a person goes dark.  night shifts disappear.  a lone panic capsizes the anatomically correct.  men fill up on mouthwash.  men float.  women bite their tongues in half before they can say women and children.  insomnia becomes more than the over-hyped novelization of insomnia.  a boy draws a cutlass in a broom closet and is told he can’t sleep.  I begin to want more from a diagnosis.  a kite being flown in hell by a son gone pro.

I wake my children until there are three of them.

I see god so I can say I’ve seen god
without
his gas mask.

on leave from pregnancy,
my wife
admires
how well
I project
concealment.

our baby
slept
coiled
in the bucket
we saved
from the well.

my knowledge of dolphins
includes
how long
their offspring
can survive
in a tank
of my father’s
blood.

I once thought
my ****
was sobbing.

so did you.

a raindrop
as impossible
as raindrop’s
double.  

apple, this part of no
you understand.  

bird beatings
I don’t
report.

we’re so hungry
I could eat a dog
in a dog
costume.  I am having my mother’s dream

while you rub yourself
rabbit
beside the body
of boy
slender.

I see an ant
in an emptied
house
and hear
father
praising sleep

for happening.  taking heart,

I tell
half
the story
of carrying
to term
god’s

emotional response
to being
denied
tenure.

draped in ghost

you’re dry
in a downpour.

sickness led my brother downstairs to a blanket.  outside my mother was asking our mailbox if the man in the helicopter was alright.  my father snored in my brother’s bed while I kept from laughing in the tent beside it.  my sister brought a tub of snow inside to dig a baby from.  something my uncle said was like ******* a seashell.  he shuffled cards beneath a golden brain.  our ears heard the same god punching the extra pillow.

[untitled]

I vandalize the outside of a church in a city designed by men with bad teeth and there I mistake a drop of blood for a penny and begin to last forever

~

[abuse errata]

this mannequin
that we now
deliver
to the oral
loneliness
of circles
died
left-handed

~

[the quiet that comes after a two car accident on a country road]

could strangle
an owl
cast
perhaps
as a mole
listening
to the belly
of a stopped
deer

~

[the men of left field]    

I think / in a past / life / my sense / of touch / was yours

-

mother / ain’t once / lost / while pregnant / a baseball / in the sun

-

thunder / is lightning’s / empty stomach

~

[I see in your newer work]

the propping up of rootless boys and the past changing only what was. your father the spinner of flea market globes. a bat in the barn with the head of a chicken. your mother returning to god the ghost you painted for death. your son wetting the bed. right of owl, left of crow.

~

[annotations for son]

a small creature was shot
stumbled
and became
my handwriting.

two of my legs
need god.

~

[sculptural]

a moth attacking the ear of a white horse

[on a family farm
littered
with oar-beaten
scarecrows]

-

baby talk
in a suicide note  

-

sign language, mosh pit, 1991

[the omens]

to the rabbit
he can’t bring himself
to shoot
in the foot
the boy
with a sore thumb

whose mother
wrote the book
on book
burnings, whose father
baptized
a scarecrow
as scarce

crow

whispers

in hindsight
of course
the omens
are coming

[you]

are now’s
nostalgia


[bridge]

god has gathered the disabled to make his case against reincarnation

-

unable to sleep, I become an alcoholic

-

I prefer
like my father
my insects

noncommittal

-

insomnia is the insect my scar becomes

-

noggin, mouth-hole, skinflick

-

a ghost
when I study
angels


[wolf, wolf, god]

her plane is in the air.  she is showing late signs of believing she’s left an octopus in the oven.  the man she is with knows nothing about paper.  on the ground, in awe of the bee stings on a sister’s bare back, a brother carries orphanhood to term.  everything I touch belongs to the same alarm clock.    


