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.

not a mark on her body was admissible.  on person, she had a child’s paintbrush, a still glistening breath mint, and three black & white photos of a woman’s *******.  first blush, we had her as someone’s muse.  

     my handwriting suffered.  my cursive began to match a popular suicide note.

I have had to tell time using only repetition.  there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t.  I can see what you see in me.  none of my sounds echo.  I have a son.  I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own.  he has three rooms upstairs and three down.  when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.

i.

in no dream did I see you emerge naked from a lake smoking a cigarette you seemed afraid to touch with your fingers.  in no dream was there a ruined enough tree that could take your ****.  

ii.

we are not doing too many things at once.  we are merely extinct.  god's final act is god's only.  we harp.

I will say
I am not my father
and you

     I am not my son
and we will hold hands
until we are
so alone
that I

fall ill
and am replaced
by sickness, a boy

I promise
to write

in the mind
of baby
unborn

where time
is frozen, where god

pleads
déjà vu,

the formless
mother
of embodied
whims

ghosts
herself
to associations
of gender
that exist

only

like nothing’s
kitten

in daylight, a removed light bulb is what I have on my shadow.  I draw attention to myself with god’s health.  he or she wouldn’t think twice about holding my own child over me.  having a disabled son puts one in the position of hearing of your sister dating an undercover cop who for two weeks spoke with a lisp.  it’s a leap but it can be argued that the right eye can touch the left.  the brain is a hymn unto itself.  I arrive quickly at the fact of my other.  there is another whose ear is exile.

town crier

poems March 2014
99 pages
pocketbook style publication
8.50

preview of book is book entire on lulu site. the spine of said book has title. front cover, back cover, are purposely blank.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/town-crier/paperback/product-21548368.html

---

Talent is a mime on a mountaintop said he who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon.  He had said previously other things but this was the first to which my mother caught me listening.  She took my ear and me with it outside and shoved two cigarettes she’d been smoking in my mouth and told me to chew.  When I did not she worked my jaw herself until the tip of my tongue bled enough to give her pause.  Neither one of us cried and the cigarettes were salvageable.  The morning speaker then joined us obviously hoping for a drag.  The moment my mother hated him passed and she told him what hope was.  

He who gave me each morning a fork and a spoon would not often be seen by my mother.  He and I were late in our waking and she’d be out gathering types of dead bird from the bases of cornstalks.  I’d sit in my highchair and watch him shirtless as he prepared the tools of my art.  The hairs on his back would grow before my eyes and need bitten at the follicle.  He would turn and put his finger in the garbage disposal and pretend it was on.  On was something he never turned it because he said a mantis lived there and what would bite his follicles.  I wouldn’t be hungry then which was good for my show.  He would laugh at the misery of my scooping arms and be full of it and tired and he would ask me to rub his belly while he went to the couch on his back.  His belly the single most reason to keep him said mother.  I’d put my ear to it to feel myself kick and never did stir him from sleep.  Pretty early in this routine some of his belly hair started to grow in my ear and my dreams from then always had a banquet in their midsection.

Careful with my dreams.  Mother said they are kittens and one can bite too hard.  It is like her being stubborn and only calling me boy when most called me boy and girl in equal measure.  Sometimes when boy got the lion’s share I’d long to nurse and have to slap the ******* sound out of my teeth.  For saner things I’d walk the dog with a dog in it.  I had names for both and both were names I would’ve called my brother had I been born.  I once found a sipped at wine glass on the roof of the pharmacy mother later burned with lit stalks.  When the turkey buzzards skittered themselves nightly across the horizontal track of my looking for god I’d imagine my brother skinny enough to fit in the parched tube of his swallow.

Now that I am returning to Shudderkin, the welt left by my larger than life father whipping his belt across the tailbone of Ohio, it is clear to me that what we called a dog was correct only on certain days.  The mongrel keeping pace with my bike, the second name I have for my brother, is not the physical dog a city knows and not country loyal as country wants to, and so makes others, believe.  It is instead more like the talking when one is sped up and words get put together and then are stuck there.  Dog of Shudderkin.  Its tongue does not droop or even wag outside the mouth.  A pinkness has always gone on without me.

it is hard not to do what I’m accused of. have self published a collection of poems, most recent, titled ‘we stole not the same bread’. don’t mean to implicate. it’s 105 pages. link below.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/we-stole-not-the-same-bread/paperback/product-21626878.html

the foster god has done a bang-up job of resembling your father.  I admit.  my eyes are faithless.  a group of boys beat my son for beating my daughter.  when I carry my kids, my kids relax.  I can feel it in my *******.  the group of boys are uneducated and call a ******* the peter’s backpack.  I would laugh but the group’s leader has a razor and looks none too happy god has promoted him to shave me.  when done, my ***** and its carriage look as if left by an angel to grow alone after not being placed on an infant.  there is nothing to be said but one of the boys mutters away.  the leader shares that this boy is set to star in the film version of your father’s suicide and has agreed to **** himself for real.  once gone, I can’t tell if the boys were never here or if they are simply not here now.

I will be pumping gas into a make of car I call off-white when a passerby of guessable hostilities won’t know enough to ask if it’s my dog coming dazed for every one of its legs down the road at me like at a spot it senses I’ve disappeared near and I’ll have to agree with my mind it’s the **** dog for sure and it’s not far from where my boys are huddled in a borrowed blanket smelling smoke and I gather it won’t be long before the dog is nothing more than its best instinct so I let the lever and reach through the space where a passenger should be blowfishing on a window for my last gallon of milk to pour on the car like a rehabilitated pyro to give that dog something to see and something to lick.

