Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
71 · Apr 17
sacrifice,
sacrifice 4

If you love your children for too long, they become lonely. Remembering everything is not enough. Update your isolations.
71 · Mar 13
BEGIN TIMES
The angels let us drink for six days before telling us about god. Day seven, they give us each a son old enough to bite us on the arm. It’s a lot to process. This rabbit is all ribs. Eight is wasted on angels who miss their ghosts.
Dear Ethel Cain

I heard a song just now and my stomach wept weeping still. I started a band but we all had pianos. Frogs showed their throats to owls stuck looking away. You told me your opposite loved god for making jesus attracted to nothing. After is a place in the wristcutter’s belly.
Dear Ethel Cain

A spacecraft carrying blood for the animals god didn’t name loses power near the star of Bethlehem. Those on board have nothing to write with. It’s not the saddest thing, but has happened prior to there being sadness. Later, sound takes a chainsaw to the sound of a chainsaw. The world makes me afraid of movies.
70 · May 1
ANGEL TANTRUM
As forever’s divine infant, god inherited permanence. Think about that for a second. I cross my legs in front of light bulbs. Our food catches up to us. Shape is just rain wanting a past. A room is a line break a film is a room. I can’t move. Bring the deer inside. The horse is so small that nothing but a moth fits in its mouth. The deer is washing the feet of a doll. Bring me the doll it is crying. Bring me the crying of the doll. Turn something on. Turn on toothaches in the wild. Start a car made of toothaches. I don’t know what poems look like. Don’t die in poems.
Be the false thing that god worships. Lead hyposexuals to the sleepwalker tired of finding your body. I am desperately dumb. America is ruined because the destroyed parts of America angel no creature to a stop. Imagery is a measure of detail's molasses loss. I can't go back, or I'd take that out.
70 · Apr 20
sacrifice,
sacrifice 8

Gaze
Is a lost
Film
Filmed
In the seen
Abyss
As memorized
By a mother’s
Basilisk
Star
I don’t
Say after
Life
Around rabbits
Cigarettes
Give the dead
Roots
Made of smoke
Gaze is the unnamed
Limb of sight
Time a pause
God takes
In the post
Angel
Tantrum
Of a carpenter
Ghosting the ghost
Garden yield
Of his father’s
Pawprint moon
Loss
Has bones
All of them
Found
Fact
After sobbing
Fact
70 · Apr 24
as far as last lines
God thought I was a dream.
I’ll love you in heaven.
I didn’t read
All of your poems.
They didn’t change my life.
God told me in a dream
That angels
Throw eyeballs
At scarecrows.
I get weird
Born
And ******.
I am afraid of my children
And my children are afraid
Of their friends.
I wrote in my head a song
I wanted to hear.
Owl, whale, crow
Is the only
Order.
Writing about god doesn’t mean you’re smart.
Barton you can’t
Use
Like that
The animals.
Word choice
Is a hoax.
As far as last lines,

Roll that tiny spider
Into a cigarette
For years.
70 · Jul 8
LAST ANGELRY
Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.
70 · Oct 2017
entry
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
I tell the mechanic my car sounds like it’s drinking blood / I am not trying to be funny / end.



abuse, 1980: because a tornado won’t touch a house on fire



in the nursery, the babies with elderly features…
Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
sympathy pain, crib

of a normalized

hunger
The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.
68 · Jan 28
BEGIN TIMES
I cut myself near a doll that wasn’t meant to look like me.

Nakedness,
find your nudes.
angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock

Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.

can be purchased via:
paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com

/\
\/

A couple short poems from the collection to convince one of nothing:

A CIGARETTE IS A STAR DE-AGED BY GOD

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

ANGELS WANT BODIES THEY CAN LEAVE

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.
67 · Jun 24
ANGELRY
A minotaur, a unicorn, and an angel walk into a bar. Stay terrified. Your feet will bare themselves to abandoned rabbits.
Dear Ethel Cain

Knowing I have skin makes my skin stay put. I am perhaps in my last translated body and am maybe hearing creatures compare voice apps for crucifixion survivors. In the dream that cannot undream the dream of my assault, two men who share a neck find part of my stomach in my son’s brain. I was wrong. Everything I touch forgets being my hand.
In this church there is a toy phone on top of a toilet seat. I miss trapping god with nostalgia. I miss amnesia. A boy is a bell is punching into that fatherless space created by any shape born into a world of swimsuits. Oh fury, moon of hopelessness, the astronauts need nudes.
67 · Jan 1
NEW YEAR MACHINE
You can't drink in the bathtub if your son is disabled. The eyes are more violent than what they see. People standing on a haybale pretending to be high shouldn't be killed by a truck. There is one year of *** and two of snow. I unmirror in the dream I was left in for the bot that I was.
67 · Mar 28
FAREWELL
to the goodbye
that created
distance
66 · Nov 2024
film,
Barton D Smock Nov 2024
film 1

An angel eats a mouth and sees for shape a horseshoe deep in the story of satan’s toothache. My sister’s hair listens while I grow nothing. I leave the poem briefly to raise an addict and the addict says pain is god reincarnated while alive. You don’t come back.
66 · Oct 2017
what a horse knows of god
Barton D Smock Oct 2017
hand-like, unfixable, the hugger of its neck
They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.
66 · Jul 7
ANGELRY
Churchbell, fetus, ceiling fan. A frog hops out of my brother’s dream and lives instantly. Seven men pull a child in all different directions out of a car perfectly owned by their wrecked father. If you don’t sleep, your body will remain too crooked to crucify. Many of my poems are not called 'cleaning my son’s back'. Here we are.
Soon is what everyone dies of
65 · Apr 3
BEGIN TIMES
A squirrel in the guest
blood
of god apes
history’s unthinkable fetus.

A brother and a sister
forget
at a funeral
who they look like.

My son’s
hot ear
smells
like the cigarette
gave Jesus
away.

I love you.
Terrible
that we’ve met
Next page