the camera is blind.  the blind

my dog
is going.  

in my mother’s sleep
I am kind
to think
she lost it.

a foreign adoption, a procured act
of landfall.

I bomb my lifelong
dollish
sense

of the photogenic…

the dogs were fat, the ticks were full.

he’s got this look like he doesn’t know how much he’s into them for and the kicker is he’s alone. I’d subtitle him as nervous but it wouldn’t be ample. we’re brothers, 4 years between our bleaker anxieties. he talks with his arms and I see my father at age 32 and my father sees me and winks. brother he knocks the table wood that separates us with both knuckles and tells me he’s gonna need luck in both of these and he shows his open palms. he begins to gag and I **** but he shows me again his palms. I lean back in my chair and pretend I am in a very small space and pretend I am cigarette smoke. I see the oval in his throat and then an egg and then the egg broken on the table. my brother he loses his cool and bites his palms and futilely tries to set the table afire with matches, some light some don’t, no matter. he tells me he usually catches the egg and telling me calms him. still, it’s some trick and I say it. not a trick, he says, but magic. he drowses right there in front of me and my subtitle is ‘****’ because I am scared. we go inside to the dog we’re sitting for and I retire to the guestroom where I check the eggs in my bag to make sure they’ve not broken. I go into the bathroom with one of them and say down the hatch. I spend the night on a hard bed and care for my stomach. my stomach and not the egg.

ten men beginning to show outward signs of starvation are standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the small window my son is looking through while balancing himself on an exercise ball in a room I am convinced expands.  I am not allowed to have this dream.  when my wife whispers, I whisper back and god continues to be here by choice.  repeating myself means I’m here when I wake up.  son, ball, room, window.  ten ******* minimalists.  I am not supposed to admire the travel writing career taken on by my son your surgeon.  I am saddest knowing my wife’s dream is not the same.  ten women and the chance I haven’t done it.  were it the first year of my probable eleven, god is the lie I’d pick to get out of the room.

when homeless, I would try to score a place to do chin-ups.  the false prophet of my inner life ran parallel to god.  I was one side of a custody battle that involved my brother and with him the depression he called Christ because it came and went.  I met a woman convinced she’d become a gate.  not heaven’s ever and not hell’s anymore.  I stood watch while she slept.  no one counts, she was right, the dead made so in a dream.  likewise, if you want to get to my brother you’ll have to go through me.

a woman

(mother
of
a fingernail)

kneels
in snow.  a man

we miss
like a film

thinks

(canvas
of
yen)

water leaves its house.
the only word I have for absence is mouth.
some pills, on other pills, sail.
egg shells, halved as born that way
bubbles.  paperbacks, swollen, zippered
into a mattress.  doors ajar
the awe of room.  ark, whale, and a third

in her like jonah:  a loss
I’d touch
to abridge my hands.

the crow
the fine print
of nowhere.

the bomb shelter
the rumored locale
of a mother’s
laundry room.

the bare cross
the teething
toy
a baby
bypasses
for the neck
of the woman
waiting
for her junk
to fall.

the mare
the anxious
bike.

I was touching oranges every morning and throwing nightly my head back in the company of tossed off grenadiers.  the hotel staff boys and girls alike would come into my room naked showing their teeth to me as smuggled envelopes.  an oil soaked rope ladder moved with the wind under my window gifting the square shouldered gardeners with black dots deeper than any woman.  if the hotelier was on holiday it would fall to me to schedule any hanging that had been postponed- seven men, one woman, I’m not proud.  I wrote eight poems that year, one for each blade-followed blade of the slow fan sipping at the maid’s diamond drunk back.  when the man I worked for brought his men I jumped into the pool, it was lunchtime, and came up swallowing and came up collared inexplicably by my trunks and for this many raised a glass because it took many to raise it.

drops, the man, his book.  it has no end.  but what can be said to men such as he,
not open to the closed terrors of want?  I've doors to lock.  the head librarian
may never return.  presently, sir, I've a candle to light

squired as I am to the dark aisle of sighs.  
the girl, there, on her belly
pretending to read
the intricate press
of your thumb
on her heel-