I was a doorstep baby and brother a treehouse.

moon of the injured.  moon of the blind.

this is Max.  the Max I know when I am escorting into the city nobody you’re close to.  Max is a replica of a doll I donated to a shelter for the baby robots that wandered in and out of a world I was young enough to change.  Max is here because here I can tend to the unrecognizable things that have assumed the forms their inventor failed.

I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers.

my mother as a young woman once attempted

in the car of the train her father took to work

to eat her hands.

it was a story she put an end to
but not before
I lost a tooth
putting my baby
brother’s
feet
in my mouth
to keep
them warm.

my brother as a baby
was far
too small.  one might say
he had the brain

of a snake.

peace and quiet haunt each other.  there’s a hole in my soup.  no disease is rare.  no son.  god taps me on both shoulders because they are his.  my father is the soundman who fails to establish his mother’s voice.  my mother is seconds into sobbing when she disappears without it.  the tv show is very kind.  the old man dreams his wife is young again and she dreams he is strong.  the cemetery may remember death but needs told.  the hallway is nothing more than the hallway of a particular nursing home.  light throws itself like a voice into the deeply peculiar where I touch myself when I clap.  a ghost pokes itself in the eye that undressed you.

with a kid for each hiding spot, father thanks god while mother takes a head count.  I am back from the fair with a rendering of how I will look to my ******.  my brother is already in position and has contorted himself in a manner he thinks will convince me he can shrink his ears.  my sister is nowhere a bumblebee can’t find.  our puppy picks a new favorite because it bruises easily.  numbers game or no numbers game, loneliness is coming.

purgatory
the map lover’s
heaven

-

tea time
and your doll
has no
belly button

-

is your blood clot
still

a cloud

her isolation has become a habit.

her name is prologue.

too many stories
get smacked in the mouth.

violence did not tiptoe into a trailer park.

her author doesn’t know
*******
a white male.

she does everything
in the outhouse of a haunted astronomer.

until I found her cigarettes, my mother was a giant. is there something I can say online that will give me hands? leave an empty laundry basket in a cave that’s crying. rain gives water a church.

my son says
he is as sick
as a whale
and I take him
at his word
but ask
anyway
has he swallowed
anything
he should not have
and my son says
he was told
to swallow a pill
by a small woman
who pointed
to a smaller man    
     who got to the pill
first

******

god the claustrophobe



clean

as rainclouds
pause
beneath
the disoriented
heaven
of our
beloved
thinking woman’s
fireman
a cat
grooms itself
in the manner
we’ve been
to vanish



object permanence**

rabbit
named
vertigo

author unknown / who hears a poem / unlike the poem you are reading

-

the unknown wife / a hidden talent / handstands / above a pair

of slippers

-

stupid babies / don’t worry

in a remote location

-

scissors / the hair / shrinks from

     then fingers / in a mother’s mouth

-  

if dead / only his ghost / would know

    he was my father / in many ways

-

a makeshift hood / on the same head / in a different body

of water

-

children / less widespread / than children

praying

when drought came
to my brother
I left
for the city
where I found myself
blanketing
manhole covers
with my coat
for women
who gathered
on rooftops
with men
whose daughters
had been killed
for jumping
rope

a prison closes because another opens.

on a track, a train car is hit by a train.

     the central aesthetic of a father’s dream
remains a homeless shelter
with a skylight.

nourishment belongs to private property
where god     steps
on a stick.

in Ohio, a conductor’s widow wanders the wrong prison
with a piece of her mind.

I am on the train that will take me to my brother and he is on the train that will bring him to me.  he has only just seen the great bird I’ve envisioned since birth.  I make myself in his image and use his inside voice to describe the bird.  my train arrives early.  once off, I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it.  I pace.  a beautiful woman asks me if I have a light and I say sharply no.  I apologize to the woman and explain how nervous I am to meet my brother this way.  she says she understands.  she says she’ll probably see god before she sees her sister.  I offer her my cigarette and she takes it with her.  my bird is getting smaller and I don’t know who to blame.

at the end of light, more light.
it is why I have been walking.
since you’ve known me
I have walked.

I am leery
of your sadness- you’ve mock deer
on your lawn.

you bird watch.

you rake a single leaf, give up.

sadness is your gut is
tamped properly. when I recall

on highway of abandoned upkeep

pipe tobacco
and knowhow

my hands
make visor.

a car slowly passes
other cars. I call this car
my death, and then revise.

my most recent self published Lulu book, [MOON tattoo], was reviewed by Krystal Sierra, and part of what she says is here:

Because of the relationship between the line and white space, the reader turns back to the poem again and again, a practice that speaks to religious tradition, incantation byway of word and image, how the poem itself becomes the way God, or Spirit, communicates with us via channels we understand, the interplay between the word and white space much like what we know and do not know about the nature of the divine. – Krystal Sierra

~

some poems, from [MOON tattoo]:

[level]

brother is digging barehanded in the backyard a hole for what he hopes is the alien of god’s choice. as for existence, my mother’s is low on mine. my father is keeping out of the same sentence any mention of ****** and totem pole. no one including you cares for my sister’s worry that this no this is the bottom of a rock. if asked, I will say I was visiting with my arms the museum of rowboats during the regional spike in baptisms we as a family failed to interrupt.

~

[meditation]

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 ball is not red. now stare

at the ball
that isn’t

(my half of the seeing eye dog

for yours
of sickbed)

oh,

our abuser’s futuristic nudes…

/ the angels
want
their dead