal
in the missing
church

~

paint

the heels
of saint
fetus

~

robot

sometimes when my knees touch

~

punishment

our mouths could turn food
into soap

~

dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.

says throw a ******* baseball.

-

I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers

-

I was not raised by scarecrows.

had a toy that answered to wolves.

I want to drink and watch a clean body enter clear water  

-

I have prayed naked
over
an insect, have lost

mother
to her gift
of not talking

to animals…

-

the ****** believes
loneliness
can be
exaggerated, dear

spider:  I swaddled

in blankets
so many
babies

the identity
of the kid
didn’t
beat us up
is

the schoolyard
our church
of arson

in plainclothes my uncle claims he’s a disappearing clown.  says he’d take me to the park but boy god borrowed my pigeons.  we’re eating in a stalled car the grapes he’s pulled from behind the ear I didn’t get from my mom.  when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.  grief is the herd my sadness trails.

the stone’s wait-listed heart

a god with something to prove

the common telescope of a haunted cyclops

a round of leap frog
played in poverty’s
backyard

homicide

grasshopper

between my mother
and her paper
cup
I’ve heard tell
that even sorrow
has a life.

father yells
at dogs, at the necessary

born, at me
in the mirror
to turn

around
get someone
can clean
this up.  father calls

light
the unspilled
blood
of the god
we're in.  he suffers on his path

the suppressed
amnesia
of faghood.  being gay

has long been
being open
to the possibility
he’s not.

angel: I know

my son’s
disease
is lower
than pork, that suicide

means god
has a say
in how
we’re prepared…

also, that above
the lake
in which
my father
sees

a strange
fish
there flies

a burning
bird

a brother
dodges
suicide
with a piece
of paper
that doesn’t
work. a mother’s
blood

goes white
at the ink
of amnesia.

bus stop, breastmilk
there was

no me.

at what would god
not
be caught
dead? speaking

is how we talk
to the words
we say.

I saw my father
standing on a chair
waiting for god
to take him
for a walk.

I started sleepwalking
around the same time
I pretended
to sleepwalk.

there was this bible
one had to step on
to reach the phone.

and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours

they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

my wife and I
we walked
in our sleep
with Jesus
on the water

my wife knew
instantly
but I had to ask
his name
which woke

the kids

I’m here, now, if you want to put a bug in your dad’s ear about pouring coffee.  in the war the thing I felt crawling up his spine became his spine.  in the war I called it abandoned and he said not while we’re in it.  he scratched the worst looking dog into the side of it so we’d know it was a church.  I shared more than once how I’d be stupid as that dog to guard a dogfight and less than once how jesus would’ve been a suicide bomber had the crowd been clueless.  we cried about women and children and by our crying they were found.

and she was nice to her kids not because she loved them but because not a single one of them was predicted to reach an age high enough to become an only child.  and she held on to coat hangers and to memories of pressing outlet covers into place.  and she lynched dolls claiming they’d be lanterns for god when god got brave enough to move again.  and what went on without her went on to cheat death or her brother out of his massacre.

as the hell it was
to record our whimsy

     as the hell it was
to read it

during the assault, I was seen praying an oceanographer into heaven by all but god.  a body entered a nursing home to find a suitable head.  I stayed put to care for the little blood they say never hurt anyone.  I have since held that some have both haloes of bird and star.  that any man with two has a single unnecessary blindfold.  long

that there is no wrong way to collect errata.

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen.  in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream.  in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.

was a clarity to being beaten. to arriving before clockwork. a clarity also in the poems of his abuser. psalm and caricature. snail and gasmask. I miss hand, he’d say. because it misses raft.

yarn
disappears
and blood
shows
its hand

-

homesickness
is what curls
in a mother’s
foot, her toes

-

having babies
for the color
white, this boy

-

he comes
came

-

compass
the thumbless
orphan

naked I have cleaned the story of my own drowning

-

father leaves his raincloud

mother
her trapdoor

-

sometimes when my brother is near an apple

a body-bag
fit for a mouse
changes
color

death
with its collection
of misfit
bookends
has an ear
for birth
if birth
is speaking
on the loss
of an empty
headed
photo

-

is god going to **** it up

the addict’s
spotless
campsite

yes

in the dream
I hadn’t been
using

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

in a photograph
taken
by television
the boy
was hidden
from children
whose madness
gathered
eggs
for the animal
in tail’s
dream

I will be pumping gas into a make of car I call off-white when a passerby of guessable hostilities won’t know enough to ask if it’s my dog coming dazed for every one of its legs down the road at me like at a spot it senses I’ve disappeared near and I’ll have to agree with my mind it’s the **** dog for sure and it’s not far from where my boys are huddled in a borrowed blanket smelling smoke and I gather it won’t be long before the dog is nothing more than its best instinct so I let the lever and reach through the space where a passenger should be blowfishing on a window for my last gallon of milk to pour on the car like a rehabilitated pyro to give that dog something to see and something to lick.

I mock blow my brother
who has just put
a snowball
down his pants
after claiming
it
a bar
of soap.

we are as high
as our father
is gay.

if we go in the barn
it’s for the Ohio
breeze
to begin
the joke
it abandons.

our mother is openly sad.