I don't suppose you'll find her shoes.

father was visited one night by his terrible stomach long enough for it to mumble no one has to know I’m here.  his brothers were all red sheep.  his daughter from his first two marriages has since gone on to assess accident vehicles.  when I was a boy I’d tell her one breast didn’t like the other.  she’d cry.  twirl a baton.  her baby brother would call to her from the front lawn and I’d have to go under her bed for the window ladder because she was wearing a skirt.  her mother was said to be able to floss with cobwebs.  her mother entered my thoughts with video game controllers that had taken the brunt of nosebleeds.  everyone was soft or painting books in an after hours library.  afflicted with hush, my father ventures wholeheartedly into the phrase it’s all ***** in a sandbox while aware of the baton as anomaly.  poems provide the mediocre privacy of poems.

this must be satan’s emergency room.  where so withdrawn I declare myself in need of stitches.  where my mother empties vending machines once a week hoping to see me but dresses like a man her father knew.  where paperwork is accepted from females only and files one as pregnant or twice as pregnant.  where my son would make an airplane but for the heat in his hands.  where my feet grow toward the ocean until I am all feet and my face goes straight.  where satan himself does what he can.  fills the bedpans on days of inspection.

you’re angry that they’re beating him while you’re awake.  to qualify for the reverie of picturing a river it is necessary that you recall the correct number of infants that set sail.  the basketmaker has dedicated her life to relocation.  she leaves behind the ugliest bells.  your son has never been ill but acts like jesus surprised that he is.  the television powers down every time a stone turns into stone.  dying would mean dying before your brother whose blind wife means to live only as humbly as her dyslexia allows.  the *****.

wide-eyed with our father’s exhaustion, my drifter of a brother enters the new house at night to steal a less than perfect fang.  the infamous gun of our youth.

I’ve had children for years.  I’m only now going public.  my advice to them is no secret.  speak when not spoken to.  throw a rock at least once in the general direction of a future sibling.  climb a tree.  in the absence of tree, pray.  if my advice disappears, stop eating.  not too rapidly.

I bury the carnival fish.  my neighbor pretends he is casting while my son ***** on the opening of a plastic bag.  I take the bag and blow into it then pop it on my palm.  my neighbor’s heart is safe but he tries to grab it anyway.  the vietnam war is a pop-up book of the vietnam war.

the sons they share the window from the inside-

they overuse nothing; not palm, not forehead.
they do not fight, though one is older.  
they share a blanket and under it nakedness.
their penises rise but not for long and both sometimes notice.
mostly they giggle, but with patience.  the ice storm
they relieve by saying stupid ice cube storm.
the wires they have been watching sag with branches.
one branch alights middlewise to ash but is whole
for the loft of the wind’s crowding
  
-as two might share a sole thing willed.

two of three
children
go with father
to the movies

-

his sentences
have to them
a smoker’s
brevity

-

understand, you, that the saying
of the word
angel

is limiting
to the length
of my son’s
life

(which must not be
directly related
to god’s attention span)

father takes a shower because he feels half full.  in order to revere him in a detached way I have to run a hot bath and sit on the floor while holding a bar of soap with a plastic fork stuck in it and I have to be blind not to see it’s a sailboat.   mother has to be blind not to see it’s an iron.  I lift it to her unnoticed and there is only so long my hand can burn before it feels like a hand again.  father makes his hands into bunny hands at his bare chest and hops into my mother who squeals and covers her mouth and allows her face to look as one who’s given up the ex-con.  father removes his towel and she whips him with it and he goes naked laughing and swatting at hanging model planes the guns of which he reports to memory.  she fixes  him a plate of food knowing he’ll throw it from the roof and say he’d rather eat a bullet.  when she is outside for the plate my father controls her with a remote he claims doubles as a detonator.  she sees me kissing the ex-con and mouths goodbye like a paratrooper.

my brother enters an advanced state of vicarious living.  

I recognize him most when he is bare handing a baseball.  

     we both know I haven’t been myself.  

-

place matters little unless a deer’s eye brings the fog
down
with it.

in his prayer, my brother asks god for nothing.

     god prays back.

