older poems

~

[dream’s fossil]

dear eggshell belly. dear mother. dear church of my father’s owl. dear Ohio. dear owl the deaf bee’s church.

~

[the lost]

before it is dark enough to carry the television into the forest and leave it, a mother checks the oven for her loaf of black bread. her overseas child follows a dead fly to another dead fly and so on. her sensitive brother turns over in his grave to be on all fours. her wiser husband rips the cord from the base of the television and uses it to whip the basement door. when the door opens, any dog will do.

~

[men hermetic]

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.

~

[cessation psalm]

the less said about god’s addiction to brevity

as heard
by the angel
of birth

~

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some poems from available collections:

[cripplings ]

touch is a sign of weakness. my father opens his mouth after speaking. meanwhile, miracle, it occurs to me in separate car accidents that bringing me to my son in god is less an undertaking than that of arming the man who transports a stopwatch to a cemetery. do we live the lives of those experimenting? beauty is not alone. suppose it knows.

~

[notes for stimuli]

I start my sentences
like this:

the thing is.

thing is
my son
like yours
is dying. thing is

I was told
by god
to be a man.

I love you all.

I love
but start a fight
with someone
I’ve never met
over what
a *******

poverty

no one
talks to
not
in years.

one must apple boldly in a cornfield of rust.

baby clotheshorse
eats baby
litmus.

taste
keeps my tongue
in the dark.

~

[fasting vision]

to punish my brother
for no reason
I told him
I could see
his stomach’s
shadow
but because
my visions
never
work
I vomited
what my sister
ate

~

[sylvan vision]

nudes
from the circus
of harm
grab
the evolved
handle
of my father’s
apocalypse
and though
I call it easy
what I’ve gone
on the doll ****
I can’t help
but bride
up
a storm
giving oral
to a corncob
from fixation’s
honeymoon

~

[daughteresque]

what would she ask
sadness

that old blindfold
from the future

how did you
get old, how

did my father
eat
and eat
at the same

time

perhaps
you’ve seen it
the mask
that took

my face

~

[forty]

because I wanted the poem
to feel
as rare
as my father’s
anger, and because

a pigeon
is
what it eats, and because

mad with bread
the oven
my brother
buried
took a snapshot
of our dog
bigfoot
sleeping
in hell, and because

my son is not a pattern
his body
can resume: the alien was impressed

but my mother
god love her
was bored

~

[BURNINGS]

~reanimation

it is nothing

compared
to the sobbing
of worms

~outhouse

the bathtub is full of ****

it wants to be
an egg

~frogsong

depression

decorates
a bird

~miracle

a bunk-bed for sister’s hair

this dream where an owl as big as a mouse lives with a mouse in the mouse's hole and they share a scratched up plate that looks like something a microscope would eat off of and for once I don't really know who I am in the dream beyond maybe just in the theater making sure I don't drink too much because when I drink too much I miss scenes but inevitably I miss a few scenes and I come back to the mouse and the owl fighting over the plate and the mouse kicks the owl out and says this wasn't normal anyway and of course the mouse says all this without speaking and it's only when the owl doesn't leave that the mouse realizes the owl isn't real and the problem with this realization is that the mouse then thinks all owls aren't real and I can see where this is going and so can you and I told a friend about this dream and he said dreams don't usually have a moral or end that way and the real end of the dream is that I don't have friends and now we're both sad

I am asked on voicemail if I want to get weird. The message is a week old. I had already a weird week. I don’t know if the invitation still stands. I don’t know if calling this person back would be weird. I call and get voicemail. I ask if the weirdness is still available to be gotten. It is important to me that the identity of the requestor is known only to me. This is why: the requestor is presently dead. That, you can know. Also, that said person died the day of the first message about the weirdness. I recognize this as my life, or more correctly, as a thing my life includes.

1976
her ghost
on standby
my mother
throws a phone
at the man
reaching
for his gun
while my father
closes
in a prison
yard
the white
bible
he’s named
the gospel
of the bad
knee
and swears
to carry
my voice
and with it
me

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

will have you know, brother
I’ve endeared myself
to vandalism.

when undercover, and in danger
I lift from one of your letters
the phrase

     I deeply miss deer.

my sickness has returned from its pilgrimage
to the year 1985
and has
unfortunately

been documented
     as an acquired taste.

when there is a god
or a nesting
doll

I hushedly petition
that it entertain
the tenets of our sister
     the startled
futurist-

the middle life of hands

say poverty could possess a doll whose favorite and only outfit a schoolteacher mends while picturing

     two pieces of chalk which become the late life ******* of the ghost mother who cannot cradle the crucified yet travels to the many scenes of crucifixion to lade the Christ pale glove onto the hands men think they’ve touched.    



sibling talent

my sister rubs cigarette ash onto her palms.  her lips could kiss a mime and get away with it.  I can’t walk on my hands at night without having my father come home mid-day to find my mother on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with circus cloth.      




husk bearing*

the bath a baby pool for the barren.  I turn the knobs, hear nothing, and call to my mother.  call with *ma, and then ma again.  most made of one silence but she of two.  my right ear at the door and my other patient.  her knees sound like my father’s cheekbones.  the tears in them he says are shrapnel.  of course I don’t believe this.  when I wanted to paint my treehouse yellow mother straightened me and asked for stillbirth yellow.  then poverty yellow.  for another example you would have to believe my bout with chicken pox left a yellow basket stranded on the still river of my tongue.  

     listen.  the buzz on a delay

but bee
arrives.

