[untitled]

today I was outside
holding my son
and hummed
into his neck
a man
resurrected
to faint

-

childhood
animals
deeply
unhurt

-

this machine can detect silence

this stick
if stones
are gay

~

[tenderness]

it is there
in the way
my father
refolds
a single
grocery bag
for a cyclops
that never
arrives

~

[having a disabled child]

means:

there is a tent
being studied
by dream.  

missing
more than snow
the ashes
of snow.

footwear.  and checking
our food
for holes.

means keeping
dry
a diver’s
eyelash.  and leaving

to finish
absence.

~

[jesus]

an unhurried ****** whose character development was orphaned by ghosts

~

[high-dive. dusk.]

as if any father
could heal
a cigarette
or remove
for a grey-eyed
newborn
the stitches
from a dream
    
~

[mother praying for two]

tooth fairy gone to salt

shell of a bee in an empty lamb

~

[/ yyyy]

doll burns its tongue on a teacup breast

at your abuser’s
costume party

~

[later meaning]

my eyes meet in a tunnel beneath the museum of things that belong. sister moons the moon. mother she buries the ironing board of a crucified dentist. childhood starts at the top. the painter of stomachs eats from a footprint. egghead shreds a pillow in the madhouse of snake.

~

[eremite]

the frog in the hood of my coat
has I’m sure
a later meaning.

my brother is on his back in a field he calls helicopter.

I know my father’s mouth
by its embrace
of doom’s
unconnected
dot. there are sounds

I can’t make. like that of a boy

squealing
as he rubs
a toy tank
under a blanket
for a god
whose mother
a face

could love.

~

[highs]

eardrum the airbag stomach of a lonely doll

brain
a blue
parachute

~

[handheld]

somewhere between satellites and baptisms

grief
the daydreaming
thumb

~

[days of bread]

the image
crucified
for its lack
of focus.

the loud music
over which
you hear
make
your blood.

the weakest
electric chair
this side
of moth.

father’s grip on a rolled-up magazine.

crow laundry.

an out-of-shape
coat hanger. & (and)

the news
that my nakedness
has died.

~

[possessions]

i.

chew toy
abandoned
at the throne
of old man
scissorlegs

ii.

a claw
from the lottery
of hands

~

[promising]

the girl wearing a scuba mask is not on a skateboard. this, after all, is church. I see what you see- the writing suffer. I’ll wash, later, a pair of black socks from the minefields of the one we call birdbeak and you can be the puppet with a needle in its arm.

~

[last names]

he cracks the motel room door from inside and ****** from wasp to spider to spared cricket.  he can smell the baby’s back as it begins to burn a hole in the pocket of a bag-headed hitchhiker.  the earth is 42 years old.  a car in the lot below moves over a body and stops.  the woman in the car is ******* a tooth through a cigarette.  whatever god put in her cake is almost gone.  

~

[for Eric]

I’ve held dogs as they die. vet’s office, 1993. a bad dream is a nightmare and a good dream is nothing. is a dog’s rib. I get an idea, here and there. design the same bathtub.

~

[lost grass]

eat loudly, mouse, for still I have my baby blood. loudly else you become a fish. else I jaw ear

from the character actor’s god.

~

[clarion]

heaven is art and hell the artist. regret matters only to the creator of regret. brother hops around like a drugged rabbit. headcount is the nickname given by sisters to the outhouse built on a sandbox. an ambulance from dogcatcher’s dream puts the hurt on a flickering cornfield. our cellar is a mirror where thunder goes deaf.

~

[for daughter]

in a wordless dream I’m nowhere near anyone I can’t be.  my dad’s mirror passes out.

~

[untitled]

snake
is the best thing
for snake.

I know you’re sad.
like a yard, a vandal, a roof.

seeing the future
takes time.

~

[laity]

the unmarried wind will comb its hair in heaven
but for now
in the Ohio
of the weightlifter, that odd
follower
of stillness
who built
on roadkill
tornado’s
church

in the story, a newborn is placed in a mailbox.  we know of no harm and the story itself is very casual.  an angel tells us the job of an angel is to fly in front of the master when the master is ****.  we try to hang on every word.  the mailbox is the only mailbox in heaven.  our questions turn our stomachs.  some of us become hormonal and some of us identify pedophiles by future rote.  we head home in a pack.  a siren behind us wails a moment before being joined.

don’t talk to babies.  write.  write to be the first one there.  the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth.  walk once a week into the wrong bathroom.  worry.  bump around the house at night, noisemaker.  a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard.  pull.  pull from your habit forming past.  be the bomb god’s yet to wear.  surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty.  open your mouth then look at your son.  call it photography.  if spotted, be a monster.

footage
of evil
things

whose people
are sometimes

asleep

-

father, footrace, fistfight

-

uphill
you’re such

a yo-yo

-

the bike
no bones
is beauty

I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.

under the boy’s pillow
she slipped
an empty pack
of cigarettes-

the kind
her teddy bear
smoked

her father
of tame abandon
given to sayings

any such
that would
when uttered
refute the admittance
wrongfully present
in so many
confessions.

all boxes contain the same amount of silence.

he surrounded himself with boxes.
when she moved
he said nothing.

there was a night
my crow dark mouth
held a small priest
who gave his head
to be smothered…

I go as a mute to the oral history of praying hands.

that my father can sleep, god has me put a pea under the resting body of my disabled son.  my three older children are sober enough to call my mother.  my wife puts a gun to a head that’s not in the freezer.  I jump rope thinking I might move into the land of plague my acre of miracle and find for snowfall the farm machine that once cleared lambs from the formlessness of habit.  night, you.

as touch explores its past

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.

father smokes to make something disappear.  he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected.  when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil.  mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears.  terrify no one your childhood knows.