-

our resort cabin inhabits
each of us
differently.

it is either dark or darker.

     asleep, I touch my brother’s cheek
with a fly.

-

we both have reasons for not moving.    

I want to feel old.  to leave  

     knowing

he’s been here before.

as a filmmaker
I’d bury
the permanence
of my son
the magnifying
glass
in full
dress
of the shadow
lurking behind
the crudest
of surveillance
systems

mother attracted to jobless
occupied
men.

a belt once used as a tourniquet.

******* circa 1989.  

1989.

posters of found children.

a reality play.

any information leading to the exact time the prediction was made.

willing to create social network
for pets.

a dog much like the one I lost

that the two  
can fight.

there will be
no more
death*

announced
a wasp

to the lot of us
come to patch
my mother’s
roof-

then a fourth
strange thing
happened

     mother covered
with a black cloth
the empty
birdcage

to my daughter who thinks me moral

I keep only
the animal
that has bitten
at the legs
not jawed
by the trap

to my sons who wish me home**

    the bread crumbs
were eaten
not by birds
but by a starving
boy
with a lost voice
who’d wandered
from his home
in a delirium
brought on
by a toothache

of
velvet crow.

     what moving here
might mean.

that waking
beside you
is old; and land.  that the land
beside you

is asleep.  beside it

a creature
indigenous
to another.

that something
in me
is rich.  not to place

in drawers
used

tape.  that if a train

is crowded, it is crowded

with libertine

balloons.
 
the word chthonic.

     flatlands, or lowered

beds, when we get there

the top bunk
is yours.

awards itself
a **** name
would make
Lazarus

love life.

I prayed often
that you would die.

not horribly, and perhaps
at that age
by death
I meant
disappear.

     wherever you are

I have long held that your reemergence
would bring me closer to god.

Alien’s heaven

poems

Barton Smock
June 2015
 

 
pilot light

baby, baby talk, and pilot light.

kitchens everywhere,
god is alone.
 
no brain

father smokes to make something disappear. he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected. when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil. mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears. terrify no one your childhood knows.
 
son

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.      
 
knees

visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke.  leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad.  my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays.  sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.        
 
yearly

our collective identity is a sick child. some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless. people are for others. are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from. the child prays. the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination. we pray. we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost. I trace a finger to put my finger on. the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once. nothing in the world is the world.
 
boy and gun

it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.  
 
vernal

when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god
 
race

says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.

says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.

says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.
 
area

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)
 
barbaric terms

each twin
slower
than the last, she spits

over my dead body

baby
after baby
out.

as news
of the massacre
spreads, the young
call it mother
by word

of mouth.
 
longing*     *for Gen

the baby boy stiffens at the sight of unrolled dough.  we say he is pointing the way to god.  crippled by the sadness in her hand, his mother keeps a claw mark like one keeps diary.
 
closings

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures
using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.
 
ins

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic
 
bloodless     for Noah

my brother was blinded by a crow.

I’d tell you the story
but know
you hate it.

*******.

brother’s darkroom
became
the crow’s.
 
breathing spells

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.
 
intelligence

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window. sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.
 
disability jargon

i.

when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees

ii.

homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to

iii.

eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self
 
concord

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.    
 
altar

the baby is too light.  its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break.  its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach.  some of the boys bail.  some don’t.  the mother’s nickname doubles as her real.  the baby is not called bricks.


 
zero

when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill.  years go by and I am zero.  the number arrested for suicide.        



 
basics

because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub.  something slides from his belly and becomes wedged.  his dream business goes under even in dream.  he makes eyes at CPR manikins.  his son, his life, pushes for legs.
 
preparedness

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.
 
outlet

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

 
viewership

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.


 
pressure

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.        
 
high

mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.

father, I can’t bury
my face.

in lieu    
of the lord’s
dog, raise

the lord’s
bone.
 
the mice

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect. she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other. both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen. sister gags and it makes him think about gagging. now no more, these were the heart of the note.
 
signal

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  
 
observance

when drought came
to my brother
I left
for the city
where I found myself
blanketing
manhole covers
with my coat
for women
who gathered
on rooftops
with men
whose daughters
had been killed
for jumping
rope
 
peril

I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.

take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.

