I refuse it.  

this that says
it is the boredom
of boys
beats

a cow.

not even to death.

     will accept
on sight
the boredom
of girls
this that projects
a bovine
delirium.

will accept the exotic anxiety of my workaday father

as his cigarette falls
into the fibers
of a broom
made shovel.

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.

as the mornings darken, I imagine the paperboy’s mother will soon be joining him. if my wife can stand her, she doesn’t say. what she cannot stand is living here. the paperboy’s ******* mother- what a dilemma. I’ve seen that boy with his fingers in his mouth as if something is there to explain the purple chore of his being. I’ve seen his black teeth. I’ve seen dogs bite his elbow once then leave him alone. I’ve watched his elbow heal a day at a time not once adorned with bandage. seen him crack a dive bird to ground with the rolled up paper of my neighbor. who prayed over the bird and raked it to gutter. whose cat brought the bird to my step, yawned, and dropped it. seen that boy look dumbly at a mosquito on his arm and I’ve seen him let it finish and remain fixed on the spot minutes after. hours even.

there throbbed in a bird’s nest a comma.

fly!  the map of hell is burning.

I must finish the sentence my jailer cannot.

god is blind.  but why mourn?  abandon the moon
like a paper
mask.

a mosquito circles the string of a kite.  half risen
there is blood
in a straw.

my son has drawn jesus being killed by arrows.  

I have used my whole body under a blanket.  

our fathers were making bacon, which of them
caught fire, we take turns.  mine runs
out the door
into a silent film
about a pool.  yours
has a wife
eating ice cream.

any judgment in the court of murmurs
repeats.

we will be sad and there will be **** / we will be sad.

if we do not travel, it will be
by crocodile.

in the clothes that briefly kept eve.

he’s a first timer visited by two ghosts that have nowhere to be.  not a single pencil in his house is sharpened.  his days are cut short.  not by sleep.  he is famous for three things.  all three are online.  his mother’s blog sickens him.  has one entry.  has one entry with a link to its visiting hours.  he is working on a fourth.  loneliness as a cure for homophobia.  homophobia as a remedy for memory loss.  the baby in his stomach comes and goes.  at will and not.

for Russell Edson*

whose name
escapes me
has paraphrased

death

death
is as big
as a house

the tinted weakness of late day.  the sound of a mother being driven into the child by its legal father.  biology as paperweight.  as bird hopping on earth.  god as the oh well limbo in limbo.  are the many heavens of discarded appliances equaled in number by dolphins unimaginably safe?  does the thought, to be darkened, arrive?

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs. my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened. soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I was startled. startled too that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad. I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of my enemy. the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise. a couple times I lost the toad, the land was new, but I knew to stop and the toad knew to rustle or in my more desperate moments to come wholly back. everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance. I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly. the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels put short end to short end as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine. the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but was back to its original in no time. I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button. I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and the boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.

I was raised by wolves on nothing but stork worship.

on the day of the shooting
I was sent from school
for wearing a blindfold.

you were born
brained
from afar.

the disabled inherit
all but
private moments, former
selves.

god is looking at your dead body right now
sad you are somewhere
moving.

the rich man sits on the abnormally small black couch between his twin sons who, having never been separated, begin to sob.  he touches their heads together and worries their emotional immaturity will awaken his old want to have *******.  he tries to think happier thoughts but cannot keep them from arriving in pairs.

a baby left in a cloud.  a cotton ball pregnant with a dot of blood.

     states away, his wife regains consciousness in a spacious kitchen and rubs her forehead with a hand wearing a dish glove.  her mouth moves to the words of an old poem of his wherein the leg of a preserved grasshopper was used to replace a burn victim’s eyebrow.

will have you know, brother
I’ve endeared myself
to vandalism.

when undercover, and in danger
I lift from one of your letters
the phrase

     I deeply miss deer.

my sickness has returned from its pilgrimage
to the year 1985
and has
unfortunately

been documented
     as an acquired taste.

when there is a god
or a nesting
doll

I hushedly petition
that it entertain
the tenets of our sister
     the startled
futurist-

due to
a propensity
in each
to apply
face paint
while disoriented

my father
routinely
changes barbers.

because I believe
in the apocalypse
I swallow cologne
to silence
my blood.

it should be harder
to be happy.

