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.

the man his shadow and the woman her dream.  

their child
its track
of time

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.

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

a line

tree: the unbathed statue of your screaming

–

shade: the folder of my clothes

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

prays he’ll see again them cows of lake suicide

a body to dry my blood.  some god

seeing me
as a person…  

how quickly birth gets old.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

for a spine, doll prays to fork.

all kinds
of shapes
miscarry.

(-)

it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium.  that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.

anyone with sight was put here to warn my son.  the past is the past of no sudden moves.  the future is the language god uses to hallucinate.  if I remember correctly, memory is the safe word my father avoids to make his presence known.  touch is the cage in all things mom.

I always ask my brother which eye he wants to open in the dark. I have a foreign notion of how to be homesick. I have a son whose body won’t tell him he’s well. I see the face of god as an idea gods use to evoke intellect. as a girl, the man of few words found himself surrounded by things she could describe.

notes on the boy

his sickness is a hotel.  

his health
the failing eyesight
of his father
     the soon to be famous
window washer.

his dream
a documentary
on falling.

     some watch
the room they were in
from the room
they are.

your mother came at my mother with a fork.  

those first days
though I kept it from you
I told myself
you were too sad to eat.      

-

dusk, hide & seek.  

I’d count
and you’d count
behind me.

-

dusk, losing sight
of the frisbee.  the scarecrow

we think is a scarecrow
until it bends to pick up
a cat.  we think is kind
until it swallows

the cat
cat noises
and all.

-

I think I’m elderly

you somehow
replied.

**** these white staffs that draw smoke from the body
**** the lost tiny ******-off messiahs they belong to

**** nine pillows
bedding nine sweaty heads
cramped
with housing
worries

     under one is one ******* tooth

younger times, I’d lose some of my hair when bathing the sick.  now older, I am not a private person.  I foresee helping father with his winter gloves and him thinking I’ve returned his hands.  if sick, one shouldn’t be grateful for the inclusion.  there’s a **** son in all of us.

I would find in my travels sometimes bones.  one, in a brown paper bag on a bus bench.  or another, floating beside a bellied fish in a pet store.  as it was key the bones did not enter my thoughts, I began taking an online course about preservation.  I hadn’t expected logging in to make me less of a transient.  the stress of having to remember a password brought forth desperate visions of my daughter being broken by nothing and casted by men who for the sake of visitation had been made peripheral.  the stuttering nature of her struggles wore on me and I had to abandon the bones for these representations of peopled hospital rooms your nostalgic primitives call photos.

a crookedness within a white cat.  a naked boy on crutches.  a girl in a pink jumpsuit jogging in place beside a man rolling a tire.  all of this says I’ve witnessed my father by himself on a child’s swing ******* two unlit cigarettes.  we don’t exist until god begins to worry.  our neighbor is an old woman with a gun.  she is afraid her color will suddenly change.  when she chases my father home I understand the riddle of his cigarettes.  around him I pretend to be asleep.  I hear him watering a rag and wait for him to press it to my nose and tell me my dreams are bleeding.  when a kitten, the head of our white cat would stick to the refrigerator door.

I was raised in a silence and went on to *******.  I was not close to any named animal.  I let my brother's leg break in the barn and watched as he appraised the length of the rope he jumped with.  when hunting together we followed telephone lines and shot into the air.  birds did more than resemble the feet of our jesus.  our mother was glad we lived but couldn't recall which of us snuck up on her.  our father let us call him by his first name.  his logic remained impenetrable.  he smoked to remember smoking.  slept on the floor so mother would stop making the bed.  before standing on his head in a full bath he'd promise to breathe with his brain.  he'd introduce us as my son the tattoo and my son the artist.  I loved him so much I had to run away and come back.  to this day my brother doesn't know if he was taught to distance himself from prayer or to embrace it

to distance himself from god.

immediately old, the statue of the woman with child.  the baseball star, the soldier whose gun won’t fire, the preacher whose bait palm seems ready to deliver,

     or to receive a dog’s mouth, or pitch underhand.  we try our throwing arms.  poor mary.  you can stone her.  she will never lose the baby.