let surgery leave something in your mouth.

weigh them as a whole, the clothes of the smallest person who died on your watch. the blindfolds. the dreams of your stick population. down the pill

yet inside
the black
sheep.

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

we had a baby together to solve our bug problem. god said all we had to do was read to it. the books made us look poor. some of them took batteries and, if struck, played music.

the memory
before I have it
of this terrible
thing
I’ve done

/ and the fish
the flaggers
of blue
runways
are swimming
two by two

/ and god has no one

your hair looks like a missing wig. dream is comb in a glacier. sleep an ape’s thumbnail.

a rake
the scarecrow’s
broom.

ugly makes you easy to find.

as a word, plot seems artificially unaware of its absence from a book of baby names.

online, abandonment needs a vacation.

/ GOD

comes home to a punching bag in a treehouse. to a breathing machine being fixed by a marsupial. to a son talking himself down from cooking-show fatigue. to a clockmaker’s lab rat

putting a spell
on a boat.

[entries for the unmarked]

i.

swimmer was a cornfield baby

ii.

fox clock, always

noon

in the egg thrower’s
aquarium

iii.

playing tag

no blood
allowed

iv.

her bones
disappear
when pups
nurse

[entries for travelogue]

on his belly to **** on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision

/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal

died of different
things

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

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…

I can’t speak
to how
the form
my father’s
form
mimics

is able
to take
from lightning

a licking
while whaling
on the snout
of what
was born
muzzled
then sewn
for safekeeping
into the belly
of a punching

bag…

(I am not
the one
my meditation

needs)  violence

is my brother’s
music

I had
all year
one
idea

-

the infant is forever in the infancy of immediate hearsay

-

I was online / had a nosebleed  

-

I was with your mother when she safely evacuated
many

from nothing’s
installation

-

you may

in event
of god

instill in my sons

the all
clear

a fist camouflaged as a bird, a very baby, bird
is born in a pile of bricks.

I open a door for a woman
because online a photo
has taught me
I stand
as all stand
for ******.

     home for good
with papers
she’s convinced
tell her what she’s like
in the workplace
my mother, my mother
like an artifact
of her own
paranoia

     survives.  

(I am a response to a world I’ve yet to receive)

from the many scattershot piles of junk, my father is able to make a two-headed shovel.  his laugh wants my mother to worry for no reason.  in the space between us, things die in pairs.  in motion, my father is adamant.  of the one camera hanging from his neck, he gives me the one that works.  he has me shoot him standing on a chair with his arms desperate to keep his hands.  he has me cut them off so our memory will later deceive our outside trappings and believe he changed a light bulb.  now it’s me laughing, the boy god, the hope.  hurry, america.  hurry, chuckles.  if the **** looks the same for three days, it becomes a ruin.

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.

last day, 30% off all print books on Lulu with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

/

some poems:

/

[her impressions of the experiment]

his animals hiccup somewhere within the contagious yawns of god. his tumor is the crow of the ocean. the foot they hope to find me with is not yet purple. I shred a tiny pillow but your baby ain’t blind.

~

[estimations]

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

~

[upheaval]

a mongrel circles the stump of a tree. a spider from the angel’s dream goes on to spin a caterpillar. mom slips in and out of pregnancy. it’s my first time hearing a groundhog hate itself. you won’t crawl to anyone you haven’t seen swim.

~

[no after]

and what would you have me imagine? a change of tense in a tale of abuse. a baby licking the palm of a doll. a spoon. a robot’s broken arm. a chalk outline of a worm. hunger’s tacklebox. our allergic sister’s suicide note. a calf eating its first canary.

the bunk
above mine
I call
deathbed

is

my brother’s-

he has
his own
way
of thinking

     showerhead
is spotlight

     he argues often
with sister
about
the staircase

two times
of three
she pushes
him

but today
she is tired
and agrees
by saying

silly
backward
staircase

     and I, as ever
unable
to break
the heart
of either

sleep
for both
as they watch
me

eat

errors in care

how many hells does a death need?

the lost mind
the nurse
of the mouth.

I mean to be impossible, oh

/

and dreamt
from sleep.

~

horror movies

because they have no master
and don’t
overstay
their goodbye.

because in talking
we hid
sound. death

happens more
on land.