I give you my sister

who has tried to flush
her prosthetic
nose.

the dark, the ocean.

I have two reasons to believe god
has not stopped creating.

-

our father
had this phrase

all in good time
psychic

and this other

you’ve got
the dropsies

-

I bring these borrowed hands
to shelve
your books.

you seem touched.

-

my anger has gone the way of the milkman.

his doomed child
with her piece of chalk.

I heard myself reprimanded for childless behavior.  I saw myself as two of the same people.  my older brother gave me pennies he thought were sleeping pills.  we later agreed I thought the same.  the funny talk went from my mouth into god only knows.  strangers begged me to repeat myself but not a one could tell me what I’d said.  those far to me sent word, or meant to.  my sister showed up out of the blue but stayed just long enough to send her privates into hiding.  my mother and father promised to punish me for no reason.  I began to love them for giving me a son.  I began by telling them I was in some trouble.

my first job
was to cradle  
dogs
being put
to sleep.

mother had arthritis
her hands
heard thunder.

brother fell
hard
for a one legged
man.

father worried
his own leg
meant
the world.

at the most
three dogs
per wheelbarrow.

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.

i.

I have for you a bird barely alive.  my son calls it the foot of a large rabbit.  he knows I need a way of thinking that allows thinking to continue

     without me.  

ii.

our daughters don’t live long enough to give America

     ruins.  their legs give out     but before

they collapse     we wish them    

luck…

iii.

…touch your father
see if your mother
comes back

backstage, the ventriloquist wept.
he shook one of his two dolls at a ceiling fan.
his wife in the show was not his real wife
but she put her forehead on the back of his neck
just the same. his cell phone rang
and the show wife made a little joke
of having the second doll answer.
I thought of my mother and my father
safely
in third person

they were taking turns moving shampoo
through my hair
as I hummed.

i.

no more can you see
into another
than at your age
have a stroke
to mirror
my father’s.

ii.

     deep into the assignment of my youth
I was said to be bowing
when in fact
I was dipping
into the thigh
of Jesus

     repeatedly
with a brush.

iii.

we haven’t always been godless.

     how this persists as comfort
is a vision a fox
has

of illness.

iv.

     to fox I apply a certain wakefulness.  

v.

my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends to the earth a cornstalk and lets fly.
he confides of everything he is the most guilty of hate getting him places.

     I have to find the mouse that means

other mice.  

vi.

     (above this plain a woman’s privates thunder  / below it
      there are those
      whose tears
      are a newborn’s
      thumbs)    

vii.

a mare kneeling  in a bed of maroon straw

intuits doom     as a color     as optic

     Apocrypha  

viii.

subconsciously, I am holy and by holy
I can offer not being seen in the grocery
as my father squints into a handheld
calculator.  

ix.

to fox paw
this thorn

     from my mother’s
apnea

confirmation that Joe is and has been born.  confirmation of the received body.  confirmation of a previous perception we held of the few actively trying to be prophetic.  confirmation the killed have consented to patience and will furthermore die.  confirmation of past with asterisk pending.  future confirmation that in adopting the plainspoken one will reiterate qualifiers designating poverty as a chosen residence.  have visual on verbal capital.  have verbal on holocaust.

entirely the use of his body.  cigarette like a lover only there to sober his hands five minutes.  anything fell becomes the last link of a buried tow chain.  emphysema, the on again off again j-hook of his right heel run off with devil horn.  how lifts, watch him, the blank assigned weight of your firstborn without housing a single thought.  it is always, this, shoe that drops.  a lifetime of work, say it, **** your mouth away.  your mother has tried to **** him; she a lack river.  handless and is not the one pulls him out or keeps him from being.

I see so much of myself
in my son
it is no wonder
he

is where I go
to sleep.  

-

his wakefulness
is a gift
handed down
by a sister

     he had to stop
making up.

