five bodies
in a one room
cement
house.

an inventory
of warm
voyeurisms.

I don't want to know
who's been looking.

it is my job
to approve
the older machines.

add
a second room.

three year olds
not seeing
birds.

I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined.  nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave.  the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube.  my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his.  mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost.  I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog.  I have not heard of the spoon that has a past.  something in my stomach wants to see a star.

a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool

a dead spider
beneath it

I could talk nightly
on these-

my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt

to koan
the world
makes perfect
sense, to motto

it makes
none-

two vowels
in the word
poor

for an elusive
smallness
not seed, nor raincloud
grievance
of ghost

that was
the is
my father’d
been

/ not that I have two birds
but that I ask
for the stone
back

/ nothingness
edited
for space

a plea
addressed
to the non
readers
of said
poem
to leave
its writer
alone

to present oneself so falsely-

be happy
for the work

return won't have me

abuse has no before,

no after.

small windows for unfeeling birds.

my grief writes in the wrong diary
of the orphan
in her tummy

this my lonely tower with no one in it.  this the soup as it burns the tongue of a man on stilts.  this my boy’s breath in a cup of snow.  this the thorn of a mother’s depth.  this my patch of artificial grass.  this the melancholy itch of a traveling hand.  this my lowest number of dead.  this the high brother who cries in a satellite named for his *****.  this my drug use.  this the videocassette from god’s garage.  this my cloud of discontinued muscle.  this the pink hammer with matching nail.  this my mouth on a snake-bitten snake.  this the quote.  hell is a fire sale.

death
alerts god
I’m not
photogenic

I held an apple with my ankles.  
boyish, I guess, very still.

these two girls, new to me, in my sister’s room

they were
with their hands
talking.

about tomorrow, or maybe
a spoon.  I could imagine

mother, by me, loved.

dad sitting sober as a fence, looking to bite
before dinner
a hard sweet.

nightgowns, drying, the last of our water
on four legs.

my sister
a curtain
sheer

to the angel wake of my bones.  the mute

rub
of soap
in a stranger’s
bath.

I leave the dream, I come back

this is how
it’s done
there is

a record

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage.  we have been writing in unison instead of eating.  our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.  we are dying in two of our mother’s arms.  our mother is elsewhere repeating after the man who does our stunts.

my mother she applies a silence to her lips.  I don’t hear her go but can see that she is gone.  my brother falls asleep trying to remember the last time someone carried a tune.  the movie of his life is left by yours.

we were telling so many stories we stopped having to make them up.  I dragged the murdered bodies from my dream and buried them in places that exist.  nothing happened and we started a club for our brand of intellectual improv for more nothing to happen beneath.

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.

christ is a boy armless in christ.  eats his corn

his teardrop
corn.  

thinks he’s been given
by *******
the power
to spy
on a fish.  thinks god

is part
food.  hears

from a demon
touched
by snowfall

that the boat
is real

but first
starve a crow
that is blind.

it is not so exact
this language

both parents thought to report the child missing

god is weak
but can address
the outdated
animals
of
your poems

without me
stones
meet

we keep missing each other.

I’m no you.

my favorite sport is god.

my father
drops a bomb
referred to
as common
on a place
he makes
famous.

in the dream, I had a baby and left it there.

behind
is the part of my life
you’re in.

dad is trying to load bullets into a flashlight.  his tv show is having trouble sleeping.  mom wants us to drink the water while it’s hot.  myself I’ve heard horror stories about ******* in the baby pool.  I tell my brother having a fever is alot like giving god a *******.  sister opens the oven for a doll she thought would be taller.  we like you but not when you’re lonely.

I exhaust my children by going back and forth on god

smoke-rings taunt the copycat spirit known as the ghost of my child’s mouth.  on top of that, the crib is giving me grief.  I click the remote at my wife’s body as she compares herself offline to nothing god can search.  the book of frenzied commonplace is stolen by the brother wearing the shoes I gave him to lift his mother at a later

from an earlier
time.  martyr starts before it ends.  a bald man with a comb tries hard to make it happen.  this cracks me so I have to speak on the pregnancy or bust atmosphere not in my house.

satan is a dinosaur. existence an earliness for which I’m never quite prepared.

/ having been to volcano and back, dog

has this look

less than
she can
chew

for Russell Edson*

whose name
escapes me
has paraphrased

death

death
is as big
as a house

you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.

I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.

you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.

up ahead, we work together.

