Dear Ethel Cain

I am maybe too high. I want to speak to how their nowness robs us of being present. I was giving head to seashells that heard the breaking knee. Or fasting in the pawn shop of my father’s early sleep. Anyway. Hearing an apple cry keeps the angel’s fossil dry. Nearer nostalgia I’m not to thee.

Dear Ethel Cain

The surgeon puts an egg in my son's mouth then shoots herself. On earth, we refuse the naked. The angels think we're weird for losing teeth. The last time I wrote sick was the first time the television marked the last time we'd seen a bug. It's not true but here we say all circles are male. Longing is a cult created by birth. I don't care. Belief invented your mother and my. The past dies of narration.

Dear Ethel Cain

A microwave in a wellness center is left alone long enough to miss a bible. Fate does its work early. Babies make loss fun again. I try with my gut health to stop time. Angels, born on, turn off.

Dear Ethel Cain

I lick sugar from the windshield of a deer-shaped car. Make a bird from a hunger ballon. Have an ****** that belongs in a stomach to lovebombed plastics. Catch photophobia from the ghosts of angel suicides. Fix a machine with a drinking machine. Listen, glisten. Etc.

Dear Ethel Cain

An abuser loses their phone, their fingerprint. Longing faces its first deadline. The eating competition of our dreams is on its third snow delay. The work my body puts into me is killing my children. I think of that fingerprint for 100 years in sunscreen time. My skin turns white from being seen by a ghost. My teeth go grey. And comb their fear.

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

In the movie hidden by me watching god

In the movie hidden by me watching, god gets in the ambulance ever time

In the movie hidden by my watching

Their poor happiness

The child running after a wild tire they’re poor

Poor acne the handwriting it becomes

Angel acne a bone popping out of an echo in the ghost of my soul

The handwriting it becomes when put by the handless

On that tire gone

God of hands

~

[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

Existence a distress signal

mimicked by those
visitors
looking
for the body
of god

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.

as he prepared to leave my world to the memory of a man addicted to god, my father was stung by a bee.  this matters.  bees carried the scent of absence.  bees spoke to mother.  mother was the woman it took two like my father to make.  mother swallowed to bruise the body of any dropped thing sounding itself out in a nightmare had by children new to infancy.  mother swallowed and called it singing.  there will be a god.  this matters.  perfect, now, the nothing you say.

as acne commits my face to a memory of scripture, god worries that man’s silence is a pox upon both the crow and the crow.  on good authority, the cyclops is blind in one eye.  you were tortured, yes, but nothing stands out.  my living hand performs for my dying.  imagine my father’s dismay at the realization yours had of having done this autopsy before.

the fireplace is on drugs.  get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

-

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold.  jesus-on-a-stick.  the crown of thorns, extra.  I close my eyes.  I dare the brain.  the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

-

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful.  I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams

dreams only

-

everything happened in 1985.  words don’t mean.  numbers mean.  tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

-

the wind is asleep.  it sleeps outside.

uncle has been all day figuring the teeth of his that will never touch.  he has this riddle he calls code for what to get the man who has nothing.  if I can get him to stop biting his wrists I might be able to chalk something won’t need moved.  when I was born, I was small enough to fit in most mouths.  uncle is not the tiniest bit mad.  he holds babies only when they are hungry and he is not.  those with angels think those without are selfish.

the people are looking for something that tells them what to show.  my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees.  at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends.  a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth.  grief is a good listener.

the ****** boy is waiting for it to dry, it

being
the puppet’s
toothbrush.  his lover

a practitioner
of moral sadness

knows the body as a representation
of surgeries none perform
and the future
as historically
inaccurate.  where we’ve met before

I’ve narrowed down
to isolation.  was there I last lost mother

with her hacksaw and chair
dreamily approaching
a tire swing  
as if the human voice

on any land
letting go
of god

could raise
a tree.

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my newest self published work is [MOON tattoo]

~

and, poems:

~

[opening line from a year with mother]

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

~

[horseface]

you strike me as an invasive listener. I love your body. loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes. does this make me look alone? like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone? my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with. horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare. earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant. if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.

~

[early work]

the babies my father held.

the hell, the world’s
largest.

the parts of the house
that caught fire
in two
moving

vans.  the bully

mother poisoned
in the dreamy
media
of religious

thought.  the daring

suicide, the doubled
god.

i.

a father doing sit-ups on the uncut lawn of his neighbor.
the father’s two children pushing a broken thing past him.
the shop the children map from the inside. its keeper
who is also the neighbor and knew their mother.

ii.

the grace of a thing could be a frog pushing off.
I am alternately sad in the legs, the body, and the head.
my father regards the misshapen wheel of our manmade
pond- bangs on himself and begins to float.

iii.

small one she wins a rubber thing at a firemen’s ball.
some flying creature her grandfather becomes.
his top teeth tremble like worried pilots in a silent plane
weighted with unknowable freight.

as happiness
abuses
the brain
of a dollhouse
plumber

think
of Ohio
as a bed
above
a restaurant

then
of a man
and a woman
each
trying separately
to have
the baby
god
won’t recognize

that in sleep
can play
pretend

it is hard for the nostalgic to forgive. I was raised on awareness and reincarnation. I remember, doghouse, the dollmaker’s tornado. and how to clear for my drunkest brother a mousetrap from a mountain path. believing, as a hostage would, in the taker’s amnesia.

I don't need any of you.
I don't have details.

God is being tortured to tell us where we are

I don’t mean to be hopeless.

I mean to be
hopeless.

mothered by a silent
shape my
mouth

If there is
no god
I hope
there’s not

what small apologies
to my father
my children

are.  headless father

his many acts
of embodiment

     his book of two
quotes:

money
doesn’t know
you don’t
have it

you can buy

sadness

the inexplicable amount of time a father is gone
disappears.

one is left to re-enter
a mirage of hell
sent from hell.

a mother’s song begins to need
a dot.