I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.

stay small, future.  

persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.      
 
no devil

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world. hell was always the preparing of hell.
 
inseparable

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.      
 
masters

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist. I am alone. I am brief stay of bullet. god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process. when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside. I miss mom. gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.
 
was

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.
 
gauze

the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew.  her insomnia
has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill.  her milky eyed

-

husband
revs a tow truck
to death
in a heavy fog.  it is possible, humanly

-

possible

-

there’s nothing
to see here.  that her god

-

is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s
spirit

-

animal.  
 
image

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire
 
godless

godless
balloon
animal
 
root effects     for Miles J. Bell

like he’s laying
yellow
on his road
out of grief
brother
takes a drag
and keeps it
until his head
is underwater
is what they call
with apples.

his eyes
have always been
two poverties
unexplored.  he is old, alien’s

heaven
he is old
but not before
he knows it.
 
the alien wept but was not heard weeping

not all
drones
dream
of you

thought clouds exist.
as does the advice
god
took.

I love your stick figures.
I love what you’ve done
with your hair.

I live in a hotel.  it has
one room
and maybe
the room it was.

two things you can do at once
are a brief
pause.

it is so
never suddenly
late.

the boy takes a long look inside himself.  his girlfriend settles on a word she can spell.  they sit here on the kitchen floor because it is clean.  the dishwasher is old and runs loudly.  miles off an ambulance driver attempts to enter a silent film while holding a garage door opener.  now back to the boy.  as my dad would say.

on my way to a rose, I passed your father.

he was brushing a moth
from the ageless fly

of his eye. his body

he said
had been called
by a bell. balefire,

mine body.claimed
he’d counted
ever hill

in the midwest. his bike

he’d pushed up
all three. in the late field

your father
did not ask.

I told him you were.

my son will never walk.

it is not unbearable
but it is also
not
still.

he rolls from one display to the next.

the beatnik Lucifer
using a fork  
to make a ripple
in the second
bathroom’s
mirror.

the spider’s immaculate web in the open mouth of the baby Jesus.

Gatsby’s gay lover working a hook from a woman’s lip

a day before going blind?

the wind overturned our trampoline which pinned the wild white pup named Fossil.  the storm passed and was our father.  our mother dragged a broom behind a small brain.  two things that are both cognitive dissonance took root in the dead twin that once bit my arm before going back to eating crayons.  one of the children I wasn’t was thought to be unlovable but later succumbed to an adorable Holocaust survivor.  are we trash?  as the pup relays itself

to god’s headache.

i.

horrors of the gentle;
a list.

father

in a son's grocery.

all things tower.

ii.

I am weak but only for you.
I am weak but only for you.

iii.

if your only fear is that you will be eaten
you are not

afraid.

iv.

the mirror's
most fervent
devotee-
has no face
 
and in these last hours
has no face.

v.

perfectly round
the muscle
that slides
from its arm.

vi.

state your grounds

for burial.

vii.

a scroll, flat.  or a tongue.  

viii.

an elephant can be opened
with the tusk
of another.

its belly can accommodate
most families.
 
ix.

the under-shepherds
under

the train

cannot lift
a single crow.

x.

what one takes for god's coat

is probably
just a moth.

xi.  

my house
is your
inherited
house.

          and death its own angel.

there’s a mattress on the side of the road that everyone pulls over to jump on. hell, some get half a mile down and come back having thrown their shoes out the window.  others go all the way home to get their unattended children or oldest relation.  some of the cars seem to be auditioning for destitute

rucksack
clowns.  also hell I saw recently a two person bike with no one on it give over and rest on the mattress.  my worst thoughts you beat with a broom.