~

devotions for pilot**

historically, it has gone this way

birth
flashing
the present, my lap

breathing

a plastic spider
in the cereal box
glows.

my foster parents
think
I’m asleep.

as asleep
as my legs.

my wife was pregnant with a silhouette.  it lost itself to her.  it left me out.  I began saying sensitive things around women about their bodies so one might trace me.  I said lord I thought my life would be sadder.  I bought an AK47 because it was the only gun I recognized.  I hung it on my neck.  my wife used her memory to pluck things from my hands.  food, mostly.  it helped me realize I was rarely using both hands for the same purpose.  my wife began going out at night.  said she did so to hate America.  when once I tried to join her on the front step I was informed how she missed me but not as much as I believed.  she threw bread crumbs into a shuddering bush and I had the feeling it wasn’t new for her.  yesterday, I sold the gun to an interested neighbor with a child to protect.  he told me my wife’s nightgown is rather sheer but that he’s more concerned with how she carries herself.  after hearing that, I don’t think anyone could’ve dragged me to him.

a statue of my father drilling for scarecrow. immediacy as elsewhere’s double. my mother’s dream to play pool on an empty stomach. blow-up dolls for the drowned christ.

at the local library
books
separate
the victims
of home invasion
from those
researching
the doll’s
propensity
for drunkenness.

I stumble in, stumble out.

the hole we’re in has disappeared. we sleep on the gospel of baby mudlung. I pray mostly for people to get hurt. I don’t have a brother. he’s all alone. sister will smoke anything. a worm from the vacuum, the lice from nostalgia. I have a tv in my room that wants to play piano. I have a toy car and a turtle. it takes forever.

to adopt
god
the paperwork
alone

close by, a man is relearning how to cradle his corrected son.

my luck
the alien
I saw
was disabled

Letter 061624 climate sameness

Dear Ethan Hawke

Palestine has entered my dreams. I see car accidents before they happen but can’t tell my children. I **** a grasshopper with another grasshopper then keep the second alive. I **** a rabbit. I’d never **** a rabbit. But it was in my house. If there are babies, amen, I sleep a little in my sleep. In my death. It’s hot here. It’s cold. Palestine is not a dream. We keep touching it. Our hands go online twice and the holy spirit tortures a photograph. It is cruel to dream after never once imagining. After being, for a whole life, human.

a rattlesnake is my kind of dog.  it takes a phrase like this for my father to start talking.  his hammer misses his finger and hits a nail.  **** gets done.  his many wives run into each other so he can hear them being deaf.  if the dog becomes ill, my father has it all worked out how I’ll have to explain to some know nothing the right way to put it down.  sleep is satan without god.

my quote is a missing person.  I was taken from my home by two hoods I presumed were men and they walked me to a place new to them, old to me.  there they argued over the god I had told tell no one.  I strolled home as one does when stalking the unmanned spotlight of one’s own death.  I thought at first this would be its story as without it I am nowhere’s only sponsor.

euphoric period

a hospice worker
naps
in a lawn chair
beside a tree

(a tree
with tire
swing)

in the front yard
of a house
with a man
on its roof

     a man
unimpressed
by the woman
half ****
half woman
roughing her bare
scalp
on the wood post
of a neighbor’s
mailbox-

the only person I don’t recognize
is dying / in the house / is dying

from my
boredom.  I could check the bird feeder

or I could check
the bird-

the dollhouse needs a second bathroom and those responsible for the film I’m watching have nowhere to hang the astronaut

gathering roadkill for a game of musical chairs

/ the juggler, the darkness

~

[accident]

because
when mine
stopped

your sadness
was still
moving

~

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

~

[dear you]

I am at a word
for loss

~

[nostalgia]

my father
he was in
this poem
yesterday
so deeply
that I-

****.

they repo
even
dark.

