I thought
I’d abused
myself

where one can more easily
picture
the struck man
as a boy
obsessed
with walking.

the false
gods
of god
were simply  
evacuated

My uncle
Lost god
In a bet
Came home
Asking
Had we seen
A man
Or a woman
Taking
His clothes
Half of us
Said man
The other half
Started drinking
And got
Naked
Longer
Each time
This poem
Wrote itself
Death
Is a radio
What was it
Before

after we roll the dead dog from its towel and into god’s mouth

we take
for its tooth
a fly’s
grave.

satan’s kid continues to play chicken with a farm machine

in a slow
not still
life.

in full view
of my family
and the friends
they’ve invited
I am given
the child
who has
everything.

my father’s
brother
bounces
on the low
dive
until his legs
give out.

the child screams
in its sleep
where I beat it
as I would
myself.

my mother
     as previously
     reported
enters into
an arranged
divorce.

in exchange for food.

I flatten my father’s tin foil hat to hear farmland again.  I don’t have what I have.  I am the astronaut god commands me to pinch.  my babies are tossed in the general direction of trampolines.  my eyes are male and impossibly warring.  I am trying to talk to you as a child who was read to.  I have seen only the future my parents memorized.  I can see her nodding off at the controls of my sleep chamber.

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.

balloon, blushing into the side of a mountain.
the hand, that came from the arm, that came
from the room.
the first finder of mirrors.
hair, brushed over the blindfold’s ear.
hair, tucked under.
pet rocks from Palestine.
wrist, dropping like a slipper, from the mouth.
or like a newspaper. nine months old.

My unreachable
mother, new

and unreachable.

All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched

by the last
butterfly’s
moment…

I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.

a child
unassembled
and loved
by two
     strange
women-

a man breastfeeding in private-

this love
only a mother
could face-

overexposed photos
of a healthy
family-

a gathering
of bird watching
great
uncles-

     great
blind
aunts / with empty
pill
syndrome-

a prayer basket in the lap of a boy
sitting on a swing
during
a downpour-

     a disabled brother
and his three
rubber
nails

in a previous imagination the boy was able to overcome his attention span.  it was there he pummeled his pregnancy.  I wanted a clearer image but was told to take the boy as is or not at all.  I could feel his sister trapped in the same horror she was later revealed to be outside of.  up until then, I was sad her whole life.

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.

I am
when I drink
a birthmark
removal
expert
or an angel
privately sad
who prolongs
with a rabbit
held together
by grief
a whale’s
insomnia…

Boredom is a mirror’s god.

Pianos
in the winter
are cruel.

my first non self-published work is available at **** Press...I can't post a link here, so you'll have to search it.  (a chapbook titled Infant Cinema)  

am asking that you help it do some work for the press.  it's six dollars.  

some reviews:

Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.

~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)

Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.

~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)

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.

the bear and the elephant

the last
believers
in the integrity
of suicide’s
memory

/ nothing speaks
to a brother’s

fascination

with stones

/ for light

bend it backward
the baby’s
thumb

far
from the oral
present
of wine glasses
     broken
in the rhythmic
*******
of gulls

     the girl
allows
the boy
her measured
swoon

as he curls
to his ear

her swimsuit’s
mute
waist

him

mouthing

to a lost plane
above a silent
orchard

every name
in the banshee

book

some medicines / don’t work / how lonely

–

change diapers

else
you invent
evangelism

–

suicide, all those dates I didn’t

–

formless herself, she makes an image. animals

were the end
of god

the shopkeeper’s wife is named after the town she was taken from.  I work for no one.  when I tell her this, she gives me a gallon of milk she’s reported stolen.  three days pass in a house known for the loudness of its phone.  I meet a stranger in a park of suspects.  bread is the main concern.

he regards his ice cream cone as if he’s the lone yearly visitor of a grave.  because I cannot remember his name, we are together two men home from war.  it’s how I’m struck

just as my son
might be     on some

hot day
when life
shortens
fame.

I put my sense
of taste
behind me
by placing
a sick child
beside one
sicker.

a crow is not a star.

loss
is the salt
of now.

my brother
jokes
in the barn
about suicide.

the ****
would eat snow
if it came
from a cow.

I ask him
does he think
mom will miss
two cigarettes.

she’ll miss one, she’ll miss yours.

I am half his keeper.

/ his stomach
attended
like church

I am the photo my visions take.

high
on memorization
the mother
has to believe
in god
for god
to have
a safe
word.

the boy is dirt and noise. is hindsight’s
gospel.

loneliness, meet maker.

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?

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic

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.

via Lulu, 25% off all print books with coupon code of MONDAY25

my newest, MOON tattoo, is there.

some poems from the work, here:

[least]

there I was

lightweight, eyesore

baby satellite
and baby
drum

imagination’s
dull witness

my hair
prematurely
cat-torture
grey

my person
the length
of a sandbox
shovel

teeth
a tooth, a commandment
from the past
lives

of milk


[harrower]

it is easier now that I know I was never going to be a better person.  if I once called poetry the grieving arm that ends in five short complaints, I am sorry.  I watch my son lick the space on the table where he’ll put his cheek.  it is not for me to believe he is a sign of warnings to come.  the distant memory of his tongue is not mine to betray.  I want to kiss you to the sound of god counting footfalls on a mountain path.  for one, I have never been completely covered in bruises.  also, I was in the spotlight when my mother was asked to describe a sponge.  instead, she identified the break in the letter where a father changed pens and childhood as the longing of Eve.