I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.

our father?

he is made mostly of the words that display my words.

the form
obsessed
image

-

the bad
back
of god

the number we did on our mouths
as boys
as indians

sitting on the earth
calling

with echo
to a lost

friend’s
child

that I be baptized by a vandal whose frostbitten hands…

that I could touch you with what I’m seeing and that a thing be worth

no words.

pray knock, mannequin

here is my daughter     she lifts arms

for a living, I’m not

around

-

when young, not so much losing the mind
as going elsewhere     with it

even then, you are not the first to arrive

-

the baby won’t shut up

I can’t find it

-

my father is poor / is missing

people he’s never
been to

-

when she was not    not yet     I cut a hole in her

for when she would need to see
the light

-

here is my brother
buying a coat rack
for our christmas tree

so it can double
as a coat rack

-

for the sake of your memory,
I wear the same clothes everyday

bounce down the school's
most narrow hallway
off kids

playing moth

poverty has its own alphabet. we speak only to expand our understanding of what came second, be it silence or the ventriloquy of god.  no one here has lost a baby but there are enough of us to go around.  I’ve nowhere to tell you about place.

he knows three languages
but hurts me
in one

-

our baby hasn’t spoken in years

-

we were left two insomniacs

they are slowly
picking teams

-

satan has no memory of passing through deer

I am from the future (I miss

you) there is a way

to contort
the body
and deepen

scarecrows (my son

has an illness)
I’ve seen

in pictures

father is cheating death or cheating resurrection.

this is my first video of a mother daughter divorce dance.

easier to leave a baby than a note from god.

I am at the movies to see one.

spasms even the smallest spasms in the very small, oh.

it is in our DNA to progress, oh.

he is hard to lift.

what could’ve been is not heaven to what isn’t.

here is a beginning:  were it not for trace elements of mirroring,

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.

a costume party in my father’s house.

     my mother
in her Sunday best.

little old
hermetic
me.

loudest brother
in the attic
with a stick.
in his mouth.

     my most housebroken
sister?

basement, on a stack of bibles.

other siblings, non locals, dogs, my father…

all in the mind
of your private

nudist.

my hands miss me.
two aches
on a frosted
window.
I carry my son
as if he’s come
from the freezer.
he is life on the moon.

     hell on earth
stop treating
addiction

like it’s something
you haven’t
attained.

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.

the bridge
the broken arm
of god.

the ventriloquist, her immortal canary…

birth the jackpot
hit
by grief. a wiseman

mourning
his third
son.

the man without white hair returned your comb.  he said half of his dog is still missing.  I thought we could set aside some time tonight to be sad.  the kids will be here but if we work together I think we can make them believe they are not.  the man agreed to wait but then proceeded to turn me away.  so many have it I fear white hair has become the norm.

terrorism

trading
back and forth
the dead
before they are
and after


pilgrimage

one’s ******
recovery
of a native
alienation


novitiate

I know my mother
by the back
of her hand


drone*

I don’t believe
in being
attacked

amnesia occurs as often as god.  we speak as one to one who puts a value on value.  we assign an indirect loneliness to pregnancy and present ourselves to prison populations as a way to avoid hitting the pregnant.  like you, I become my own pillow when back in the school days of my tornado.  yes I place myself in a song and you place the song.  reading remains a new form of plagiarism.  I am super psyched about the babies.  I don’t want to mess up their traumatic bonding.  hypervigilance is a thing.  like you, I know I’m close to what I’m ghost of.

memory
to the mailman
with a bad
back

is a crow

carried drugs
for stone

a skinny boy with long hair
mid
koan

leaves me
his imagination.

     my mother
     shaving her head
     with a lollipop.

the second thought of our hastily created christ was to encourage the brutalization of magicians, most of which we corralled into footage of women having out-of-body boredom.  the sons we had not killed came out of hiding and we scratched them openly behind the ears and gave quarters to the fathers of the sons we had.  like yours, my mother started a grief sharing group to bring me the glimpse I starred in.  animal shaming was passed like a torch above rabbits and dogs.

I saw today a moth so large it could probably replace what it was your dad hit with his car.  the size of things lately has me putting babies on the shoulders of those behind this groundhog-eating craze.  I’ve moved back in with mother.  I’m waiting for her to know.  high note:  they’re okay, my tormentors, they’re not surprised I’m ugly.  my brother still believes his tongue is proof he was once made to swallow an extension cord.  because of what happened, I’ll never be different.

I can only do small things

and

you’ll have to take me at my word.

I have privately published a book titled {in this life another is you} which is a gathering of 50+ unpublished / unavailable / non-displayed poems of mine. I am making it available for 3.00 via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com). all monies I receive for the book will be sent to a poet friend of mine who was injured while clearing debris for others after Hurricane Irma. books will be shipped on October 13th.