~

[goodbye]

my penchant for last things does not end

following is a list of evocative baby names.  the least you can do is wait for it.  wait while my brother donates the blood I loaned him.  while my sister decides to believe in war.  believe because she is finally allowed to fight.  war because my brother is dying.  dying even though he has money enough to cover his inheritance.  a disabled twitter account.  that I often quote.  quote from inside my different *** marriage.  where I’ll meet my wife.  and her only child.

after leaving its memory to the hibernating bear, the insect died.  I don’t know what story you’re trying to tell.  the angel has three fathers.  the angel was born to blackmail a ghost.  this bald ******* thinks I need shown how to chew my fingernails.  the mask is my elevator and the pig my coffin.  I have a sister was made to make an egg disappear.  a father who’d shave to give the thing in the stomach time to plan its escape.  the angel vomits into a pink wheelbarrow.  shows affection.

it took her nine months
to crave
being lifted
by baby-

his strength
worried us

and our rage
would not
blind-

I was the first
to remove my belt
the first
to become
dizzy
the only

not laughing
like a *******
girl

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.

grief in the near future

(practicing)

safe
grief

the quiet woman mothers a silence gone rogue

and names
her kid
to death

coming up
we are
with names
for time
machines

a man goes unmolested into the knowledge of his body.  has one hand had no choice.  puts a doll in a carseat.  makes his boy watch.  a man recoils mid-dream

from a caterpillar.  I am

what I’m
again.

a cyclist avoids a dog
but takes out
a table
of garage sale
figurines
as a drought
pamphleteer
reprimands
a child
for *******
on a hose.

     I haunt my faith.

according to my father
my father
isn’t alive     my father
eavesdrops.

except for talking
he’s been silent
until

in pictures of her
as a young woman
his mother
is dead.

I have a friend whose father, though imaginary, was able to get work driving a cab in the country parts of Ohio. if I close my eyes I can see my own father lost in some wooded area naked and wearing a cape. the cape is deep red and my friend is female. when my mother reads me a book without pictures I can tell when she’s rewording the phrases she finds plain. how she reads ahead while reading aloud is something I hope to one day mimic. I do worry about the books I claim to know as perhaps there is a sadness in them that remains untouched. plain things are often sad things. I would ask which causes which but for the unlimited amount of time we have left.

I have an ear for each parent I believe in and a hand for each god I don’t.  I have yet to make a body that doesn’t become bread.  in the process of comprehending the smallness of my twin’s brain, I lost the only friend I could talk to in code.  my son won’t use a spoon as he fears it distracts his food.  the fork is next and the knife, safe.  my daughter is a drunk and also a soup that gives the same nightmare to the mouths of my angel.

doom is the second half of a week long hotel stay.  I **** on a pile of white t-shirts, one of which is liberated by delirium’s child.  eat snow, understanding.  

eat it in your hermit’s realm.

in a hotel bathtub
beneath a crooked
showerhead
two boys
on thumb war
number seven
are seen
by the same
hallucination
their colorblind
father
had
during
his dry spell, his bug
collecting
craze
when their mother
was the god
she went back
to being

i.

a child’s edition of your father.  in which

the unused
scarecrow

is found
hiding
the *****

mags, the cigarettes

of a sister’s worry, and other

inanimate
markers

of accounting, meant to be

traded
for fireworks, for fat frogs
not given
to snake…

that is, had the boy
lived
to unsee

the water
he didn’t
make…

ii.

(my handle on death)
is holding
a book.

an overfilled
pauper’s
grave / transcends
its archaic

reference
to belly.  all mothers

are single.

closed mouth
of a shopkeeper.

his finger
an abandoned
cross

the length
of jesus' spine.

forgive
the hush
of forgiveness, forgive
the state
of my house.

we open
early
no light
is first.

we single out
the second
sons
to copy

scripture.
 
the barber
the dentist
good

and absent.

morality
we use it
when two people

or more
run down the street.

we know
it's a bone
rolls down
the roof

     which bone
for years
we disagree.

the white man came out of nowhere

we’re talking
the biggest
white
man
ever

     I have friends married to men
whiter

this is what I’m saying     about my mouth

it lives nowhere

Ohio maybe, Ohio has just
the four
seasons:

spring, summer, fall, your mom

with what she’s learned online, she puts her age between nine and twelve.  

-

based on the following, her attacker

walks.

-

(that’s funny, he didn’t sound invisible)

-

how do you pray
for a clock?

the roof over his father’s head.

the rain.

the guardian angel
and the imaginary
friend
loving
over the loss
of toy.

his brothers on the roof
playing possum
with a possum.

her.

her and her mother
separated
by a grocery
aisle.

by litany.

his father sleep *******
on a secretly
fed
dog.

crop circles.  eyeglasses.  his monsters
led away
by a group of mimes

the genital
mimes.