gaze upon our father
create a woman
and suddenly

know
to leave us

i.

strength
not the strength
a statue keeps.  

ii.

mother's hunger
the hunger

of marionettes.

iii.

the beggar
father hides
and the beggar
he hides

behind.

iv.

brother
don't sleep.

the paper dolls
have been cutting
your hair.

whenever the doorbell rings, father says it’s broken.  the outside world must be a quiet place to lose a baby.  wow.  the scratch on my memory makes me think we had a cat

or a mother
with time.

[otherhood (i)]

loneliness the born artifact of my father’s rented dream. god the hobby of replaced machines. forgiveness the eldest stowaway and mistress of the seasick hologram. the monster you became to attain formlessness. mom a rabbit. her dying frog. hunger erased by what it loves.

~

[otherhood (ii)]

it is not real, of course

the trailer park
on fire, the accepted

field-

wheelchairs
crossing
without us

I wonder sometimes
born
what was it
we fled

and how it can’t have been
our earliest yearning

to arrive

like when the water
got turned off
I still
got naked
and had
you know
my little
boat…

moms who smoke
that’s how
they dream

people **** themselves all kinds of ways. round here being Millersport, Ohio. dark and stormy is how we talk about hair. the dead before they go. my mother’s hair was dark and stormy. wasn’t a monday; her boyfriend was upright and able to hold a pan. she took a couple to the back of the head but kept walking. went to this particular barbershop that’s still there, same barber, still cuts out the dark. passed people no street to be on so they were milled about and missed her darker and missed her stormy looking up as they were. something coming and it wasn’t my mom. all kinds of ways and my mom had to use a tornado. the upper half of her body was too much for the tree but it got its mouthful. her boyfriend held that pan for a week in the same hand.

as I am now turned out you might call me on the disconnect, heck, the dialect. you might want it to be horrible putting only half of her in that tree my own mother. truth might be, tree, my whole mother, and no tornado. I might take you at your word and tell you the tornado carries nothing but my home. that my mother locked herself in the cellar on the sunniest day of the year. that I knew beforehand what the year would bring weather wise. that she lived through all the following malevolence behind those would say to her son she ain’t all there. that when she came out of the cellar it was because of a bird she’d claimed to have heard in her belly.

/ my newest self-published collection of poems, [depictions of reentry], is available now on Lulu.

will send for free a hard copy to anyone interested in writing a review – make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

book preview on site is book entire

some poems from it:

[liftoff]

the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.

-

my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.

~

[attic radio]

the fattest baby in the nursing home can’t chew with its eyes open.

it’s a slow day.

looking into the future
a skeleton’s
dog
sees only
sticks.

lightning
marks
the robot’s
church.

~

[meditations on depth]

the mouth
of the thing
that eats
in fog
a doll’s
head

-

the holy spirit
high
on the bricklayer’s
toothache

-

a cat person
at death’s
door

-

poverty

a belonging
moved
by many
mirrors

~

[seeing]

bored as a slaughterhouse

crow / angel

on a skateboard

~

[depictions of reentry (xxi)]

the barn
bat
with the eyes
of a diver’s
shadow…

the dads were all digging
the nudes
were thinking
small

every chair
an electric
chair

in daylight, that motherless grief

~~

/ my first non self-published chapbook, [infant cinema], is available from **** Press.

I currently have three signed copies available for free- make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

excerpt, here:

my child. my diver who wets the bed. my worrier who rescues domestic scenes for animals accused of gaslighting. my swimmer. bather of grasshoppers. my lovely bird alone in an airplane.

~

two things to do on an empty stomach are:  

hold a séance.  

follow the spider’s trail of abandoned birthmarks.  

~

in the video, the young woman is being force-fed cake by a man with a ruined tongue. my mother can’t eat and watch at the same time. your mother is holding me and wondering what happened to this thing. our fathers are veering into the realm of film criticism. where you are depends wholly on my sister’s makeup. god’s parents have no concept of time.

