I can only do small things

and

you’ll have to take me at my word.

I have privately published a book titled {in this life another is you} which is a gathering of 50+ unpublished / unavailable / non-displayed poems of mine. I am making it available for 3.00 via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com). all monies I receive for the book will be sent to a poet friend of mine who was injured while clearing debris for others after Hurricane Irma. books will be shipped on October 13th.

map
in dream
what you can
of heaven

be the hurt
child
who fascinates

(birth) *****

thunder
with the soft

horse of male

privacy / my angels

are graves
in a country

of wind

god remembers

a giant

that to us
was plain

One is born
with one’s
own language

[removal musics (xxi)]

the agreeable loneliness
of dog
and the detail
I don’t
go into-

binoculars
and the neck
of christ-

~

[suggested titles]


nothing goes through puberty quite like the hands of children who keep track of god

-

for every cutter born in an Ohio treehouse,

-

an infant becomes attracted

-

I got a splinter.  someone gave me a goldfish  

-

for what image have you taken root

~

[in the toy aisle making a promise to my hands]

footprint
a gift
oh if bird
could nightmare

~

[removal musics (xxii)]

the first thing an ant does is close its eyes. of the three people who identify your body, all are god. no one was meant to write.

~

[response musics (v)]

the splinter in your wrist
you start to worry
is it warm
no one
gives birth
while you’re
asleep
so what
you can’t describe
an action scene
to god

~

[response musics (vi)]

what would I say
but there were people
and I was sad

why would it return
this once
your sister
acting out
rabies
in private
and why

were we there
how much
glue

is a scar
of glue

Losing dogs is good practice. In heaven, I look with Ohioans at ruined cars. I love Jesus for those few moments she went unnamed. I don’t see blood. I **** myself when my nose runs. When I say moon, put out on my brother a cigarette. When I write moon, become on earth the first to be invisible. Religion is apology and pain. The afterlife is a place for morning people to talk about death. Dear Ethel Cain, I don’t think letters help. I so try to not love poets, but they read aloud so nervously that books disappear from the bible. I keep in the same place coughing up anthill dirt. We can’t find the sleep god died in.

Eat nothing, ghost. Watch with an angel the earliest body horror as hallucinated by god’s mother. Point out to me on shadow’s brief map the dot of my burnt sleep. Sing to your father three safe words per image. Deadname yourself in front of touch. I want to age and to not be loved.

I cured my son
in another
language

that of a perfect child
born
to draw
a circle-

doorbell, house of nothing

swimmer’s nostalgia. grain of salt.

the infant
is clumsy
but no one
knows

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

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

I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.

[mercy musics (i)]

this is where
her name
is changed

to dog, not
puppy

where her father believes
he can stab
a bird
and talk
to ladders

dear
ladder, longing

eats only
the hungry

these are my
stick, and haunted,

persons

and what’s
more, it’s mostly
female
this lost

baby

~

[mercy musics (ii)]

angel, with urn, sleepy

as a hoofprint
is not
a dreamer

of unmarked
edens, but is

of the child
eve

who buried
a mouth
to imagine
a pig

to speak
it needs gum
from the invisible
purse.

comes with everything. cries like me.

bible and the missing
book
of aspirin.

fast food chains.

mourners.

a woman
with a handsaw
whose rabbits
dream dove

what creature
itches
at night
knowing
I have learned
to crawl

“Probably I’ll die like this,
a long time ago.” – Franz Wright

I will never forget hearing god pronounce your name
to a ghost obsessed with wolves

out there in the dogness

I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color.
I want my doctors to say seashell
*******
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray
to a ghost
that’s praying
to them.
I want your poems
your shorter
poems
to drive
death mad.
I want to crucify my tongue.
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.

the lamp
eating
its bowl
of light

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

I don’t have very long
says the stone / all sadness

recent

the poor
in Ohio
say
Ohio

–

some ****** eared stranger at the door is listening as if to a radio where being announced by name are the blow-up dolls gone missing from the home life of victims.

–

in the two accepted versions of the story you have a son your husband beats. in the third and final version your three equally tall sons lift you privately from a parade honoring your **** scene. this is theirs.

–

similar persons of colder weather gather elsewhere and disrobe.

all await
the dog of evening.

its blindfolded boy.

–

he spends a few good hours trying to pin the small shadows of overhead birds beneath his feet. his wakefulness is a gift handed down by a sister he had to stop making up.

–

I squeeze my infant son until he is young enough to remember impressionism’s grocery.

–

I skin my knee a total of three times. I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake. he demands nothing. he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference. he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long. my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become. I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother who smokes on the roof in her Sunday beast.

–

from crow
to anthill
lose
the thing
that’s there

telescope, craft your grief

god is what
if all
believe

books to step on, scarecrows

to kiss.

animal
a thing left speechless.

night
a lost
suitcase.

the apple, the quiet. brother’s

double
nodding off
on library’s
secret
horse.

door songs.

mother, mother, father-

wind’s childhood, nothing’s

gift exchange

I don’t know the name of the animal that slept with god. that ate the pea and left a rib. that moved the angel’s grave. with help.

