I don’t think I was born to see my face. my father looks like he’s about to say nothing. her vocabulary comes and goes.

the child
saint
of separation
anxiety
eats

so little
that when
he
or she
chews
open

mouthed

a ghost
gets
a birthmark

you’re part of a story you don’t have to tell.

the animals that took your feet are dead now.

my boy
pushed your boy
into something
we thought
we’d outgrow.  

mittens on

it’s time
to eat.

I was raised by wolves on nothing but stork worship.

on the day of the shooting
I was sent from school
for wearing a blindfold.

you were born
brained
from afar.

the disabled inherit
all but
private moments, former
selves.

god is looking at your dead body right now
sad you are somewhere
moving.

in a photograph
taken
by television
the boy
was hidden
from children
whose madness
gathered
eggs
for the animal
in tail’s
dream

I’m going to let this **** me.

I’ve hired two frail boys
to roll away the stone.

my father is the man
with his pant legs
rolled to the knees
standing in the mall
fountain’s
waters.

my mother the woman
bewildered by the boy
in the food court
typing on a keyboard
attached to nothing.

some meals for which I would use the word exquisite; these are some of the meals I had.
online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.
in house, I matched socks and when I could not I became accusatory.
worry was everywhere- I would, here, like to subtract the time I spent in the bathroom
and add to that
choosing an avatar.

what I called a proverb I would tell my children was the proverb of the right hand’s ring finger.
it made them laugh.

in hell, I thought I was in hell. I dreamt not of my wife, but of a grape being rolled by a palm.
gently toward a grape the dream could not see.

as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

if more than once
the brilliant thing
you’ve said
gets you laid

oh and honey, look, it’s the same scarecrow the lightning could not wholly take.  it is telling me, oh gosh, about the suicide of our neighbors last year.  says they kept it a secret from each other.  the man got to himself quietly in the bathroom and the woman took a shotgun into the basement.  time of death had the man going first.  you think it was them on the left or them on the right?  them on the right had a kid, a little boy, I think.  what age would our son be?  their boy was about his age because I remember taking our balloons down and the man asking me should he take his down.  they didn’t give the boy a middle name, he said.  out of the hour or so we talked, I couldn’t file that one.  was the main thing scared me off.

I want to sit around and do nothing and I want to have a handful of kids that sit around and do nothing.  I will call myself the end of god and ask women inappropriate questions by way of populating obituaries with written code.  you will want to argue and I will have to get up and we will try together to save the child I crushed parts of.  the face of the child will be our slideshow.  I don’t know who you are but I know who you think.

a father remembers making dinner and whistles at the sober. his death nudges a turtle in the direction of some absent creature chewing gently on its tongue beneath a poster of a missing dog. lightning prays wheelchair and preaches lawnmower. there is a woman here said to live on hair. on whose mouth we survive. birth thinks only of itself. not a day goes by in the grocery of touch.

I clip her nails
whose doll collects
cereal boxes

as if waiting
for you
to hallucinate

it is there

the sea

-

eating secrets in a dream

is the owl
with hands

-

I think we buried
darkness
wrong

disappearance, firecracker
you never
get past it.

in the angel’s book on animal visitation

a deaf clown
bombs
a flower.

it is beyond me
why you’d want
to be more
than your illness.

where does one go
when gone
three days?

he’s not even as special as his mother’s comb.

I am a piece of me.
I am the posterity hell avoids.

when possessed his muscles tighten.
not in english
he smallens.

