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

the kind
her teddy bear
smoked

Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

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.

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

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.

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.

The people started naming their bodies

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

The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.

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.

[notes from life under bell (i)]

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.



[notes from life under bell (ii)]

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.



[notes from life under bell (iii)]

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

[notes from life under bell]

(i)

on video my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s maybe four. I don’t know where to begin. this pond behind her, perhaps? that in my memory is the size of a fire pit. or maybe, here, in the darkening sameness of those sentences strung together by cows. or years from now, even, with the word no and her sister’s lookalike being assaulted by an only child in a library of fragile non-fiction. my cousin is singing a song she’s learned by heart. she’s five. a careful six. sound’s fossil. no city half-imagined. no insect obsessed with privacy. time matters to the frog we catch.

~

(ii)

there are days he is the son of muscle memory and funny bone. days his hands are gloves from a small god. poor god, he says, and grows. days he can carry a circle to any clock in the town of hours. days his past can be heard by his siblings- you’re beautiful the way you are. days his blood pushes a bread crumb through his thigh. days his scar is a raft for ear number three. nights his brain / the separation of church and church.

~

(iii)

violence is a dreamer. a boy on a stopped bus is dared to eat a worm. it feels authentic. alas, there is no worm. the devil knows to stay pregnant. word spreads about the girl without a tongue. cricket lover. and then, bulimic, when she won’t sneeze.

~

(iv)

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

~

(v)

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

~

(vi)

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.                

~

(vii)

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

~

(viii)

onstage a dog barks at an empty stroller.  the mosh pit is weak.  last count had three pregnant, three resembling the man who unplugged my father, and two praying for the inner life of a hole.  onstage a boy is holding up a kite for another boy to punch.  dog’s been tased.

~

(ix)

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

~

(x)

outside the bathroom’s designer absence, our melancholy impressed by symbolism, we form

a line

~

(xi)

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

shade: the folder of my clothes

~

(xii)

praying he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide, the handcuffed frog shepherd

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide    

~

(xiii)

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.  

~

(xiv)

lonelier than creation, I have nothing on trauma.  genetically speaking, I don’t think anybody expected us to spend so much time on one idea.  this open umbrella.  ghost at the keyboard.

~

(xv)

and in the spacecraft where a mother diapers the doll that makes her fat there plays the voice of god asking for a film crew none will miss

~

(xvi)

we wore clothes as an apology for being nearby.  a door was a door.  a ghost was a ghost and a door.  the house was possible.  its rooms were not.  baby was a body spat from the mouth of any creature dreaming of a bathtub.  I got this lifejacket from a scarecrow.  said the redheaded tooth fairy.

~

(xvii)

his baby is wailing in its crib for its mother and he mans you up for a cigarette and blows on the baby’s face and somewhere you yourself have stopped crying as you are pulled from a pile of leaves by two people made of smoke

~

(xviii)

for a spine, doll prays to fork.    

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

~

(xix)

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is.  day four:  prayer is dismissive, but welcome.  whose past is how we left it?  body is delivered twice.  beginning and end.  nostalgia and wardrobe.  middle eats everything.  it snowed and I thought my blood was melting.  could be the way you reason that happens for a reason.  I was a kid when mouse was a kid.  there’s no hope and I hope.  

-

my son’s weight is a cricket on a piano key.  it’s more than I can handle that god gave us god.      

-

aside:  we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

-

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise    

-

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb.  his fist has been called:  hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard.  I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates.

-

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

-

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

-

the disappearance surrounding said event.  a horse belly-up in water’s blood.  see telescope.  also, cane of the blind ghost. magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure.  

oh silence afraid to start a sentence.  

-

in the photograph a fist is cut from, a kneeling family of five is putting to bed

the unremembered
present.  

-

traced, perhaps, for a terrible circle-

today was mostly your hand.

the mother of your hand is smashing spiders with her wrist. we have a high-chair for every creature that eats its own hair. the twins in the attic have switched diapers. skeptics. voices heard by the ghost of my stomach.

we put a museum on the moon. I had all my dreams at once. a mouse was wrapped in a washcloth then crushed with the songbook of baby hairless. fire treats grass like fire.

it is snowing the first time my daughter drives alone. Ohio is cruel. stillbirth, old four-eyes. you want them to like you. the insects you save.

a lawnmower starts then dies then is pushed by a noisemaker past fog’s dark church.  an unprepared prophet drinks the milk meant for baby eyesore.  my sister loses most of her hair putting together a puzzle of her mouth.  a bomb is dropped on a bomb.