in a town of gentle drunks

I found myself
helping your mother
place a brick     on a magazine

known to give
your father
hope.  

     when I told her I could no longer watch
your father
circle        
the brick

she told me she dipped it in motor oil
once     (and how that was enough

bible)

the cigarette
the worrier’s
flashlight

the past
a widow…

deserted childhood, electric eel.

if poor
put mouth
where mouth
is

-for Jacob-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to imagine you can board a paper airplane to resume your life elsewhere as a supplier of matches to the triangle of vague nations.

-for Noah-

when I say there are four of me, I want you to fill equally exile and absence with a color you’ve seen twice.

-for JP-*

when I say there are four of me, I want you to put my face to a face and imagine two hands shaking beneath a god with six.

a raindrop
as impossible
as raindrop’s
double.  

apple, this part of no
you understand.  

bird beatings
I don’t
report.

we’re so hungry
I could eat a dog
in a dog
costume.  I am having my mother’s dream

while you rub yourself
rabbit
beside the body
of boy
slender.

I see an ant
in an emptied
house
and hear
father
praising sleep

for happening.  taking heart,

I tell
half
the story
of carrying
to term
god’s

emotional response
to being
denied
tenure.

draped in ghost

you’re dry
in a downpour.

my dog dies
and I take
its place.

because he could be anyone
I use my dad
to get laid.

christ had two sons
his daughter
ate.

20 times
I kiss
like this
my father.

a man with a vacuum cleaner
meaning to knock
on a door
is possessed
perhaps
by the heat
of day
to instead
answer
the door
(while)
behind him
a girl
wearing
the hat
of a dead
witch
is carried
up the street
on the shoulders
of a boy
whose bald head
is empty
(above

it all)
a crow
born inside
a footstep
is passing
for dark

the prodigal son of simplicity

-

the pill popper’s
demographic

-

the mouth
as it keeps
the face
from parting

-

the canyon
of where
not
to snort
the ashes
of risen
sheep

-

paper
and the cup
it’s being

a note on my chapbook [infant cinema]: it may be a temporary thing, but it’s been reported to me by individuals attempting to purchase the book, and I’ve also verified it myself, that the website for **** Press, the publisher of [infant cinema], is currently reading as expired and has been for a few days.  while I hope things are okay over there, I wanted to let everyone know not to direct anyone that way because I’m not a liar and neither are you.

in the mind
of baby
unborn

where time
is frozen, where god

pleads
déjà vu,

the formless
mother
of embodied
whims

ghosts
herself
to associations
of gender
that exist

only

like nothing’s
kitten

knowing
I will soon
go soft
on spiders
my mother
crushes
an egg
to keep it
she says
from choking (father

he brains the head of what god could not squeeze into (brother

invents
a dead
sister
and with her
laments
the loss
of the throwing
arm

that now
predicts
the rain

beaten
as it was
beyond
anonymity
it had
no choice
but to hear
from birth
whose face
it had.

mother is down to almost nothing.  recognition

is not
so fast.

as my face
will one day
correct
my body
I expose

the elements
to my
ugliness  

-

my son is my search

history

-

headlights
when headlights
emerge
emerge
from a period
of non
worship

-

(wave your arms
long enough
you’ll have sticks
for arms)

-

they don’t  
happen
in my
lifetime
the terrible
things
I’ve done

this my lonely tower with no one in it.  this the soup as it burns the tongue of a man on stilts.  this my boy’s breath in a cup of snow.  this the thorn of a mother’s depth.  this my patch of artificial grass.  this the melancholy itch of a traveling hand.  this my lowest number of dead.  this the high brother who cries in a satellite named for his *****.  this my drug use.  this the videocassette from god’s garage.  this my cloud of discontinued muscle.  this the pink hammer with matching nail.  this my mouth on a snake-bitten snake.  this the quote.  hell is a fire sale.

A tooth looking for your mother is not the same as a tooth searching. Lived experience is our jawless god’s highest fraud. Dear squirrel, we don’t eat creatures made of ghost worry. Future is the aftermath of the future. I’m ugly in heaven.

when pain
experienced
a woman
so strong
that my mother
became dislodged
from the two
schools
of thought
founded
by my father’s
hunger, I was told

that before
he could be adopted
I had eaten
god

make your cry to the lord of obnoxious minimalism.  

*****
all you want
underwater.  nothing leaves

the imagination.

to stuff our faces or to knit the same hat for the unseen gargoyle of our still life or better yet to give legs to the rugburn it takes to find a newborn’s nose

when toothpick young you see a snake go mad with second nature and a sponge dragging your mother through nothing’s data

it gets around
at auction
that the crucified
they are planning
to bid
on a pair
of ballet shoes
worn
thrice
by the mistress
of radiation’s
exposed
angel

/  still, it’s nothing to shake a stick at

the addict’s
board game

“There is no time for comedy;
every stone regains hope and dies immediately.”* - Frank Lima

sleep,
the clueless angel of a working elevator…

(father likes to say
a cricket
in a stone
is not
trapped)

meal of the orphan
part orphan

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

I saw
my son’s
muscle
spinning
in the web
of a spiderless
god.

it seemed
only fair...

her father
of tame abandon
given to sayings

any such
that would
when uttered
refute the admittance
wrongfully present
in so many
confessions.

all boxes contain the same amount of silence.

he surrounded himself with boxes.
when she moved
he said nothing.

there was a night
my crow dark mouth
held a small priest
who gave his head
to be smothered…

I go as a mute to the oral history of praying hands.

death
alerts god
I’m not
photogenic

film 3

Tell them this was handwritten. Tell them Ohio locked itself in the bathroom to imagine deer. Tell them god’s eyesight was too still. Tell them I couldn’t sleep. Tell them I couldn’t die, but that I bled to sleep in a field I was eating. Tell them the field is gone. The field is gone, they believe.

to fall asleep, I’d try to swallow my tongue.  my words came by way of spelling bees judged by scarecrows.  my father would’ve drowned had the rope not snapped him back.  it was a story he told to knock a letter from poverty.  my mother worried off and on how close I was getting to my childhood.  she looked at me like a pill as if to say dissolve already.  we lived in a room that for halloween went as a house.  that in the past had failed as a church.