-

(as I once thought to save my mother)

to the shadow of my bed I call sleep

a woman with bare feet put her breast in my mouth.  her man lit a cigarette and opened the schoolroom window.  I pictured a microscope slide pressed into a ladder of blood by some pink thumb.  miles off my mother came to on a raft and was afraid.  witchcraft, she said, to the dry land below.  to the kites on hiatus, tied to trees.      


to the man who will say to my daughter a lurid thing

the whole of your mother was lifted by one with a similar weakness to mine, lifted over the head of the so named, was the whole of your mother, and she was witnessed safely, snugly, to be fitted by the circle window of a kitchen door, seen by your father’s father, whose care led to the phrase hungry as a hornet, because he was a ****-up with horses, had been kicked, left by anger and like a small nest.


to those who think me wild**

so I can see my mother sleeping on the roof on an indian gift shop, I pull by a string the toy rhino on wheels up a nearby hill.  I hear my brother crying into the sleeve of the shop’s owner for what seems a lifetime.  the lifetime I’m referring to is my father’s.  at the top of the hill father mugs me for the rhino’s horn not because he is a coward but because he fears the red ball my brother could not leave.

each nun my mother sees is shorter than the one after it.  this too shall pass?  she remains nonverbal.  I try to include my son.  my depression is a tractor beam that attracts newborns.  my thoughts are a thought below the whimsical race.  I take photos of escalators paralyzed by three dimensions.  I give them as gifts to my father lost at land and sitting on steps to hear the silence in his head.  a toy pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store.  you are made melancholy not by the pup but by its fallen battery pack belly.  I say to a pockmark what I say to immortality.

the middle life of hands

say poverty could possess a doll whose favorite and only outfit a schoolteacher mends while picturing

     two pieces of chalk which become the late life ******* of the ghost mother who cannot cradle the crucified yet travels to the many scenes of crucifixion to lade the Christ pale glove onto the hands men think they’ve touched.    



sibling talent

my sister rubs cigarette ash onto her palms.  her lips could kiss a mime and get away with it.  I can’t walk on my hands at night without having my father come home mid-day to find my mother on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with circus cloth.      




husk bearing*

the bath a baby pool for the barren.  I turn the knobs, hear nothing, and call to my mother.  call with *ma, and then ma again.  most made of one silence but she of two.  my right ear at the door and my other patient.  her knees sound like my father’s cheekbones.  the tears in them he says are shrapnel.  of course I don’t believe this.  when I wanted to paint my treehouse yellow mother straightened me and asked for stillbirth yellow.  then poverty yellow.  for another example you would have to believe my bout with chicken pox left a yellow basket stranded on the still river of my tongue.  

     listen.  the buzz on a delay

but bee
arrives.

her first love
a clockmaker
in a forgotten
teacup.

her second love
she abandoned
in the topmost car
of a ferris wheel.

her third love
an eyeless
thief

who once emptied
the coins
from his hat

onto the counter
of a small balloon

shop.

her fourth love
left sugar
on her back, and a hook

breathing
under the coat

of her fifth.

lightning
might find
sixty
people
per year
one of them
foreground
of oblivion’s
lucky
bee

i.

at Beggar’s Pond with cousin I seen this bullfrog leap open mouthed from a mud bubble at a low bird and it took the bird to depths.  we wowed our way through reenactments but there was no betraying.  frog thrash nor bird thrash came to relieve the sight which had passed

had become
our post.    


ii.

men on break from the hauling of your stretchered father     men parked     yonder.

my long stick tied to yours and may our greatest concentration be with us     may it scoot

god  

over.


iii.

this ladder once leaned on the Tower of Babel.  black cat, these are the jokes.  

as crow
& thunder  
battle.


iv.

then again, a pair of babysitting sisters thought he was

plenty fine     like a little

*******
tornado.


v.

I look it up about bullfrogs.

in madness, explain a chair to the ocean.

unborn, be buoyed by pregnancy.

scrape
mother images
on a cave’s wall
by the glow
the unborn
have.  

I sense I still flicker in two lost minds.

she would say god planted in her a notion of anorexia.
she would sanely say her morbid obesity made her largely abstract.

one mother
beside him
pulls disease
like ivy
from the wall.  

he puts his glove
where her breast
should be.

with a finger
of hers
she traces
the moustache
drawn
on his visor.