~~

/ also, ending tomorrow, is the goodreads giveaway for my self-published thing, [FOUR], which includes four recent titles of mine in full along with some newer poems.  

some poems from it:

[the many]

as an uncle
can enter
any garage
and sense
the absence
of a nailgun
so
can a holy man
prepare
a meal
in the missing
church

~

[purlieu]

a bruise, a school

of fish.  a caterpillar

crossing

the floor
of hell.  a thought

sick
to a son’s
stomach, a winter

glove
in spider’s
nightmare.          

~

[mouthings]

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.

~

[stratum]

two brothers come to blows over which sister likes fast food more.  a man we want to love is shadowboxing a snowdrift from the parable of touch.  blood is a food group.  I pray to my hair.  call my footwork by name.  take my time

with amnesia.  

baby facts include being born again in the museum you were carried to.

I would read my books by the light of brother burning his. sister could heal with her bare back the angels of lab rats.  father drank water and mother its hiding place.

we do not know the exact day our son stopped aging.

by age
I mean
he has seen
the ghost
he’s envisioned.

–

by doctors I mean anyone we see on purpose.

by money I mean the money we made
in those years
that didn’t
move.

–

at forty
cutting oneself
with oneself
is not
****.

–

three years in, our daughter lies about what she is eating. asks

that we read to her
as she has
forgotten.

when pregnant, she says she has something to tell us.

–

I am not the life I wanted.

–

by tell I mean she says nothing.

–

we recognize the toy soldier as the last gift

meant our son
was normal.

–

the soldier has gotten older
and is obviously
sick. from the same set

we look for the medic.

–

no.

–

I take the soldier in my hands then pass him, alien bird, to my wife. he coughs once and tries to raise his hand but the weight of the gun is too much. my wife says: how sweet.

this night, our old bodies, our coughing soldier on the nightstand. we kiss and the sounds come from our teeth. I think about the tooth fairy, about not being rich. how we can afford

but probably not find
a coffin
that small.

god remembers

a giant

that to us
was plain

a mother

as if
merely
on leave
from that place
she never
once a mother
was

begins to write
stories

populated
by illiterate
men
and men
meeting
to her knowledge
in a misplaced
fog
that god
recalls
having
on hand
might his people
blame
randomly
his wife
on a childhood
disappearance
which exists

as a recollection
of sorrow
at birth
in a town
of vandals
and caricatures
with no need
for immediate
representation

the abuse
continued
it was almost
slapstick

he looked
at a plate

clean, hell’s radar

the dreamless baby of a kidnapped mime.  a god whose mirror packs light.  the hand-me-down

self harm
of the terribly
made.

they’d say his head was hard because it was too small for god to kiss.  when he’d come into town, he’d leave with children we’d not seen except on  posters.  his welcome mat was a napkin spotted with blood from a Q-tip.  save for the tiny matter of Jesus, our parents gave him little to do.

the distance between my brother and a random sister

if

what they struggle
to share
is darkness
their childhood
blanket…

-

realistic depictions of my mother watching films

-

also

for a shy
god

my mother
divining
from belly
mud

trends
in angel
fashion

-

me
liking only
the me
I see
in mirrors

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my ******* kid.

her father quells *******.

ants are quiet.

-

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

-

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall.  sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

a plump girl in a flea market

barefoot

barefoot as

the jesus doll

left

in her father’s

car

a car so yellow

it hurts one to be

inside the car

-

some lady turned up her nose by pressing it to that screen door
your kid seems okay
licking

-  

this my face and this my totem face-

make neither
too long

-

hope is a rabbit’s foot

secretly

the lord’s

slipper

you are here for your own protection.

I know
to be disabled
is to live
introduced.

I mother
the way I mother
my hands.

I do this
in the city
of retroactive
imaginings.