a friend of mine begs me to have a beginning.  I rub my hands together and lose track of which cleans which.  my mother steps back and forth over a bucket.  my father inspects the chalk outline of my brother’s progress.  my body wants to be my brother’s body and so plagiarizes the latest convulsion.  it happens to be violent.  I love my sister for trying to pinpoint the moment her shadow appeared and for deterring my stillness.  my brother is a riot.  his creation story gives birth only once with dignity.  he mangles a paper clip and pulls a praying child by the hair and is separated from his life.  the paper clip becomes a bit small enough to be used on a snake.  I have a cut that needs some attention.  the void is a man.  the beginning is money.

on any hill without a cross, they pause, and the father points.

when they are tired, father and son, they plunk into
then off
the sides of valley homes.

one home in particular remembers thinking
kids these days
roll anything
looks like a tire.

your own father smacks whichever finger lifts without the rest.
says you sleeping don’t mean your epilepsy knows.

in your dreams the father does not point, and there isn’t a son.
just a man on one hill after the other, sunlight purling
into the seeable
dark yarn sea.  his eyes leaving his head,

somersaulting,
somersaulting,
godbraving.

I was trying to write about ***.  
it’s not like I was planning to be there.
I had a cotton ball in my hand; I walked out.
a bird circled high.  
I could hear my garage door surrender itself, flatly,
to a low heaven.
I was sad not to have the work of my arms behind me.
sad god would not once be startled by an animal.
the leg of my pants drooped from the mouth of my mailbox.
gentle cloud, and I quote

I thought of you in uniform and was copiously delivered.

dear god

dear god
I will fight you
or anyone
for the title
of this poem.

I will fight you for my son.

I will fight you
or anyone
who drops him
in the ocean

     who circles back
to save him.

focal

not even
a half hour
passes

and the man
is tying
the kicked off
shoe

     wondering
if the other
is nearby
or in

the ambulance
with his boy

immolation**

when it burns
in the oven
we call it
crow bread

     in our mouth
we call it
wasp
then slap

first our own
then the cheek
closest-

when it does not burn
at all
we check to see
if we are wearing
black socks, if we are standing

on carpet

why did Shia LaBeouf cross the road?  because he wasn’t a chicken, he was Shia LaBeouf.  I want to worry.  it is funny to me like Patton Oswalt and Lena Dunham being flabbergasted.  I wrote once how suicides fight for position.  suddenly everyone knows they were once Leroi Jones.  some of course were and I want to be sorry.  the original thought in my head was to be postdated in birth like a present.  because of where his home is, Lars Von Trier is homeless.  imagine I lived from the age of 18 to 23 and from the age of 24 to 29 I got paid to reenact those years previous.  I will waste my time with yours and there will be a whirlwind of poverties speeding by and seemingly one.  if the great performances of James Franco say again how the unknown soldier is the eater of fame I swear I’ll call you and your double out as Lynchian.

the would be
landmarks

     (the fish)     she eats     in a dream.

formerly, a palmist.
sweet on my mom.

mine are still
her favorite

hands.  

on its own     all hunger     is young.

The church is an iceberg.  

     from Winter Night, Charles Simic


No one remembers what it was
They were knitting
And what happened when the ball of yarn
Rolled out of their laps
And had to be retrieved.*  

     from Gallows Etiquette, Charles Simic



I was on lookout in a tower
     eye level with god.
I had a pretty little head
     on my shoulders.

the idea came to me
in fingers

that touched
my heels.

and notice, in my knee,
pins, toothpicks. randomly.
the kitchen, softer, than recall.
than rain, than book, or empty hall.
than bird, than bee, than tooth
in straw. what bird what bee
I wouldn't know. save sounding
what a day might own. I wouldn't know
my wife has left
but for this brush, its night haired theft:

my wife has left. she wasn't tall. my sons
have gone
to hobble dolls.

again, this word ******.  my anger loves you.  only my anger loves you.  a closed pocket mirror in my mother’s purse is on its own.  a person is a message.  the offer stands;  I will ****** you in exchange for ***.  this is not where we go when we live.

