the tinted weakness of late day.  the sound of a mother being driven into the child by its legal father.  biology as paperweight.  as bird hopping on earth.  god as the oh well limbo in limbo.  are the many heavens of discarded appliances equaled in number by dolphins unimaginably safe?  does the thought, to be darkened, arrive?

boneless angel whose love of knitting)

(the boy from the second garden takes a bath

her dream the one where my father pretends to research the wrist of a deer

–

given another chance, I’d check my memoir to see if it’s happened yet

–

god is the least efficient way to feel nothing

the microscope god avoids by ******* his thumb

–

dream and blood- their unpainted rooms

–

the deer tipped off by mannequins

–

a zookeeper’s empty mom

the stones
die
and turn
ghost.

I ask them
to mention
my throwing
arm.

traditionally, one sings
when around
water.

     I walked early-

two to four weeks
before my mother
began

her lifelong
affair / with baseball.

poems from my most recent self-published collection {name calling}, available on Lulu:

~

[boy with bible]

scissor his hair
with fingers
from the hand
of your longer
arm

picture him
as a hardscrabble
mystic

gay

/ the frog shepherd

~

[entries for loss]

can we stop this talk of the baby cut in half and ask why this town has two graveyards. show me a dog showing an angel where to dig. the brothers have all gone underwater to raise money for hand signals and the sisters have taken from a tale of snowfall an ****** to amnesia’s headstone. the parts of the movie you look at

vanish. it’s my fault there’s a god.

~

[entries for yield]

in laundromat
my stomach
moves
my bed

my blood wears a blue sock

and a fly goes down on melancholy’s crossword

my sister is here to have gum in her hair
and hair
in her mouth

tooth is the ghost beak is not

mom makes us wear most of it home

the animal’s first time as something else

~

[entries for transformation]

i.

is there blood in something born outside,

a history that works in one ear?

ii.

time touches nothing. is the *** of my bruise

/ a scar

~

[entries for water]

seasons by the look and smell of him being beaten.

a hole in a fingerprint. doll overboard.

~

[a letter, silent]

a letter, silent

dropped by a word
into window’s
bible

–

cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost

search

for earpiece.

–

medusa

her headless
horseman

i.

the buzzard my brother keeps alive

ii.

the bowl, a clock

the dogs
avoid

iii.

dizziness

that strikes
the struck

a hotter hell fore I got that praying mantis in the jar.  tighten that lid tight said god said father as he took a match to the tick on my neck.  he went inside, I picked up a stick.  stick I threw short the length of heaven as heaven I thought was a road.  the road, at that, our house was on.  get yer brother's dog and call it a night and I did.  and the dog, too, making it in, before anything fell, that stick caught on the bottom frill of some curtain calling down the middle of no show nor audience for it.  

     if it could have been reached, the blackest point in a man, it wasn't.  but the point just before, my mother knew- to turn the bulb, in her white hand, just so.  turned as a globe with a knot in it, knot made of knots from the belly of my brother, nervous fat friend only friend of the outdated world.  he would take with him one night his dog

and shoot himself.   they'd argue what night for a week after.  loaded the gun proper at least and my father would be dead today white hands or no had there been more than one gun she knew about.  I never told, not even the night, how that mantis stayed alive on its tack beating its wings at the frog-throat black like an eyelid against a thumb and my brother I told him he can't sleep through anything but go to sleep anyway with that dog that was my dog long before you were born dumb as a ****** in a mirror.

I skin my knee.  I skin my knee a total of three times.  I begin seeing Jesus but only when I’m awake.  he demands nothing.  he is thankful for my knee and for my indifference.  he crookedly shrugs his shoulders when I curse.  it’s the shrugging that pains him.  it is his hope that one day sin will be a pet peeve of mine.  so that we can share.  he speaks so fondly of my braces I leave them on my teeth a year too long.  my father has me put my head back mornings before church so he can run the hair dryer on low over the open ache my mouth has become.  I talk on purpose when he does this and he laughs and forgets about my mother’s wafer-dry tongue.  how she takes it with her when she smokes.  on the roof.  in her Sunday beast.

each nun my mother sees is shorter than the one after it.  this too shall pass?  she remains nonverbal.  I try to include my son.  my depression is a tractor beam that attracts newborns.  my thoughts are a thought below the whimsical race.  I take photos of escalators paralyzed by three dimensions.  I give them as gifts to my father lost at land and sitting on steps to hear the silence in his head.  a toy pup expires with a yip in a ransacked store.  you are made melancholy not by the pup but by its fallen battery pack belly.  I say to a pockmark what I say to immortality.