I salt
with memory
a deer
and am told

lose
the deer.

in my lifetime
the unborn
will be identified
using
the baby
you were warned
by.

the moon will die
and the owl
will stir
something
in a wolf.

a bird will say
not here
not in front
of the eggs.

my father is on the run.  before leaving, he pinched my mother’s cheeks and said there ain’t a buzzard knows your son is a dream.  his letters mention a clone upset at being homeless.  his handwriting has a sound to it.  one I can nearly recreate if I chew on my fingers after a hot bath.  the last dry morsel I had was my tongue.  in a recent game, god’s tongue was a campfire.  my mother doesn’t disappear but to make food look for her hands.  rainfall we understand as god’s census.  next thunder, I’ll gather chickens for his beard.

dead owl

an oiled rag
spotted on a walk through
the morning after
a protest

-

     in a cell, a boy
hardly old enough
to be a boy

his body stuck to his clothes

his one bare foot
crisp     as starvation’s

mouse

-

          astray of a hawk

the river
leads my shoe

20% off all print books, there, thru October 3rd with coupon code of SAVETODAY

my latest self-published (on demand) Lulu books, as such:

[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from]
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

~

[MOON tattoo]
9.00
114 pages
published March 2016

~

[shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner (& other poems)]
7.00
114 pages
published June 2016

~

[FOUR]
12.00
340 pages
published June 2016

~ this is a combined publication of these four collections: earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from / MOON tattoo / infant cinema / shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems] ~

~

[depictions of reentry]
9.00
146 pages
published August 2016

~

speaking of books, and of talking to myself, I said some things about two recent, and excellent, books of poetry:

Nothing Good Ever Happens After Midnight, Sarah Marcus, GTK Press

thief

I can live knowing it goes missing. but, it being here, toppled from its rightful place…I can’t live knowing there are two. that it has no plural. that I have to say it twice. that I am asked on my deathbed about deathbeds in general.

–

bear

can we talk about bears. no, can you. that’s what I mean. I mean I want to listen. is there a bear I can learn about apart from the others?

–

panic

can we say muscle memory is the orphaned narrative of a bilingual body? that a house is so clean its rooms disappear? can we say home?

book, even?

the empty room released into the wilderness.

–

reader

this book by Sarah Marcus. while you still exist.

“Find a midwife whose name sounds like a spell.” – from Do-It-Yourself

“…Water
finds a way out. When I enter a
room, I locate water.” – from I Didn’t Know

“I research how to remove a body: a strange erasure, an omen.” – from Fetching Water

“Her dismantled den. Her dismantled den.” – from Den of Thieves

~

marshland moon, Eleanor Gray, **** Press

“(it is nothing, is nothing

…and so, where fables began)” – from [Lady’s Slipper]

After reading:

if there is no card

the flowers
are
from loss.

I didn’t know how to end things. I threw a soft doll

at a bullet.

I was trying to be quiet
but silence

it has
a safe word.

The way swimming plays with my shadow. The prop

high-chair.

~

During:

The missing child learns a new word. Not from me. Not that I remember. Our favorite program? A previously ruined nostalgia.

“a nameless sensation which perpetually haunts the body” – from [and then, Monsters]

I have a look I want to give loss.

“I want to say goodbye, I want
time to say goodbye” – from [Skeletal, Furred]

In my dreams I am ugly. In my dreams I am not differently awake.

“and so, what then of
colossal sleep, “ – from [Zero Beauty]

~

Remnant and Root:

“there is no language that can articulate what it is I suffer by, or do not suffer by- like all the sufferings suffers I am…” – from [Inactive Currency]

“/ do I even know of longing / I know of being held / “ – from [Wormwood]

“how do I
…love the very gnat of self” – from [Plox]

“holy, holy the black asterisk of wound
for the child I never was” – from [Languid Limbo]

“ ‘murmur’  I had forgotten the word
ash without meaning, death without purpose”

“-I am
a song, an urn, a stairwell” – from [Susurrus]

~

This is a book. The title, to me, is very alone…and, intimacy, the most distant of permissions.

the tree was gone but its shade remained.  he told her the war had a humble middle.  they bathed together in a mattress on top of the shade.  they agreed to avoid the uselessness of their youth by forgiving animals.  she had been a writer.  he would be a bed of one nail.

soon
after heaven
took
so much
we stood
in the padded
room
where once
our mother
stood-

shreds of gowns
still unsettled
teased our hair
grey-

nothing
between us
we hugged
as two
late arriving
wraiths-

you bent
for the head
of a black
pushpin
but thought
better
to leave it

     whether eye or mouth
     we’d have to see
the doll

in my father’s car, father driving, my fingers curled as if readying themselves for the wheel.  father small talking, his dark chatter, my hands like jaws left open, horrified before the heads god plans to put them in.  heads not to scale.  heads trial size.  

