a late swimmer, touching
one side, then the other.  
night window, this wine.  
a walker, beggared
to the wend of a wheel

loosed from the lean of its car.  
a bad man jawing
a gradient slur
of hand puppets

on another's dark drive.
a second swimmer
I hadn't seen, touching
the first.  same stone
on the pool's bottom-

unmoved, unmoved
by the yaw of the moon.

the loneliness
that schoolwork
provides

is god

his body
is your body

has nothing
to leave

it doesn’t take a genius but it does take my brother to see the frog’s been tortured.  he splits my friends into two groups, telling one he has a month to live and the other that I’m dying.  he pulls me aside and asks if I’m up to finishing what he’s currently calling The Mourner’s Guide to Interrogation which began *a month is a long time to the instantly bored.

as an adolescent, he toyed with the idea that he was a vision of god’s and set himself on a path to befriend the less conversational bodies of fractured families but found it was too much like giving candy to the poor.  his disenchantment carried him into my early twenties where I became his father for an amount of time shorter than the left to right the eyes employ to take note of the baby often placed at the beginnings of horror movies.  his mother lost the use of her elbows trying to swing him away from the mouth his sorrow came with.  her plainness landed him on his first victim’s radar.  when we love him at the same time, our love reaches the society of secret special effects.

I wear a blindfold.  I look my age.  I push an empty wheelchair and with it map the way to your room.  I go without.  my children rebel.  my children rescue their behaviors for later use.  I tell my oldest she was my idea of a first thought.  I tell her in a dream.  I have a disorder in which I add to everything an ‘s’.  a second disorder in which I taste chalk when your father eats it.  my mother is a two-man show.  says for example by god I’m next to jesus.  I hold her hat.  she looks into it this time and the next longer than the last.  the rabbit doesn’t make it.  my boys enter a room that’s been moved.  my father keeps me young.

summer was for sexting and for watering the scarecrow’s spine.  say it with me this was not that summer.  as a ghost might surprise the mother and go to salt, a doll might remember its teeth.

the ransom note
in suicide’s
dream journal

the ghost of the brainwashed rocking chair

fingers
teeth
who’s keeping
score

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

the sleepwalker and the hangman jumping rope in the town of the sheepish tornado where the church of two birds admits the child of the expat exile into the afterlife of a stone…

was this bug was biting me into house and home

/ the baby it was my belief
had come out to give me
a knowing
look  

/ I couldn’t
so to silence

eat my way from a wet paper doll

nostalgia’s book of mug shots.

murderers mistaking boredom for regret.

the dwindling league of hesitant fathers
struggling to stay
in formation.

paroled amnesiacs
last seen
by this
photo.

shortly before
the birth
of my eldest
brother
my father

so absorbed
in his most
unfinished
sermon

misplaces
a voodoo
doll

of a mime
my mother’s
mother

loved
and also
lost

the dog moves from sun to shade

its master writes of the beating
a woman
takes

I saw
I can prove it

the size of that tick

does anyone
remind me
to eat

the boy
whose first
computer
was pain

they put something in his food
to make
him drink…

-

one animal
out of how
many

-

marries

-

to avoid
god

memory
has nothing
it remembers
making

-

I’ll know an animal when god sees one

-

the guard
I slept with
gave me
you

-

pain, indicia, Amen

the body
a saying
from birth

I am not done / I carry my son

/ from the bathroom
his mother
died in…

death
didn’t see
a thing

choose
three
to deny
shooting

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

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.

the **** came boatsick and I made to light it with the marshmallow burning at the end of my shaky stick when father pinned it at the neck with his right foot and kicked it longside in the beak with his left and then brought the left heel back to break for the second time its neck and the **** hummed and then died and then I thought it hummed again but it was my father lowing in the soul he didn’t believe in as in life he finished nothing so couldn’t on faith have something that everyday waited and I remember thinking later after learning the word rabid and of the affliction rabies that authors swan to the dying animal from the shallows of knowing that the animal mourns maybe nothing and definitely does not mourn this that happens no other way.

as I was burned
in the act
of nothing
brave

     the book of my hands
drew the flame

from my children
whose names
I mouthed and spat

for jacob*


in dark
I’d make
the bedroom
door
     and there
     pause and bless
the toy driver
of the bus
for lighting
up-

but you
would stir
at my attendance
to an absence
not yours     and I would return

before trying my lead
again

     fourth brother

I am struck by the urge to pray.

my trauma has yet to occur.

the stress my father knows

knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.

night is a ruined crow.

I see the city as possibly bombed.

the men have gathered with small boys on their backs. each hopes to be, briefly, in the shadow of a plane. the boys can only think with their hands how warm their fathers are. a shoelace or two teases tired the tongue of the devil. wind, the maker of mask, makes many. mothers at home pick blankets from the floor; fold magazines without looking. one of the men swears on the grave of his best hound he once saw a woman parachute naked. most of the men keep her there in that plane.

I repeat
I know why
the bizarre boy
stims.

to be alive is to be monitored by loss.

in this, your missing dad is like a father to me.