[bygone]

I started smoking in my early thirties because I missed my brothers.  because a train is the only thing I can act like I’ve seen before.  because a claw opened and a child dropped.  because unhurt the child was a girl and injured it was a boy made of being touched.  because giant birds were ****** to give other people rain.  because all hail, as all do, location.  because riot then riot envy.  because bright spot became a cloth in a police car.  because I can’t sleep and couldn’t without thinking of sleep as a copy of a copy.  because lost the baby wasn’t getting any younger.  because nightlight and tadpole, mom and dad.


[nigh]

don’t talk to babies. write. write to be the first one there. the frostbitten woman ******* her thumb has all her teeth. walk once a week into the wrong bathroom. worry. bump around the house at night, noisemaker. a depressed elephant in a walrus graveyard. pull. pull from your habit forming past. be the bomb god’s yet to wear. surround with others the baseball bat signed by the last woman to mourn sleeping beauty. open your mouth then look at your son. call it photography. if spotted, be a monster.

[indwell]*

I either have to **** my father or keep loving him.  a friend of my brother’s says she can get me cigarettes, a knife, and two cans of beer.  says her own father was a doctor up until he delivered a baby with a serial number tattooed on its arm.  she doesn’t know what her father does now.  her mother is in the dark.  her mother is obsessed with the three the disciple lied to.  people want me to back up but a man is never the same sadness.  define people.    

~          

from *Drone & Chickenhouse
84 pages, poems, Barton Smock, Oct 2015, 6.00

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html

sometimes you see the dog
when dog
was wild

and father
with that straw

trying to take
all
the air

and on the dog’s back
a village
or two
burning…

seeing is yeah

useless

how I still bring water
to the stomping grounds
of jesus
on a walk, say,

for son

a man and a woman, as younger couples do, moved in next door.  my wife lifted her wine glass and mocked a telescope.  I noted how the man seemed to have his **** together.  wife noted that the woman seemed masculine.  things got complicated very quickly.  the man and I became brothers and that somehow led to a promise of equal ******.  our wives tilted the scales a bit and agreed to switch husbands.  logistically, staying in this house makes the most sense.  we unpack a box here and there, reflect on the wrongness of this bauble, that book.  our sadness?  protected by the dog with a weird name for a dog.

our neighbors have gone underground.  I hear beneath me the beatings my son wants to answer.  there is no way to keep quiet but alas we are addicted to betterment.  bike lock and wheelchair.  the outsider’s visual aid device.  things invented by no one for the housebroken all.  my daughter puts words in my mouth and I use them.  my younger self is an alert.  think now of what you will say.  address the secret responsibility of having mice.  my wife goes next door often and comes back with the food she left with.  we eat for a week.  we blame each other for being so close.  our visitor has no ticket.  as the visitor explains, the ticket is god.  few pregnancies fit the bill.

it wasn’t
that he’d been
in a terrible
accident
but that
the image
I had of him
hadn’t

sight has a single trick

show me a food
can keep
itself
from being
eaten, one of these

is older
than the other (the hands)

the parents
of touch

mistaken
for the order
of conjoined
hesitance

we were good
alone

i.

to turn one cheek, then another
of the dead
it’s necessary
that they take the chin
roughly.  

ii.

I wish I could tell you of a bird
and from there
follow it
to the edge
of a puddle.  

we could turn from them
and loiter.  open a shave shop
and swivel
the slow times
away.

iii.

I wish I could tell you mother
I am not dead.  that I am another’s son.  

     as you would say

he’s disappeared
again
into himself.  

that I’ve been identified
as being my father
all the way through.

iv.

or tell you I was merely guarding
the post
of self
    from which none
are relieved.

everything but the barn is red. the barn is the shape of red. one can jump from its roof and never land. deafness, my proven

ladder, puts her mouth into words. she wash in horse

her father’s hands

/ of a grief misplaced by loss

a beetle in a sack of eyelashes

a dishwasher’s ice-cube

a costume party
for those
no longer
pregnant

a birdfeeder
weighed
by a church, a fingerprint

carried nowhere

by milk

asleep
I am headless
in a clawfoot
tub
the half-awake
boy
on my chest
the disoriented
pulse
in the hand
of god

Free mail shipping or 50% off ground shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of SHIPWEEK16

~

these are from my collection, {MOON tattoo}:

[portion]

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.