I worry the heat in my eyes is permanent.  my lids worry as well and retreat.  burn pain is its own person telling me I am long term its most bearable memory.  

the hospital seems a distant campfire lowered by the sleepy laughter of the still beautiful.  my daughter.  who as a girl melted the faces of two action figures with the bulb of a reading lamp not to upset her brothers but so the figures could kiss.  

I begin to make sense all by myself and nod to the dog shaped thing drowsing in the car’s murk just beyond my feet.  politely father asks if he can help and I okay him asking me anything.  he chooses the health of my sons.  one in particular.  I stick to the dog.  to the puppies it ran from no faster

had they been aflame.

i.

this is what I was thinking:

blow blood from your nose.
the word

stem.

and lead me to a flower.

ii.

dies adult
the child
of god.

iii.  

wheelchair, from its

handle
a ribbon
you can flick

like a blue
ear.  

iv.

her soul
like foil;  why mama

she pillowed

the coughing
iron.

v.

stepping on a nail
this is my father

he walks like  that

on his hands.

vi.

a red oil
ants carry.

stick people
their hands
are lonely
at the same
time

-

in my son’s stomach
is something
from your seashell
collection

no matter how much I touch him
he’ll be touched
more, it is not real

-

but it is
the christ
balloon

give me
the gift
of sorrow
the strongman’s
pencil

-

in the purgatory
of spaced out
animals, ****
on the short
straw

-

tell me I’m not surrounded

-

show to my brother
youtube videos
of our mother
sleeping
on her father’s
back

-

say something in my sister’s mouth

-

scrub me
from the shoemaker’s dream
with a rock
the rock
I deserve

my body at three years old
is being carried
to a mailbox
by my mother
who blizzard
or no
puts her ghost
on the map

(i)

no one in heaven is named after god.

place is an animal. animal a cure

for déjà vu

(ii)

my hands
are the hands
my hands
could rescue

(iii)

I was wrong. now is not

the afterlife
of the present.

not
yet

(iv)

our towels are asleep in the oven. our surroundings

lonesome.

/ mom severs mother from the **** vocab of our nakedness

smearing mud on her **** to cool the baby.

trying
to burn
dirt.

like a scar, some father
reciting
the same
verse.

the attractive couple carry a live lamb to the last place their picnic blanket was not seen on fire.  the lamb taxes their young muscles with every weight gain its mind records.  they point and the lamb shifts but does not fall and it’s their pointing makes me hope they are happy.  the whole scene overwhelms my leg and I ask my closest son to rub at a certain area with his palms.  my failed son, son I am lost on, son I swing

at and miss
who goes on to refer to kites
as fireworks.

it wants you to hold it.  it plays dead.  its mother is bombed into her mother’s mind.  I think of what I did to the chicken’s head and how it stopped the chicken.  how I know something I’ve never seen is beautiful.  I can’t make out what my father is pointing at because he believes it’s forgotten the both of us.  I grant my brother his exile of proximity.  for example, no chicken is overwhelmingly chicken.

paint for me / in lost / white

an Ohio / so divorced

from its visionary
plainness / that one

can brush
an erased / hand / at the mere

thought / of spider’s / hair

the antecedent story would be a simpler telling-  how it came to be the boy and I and three cows.  one can imagine; one must.  we celebrated spontaneously in our biddable house and we lost track.  sufficient that I was aged and he much less.  our argument presented itself like this:  magic paper or magic milk?  boy he would hold the bucket above the paper and pour.  I noted this was an act magnificent and an act personal.  I was pulled into the boy initially but pulled back.  the milk though went into the paper; abandoned, freed, gone.  the boy did this once a day for three until the bucket was empty.  I said paper, he said milk.  our further experiments left the paper sunned and thus brittle.  we then had only our cows which led us to grass and hormones.  hormones led to science, grass to god.  grass to his mother.

[parade for sorrow]

I miss
blinking



[imp]

the man digging in his yard is looking for his dog. this is my lucky window. in this much silence, a baby could get a tooth. a mom a finger if a car door slams. the man digs and the ice comes for its heartbroken road. wounds move in a deerless world.



