from angel tantrum (self-published, April 2025)


RESPONSORIA

I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.

~

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

~

A sickness moving through the angels. One theory: Two guns in a dream tried to make a hand. A second: God had *** while pregnant. For the third, stay beautiful. Death thinks you’re still here.

~

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

~

The last
beast
I wish
we knew
the order

There’s a crow
crying shape
under my fingernail
that looks
if you look at it
like a map

Angels make little dares
beneath god’s blood
angels
make little dares

~

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.

~

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.

~

No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.

~

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

~

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.  

~

My son is sick and I want a gun. I forget three times in front of a ghost how to *****. We lie about déjà vu. I say dog. You, whale. The world destroys loneliness.

My stomach travels
with an angel
back
in time.

I miss roadkill. Freeze my brain.

Death becomes death when it forgives god.

~

I will always know what you look like and it terrifies god

~

I die and look for my mother.
I die and look for yours.

I die and my brothers don’t.
I die in Ohio to impress
with a bruise
an icicle. I die and my daughter

I die and my sons

I die
and which
of my sons

I die and god says
that is not
salt
that is movie
salt

Death gets over nobody, I die

there

I die on somebody’s birthday

I die bc pretty
Because I can

I die where
I die with a rich interior death

I die for rich poets who’ve time to be good parents

Love dies from god

I die and see an uncle trying to drink his eyes back
I die and you can’t
I die in a shadow from three thumbtacks

meant
for the savior
of a self
harming sister

I die in my father’s dead rabbits
all of them
die once

~

The poem says so little.

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth.

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once.

~

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

~

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

~

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

~

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.

~

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.  

~~~~~

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.

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DEATH AND A DEATH PLACE

The eyes have only
their childhood

SON IS SHORT FOR LONELINESS

Try
in a coffin
to roll
a cigarette

Emptiness uses the unfed to see time.

The angel of dearth
Is the dead
Twin.

A comma is in a bird.

I do a search for images of babies born without ribs and I don’t see what I want. An article scares me in 1983. Saying that thirst is hunger’s blue ghost is the same as wanting thunderstorm to be a strong password. I’m not on fire but my son is sick all the time. In my nightmare of plenty, sea creatures for the skinning of god pretend they’ve kept god young. A dead angel weighs more the more the news of its death is shared. Is this a love song? Sexting in the *** shop, no two phones can cry like me. Vexations pin the ghost spot where you cloned a sighing bee. Touch touches its exile and my stomach slurs like speech. Positionless you dial theft bereft of any thief. Yes and no. Yes and no. The angel is dead. Dead over here.

odd that the abuser lives for flashbacks. that movies ask god for more time. that I smoke might an angel picture thirst. that I say not here, mouth. in the church of the empty bowl.

**** nostalgias accumulate in the sadness of new elations. I am photo deep in the longing you’ve abridged. Hands shrink with age. Facts wrestle me from the hair of god. You’re allowed to be a vibe. After kissing the salt from a dissolved rabbit mask, I see the redesigned deer of my disappearing. The writing stops but it can’t tell you.

There is no god left for god to impress. At night I grow in my arm an arm for my son. My dream lasts for three days. An animal forgetting to drink. A perfect stick crying itself white in a hell of dog heads. *** doesn’t know what this poem is about. Eating is a shape death knows to eat around. Heaven only looks abandoned. Imagine a shooting range. Not that one.

You died and ever
thing
was left

film 5

Each creature in heaven thinks it's the only creature in heaven looking for god. I itch at night with the short life of my skin. In a world without touch, I am sleeping you with my hand. Anyway, I want to say I'm sorry to my mother and my father for keeping them awake. For making them read this right now.

Dear Ethel Cain

An angel overcomes a severe stutter by playing musical chairs with two boys who years ago were struck at different times in the head by the same horseshoe. A stone thinks of a stone thinks of a. A line of computer code erases the rib of the snake it was written to memorize. I’m not telling you this anymore than I’m.

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a ****** we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish.

AI ruins reincarnation. I have tried to be seen as blue without the choking. My son looks for his won body. His own. *** breaks three lightbulbs in the chickenhouse. I first thought an ******* meant something was trying to get in. I stayed up nights longing for the swimmer’s re-kissed ears. Is your mom happy? A ghost knows where it is by snowfall and by crushed cigarette. My dad was crying and I had to pretend I hadn’t sat on the arm of the couch weird. My son bites his arm then presses a button on his speech device that erases the words from a prayer uttered in a time machine. I didn’t **** myself bc I never did.

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.

My brother can’t get that dog injured by fireworks to leave the church. He has me try different names on the dog but I don’t think it likes being called. The dog isn’t ours, of course. Hard to know if that goes for the whole dog. I dream I write a book that can track sadness. God has been the same since eating plastic.

I get sad and write on myself.
Watch hunger like it’s a tattoo god is practicing.
Is this the life to say goodbye from?
We have to give these guns to someone.

Thunder forgets
its god.

Television, our widowed star.

I’m in all of my dreams.

A man kissing a man behind the ear
behind a tree
no god made

A thumbprint above the front door
of the house of a hand
surgeon’s bread
making child

The frozen pea
in angel’s wrist

sacrifice 3

God
a mere
flare
Creation’s
signal
to Eden
of a typo
in its dark
message
Leave
under a corpse
of light no
cried out
thing