~

[mud times]

satan began possessing squirrels

he did so
in the name
of footprints

my sister
the poor girl
was pregnant
with a people
person, she waited

with me

for my hands
to look
like mittens

~

[pinch]

mother
as she
unrolls
a tube
of toothpaste
talks
of a crack
in the lord

these empty
things
I’d rather
they not
look it

take your father’s
drag racing
or a fork
with you
when you bathe

I was scraped, she says

your cheek
to me
a wounded
dream...

it doesn’t last
the prophet’s

grief

~

[clearing]

god
my path
to meaning
nothing

-

she had a sock drawer and a  pair of secret hands

the hardest time
with houses

-

what if the end stops coming

-

what if

from one cannibal to another

it is extra
this bone
from the horse

Moon
ate

~

[curio]

making book covers
in the ****

my brother
my higher
brother

is on
about
some late
film

performance
by a woman
he says

has inspired him
to take a ****
on a baby
in a pick-up
truck
and to drive

the truck and to call his route

the border
of the last
miracle

or we can call it
something else

I don’t think
he knows
really
I am just
something saddened
by sorrow, a frog

aware
of caves, as if god’s

creatures
were a result
of god
imagining
what she’d not
seen

scatter...

longhand
the syringe
of poor
colossi,

wrists
both suicide
attempt
and apologue:

I love
brother

for how

he’d split
himself
into outside

time
and inside
time

that he might
tell
a door
****-off
or a dreaming

hieroglyph
his tale

the band-aid
and the risen
ant

~

[mesmeric]

the fish are biting and my father is wanted.

thunder the size of a seasick dog
has crushed
again
my sister’s
baby
for crushing
pills.  for every

hunchback
goes
to heaven

there’s a shadow
passed out
in a dream.

he beats the mother and calls it practice.  the washer breaks and he throws the clothes into a full tub and stomps on them while smoking a cigarette.  he provokes my image to send him back to his rightful nose.  my thick skull is high on my spit.

in a childhood
some child
had

as if late
in locking
the gates
of the orphanage

as if drunk
on a long
history
of being average
in isolation

as if auditioning
for one
of four
sounds
a baby
simultaneously

makes
like
not exactly
this:

stork poor radio drama)

the father
pitches himself
to a scribbling
god

whose image
left little
else

I pull them on
as the pair of gloves
I haven’t worn
around a baby.

I hear
behind me

(in the voice of someone
imaginably
younger
than those
who make
short work
of god)

a stone
being named
repeatedly.

*** is both
the girl
and where
she was bitten.

seashell as failure. bread my raincloud.

touching my face in a clueless dream

on sorrow’s
blank
horse.

amateur night
in the electric
chair, a bundle
of almost nothing
rocked awake
by a mime

enter
as if you’ve been sent to finish another’s listening.

love hushfully
the person you weren’t.

switch genders in moderation.

     for the memory of our first meeting
cling to the hand you’ve prepared.

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.

the below is a tentatively titled and finished companion piece to my recent chapbook, infant cinema (**** Press, dinkpress.com, April 2016)

infant cinema can be purchased here: http://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock



shut-eye (in the land of the sacred commoner)

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

~
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.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

~
and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

–

god’s color has returned

–

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

–

first

~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…

~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet. he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.

~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

–

I want your work to matter.

~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…

~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair

~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

–

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia…

~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love

~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ

~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…

–

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double

~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover

~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never

far off
what crawls
her way.

~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

~
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.

~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.

~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?

/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.

~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake

~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.

~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean. a boy whose mouth

was never
here. all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark. I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between

~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return

~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.