[born]

disguised
as

as if
I would know



[access verses]

a classroom, a house

but never
the ghost
of a church

–

the boys
they play
scarecrow
loves
horse, and the girls

the shepherdess
on a boat
names her dog

–

hey, distance

lose
the baby

(says
the empty
box)



[holding the baby]

a deleted voicemail of a boy asking his mom how to prepare a past meal. my handwriting an insect I want the best for. dream and the moth it won’t finish.



[vespers]

them raccoons out there is tarrying

up

yr bible

–

tearin

–

border: my eyes can’t stop what the back of my head is eating

mirror: a godless hyphenate

–

my man is a body whose moon is vacant

–

they is out there to flood

sightseers

with basilisk

****

–

in the valley of my choking
the fingers of my father
are going
dog’s-collar
purple

–

out-the-way churches. and acne



[declination]

in forgetting how many to save, god wants to know

are you still
seeing

things…

I remember the animal, the appropriate

mask…

once held, is the baby
less
wild

is the room
in the room



[sympathizer]

the many plain
sons
of god
their parking

tickets



[the mud on god's cheek]

at birth we are given a ladder we can’t see.

our feet

bare



[animal masks on the floor of the ocean]

mouse, teacup of the missing stork-

owl, lamb of night-

this was god. he was sad and everyone noticed.

high we are beaten for acting like the same horse. memory invades the afterlife. I talk only to the animal that takes me to my sound.

if his ears can hear one thing
how does he know it’s god
how does she know
there are two

to half brother
a phrase like
intellectual shorthand
is redundant

though half brother
admittedly
is full
of himself

middle sister
she agrees

     left
for alive
middle can’t
recall
her sentience

not in front of
this memory
of an army
doll

being named
after mother
but before
father

paint
with fire
the funny bone

the fence…

stray thing
from dog’s
ashtray

waiting for dad to burn off.  for mom
to send
in my direction
a phrase
not unlike

keep on
keeping
your ghost
warm.  for brother’s

baby
brother

and
for dog.  for the hand

museum
to open.

for the asker
of this:

who would want
two hours
of a life
back?

decay
is a form
of waiting.

the boy intent on crushing his privates with a seesaw.  the same boy who sees you next week to put stars in your belly.  the boy you aren’t when you’re sick of stars.  when you kick your dog for not being red.  when you put your foot in a blue mouth darker than your father’s.  the things your father says in jail about the bear no one helped.  the things he says out of jail that are prison food.  prison food he says is a stretch if you want to grow as a writer.  your dog losing color in a clean midwestern bank after being shot by a trigger sad teller.  your dog a nervous dog with a last name and its dog-like hope to be unheard of.

ask god how long it takes to decide on a language. remember the dead bear. the sleepy spoon. ask the soul about its weakness for image.

it treats the paintball injuries of contagious dogs. dry-humps to the sobbing of saint visitation. its sister delivers her own snowball in the binoculars of a man with a limp and a finite supply of plastic lawnmowers. I learn about its town from a poster meant to attract what’s never left. this is where I go to look like I’m here.

father the writer couldn’t write a character wasn’t naked.  when asked by none other than himself the writer he’d say he hadn’t time to describe the clothes being worn.  he’s like this drunk that’s been toilet-papered in a small ohio town on a former friend’s front step okay being called by boys a dumb mummy and by girls a bad bride.  son in a toppled but long since safe train car is putting bite marks on the inside of each wrist then smelling them because he doesn’t understand politics and because he wants to be found.  mother is homely and what’s left of a surgery is keeping her asleep under the newly navigated hands of ghost who’d come to fix the reception and stayed.  I am in a better place but from a room where I saw a reddened ear move high across a white wall and stop midway to become a magnet, mine, shaped like an ear.  we are currently enchanted by the rise and fall of a kite some sister flies to realize the forehead of god.

clown car
too much
for ghost

fang
in the dull
tooth
of my womb

this sadness

I did not
inherit, that I

cannot
pass on,
does not

make me
human

but some

     third, fourth

     incurious
beast

loitering
in the belly

     of a ruined, or half built

ark