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world.  hell was always the preparing of hell.

I am trying to lure my brother from the woods with a semi-flat basketball and a fallen wasp nest.  at home, the neighbor girl he has a crush on is using our water.  the first time he disappeared like this, she wore my mother’s bathrobe and called his name all the way to junior until her voice went.  her note is the oddest thing I’ve not reread.  

there is smoke coming out of your father.

a dog, plainly.  noses water bowl to mid-yard.  to the spot.  exact it will rain.  rain soonly.  a word the town uses.  (sit) one yells from a slowly passing go-cart.  someone's mother.  I often think for.

give death a sign. pumpkin seeds to the weatherman holding his throat.  nostalgia a reason to *******.  a gas mask to goliath.

i.

you can’t stop the man who’s tucked himself away.  like mine, your mother doesn’t lose her voice but disappears when quoted.  give the babies to jesus.  god wants us old.

ii.

I lasted in childhood as long as any who believed a scarecrow got its name for being scared.  though I’d go out like a light, my father never fell asleep on his feet.

in late years, the incarcerated man becomes a vessel of facts not widely recorded.  he puts them to paper for the daughter he’s imagined by.  on the outside, the daughter settles into a calming routine with a perfectly good father.  her mother abuses animals with such regularity the family name becomes synonymous with the fight to end recidivism.  on the whole, the man’s youth is something he said once and forgot.  a real wife was humanly possible.

I was reading beyond my years to childlike fathers in a house named for the woman whose hair was brought to her by boys her sons had wronged.  I was eating what I could of the horse said to have eaten hospital flowers.  I tried to make it last.  the fathers were hungry and oblivious.  they had left their voices outside before telling me they’d need them.  I worried they could sense I was pretending not to know.  I loved equally the horse and the horse we ran out of.

on a bare back
some white
from the wall
I was painting.

-

go through me.

-

the itch a home has
after asking
the home
to widen its search
for fly.

-

it snows when it snows.

absentia, angel.

-

blood, palm print, basketball.

-

father, mother, sister, brother, god, dog, *****.

-

I swing sometimes a stolen bat.

-

the children moan
and mimic.

-

give home a fly
it takes
a spider.

-

happiness
having to think
for itself
is wilderness.

a one-legged boy
and a lame
bird

in a roller
skate

as a woman
she was a boy
after her own
heart.

as a girl
she had an overdeveloped
process addiction
to program cessation
programs.

as a poem
she knew
suicide
like the back
of her hand
and with
two palms
took a bird
to its bones.

her knees remained
the earphones
of god
and god
an unmanned
analogy.

a hobbyist
who impersonates
god

attempts
to make
from scratch

a parasite.

-

I fail
not her

her nakedness.

-

she is not sad, she is climate.

-

in a sense,

it doesn’t take long
for the lifeless
body
to latch
onto
the idea
death
had
of a baby

slowed
to a crawl.  

-

if you must, harm, harm only

the touch
she projects.

not all of us could be born  

-

the rock

won’t leave
my mouth  

-

mother eats with her hands

(palmistry)

-

makes father
go weak
at the knees

the land here is so beautiful one can forgive all kinds of bad behavior.*

see rabbit knock into a pail, then knock it again, so it is upright.  

see the later mother believe ghost and for that in the thirst of ghost.

see angel, being seen, pained by a bell that aforesaid rings.

see the hand of god once thought to sweep, sleep.

see slow the jeopardy of dog ticks.  see bullets in a wall  

or track them their holes; some in a line and some stepped out.

see a film, the south in it.  your lips with your teeth.

from the double vision of a dead parent’s dream shiner
to reflections
on the body
art

of departure,

long live possession.

my father
he was in
this poem

yesterday
so deeply
that I-  ****.

they repo
even
dark.

for Mary Ann*

there are more dolls
than people

remember, daughter, our jack-in-the-box

how it studied
all kinds
of music?

pain is religious
grief
is not

food on my plate, I am always one suicidal hairdresser away from my past…

lead your lives, touch

rec'd a message today from a person known by another person. another person whose poem I commented on. was told the poem in question was about a real brutality of which the person messaging was at the receiving end of, with the poet being the one giving. person asked me if I would want my wife and kids to know what I support. to all: my existence here is meta, pseudo, simile, and metaphor. any writing I read is done knowing that an avatar is the first lie. I am sorry for all bad things, once removed. but if you need my apology, I can only hope you will one day not be so sad.

until the website/press purchase link for my chapbook {infant cinema} is resolved, I have six signed copies available for free to anyone interested in writing a review.  you can request a copy from me here or email me at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

also, due to the issues the press is having in regards to the availability of the chapbook for purchase, you can request a free PDF of {infant cinema} from me here or, again, by request made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

some reviews for {infant cinema}:

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)

beneath the tethered astronaut of his dream

the impossible boy
misses

something small

the human ear, its recent
brush
with whale

a brother wets the bed

is reminded
of age, the number

of kissable
girls-

in another life, he has
this one

there is no
imagining
of his
surprise

I start my sentences
like this:

the thing is.

thing is
my son
like yours
is dying.  thing is

I was told
by god
to be a man.

I love you all.

I love
but start a fight
with someone
I’ve never met
over what
a *******

poverty

no one
talks to
not
in years.

one must apple boldly in a cornfield of rust.

baby clotheshorse
eats baby
litmus.  

taste
keeps my tongue
in the dark.