[On suicide]

I was here long before you guessed my age  

-

(our proverbial sister dons again the birthday suit of body language)

-

the dog won’t eat.  might it know

we come from the family of sitting and dying?

we heard it last night.  the bell on the rabbit’s foot.  it made mom want to cook.  and sleepwalk.  and mice did the wave.

in one dream, a carousel horse. in another, a stomach.

–

dream is a shortcut

after surviving
a form
of angel
hazing
the boy’s
disability
presented itself
in full
five months
from its
inception
and chose
therapy
locations
owned
fifty-fifty
by the conceptual
folk
known as
bewildered church
and stray
field
and went on
to signal
the boy
with a bruise
here
and a bruise
there
on its way
to a survival
from which
it would not
recover

he walks the straight line as if ghosted by a severity that could at any moment scrape the membrane world.  ahead of him a blood drawing baby floats into a small room where some poor sap must be waiting.  he is here to address the letter writing department for challenging his letter writing capabilities he recently used on behalf of his sister who has been charged with obtaining too low of a tree when in fact the rope she was issued was too long.  his father was supposed to come as well but has acquired a rare form of poet helplessness.  as for mother, she  failed to return some time ago and for all he knows is still softening the language of the animal kingdom.  seeing the baby has made me want to set aside someone to facilitate his reattachment to violence.

you haven’t touched your food.  

the soul has windows
it doesn’t need.  

failure to thrive
has come to mean
the growing
you do
at night.  

when jailed
I thought of nothing
but my cell
and I thought of my cell
as a crib
without a heaven.  

your mother’s dark hair
is hard to swallow.  

I am secretly happy
that you’ve taken
an egg

for each day of your life

to a doll
so doll
can sleep.  

as your mother, I often follow
a black
ball of yarn

into the lake
of how
you remember.

the very sadness.  the very sadness of the intruder who brings his own plate to drop.  the very ecstasy of telling a classmate he or she is ugly along with one finger he or she must choose.  the cutting of the fingers to equal size.  the unintended ecstasy of the sadness I use to *** a cobweb where I wait for something I’ll do nothing with.

the story came to me abridged.  like birth control is a plant.  like one black family.  she came to me from town.  the Amish are being set on fire.  there are no Amish.  tell that to the people on fire.  she was perfect and so perfect to believe it was done by a *** change.  one in particular was prayed for and I don’t know if he ever stopped touching her.  she had a light bulb she’d taken from a hospital lamp.  she produced it like hearsay.  her invisible baby.

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.

you arrive early to the unpopulated town hoping you might rehearse without interruption the part you plan to audition for.  you spend most of your time in a high school locker room looking for a ball.  your one skill was recently revealed at the forefront of an evacuation spearheaded by your brother after which you were able to convince both the man in the attic and the man in the basement that they were together hallucinations seen by a mirror.  to the lord you don’t seem a day over yesterday.

after sharing her son’s birth story, the woman comments on the oddness of hearing it aloud.  she closes by saying all words are her last.  she is at least as old as the brother I’m told I have.  when told, I believe the one speaking is speaking to the room I’m in that’s been entered by the likes of me as into a place where a manuscript has just been finished.  I continue my brother as a distraction in the form of a man trying to erase a cigarette burn from the arm of a typist.  man makes the sound I have on my person that both my parents made.  instead of taking her medication, the woman imagines herself homeless in a part of town she’s passed while having ***.

infant boy, god gave your body all the bone it can hide.

bite me
when your teeth
are hot.

prayer
as the horn
the car
carries
into
a tornado.  touch

as ventriloquy.

this one sleepwalker
hung
our laundry, this other
left mom
a rattlesnake

some man was mowing drunk
mad about church, a recent batch
of runt
lightning, that baby’s
age

the two skeletons it takes to lift a coat hanger.  the ***** it takes for them to introduce it as an ultrasound.  the excitement you don’t share.  the bone fragment that opens your brother’s eye.  the haunted tourist who never arrives.  who will adopt nothing because nothing is small when compared to the crucified whose toe almost touches the paper shredder we couldn’t move.  mountain storm.  moaning tent of rehab.  eating your hands when a phone call is a phone call away.

he ended by saying surely it is evil to live.


I have not been stunned by fiction since having hands.  


he started by asking silence to observe the audience.  
he crushed a cocoon under foot because it had no god.  


I have not been beautiful since needing nourishment.  
I have not sinned since taking an active role in my dreams.


he arrived in a white limo.
he applied to his body a lotion of black milk.
he penned in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels.


he cried like a baby he’d seen.
I have not cried like that since being cut in half.


I was not ***** in a field of vision
nor have I been
since refusing the kit.

wear a cheap mask
to bed.

kid, your mama

she can’t
touch a baby
without touching
a baby

that’s hers.  

small brain,
I have less
to wash.