I like this scene
because I have kids.

in the gospel to revise apocalypse
one cannot abridge obsession

one can however
follow a man
pushing his son
in a wheelchair

to a word and that word
is amen

-

for the time the wheelchair wields a person
it will use the person
to leave the dead

alone

-

but oh
to sink into the living
with such a contraption
is impossible

he wasn’t put here
to beat you
in front
of any
fool
reminds him
of that woman
who wished herself
into a fly.

he has been more than open with you
about it
about
his reincarnation

how he happened
to be the first
to know it.

you keep it all in, bring your mother
noises

from field
so she can determine

which ear
works…

word association
is a thing
of the future.

be the property of your blood.

balloon, blushing into the side of a mountain.
the hand, that came from the arm, that came
from the room.
the first finder of mirrors.
hair, brushed over the blindfold’s ear.
hair, tucked under.
pet rocks from Palestine.
wrist, dropping like a slipper, from the mouth.
or like a newspaper. nine months old.

from self-published collection The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (poems, Sept 2013)

available on Lulu

auteurs

I am in your house
being you

when the boy
enters my house
with a sack of ash

to tell my wife
he has come
to avoid
a whole

personality

–

my wife is one to believe
she was carried
by child

–

listen,

a baby’s cry is the oral future of what touches the brain

individuation

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span. it was there he pummeled his pregnancy. I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all. I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of. up until then, I was sad her whole life.

stressful events

a father and son argue outside a small town barbershop in windless ten degree weather. inside the shop, which is closed, the barber’s wife is clipping away at a wig. nearby, and quite by accident, an invisible man uncovers a fainting spell before which some will disrobe. namely, women declaring that the eye is always naked. who are these women?, ask my teeth, which are snow.

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.

recovery

I fry a single egg
in a pan.

the sound places me
in one of my mother’s
teeth

as it dissolves.

I bring mother
the egg, and she believes
I am the same son
who brought her an egg
yesterday.

she eats the egg
over and over.

her attempted suicide
is not something
I know of. she keeps it to herself

in the person she was.

youth

a jailer
talking through bars
to a ventriloquist.

youth / spent trying to yank a doll
by the ear.

the wave

we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet. we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks. the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others. we limp beside any creature that limps. the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other. our father is two mathematicians who argue. our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave. our guesses mean little because they are facts. at school we are voted on and kissable. if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket. details belong to god.

stray dog leaping

the poor are beaten
from the future

they get off work
the day is hot
it’s ungodly

as ungodly as placing a single chair in a garage

the poor get home
the chair remains in the present

the dog
can’t afford to be here
appears mid-scene
in the backyard

the poor imagine
an electric fence
scrounge together
the amount they would pay
to fix it

& smile as they would smile
at the mindless sap
whose job it would be

whose chair it is

orb

the back of my mother’s head was spotted in an Ohio movie theater by a boy whose eyes were covered or maybe closed. I received word secondhand from the boy’s stepfather whose own recollection was marred by the violence he shied from to reach me. in fact, the theater was even possibly a drive-in where the boy remains in the bathroom standing on the toilet to avoid the knowledge he is no longer deaf. like most information regarding my mother, it hasn’t aged well. she’ll set the table at noon for two and drink her coffee and I’ll join her convinced no child dies from its hair being pulled. more secret than my son is his ability to withstand miracles.

earthling

not there when your mother
cries into a poison soaked towel
to a childish god
while kneeling
before the remnant heat
of an open dryer.

not there when your father
by the sound of it
breaks your arm
pressing it into
the shrunken right sleeve
of a shirt that should fit.

not there when your brother
spooked by a deer…

not there when my body
stops the procession

that one might be held in its image.

virtuoso

mommy I am stones. I am in the blacktop river. my veins have been used to unpiss cows. like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are. the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten. they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move. I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed. I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing. if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t. there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped. I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

notes on the saints

younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick. now older, I am not a private person. I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands. if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion. there’s a **** son in all of us.

the mechanics of the beheading begin in isolation.

exiled from what it bumps into, a form
aches
for scarecrow.  

     my mother’s dream doesn’t burn.