I am the tiniest knot in the braid of suffering.
I am my brain.

she wore a swimsuit.
he kissed her leg.
his pain rattled
in the strangest
acorn.

the vacant eye of a birdhouse.  
a tiny black plate
that in a dream
you cannot pinch.  the mute
cat’s meow
in your belly’s
lack wink.  a dry
cookie
at the pursed
fanfare
of mouth.  your thumb    
moving over
your mother’s.  dark foods
untouched
as the shadows
of fish
by water.  your father’s
ear
taking blood
from the tilt
of a baby swing.  the peasant
swallow
of a mannequin
whose ******
once fattened
your brother’s

lip.  the paw print dice.
the ***** nurse  
her long teeth
packed away

like cigarettes
in the shirt pockets
of men

shy
by this
much.

it is okay that my son’s face goes white.  I am using my son for water.  some of his blood leaves him to become a rooster.  some of his blood hardens in the coffin of his wrist.  some of his blood enters an incantatory narrative.  some of his blood is the body.  some believe the body is drought’s battery.  I am big on bodies.  you might know my father by his spearheading of the ghost indictments.  or by the clock you call love that he called the lifespan of his wife’s pregnant hostage.

birth, or god’s
way
of erasing
our memory…

this
more than you
will hurt
my neighbor’s
doll

image
made
no beast.

think of it-

death
was human

the man
I’ve only
just met
sober

     but have
     arm in arm
     week one
     through week
     three
     been jolly
with

is

     for the sake of his mother

revising

his life
cycle
from

****, sadness, balloons

to

sadness, ****, balloons

---

     it is either my attention span or my nakedness
in concrete poetry
that keeps me
from god

     (when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue)

or bluish

     (like a sock in a blue
      coat’s
      pocket)
      
---

     by the
of a sudden
time
the man
is tolerable
he ha(s)
a number of

rethought

balloon

my tongue wanting no part of my brain

I’d launch
a dead bird
from a seesaw
and take
note

the short legs
of exodus

if none notice, pretend you are waging a campaign of unawareness.  this goes for suicide.  hold the scarecrow like a protest sign.  look kid, your eyes have to eat.  what is low hanging fruit to the man on his back?  you can lose someone to illness even if that someone survives.

he’s a first timer visited by two ghosts that have nowhere to be.  not a single pencil in his house is sharpened.  his days are cut short.  not by sleep.  he is famous for three things.  all three are online.  his mother’s blog sickens him.  has one entry.  has one entry with a link to its visiting hours.  he is working on a fourth.  loneliness as a cure for homophobia.  homophobia as a remedy for memory loss.  the baby in his stomach comes and goes.  at will and not.

everyone called him Moe, and not just his friends.  Moe, he didn't believe in beginnings, but his wife would tell people when it started.  it started, she would say, when he stopped eating his lunches.  and he guessed that was about right, as right as a wife can be.  he'd come home from work with his pail and set it heavy in his wife's right arm as the baby, the youngest, would be in her left.  he'd say, no I didn't, maybe tomorrow.  then he'd go out to smoke but he wouldn't smoke.  he'd leave the cigarettes in their pack and walk out to the yard and think about putting his fat neck in the tire swing.  he'd come back to the house and put his fat hands on his daughter's shoulders and say he was home and he would be home tomorrow to eat with her and her brothers.  he wouldn't be, though.  not right away.  on the weekends he'd sit on the step with his oldest son and watch little men die.  such a small drop, from that step, not enough to **** a man.  his son would just look at him and take the man from Moe's hands and place him on his back again.  soon the day came that he left work on his lunch hour.  his daughter said thanks and poked his belly.  he could hardly move in his pants anymore but he managed to sit down.  he asked his wife for the special and pinched her leg.  coming right up was a plate of canned ravioli.  **** ravioli he said.  but he didn't say it mean.  he said it as if he'd just asked for permission to hate ravioli.  he said it again.  he said a lot of things just then, his mouth full, his wife opening cans in the kitchen.  he addressed god directly.  after these many years, he addressed god head on.  he made for his truck.  god, Moses here.  it's the ravioli, we have too much.

women march

wrapped in foil.  my daughter is afflicted with eyesight.  while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank,
the moon is the bottom

of a prop
tree.