I am in the house owned by your hospital where my son tells me I’m to be injected with a sickness to fight the sickness I was born with.  in relation to my previous longevity, my son stays for only a short while.  as he leaves he wipes the frost from inside the front window so I can see my mother’s open mouth.  the kindness my son shows me leans me against a wall and it is here I gather the strength to sleep standing up.  the man who lives with me is tolerably angry as my son’s face reminds him that he was once a great sketch artist.  he makes a promise to draw me in all my glory once I heal.  after hitting me, he blames it on the lack of furniture.  I stumble outside, not dramatically, and am shot by my mother, or by someone who heard me come in.

the words have left me.  as for shaken baby
syndrome, you gave

that ****
to yourself.  

wild goose, reappear

is what I would say
to the wild goose.  

the last copy of mama’s
sacerdotal
memoir

the copy
that makes
sense.

somewhere, the mostly boy body pretends to be explored.  we are not we.  my mother ruins a sketch of my mother.  my father smokes two packs a day because online he was called prematurely haunted.  the name of your existence

is

priest retires to make umbrella for jack-in-the-box.  (her bus

is rain)

death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

-

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia...

musical chairs

telephone

these must’ve been
the first games
of the poor

he’s with his ten year old son
at the mall

they buy a leash
for a dog
they can only

describe

until the website/press purchase link for my chapbook {infant cinema} is resolved, I have six signed copies available for free to anyone interested in writing a review.  you can request a copy from me here or email me at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

also, due to the issues the press is having in regards to the availability of the chapbook for purchase, you can request a free PDF of {infant cinema} from me here or, again, by request made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

some reviews for {infant cinema}:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.

~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.

~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

-

god’s color has returned

-

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

-

first

you’re part of a story you don’t have to tell.

the animals that took your feet are dead now.

my boy
pushed your boy
into something
we thought
we’d outgrow.  

mittens on

it’s time
to eat.

the nonfiction section in my father’s library of sleep
is faith

-

mother comes to me in a dream to tell me she’s thinking of pulling out

-

epilepsy isn’t something you can see.  clearly, it’s the snake
one tries to give it to

-

when people are gone, they’ve gone to ask

my closest frat brother looks at the toad and says frog *******.  tackles me.  fact:  there is a certain kind of toad that by staying still can **** a drug dog.  in this country, a man can sell doves from the back of a white van.  a man can run out of doves.  my ghost is obsessed with caterpillars.  it doesn’t matter what you say.  they found that woman.

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.

as an adolescent, he toyed with the idea that he was a vision of god’s and set himself on a path to befriend the less conversational bodies of fractured families but found it was too much like giving candy to the poor.  his disenchantment carried him into my early twenties where I became his father for an amount of time shorter than the left to right the eyes employ to take note of the baby often placed at the beginnings of horror movies.  his mother lost the use of her elbows trying to swing him away from the mouth his sorrow came with.  her plainness landed him on his first victim’s radar.  when we love him at the same time, our love reaches the society of secret special effects.

the town is wiped from the face of my face.  a volunteer pokes himself in the eye.  becomes the rescued map of my brother.  I take my slippers by surprise.  I reach into a sack of masks.  the first is made of cloth.  is yours.  the second of plastic.  is mine.  when one is murdered, the others read the burning book.

the animals
out of earshot
come back
as phones.

you have a son
who like your father
holds a mirror
up

to some
nobody’s

paranoia, a daughter

who steps on crickets
as part
of god’s plan.

the wax baby
isn’t my thing
but appetite
is.

if more than once
the brilliant thing
you’ve said
gets you laid

mistaken
for the order
of conjoined
hesitance

we were good
alone

in the scene,
I happen upon
an off-duty
cop
whose leg
is pinned
beneath
a vandalized
carousel
horse.

the kid
I carry
on my back
stirs
in my father’s
sleep
and I’m in
my brother’s
tree

again

dropping
the cigarette
that will miss
my mom.  

I’ve started the cry
that can’t
begin.

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.  

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail.  told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born.  I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good.  had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.

I pray to god for good things and to the devil for bad.  the focal point of any daydream is a crow.  in my father’s mind, his mind returns.  in my mother’s there fires impulsive searches for lonely teeth.  at the sound of anything overhead, our dogs are trained to dig for confetti.  I have an odd request, I say to my neighbor the cat person.  I want to talk someone out of suicide.  the cat person is on her ninth vicarious life.

outside the garage door
of a cement building
I break no bread
with the silence
of my nose

what a clown

-

the wound’s depth
leads me
to believe
in a part
of my father’s
leg
I didn’t know
I had

-

mother’s pain
is other
pets, the devil

is the devil
forever

-

this egg on my face
is from the eye
of yours
that hatched

I bury the bone I never gave to my brother’s dog in a whites only cemetery.  my wife is safe at home trying on dresses my kids would’ve seen me in had they not been trying so hard to recall their black childhood.  my father finds peace, his speechless snake.  god, god eats all by her lonesome the bird she made small.