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

[tunnel musics]

metaphor to grief: one hand grows faster than the other. blood is just milk that can’t see. the way you hold a gun makes me think of a baby’s ear. I do not want a long life.

~

[***]

in how many dreams have you appeared

that were not
at first
yours

-

hey

-

in movies

-

when streetlights go out one by one

I don’t feel
Interrupted

~

[treaty, grief, moon]

no clock
fast
we live
in the house
beside the house
we bought

treaty, grief, moon

some far
tornado

some nakedness

~

[returning]

he takes baths instead of showers

the boy
who believes
in ghosts

~

[returning]

to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain.  no cricket you hear is alone.  in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong.  his first sad poem is about an oven.  his second calls dust the blood of a seashell.  his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon.  my friends they are made of grief and brilliance.  they say they like mirrors that have in them, how do I say this?, a lost theft.  I sleep and my sister paints my nails.  kisses my head.  she is no shape and then a shape that occurs to a horse my son thinks will live.  

~

[having a disabled child]

means
or maybe
it means
in Ohio
we are shown
how to die
of symbolism

~

[I have avoided hugging those who miss your phantom limb]

no windows, ghost bird.  

lo a mirror that picks a side.  lo in rock the bones of bee.    

~

[lapses]

we are playing
rock, paper, scissors
and arguing
about the birth
of leap frog

it is good, you say, absence
with faces

and what / from the fire / would you

breathing machine
or canary

who has
a canary

~

[removal musics (xiii)]

has hunger
an ear

do barbers
when lonely
jog

is there glass
in your belly button, is this

why you feed
the unfinished
babe

what has no home
and cannot grieve, oh

question-

by know we’d know
god lost
a father

~

[a delicacy, here, this harm]

mother my eyes
my longest
miracle

mother my bones

I owl
your voice
above my son
how much hair

can christ
swallow, is it human

to want
for the uni
cyclist

a more
cinematic

church

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

for you I would covet the broken arm of a snake

in grief’s
heaven

when your son finally speaks, he’ll say the kids in his very first dream were all sick

/ kiss only those
who blame
god

[soul]

warn a crow
you’ll forget
your past

~

[untitled]     for Kaveh Akbar

all this time, ghost, we’ve been writing about the wrong body. poems talk of me like I’m here. nostalgia adrift on an oyster boat. empty acne on the face of god.

~

[untitled]

heaven wasn’t called heaven until it was full. we are made of water and there’s glass between us. when my son is asked to rate his pain he says his blood feels like a feather. I sleep at the foot of his bed often, a crooked something, a melancholy numeral…
his body- I don’t know. it repeats what most are made to recite. my brother has a ghost can see cats.

~

[untitled]

we are brave
because
one at a time
we are brave
but the mother
hamster
eats her young...

these mouths
age
in a dreamless
noise

~

[dream tells me it is because I miss pianos]

dream tells me
it is because
I miss
pianos
that I follow
a specific
cow
through nondescript
neighborhoods
none
abandon / dream

does not tell me
which half
of hide and seek
you were
when baby

I am not going to tell you the name of the movie but 1983 I thought my mom was asleep and she thought I and our closeness got near enough to be seen watching the wrong ****** put a lookalike in the right life anyway the past like your body is always new and before the eclipse I pressed a bottlecap into your thigh

you will never
know
what this
is about
but sing
**** all
to your double

What if I am close to knowing
why
I have brothers

Life is the line drawn between death and death

Once I’ve seen your body I look at your body

it was easier / in the whale / god elsewhere

god perfecting / the alien’s

coffin

–

fish and bird
loose
in the same
mirror

–

moths / of a softer / ma

the denied
sainthood
of both
imagination
and curiosity

the baby
you can’t explain

and the cuts

Dear Ethel Cain

The lie of my childhood became a lie. Let's compare suicide notes. Turtle, ashtray, ghost. Time is an angel knocked unconscious by a star. I had an idea for a resurrection story but the 3D glasses failed lol. I remember your fake mother on the set of a zombie movie telling *** jokes for the dead. Confession number one: I was born without a missing finger. Our bathroom door falls asleep before we do.

I can hear your ears

A neighbor points me in the direction of himself as an amputee. Information isn’t my strong suit. Excess of angels, tyranny of nostalgia. I dug into a tree a grave for a rabbit’s foot. Talked year after year in an echo that had my children tapping out of televised fight events. Violence is a language that rewards godlike pronunciation. Everyone knows where they were when nothing encrypted the pathway to racism in the shell of finding its mother. My drinking keeps changing the age I started drinking. Jesus gets crucified so many times that a one-of-one pop-up book of god using for a pillow a doll based on death doesn’t arrive in time for the book burning. I am late to my life and the television longs to be frostbitten. The toys have no memory. Even less when they explode.

memory (my

mother’s)

of personal
space

what
will I never
see

lost
arachnid, a triangle

drawn
by others-

my legs make me lonely.

dream, put me down.