three unicorns
in horse’s
dream
surround
a lame
deer

can dream
be stopped

I enter with my small life to profile the impressions you did of my brother.  these kids, they cough in photos.  as for her, her father’s voice could up and speak at a moment’s notice.  I move the gun daily.  if my head wasn’t glued on, I’d have lost my ears to the hive mind of ghost forgiveness.  my brother liked to play leap frog.  **** art.  we live too long.

an imaginary pet
in the thoughts
of its previous
owner.

the left hand
the afterlife
of the right.

a muscle disorder
in a sponge
sized
infant.

the *****’s paper feet.

lifted from the eyesight of a torn seagull

the beached outhouse of a father’s mermaid

the infant
would get
so angry
siblings
would blow
on its face
it would start
breathing
and a biblical
sigh

would usher
itself
into the nursery
of the infant’s
mind
where

vehicle
to a mother’s
heist
     a child
of present
fathers

would happily
****
on whoever

while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation.  in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god.  my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery.  if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.

god
my path
to meaning
nothing

-

she had a sock drawer and a  pair of secret hands

the hardest time
with houses

-

what if the end stops coming

-

what if

from one cannibal to another

it is extra
this bone
from the horse

Moon
ate

the boy kicks on his back, which is good for his memory.  
the house does not clamor for care.
the dryer has a thought, fantastic, like a pony.
the mailman, jesus christ, the mailman has caught
his sleeve
on a branch.  the boy’s mother is laughing.  indeed,
she may die.

the cigarette
the worrier’s
flashlight

the past
a widow…

deserted childhood, electric eel.

if poor
put mouth
where mouth
is

it is odd
at first
but becomes
common
the inclusion

of ghost
on a list

of demands

-

winter means
little
means
ahead

of winter

the mothers
they swallow
snow

worms

-

in no time at all

the bomb-maker’s garden
leaves its mark
on the wrong

snake

-

the infant believes I’ve sent for my body

mother talks him down
the shy
shepherd
whose dove
is deaf

father
remembers
food

the devoured
bury
the bored
stone

the rest
is easy

friendless, born

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.

the question
of where
evil
resides

has not been
knowingly
posed
to the man
locked in a room
with nothing more
than a small rock.

in an open field
of no aberrations
a woman
goes into labor
for god.

most men will throw the rock
before using it
for pleasure.

age is a factor
to age
groups.

to the garden I cannot see-

pain as my witness
I go.

a father shepherds his family from the storm cellar as his own father prepares to lose the orchard.  

your life is a boy
looking for signs
made by women.  

your mother is a vow of silence
you were born     to second.

I am nobody I speak of.  those alive to nuance, those seeing

a necklace     in a grandmother’s     clotted leg.

     god is not silent.  god is forgiven.

to jump
the dream
of audience
that buried
my father’s
rib

I stand

on an operating table
in a circus
tent
and invite

my mother
to believe
all earthquakes
belong
to satan
and not

to the devil
my sister
was
when high
on the body, its boneless

forgetting

age I’m at
I go
from bath
to funeral
to bath-

puppet
that made
a fist

thunderstorms
reported missing
by some
verbose
orphan

in the valley
referred to
as the church
of aggressive
amnesiacs

a family
of pickpockets
gathers
for a group
picture

only to find
the single
use
camera

forgotten

and the boy
responsible

missing...

I’ll dream
(when I
die)
of all
the sleep
I didn’t

outside
of mother

get

the wounded cursive of the boy who thinks himself chicken

her child
cracks
in a lifeboat
egg
after egg, her memory

has
that dream
to which
the hangman
gave
his word

the denied
sainthood
of both
imagination
and curiosity

the baby
you can’t explain

and the cuts

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.

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.

a lover of movies sets a chair in a field. sits the pillow here then there upon it.

his daughter her new trick is to bell the head of a spoon to her nose. to move is grotesque.

up close their house looks merely bigger.

her strange shoulder he sees it same as her fall down three steps. sees it without looking.

the spasms, the dormant minutiae of curse that by their accident of suddenness have killed held mice, continue.

mice the minions of mute thunders; the exiled scars of clouds.

the deaf curvature of your knee,
the low nod behind you of a humble balloon; these I address that I have returned the lover of all things made

his chair might the monstrous pass.

I made
for a toy
car
a movie
screen

from a sheet
of aluminum
foil...

/ mother worked herself out of a straitjacket

she wanted
to paint

/ my stone-faced brother
had just been born
to mark
the cessation
of all

thunder

I pick a child to bring with me.  it’s Sunday, and we need bread for the week.  the market’s been gutted since the lot of them were born.  I used to errand with my wife but it made her feel alone.  we starved together for months before receiving notice we were no good at it.  in that same notice was an invitation to attend a symposium on regulating orphanhood.  we decided to go and at that to go arm-in-arm as a grandly private joke.  we came home ready to be serious and went about choosing six, all sent from heaven, as we thought they’d been kicked out.