I put the shoebox to my ear and hear nothing. I give it a shake. in it, my stepfather curses and I breathe closer to my quota a sigh of relief. I place the box on a higher shelf where I plan to leave it for three years. five years pass and I mean that. I can no longer reach the shelf and need a footstool or something similar. I stirrup my hands and there they are suspended. I step back from them. a cat meows or my stepfather sobs. I am bogged down. I am under my mother’s heart. when I finally use my hands in the manner I’ve meant, my fingers break and I land on my back. the box falls and the corner of it finds the cup of my stunned and still suspended hands and the fingers hold for a moment and then they are weak and then they feather the box sideways to my chest. I lift my head and see my stepfather jolly to be on the set of a show he’s the star of. he is smoking a prop pipe and pretending to read a book I remember my mother being buried in. a few episodes into it I realize the show is missing something and so supply grief.

the money he’s made
is delusional.

he comes to me with an aluminum hat
and warns me of a remote
area
that will soon take
the wrong
shack.

he watches as my mother
caresses god
with the cyclops myth
of touch.  

how many times has she washed
the defaced coin
of my stubborn look?  

though I value
over dialogue
the useless baby,

in what month is your soul?

our impossible guest, the inventor of vicarious living

if it’s true, Adam must’ve been at an age strong enough to hold the baby Eve and she must’ve had some early teeth.  openings are like this when mother has been talking to delicate men.  in another, Adam has something the size of his palm in his stomach and no mouth to speak of.  in this one, mother mourns the loss of the uneaten fruit.  mourns the childless.  in the phrase wasted on the phrase pointless violence      

I don’t know like you don’t know

    we’re exiled.  in belly, a baby turns informer.  her loneliness

a first person
shooter.

the mother beside him pulls disease like ivy from the wall.  he puts his glove where her breast should be.  with a finger of hers she traces the moustache drawn on his visor.  I like this scene because I have kids.

hurry, grief, your mice
to a nearby
field.  

close, silence, your mouth
in the ****** scar
of mine.

distill, wind, the river
your ****
fiction.

scarecrow
if I am worn, let me help you

undress.

in it
brother
levels
his eyes
at the fog
with two
red rubber
*****

the *******
registry
posted
at home
highlights
the name
of a local

     thing our father
calls demon
our mother

confused

for my wife*


i.

it's old. this
what have I done, this
dark ship. the crates
steadfast
in their charge
of silence, the ice
bored
and breaking.
we move
in our cabin
bed

shift
our bellies
to stay
the compass
of hurt.

ii.

our new baby
we honor
like a bruise, a slack

blue
puppet
hangs itself

impossibly…

iii.

I say I’m sorry
in three stories
I envision
as three orphans
of wiser
men.

your shoulders remain small.

iv.

…too small
for what
reaches down
to shrug them

in an art
spooked
by loneliness

you did this
to yourself

brother masturbates with an almost invisible dedication.

mother
yells
from the river

that all rain
is highway
robbery.  

while reciting
proverbs
for mitochondria
I pass the time
wearing
my father’s
shoes

for the footsteps
in his head.

a raft     I did not build

-

a late entry
thunderstorm

-

a baby    
     waving around

another
baby’s
sock

-

the poverty I own

     the poverty
you

-

a man
on all fours

     a tinier
woman
rider

-

a kite’s shadow

on leave

-

expat nations

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell.  a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair.  a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache.  a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

you pass
from the dream
to tell me
you hold

a kettle.  your robe

is open.  the tips

of my fingers
touch

the bottoms
of teacups.  our bread

will be
this morning
the color

of firewood.  I will begin

but give up
peeling

an orange.  the orange

won’t matter.  if a man is angry

he is not awake.  if a man

sleeps, he will give
then call it

taken.  I miss marrying you.

her age not so much mattering she talked on the twins she was about to have.  I held the hands of my mothers and each fronted their stomachs with full baskets.  my own stomach was in its prime and not yet the space beneath my *******.  I wondered at that point had I heard, ever, a man speak.  a song came to me but it was tucked as in a church.  my mothers on either side of me were not meant for this genre of grocery.  the low singing, the bulk rice.  we would the three of us go home that night to our videocassette of Witness.  it falls today under thriller and or drama but we knew it as horror.  mr. ford bends the boy’s finger in the police station but not backward, instead forward, instead very maternal.

sorry, this is there.

new publication, from self and to self, full length, with theme and without. title: Stork Blood. Feb 2014, 97 pages, 9.00

for free PDF, email bartonsmock@yahoo.com

book is here and has been elsewhere:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/stork-blood/paperback/product-21447349.html;jsessionid=B705664E62077329F9C5141F5762EC50­