[entries for tone]

it learned to read by being called every name in the book and it wrote eulogies for the children of getaway drivers and it knew nail as the light bulb of a dream journal and it did not know which palm print went with which birthmark on its mother’s vision board and it had its hair pulled out in a cornfield by a boy / god was too / young to have

[entries for Ohio (ii)]

how absence is to me a bowl and to you a basket. how brothers fight over the last fish and the first snowflake. how sisters arrive whole from the museum of shortcuts. how a baby dressed like another baby is not abused. how a father slips a bear into his story of a mousetrap. how a mother points a set of wind-up teeth away from a square of wet cement. how on a soundstage I roll my ankle while you lift alone a magician’s birthweight. how ****. how it listens in a bathroom stall to the click of a viewfinder. how they horse. and ache.

[no animal makes up for lost time]

toothache
come home
I’ll wear
a shirt

[untitled]

why does uncle
love baseball
and throw
so hard

what’s a city

kid I come before you
knowing full well
I won’t remember
my answers

the left hand is for pawing
at the broken
rabbits, these buildings

think god
will jump

who does memory
impress, who

can it warn

/ I left you for nobody else

the name must be shorter than a pastoral.  the baby must outlive your father’s car.  asking for the possibility of good *** must not be compared to anything.  the person father is underneath must be from your past, your mother.  the casket must be a rumor, and open.  rumor must be definitive, like eclipse, like eye patch.  the door must be placed on the back of a military mom and a photograph is preferred.  the doorway must become addicted to selfies.  dear boy, humiliate the right dog.  tether dog.  eat so much my girlfriend says dear boy, dear sea, stomach.  you can’t hate poetry and the world.   Bob is secretly a soccer mom rubbing a lamp in public and is also sometimes Jesus trying to step on a scale.

what can god read to make him feel more human?  then there’s this about how the nose and ears never stop growing.  I can believe it because at desks even so calm some seem to be cowering.  then you have an accepting friend and I have mine and they kiss in pockets of sadness sidestepped by tomboys who have their own issues like frogs.  point wildly.  it’s not a shame beauty ******-up.  I look sometimes like a different baby.

the ten commandments

the blues

my sister’s hair

rubber thumbs

/ bedtime
for the bathed
foot, for the bee

we started

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.

he dresses plainly and drives a car beaten up by a lovely in-his-prime salesman.  he draws disability to repair the memory he has of enlarging the vacation photos you delete.  he gets paid to be no one.  there are days that are not the day his check is short.

lives in Columbus, Ohio, with a white wife and four white children.  one of his kids cannot chew gum.  in *** his body consents to stave off yours.  the lion’s share of his self esteem comes from automated payment reminders.  most recently his stepfather passed away.  before you read this latter part to your mother, remember who you were.  links forthcoming.

inside a wall, like a sponge, moves god.
when my hand moves, my hand is upon him.

my son was born, part of my palm, in his brain.
many walk into a room, and recover.

wherein
the white soup
of thought
that could not
sustain
the brainless
pilot
of paper
airplanes
was drawn
from my son’s
unheard
ear
might memory
attend
foresight
the church
of loss

above me many characters frequent my father.  they shake him firmly and I pretend their hands are crumbling into my mouth.  I don’t know where I’ve lived but know I’ve been moved numerous times.  in the movies that have been on seemingly since my birth there is one I miss.  in it, a room service cart is toppled by two men going for a gun.  moments later a shirtless woman rights the cart and the righting wakes me to how prone I am to having a body.  when we are alone, father reads by flashlight underneath the somewhere of me.  I wonder with my feet if his feet are cold.  I tried early on to go to heaven but couldn’t convince a single language that I wasn’t already there.  when a woman looks like my mother, I spy on hell.

you’re not small enough to be alone in the world.

old ghost-brain
gets a bike.

the untouchable redness
of certain
rabbits

the sunburnt scar on a fisherman’s arm

starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.

water
is nothing’s
blood.

because
when mine
stopped

     your sadness
was still
moving.