I exist to keep the image of my suffering alive.

my father is a cloak
that mows     the lawn.

the following self-published, full-length poetry collections of mine are available at

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad


in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels, August 2013, 9.00

-

think ******* nothing on a farm machine, Oct 2013, 10.00

-

abandonesque, Dec 2013, 10.00

-

Stork Blood, Feb 2014, 9.00

-

town crier, March 2014, 8.50

-

We stole not the same bread, May 2014, 9.00

-

PLEA, July 2014, 8.25



if you’re interested in receiving any collection of mine via PDF, please send me a request at bartonsmock@yahoo.com and I’ll send promptly.



-here is a poem from in the asylum we'd sun ourselves with angels:



men statuesque

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.

it is fairly safe
in this town
to walk
without concealing
the spray can
found
in father’s
toolshed

-

our love
for the spray can
while not
well documented
runs wrist
and wrist
with celebrity
worry

-

a cement wall
scraped
in passing
by one
with a stick
is the love
we have
for father

-

for mother
we scale back
on pillows
and lie
face down
on blank sheets
of paper
or watch

television

-

most times
we pop
the keys
of a ribbonless
typewriter

xmas 19--

my profanity withers her tongue.

his deserters
bayonet
the alien
grape.

she can’t stop herself
from knowing
the fleas
are burning
what with
her passionless
baby

its biological
god

a son holding his breath
above water

his reflection
swam through

unseen, and ruined

how horrible it must be for god to know he can read.

we’ll take them all,
these animals of disabled children.

you will not come across the alien I was molested by.

I replaced myself
like the nothing
that happened.

I didn’t know I was naked until I had somewhere to be.

can one get pregnant from being pregnant?

strays
in orange
bless
the brains
they bless
the trash…

-

what nothing
you haven’t
seen

-

the hand-me-down
travel
sickness
that cocoons
in some
what cottons
to others

-

dryness
the money
of angels

after the standoff, god calls me a rookie.

the injured
disperse
to form
a language
I don’t
speak.

belief
becomes a remark
I make
to a mirror.  my hymn

critiques
the immortal’s
wardrobe.  

I am alone.  my son
is from the future
his illness
promotes.

again, we have given the baby too much credit.  these are simply the gods I grew up without.  here is my son serenading the seizures his mother salvaged from the praying I do for my hands.  here he is repeatedly not.  here is yours the psalmic nonverbal.  here they are shadows limiting death’s vocab in a tiny tent not crawling with legs of lamb.

you need someone who will ask the serious questions.  a mother insisting on dinner.  a mother who doesn’t eat but smokes your father’s pipe as if the pipe itself has ended televised hunger.  you need an idea.  ballet shoes for jesus.  a brother who doesn’t have to shower.  that it be wholly mourned, you need to lose your mind.  you need a motivational speaker who talks to a pair of female cops as they stand over the tastefully exposed body of a teenage boy.  who tells them to go to a movie because it’s possible.  even if they’ve never seen an invisible movie.

I threw
a couple sticks
and waited
to be kissed
on the arm
while my brother
licked
from his leg
the first insect
to have
amnesia
pretty soon
after that
our sister
bought a car
that had hit
a puppy
the puppy
lived
and god
was hooked

I’ve worn black for as long as my husband can remember.  because of his photographic memory it is hard for him to imagine how things might’ve been had the unidentified person lived.  I try to look the same everyday but am curvaceous.  we have no children.  our therapist is gay, broke, a bit shy.  a changed man.

history doesn’t repeat itself so much as curse the language it just learned. this is their there. escapist fare for those still fleeing. and I thought my hands were loud. one headset per foster home. shadow envies prayer. prayer has lice and ghost

a bathroom for both dreams.

a brother
dodges
suicide
with a piece
of paper
that doesn’t
work. a mother’s
blood

goes white
at the ink
of amnesia.

bus stop, breastmilk
there was

no me.

at what would god
not
be caught
dead? speaking

is how we talk
to the words
we say.

I know it is common
in drawings
to place the dream
above the boy
having it.

the contents of my mourning
include the phrase
I acquired
in secret
from a man
whose legs
were not
crushed.

I can hear myself seeing.