I am looking for the mark on my body that will tell me how near I was to you when I fell asleep. we can’t know where touch has been. the third animal to which I pray

was it always
deaf

being
that you know
how my mind
works,

revelation
is suspect.

one needn’t have a baby to leave it alone.

better to brush
the combs
from my hair.

dogs don’t run off, dogs find
the twins of other dogs
and are
home.

I heard the couch was dragged
outside
with sister
on it.

this from one
who smokes
in her sleep.

suicidal, mom is thinking for two.  the storm says again there’s a hand in my soup.  my ears are sounds from the son of god.  the sister of sister insane has an arm and with it throws a roller skate at a school bus.  you can’t see my ******* anymore than I can see the worried eyes of a giraffe.  people are people from church.  the we in we let her believe.

for Jake, for Amy, for those who know*

in the beginning,

his mother and father
were there
to be
the parents
he’d lost.

his first tooth
anchored
a ghost
within

shouting distance
of the boat
named

for ghost.  he amassed

a useless
vocabulary

that nonetheless
included
the word

amidst.  when women  

and children
waged war
for the men
who’d agreed
on the drug
god
would take, he burned

etymology’s
least favorite

haunt
with a fire
he’d ******
from a sword…  

-

the lives we touch are evil.

go
to a different
hell.

men of a certain age vanish into witness.  two bricks are tied to a pair of hands that go on to clap above a baby.  I chop the tail of the mouse in your mouth to pieces.  optimism is any man after me also ******* unsuccessfully underwater.  is your god admitting there will be no more where that came from.

watching a horror film
barefoot
     when the high
priest
of my eight

thoughts    

carries my mind
to a corner
church

funerals are a form of menticide.  also, writers.  undead, I don’t mean to talk.  what I mean to do is approximately yearn.  for something nearby.  an old computer.  plugged in, cursor blinking, hell’s door.  for awareness.  priesthood.  box-cutter.  wayside.  what began as Franz Wright.  what became Lou Reed.

leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards

happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe

reverie a learned behavior

god a tornado warning and hearing
a ghost town, this

a cigarette from the purse
of a past

/ mother

i.

two boys
skipped school
to fight
in a field.

we who stayed
took sides.

I somehow became a leader

      which mattered only
when the boys
returned.

their original quarrel
ended
in that field
     where a scarecrow

interested
both-

ii.

     boys
whose names
imprison me.

it was easier
to tell
man
he was missing
a rib
than to confront
the inquiry
her body
would pose
had it been here
with her
however
long.

dogs
were wild
then.

Rabbits stick to the tree of blood. I hear everything that I believe. It was snowing. Your father was choking. Bone, he said, in the bread. They don’t even cry.

We had three good dogs. Three of my brothers shared a dress. Neighbors shook televisions to hear the ocean. Bones faked brokenness. It’s not hard to say it was real. In a city of bathrooms, puking is a language. Taking pills in a parked car shrinks god and/or roadkill. Sleep is smaller than an angel. Bodies eat pain.

I can count on my teeth the number of your teeth gone soft in the knees of boys. There’s nothing you could’ve done to make me beautiful. The ghost of body image believes in one ghost. We’re all too young but see anyway the unfinished angel blowing on the stomach of christ. Mother from her father wants only the pea behind his eye. Distance is clickbait for god.

I told the older kids it was in my ear. They shook me a few times and took turns looking. I rubbed my jaw as if to mark myself removed from the tender convincing of permanence. To each other, even now, they describe the wasp. Death makes god last longer.

Teach the baby to **** in its stomach. Go bitemark bald to the burning of tire swings. Pretend you can be nostalgic in America. Do this by having at all times handfuls of woozy spiders that prevent you from making guns of your hands. Do this by drinking. I wasn’t worried but then my phone started working in a dream. In heaven, every mirror is an exit wound.

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

I count the same money and think of my body. I send to a stranger a TikTok of a man crushing dried insects with a red rolling pin. I don’t watch anything anymore that requires sound. The last scream I heard was god’s and I named it god. The stranger messages me twice that they recognize the man. A lonely world, but for kids.

A ghost sets itself on fire with a cigarette once lit to mark the end of emptiness. No one cares about my body. Touch still doesn’t know that skin is the god of touch. I hide my daughter’s mouth in mine and wait for the angel of those on suicide watch to notice my teeth. The ghost is so still it’s looking at hell.  

( or maybe I hide my daughter in a ghost and these are the ghost years lost to the god of fast food whose son is a hunger pain whose son is a hunger whose son’s childishly staged crucifixion shocked time into a fomo that found eating to be a bone from an extra past where I practice chewing upside down get pregnant for no one

her mother
left the house
each morning
to work
inside
an animal
that was always
on the move

her father
spent the day
spitting
into toilets
for any sign
of tracking
god

why
every year
she goes
as blood?

she says
until
it’s hers

I am looking
to be sad
whispers
who else
but the blind man
in the poem
previous

son
face down
in an empty
bowl
of milk.  

his long hair
carried off
by his sister’s
head.