(second in a series of shorts for my kids)


Zen was a boy of nine years whose sister of fifteen beat him nightly.  When she would do this, it would be during bouts of sleepwalking that began when she too was nine.  Her name was Beam, and he loved her and she loved him when both were awake.  When both were awake, they would count the bruises on his body and see if their numbers were the highest they’d ever been.  Zen did not tell Beam she was his abuser and Beam promised to find out.  This presented a problem as Beam, no matter how hard she tried, could not stay awake long enough to catch the person she didn’t know she was.  Beam wanted to ask their parents to keep watch, but Zen would not let her, saying he was worried that if the person was identified he or she may start beating someone else.  So they counted bruises, and loved.  Zen is now a boy of fifteen and Beam went missing three years ago.  Every morning Zen looks over his spotless body and prays he too will be kidnapped by gentle aliens who cannot hurt their own but want to.

‘ghost’     ‘angst’

     ‘wade’     where one might

‘weep’

he began to kick the place apart in his mind but didn’t finish.
some of the chairs were already down and the tables nailed.

she cut her knees and we said why

‘underwater’     the knife was there and my wrists

were also     ‘courtship’     ‘breadbasket’

     her face to which the years had not been kind but he could tell
they’d been polite.

I know my mother     ‘merestead’

‘mammogram’     I know my mother to be haunted

by a fetus     father took his hell

*to basement
where his food
came up

mothers innocent of crow chalking about in white grass.  fathers, guilty and gospel.  gardens

and pocket deer.  my sister has a stone, one cheekbone, and a kite.  how you are seeing

that stone, let me this-  it is not god’s tear, tooth, godcrumb.  nor is it madly

a raindrop.  she loves it she says for its milk.  but she’s 12.  digs

in the night
at her ear.

from The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (poems, barton smock, September 2013)

[wilderness mantra]

sister Cain falls in love with me through her brother.  
     I physically blame her with both hands.  

she has left my brother’s lips  
on the lord.  

I try to kiss her at a baseball game
but am drunk
and kiss instead
my male
abuser.  

violence begins with me.  


[NICU]

in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.  

~

from father, footrace, fistfight (poems, barton smock, June 2014)


[object permanence]

rabbit
named
vertigo


[my son the ******]

online I find instructions on how to make my own scarecrow. I wake my sister and have her put on her pajamas while I take the overcoat my father is using for a blanket. when we’re an error of a mile from home I have to push the ATV with my sister on it. she is crying about flooding and I’m telling her what the scarecrow will look like. she wants it to have a cape. because my son isn’t born yet, there’s not much to like.


[orison]

gaze upon our father
create a woman
and suddenly

know
to leave us


[collapse]

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

~

from The Women You Take From Your Brother (poems, barton smock, August 2014)


[weaponry]

after passing many dogs
with more skin
than fur, that seem to be
the starving men
of my dreams
if the starving men
of my dreams
had been brought
to the same place
to die
if that place
were me,

the man who sold
my brother
a gun

goes

as a father
praying over
a solitary
son

to his knees
in front
of a larger cage
and I see
the smallest elephant
and I keep
seeing it
as if I’m the only
one who can
though I know
it’s there, the sound it makes

like nothing sick, nothing animal-

I am not the brother
I’m the size of.


[spoils]

a distraction that doesn’t explode. I’d say children but nostalgia is still a child. head, I need a volunteer. god’s reply in the form of a sext. a brick taken for a sponge by a bout of sleepwalking in someone I can shower.


[flatfoot]

the missing man’s yo yo
between the hours
of this and that a.m.
was no doubt cared for
by meadow mice
our estimate would be
by all of them
what a service
they’ve provided
we would advise

forget the tree, the tire swing, and with these mice

forget the man

~

from Misreckon (poems, barton smock, December 2014)


[end psalm]

god had an earache and I heard thunder. I learned to shrink into the smallness of my brain. I associated money with my father’s funny bone. my mother with the dual church of hide and seek. I went on to have a son with special needs. he cried once. cried milk.


[form psalm]

I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore. the animal gets between my son and my son’s imaginary friend. the root of its insomnia is not man but the fear of personification. god’s gone when the story starts. to war, to war.


[inquiry psalm]

when it comes to humoring
me
by name
my memories
draw a blank.