[mercy musics (i)]

this is where
her name
is changed

to dog, not
puppy

where her father believes
he can stab
a bird
and talk
to ladders

dear
ladder, longing

eats only
the hungry

these are my
stick, and haunted,

persons

and what’s
more, it’s mostly
female
this lost

baby

~

[mercy musics (ii)]

angel, with urn, sleepy

as a hoofprint
is not
a dreamer

of unmarked
edens, but is

of the child
eve

who buried
a mouth
to imagine
a pig

the fish are biting and my father is wanted.

thunder the size of a seasick dog
has crushed
again
my sister’s
baby
for crushing
pills.  for every

hunchback
goes
to heaven

there’s a shadow
passed out
in a dream.

she responded to her critics by word of mouth.


never utter anything more
than you can burn.


she carried baby dead to baby dead yet.
she had questions.


never be pretty when you’re sad
nor repeatedly
document.


things have been pretty killed
up in this *****.


let there be god said the heat
the baby
lost.


never is a lamp
unto the world
enough lamp.


beaten silly
this it
becomes god.

my brother is the safe environment I’ve created for the history of my lord.  political awareness, I mean, I mean, is a darkness.  my eyeglasses tell me you’ve been to see a train station.  do animals wait?  several impatient years later, two blindfolded mouth-breathers walk cheek to cheek in an Ohio fog that combs forward worms the length of a screen name on craigslist.  I am nearly pronouncing krokodil until my tongue disappears so I can pronounce it correctly for my mother’s not frostbit ear.  as for the two, they are mistaken by the disembodied poetics of local policing as the trophy nose of an odd-for-these-parts moose.  any re-enactment is my father the victim of a spirited birth.

yarn
disappears
and blood
shows
its hand

-

homesickness
is what curls
in a mother’s
foot, her toes

-

having babies
for the color
white, this boy

-

he comes
came

-

compass
the thumbless
orphan

we meet in a neutral space to exchange the boy we didn’t for the girl we did. I still feel as if I’m on the inside of something pretty. it is always on the eve of this deletion, at the end of my dual research, that I forgo the deeper waters for god’s raindrop. here, again, it falls to my thumb to rub toothpaste from the toenail she couldn’t

with me
looking

reach.

if I am still in one piece
is up
to you

-

as for ****, avoid

her
and / or
her

-

if above
some hobo
a soft
nightmare
hangs

in the balance…

what figure my father has
bends for the beauty
not of word but of word
unsaid.

as for intended use,
there are two ways
to stone
a raindrop.

some would argue
from hell
for recognition
of non
survivor’s
guilt, and from earth

for mothered

figures…

not played
it is having
a vision
you cannot
see

-

someone knows the someone

who says aloud

piano

-

into poverty’s
overthought
ear

god
puts death

-

I am
than pity
sooner

to my son

-

in every gravestone
a dog
of stone

lazes
loyally

as word
choice

skips

-

rope

-

in one

window, a shopworn
stroller
with a more
cerebral
destination
than decay

exemplifies
the seller’s
push

to mirror…

you find a man whose wife has recently passed
place him in a wide open space
and give him the supplies necessary
to build a common backyard fence

you inform the man that at points a mile north, south, east, and west
a baby just learning to crawl has been faced in his direction
and he will need to begin building the fence

you understand that the viewership will need to take on faith
that the babies will crawl in a semi-straight line
will not take up with imported wolves
and because you cannot film them
are there at all  

if god exists
the man will have time to smoke a cigarette in peace
before and after the fence is built
and the babies will become a footnote
to the reported sightings of his wife

our forgetful
makers

hunting
elsewhere

at birth, your life flashes before your eyes.  you have a brother and with him think that if one could record the exact moment of your mother’s dying, her death will disappear.  the drink in your glass is made from the skin that couldn’t bring itself to be your mouth.  some of it is crying but most of it is putting the word **** in its place.  out of necessity you create a crow that you might be warned of its crow-like replacement.  your hands stick to what they know.

afraid of its shadow in a previous life. the drowning of nothing’s

*******
child.

newborn
with back pain.

(the cigarette that takes the pulse of our ghost)

it is raining

on the feet of god

father’s warning
was be
careful
them crows
is as smart
as a whip.

mine
was for my brother
said to have
a thing or two
left
to shrink-wrap
in the ****** bin.

mother’s was
twofold
and babied
itself
as forgotten.

his whole life he described himself
to a dying boy

some mirror
waiting
for my skin
to crawl-

some noise
being made

some holy
noise-

some terrified toy

with its toy
lover

in sound’s
blindfold

a harp
is the imaginary
secret
a spider
keeps
in the clockmaker’s
eighth
dream

show me my mother’s back, and her elbows.
the faucet’s spit on neck.
eye black to eye black my brothers checking
for teeth.
show me insomnia, the pacing witch hats
of a dog’s great attention.
my father, but don’t
take sides.

have self-published a new full-length collection, 115 pages, title of Misreckon, in three parts: god had an earache / wrong about my brother / misreckon. book preview on site is the book entire.

it is, here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html

sample poems

site

I lasso the calf just before it makes the ocean.

overhead, a helicopter
from my past
spins.

my son says
to himself
this isn’t
your father’s
sandcastle.

luck is the stone
that marks
the dream.  dream

the stone
that marks
the dead.


how the still recall the poor

when saying her name, mother would insist the curse words were silent. for swallowing secrets, father had his throat professionally cut. I remember wiping my nose with a shirt darker than blood. instead of good washrags, we had words brought about by having company. mother ran wild through my sentences while father bent to kiss a pillow for sleeping with my stomach. apocalypse came and came. the act was the act’s debut.


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.

sister
she wore
one white sock-

a night light
in that hotel’s
dark.

eventually, I was asked to write about a dog.
there was a letter, and a man above it.
in my own letter, I asked for the woman behind him.
she arrived with the very little I came to know.
I could’ve been a room she sat sewing in.  
her one hand nibbling the other, the foster door
of her back.  my whole life in front of me
on another’s fours.

soon
is a baby
studied
by the scholars
of now
who
in their prime
predicted
that jesus
would be
in the scarecrow’s
future
the darkest
bird