-accident-

because
when mine
stopped
your sadness
was still
moving

-


I will be posting on a youtube channel weekly, give or take, of myself reading poems of mine and perhaps others I admire. This is the first video. It is small and unkempt and precursor to more of the same. I don’t give shaving tips. I don’t modify. Link as such is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiqLUwP68oA

not all of my childhood was spent in a stopped car listening to my mother wonder aloud if the monkey in the light was okay.  not all of my childhood took time.  I was the tooth my teeth chose.  my father was a magician because his hands had a terrible memory.  he touched only those things that had turned into what they were.  stone is the maker of stone.

my worries remain.  my double is moving up the ladder.  you think he is me and your thought is convincing.  I know I have a skirt because I’m wearing one.  the youtube video displays a duration of 5:11.  my mother pops in with a bag of sugary cereals.  there are great lengths that end with my father’s open mouth.  I am heartbroken that in the video the SUV has tinted windows behind which a daughter is supposedly processing the beating her dad takes at the booted heels of bikers.  if my double has a second life, I dream it.

the spider has seven legs no longer in the raccoon’s ear

-

god is from another planet

it does what it can
the world
to belong.

I saw a wheelchair
chase
an ambulance.

babies don’t know
they can’t be
alone.

we peopled this.

i.

I approach the dream as if I'm asleep
the answers written on my hand

ii.

I stick out my tongue
at the mid
born

baby

iii.

I raise awareness by praying
you go through
my exact
hell

iv.

I see myself as my son
writing to his father
about deformities

v.

in a crowd of soldiers
my daughter's head
bobs up and down

as if passed around
on a stick

vi.

it takes an army to imagine
only one thing

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.

the outhouse, and the woman in it, gone.

father’s
praying
place.

if beside it
I could see
the open empty toolbox

I knew to yank the dog homeward.
I was doing what anyway.    

in mother’s voice.  in brother’s
untucked
shirt.

messing around with our neighbor, the messiah.

if death is merely
the end of the message
why live
only to improve
its narration?

no one loves the sound of my voice
but you.

god is a recording.
talk, suicide.

the lonely man holds that the mouth is god’s mark.  the lonely man announces with a blow dryer my bath bound mother.  years ago, I was caught doing two things and was sentenced while both were speaking.  nowadays, I hear for my father who listens politely to talk of never let a beast be your eyes.

i.

     allowed myself to be born.

promptly died
for my brother.

defended
on my own terms
interior

design.

ii.

led
one parent
to the lower
of two
police
states…

iii.

…emerged alone.  having sublimated
my son’s
memoirs.

the zombie
sleeping through
communion, the love

coma

has
for death

a father at a table
looking at
two blocks.

his hash
mark
mind
suspended above

his image
as it flickers
between

adult supervision
and acts
of resuscitation.

his child
breathing
for blanket.

doctor’s orders
my special hat
is a dark
cloud.

spacing issues
have disappeared.

thin air is a black sheep born without a black kitten’s heart.

tell him
belief
is twice
the distance
abandonment
leaves.

that for baby longhand

a father easily
beautifies
the unburied deep.

don’t worry, because here is worry:

a stone in a grounded bird’s nest.

it is easy to say, I guess. to come up with
the fed multitudes.

hell is to be in two places at once that are both hell.
see above.

see below:

shade of stone, kind of bird. knowing, here is knowing:

the poor write good.

Cain and Abel
argued
over what
came first.

the homophobe.

as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.

with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.

I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.

all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.

i.

grief
is the angel
apprenticed
to coma

ii.

dearest disabled,

we’re not here
long enough
for god
to do
the damage
he needs
to survive

iii.

this rabbit hole
we’ll use it
for the shadow’s
mouth

her handwriting
knew
it was being
watched

only when
fully realized
by grief’s
main sorrow
that some
were children.

we brought you here because your father has written a strange book.  there’s very little in it about you.  we think the aim of the book is to make people sad.  news anchors, you name it.  not much in it is hard to believe.  my wife looked at me last night as if I had no secrets.  I say we but it’s just me and her.  we live in a drug free neighborhood.  look, if I had my way, Pilate would’ve made Christ wear a bowtie.  the title of the book is lesson plans for orphans.

she drinks to the image I have of myself as a naked man on roller skates who continues to have the fistfight he’s late for.  she drinks to toast the pain she says she stole from a pregnant unicorn during a longer than usual drought of immersion.  people keep us together because they are bored.  when sober, she returns to them the delirious boy who on his bedsore back carried a pair of skis throughout the only entire summer of his youth.  from her father’s memory she eats for the both of us without touching her food because her mother was the bulimic god could taste.

the mime made to put it in my mouth.
but the wind picked up.
it was three blocks suspended before the backside
of a fan

pulled it from the street
and into
a pawn shop.

it dropped to the floor.
all very
  
dramatic
said some clown
to another.  said the other

to his white hand

always putting
it on.

I walk with a cane I do not need.  the road I’m on is unnaturally level.  I have what one might call my feet on the ground as I pass a still life with strollers unattended.  ahead of me, two women are fumbling with the beginning stages of their assault on a crippled boy with a phantom brain.  the boy seems to be consoling his ears with the hidden roar of a tank.  old man that I’m not, I hear the babies being put behind me.

if it’s no trouble,

I was
to my infancy

everything