I had a daughter
and three
sons.

my hands
could’ve been
the hands
of an umpire.

in the untouched church
of suicide
was the untouched
church
of *******.

it’s like seeing
a television
on tv. the comedians
and their failed
sisters.

do your thoughts
still take
the temperature
of god?

~

from Eating the Animal Back to Life (poems, barton smock, July 2015)


[sandbox]

even with her fingers in her ears, she can hear the toy horse whipped. if we don’t have food, we can’t pray. my father was hired for his quickness, his hands

to salt
the rain. grief is a guard dog from the permanent circus.


[sightings]  

****, kid, your poems.  I took a page from your father’s thesaurus and played scrabble with god.  I came back knowing your name as code for omission.  your mother didn’t break a chair over my back because the chair didn’t break.  I worked it off in a building from the wrong twin city.  after that, my homeless jailer became your brother’s landlord.  your brother he played citizen’s parole to my arrest.  borrowed my hat on account it wasn’t full of money.  like most men, we were in love.  he had a note he’d written that would appear before a big fight it said don’t let my suicide beat you to death.


[ones]

the book is a mourning vessel for what its reader stands to lose. I have a father for every type of silence.

from* The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake (September 2013)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-blood-you-dont-see-is-fake/paperback/product-21966942.html


raiment

we are not here
to enshroud
the myth
of the woman
who swims
naked-

we are here
might our sons
mourn
the stickman’s
belief
     that his wife
went to pieces


praise act

you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.

I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.

you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.

up ahead, we work together.

I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.

our father?

he is made mostly of the words that display my words.


proof

my birdcage was a stuffed bear and my bird was a moth.  oddly the bird protected my sister from knowing she was molested and oddly its cage promised my brother he would again be gay.  oddly only because it was planned.  I was more spelled than born and consented often to being sounded out.  I carried with me a grey blanket that I held like a curtain when asked.  my eyes were peepholes I had to avoid.            


all

     the first time I can recall a teapot whistling in the manner I’d imagined

a teapot
to whistle

     my brother was cutting himself in the tub, gingerly, a test run…

-

the whistling scared the **** out of him, the bejesus

-

being made of nothing allowed brother
to volunteer
in New Orleans
after Katrina

     he opened a few refrigerators

that’s all it took

-

without my brother, I’d be in his words

beside myself

     some ****** eared stranger mucking up a white door
listening
as if to a radio
announcing the missing

     blow up dolls

by name


funereal

as some things incorrectly have wings, we stamp a chicken into the hood of a cop car.  the groundskeeper on break inside the church wonders aloud how much is left of the lord.  a boy not part of our boyhood bikes over to us with his feet he’s named individually show and tell.  the cop chuckles but straightens out when he sees what I’ve made of my hand.  the boy says careful it might stay that way for good.


infant travelogue

mittens on the forepaws of a dead wolf.  

one must be serious
about art
but also
flirty.

I will raise you as my own.  

I will make two parts
of your mother’s
passing.

she will live in childbirth.


notes on the saints (iii)

a crookedness within a white cat.  a naked boy on crutches.  a girl in a pink jumpsuit jogging in place beside a man rolling a tire.  all of this says I’ve witnessed my father by himself on a child’s swing ******* two unlit cigarettes.  we don’t exist until god begins to worry.  our neighbor is an old woman with a gun.  she is afraid her color will suddenly change.  when she chases my father home I understand the riddle of his cigarettes.  around him I pretend to be asleep.  I hear him watering a rag and wait for him to press it to my nose and tell me my dreams are bleeding.  when a kitten, the head of our white cat would stick to the refrigerator door.

red words
on a page
in Exodus.

the yielding
bird red

in paintings
grandfather
gave.

glass
in grandmother
breathing.

     her hands
how they
would fuss

bow ties
to the palms
of jesus.

mother’s
yarn
too tight

on my finger.

visiting my brother’s neck.

sister Cain falls in love with me through her brother.  
     I physically blame her with both hands.  

she has left my brother’s lips  
on the lord.  

I try to kiss her at a baseball game
but am drunk
and kiss instead
my male
abuser.  

violence begins with me.