we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…

I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue

that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…

if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…

I have nothing to shake

from death
their doll

death

we’re at that point in the conversation where someone is called someone to protect someone’s identity.  we’re in a sparsely populated room where last time I checked you were having a party attended by people who believe people **** people.  I am currently the sobriety story you beat into your kids until the neighbors take them away to a toy train that circles someone’s sister who is convulsing on the carpet to free her braces.  your dee-jay brother is being a **** to everyone but me.  his song makes me sad the rest of my days which are also the rest of my snow days.

the man says I can’t seem to get out of my own way.  the woman says I have a child inside.  the girl at my bedroom window says it’s the same rock every night that hits her in the back of the head.  the boy says he is silly with love.  he says this as his eyes cross then close before I can see them touch.  I am told by all four my mother and father live just down the road.  that at times they are not made for this world.  and at others, not ready.

these names, before you were born. colorblind orphan, yawnless fish. ghost with calendar.

look at me
when I’m invisible

she is
by the tail
easing
a mouse
from the bell
of her pant leg.

present tense
my love
I have broken
the teeth
of your purse.

he thinks
of a pill
and bottomless
rabbits.

tied a string to a stick and called the stick dog.

for this, the boy received a beating
half of which
he shared with the dog

     so he could eat
in peace.

noises the poor can’t make

and mugshots

my lord

boy is, when sad, what father

dusts off
and coins
anew

(this was your mother’s)

qualifier-

(your mother is a lemon
god’s lemon
tows)

but back
to scarecrow, as in

scarecrow lucid, the formless

boy with knife
in lacking
wield

slouching
before a blank
television, his missing

tooth

false

this man jim calling himself jim repeatedly to his mouth until he is no one or no one but.  been thinking to **** his wife out of love and his thinking presently not different.  the church is empty and for its emptiness jim’s forehead is a blank check getting away from him.  to not **** his wife he’s been reading books but none of them halfway before he gets upset with how authors think they know towns.  all drab office and good deed and maybe a dog or a horse loved by some kid been felt up.  hell the history of a building starts when one enters.  jim of course can’t place his anger.  I can.

jim kills his wife because she is sleeping.  or, while.  you have to understand how some use sleep as rebellion.  afterward, he realizes he only thinks he has done it.  she opens her eyes, her name is dee, said once and enough.  he holds no pillow nor has one been dropped.  she says jim and down the road they have a daughter and she further down a fat kid

even at three and four and five a fat kid.

a bowl of soup bleeds to death
in the eatery
of my praying
hands

nudes
from the circus
of harm
grab
the evolved
handle
of my father’s
apocalypse
and though
I call it easy
what I’ve gone
on the doll ****
I can’t help
but bride
up
a storm
giving oral
to a corncob
from fixation’s
honeymoon

the details of the effort have left me now that I am weak and moral.
even that I call it an effort seems to me common.

I don’t want to hurt you.

the three boys I will start with were born yesterday and shirtless.
one of them had a sister the other two were in love with.
she wanted to see a pitch black squirrel.

what darkness in her mouthed such a request must’ve been her mouth.
the two boys had never kissed a thing and her promise to kiss on sight of said squirrel
must’ve stirred
vague & crow
into one bed.

the squirrel itself might’ve been on its way to being asleep but instead it died
struggle
and / or
fumes.

sister laid her eyes on it.  one resting, and then the other.

the film
halfway through
had this idea
gave mother
heartburn

-

the baby

-

the baby is a monster with a broken foot

-

it comes out of my mouth this thing that feeds a brother

it learns to read but only has time

for phantom

-

cosmonauts

-

mother she loses father to headaches anonymous
mother she likes the film

it’s one
of one

it reminds her of raccoons
refusing
to eat

-

profane chauffeur, grief

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today.  above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having.  we do our jigsaw of darkness.  clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

I would look in the mirror to see if people knew I was ugly and maybe now my son does the same. in mine, god had no soul. in his, god’s soul has nowhere to go. I love you. I don’t matter. I love you and I don’t matter.

–

if I could go back in time, I’d help her take care of me

for the error
of the foot
the feet
are punished.

the ears
call
but nothing
answers.

one hand
is a hand, the other

the hand’s
map.

tonight, I stole two beers from my brother

two gods
whose vexations
share
a city

I am still not sure
what I’ve requested

asylum
or sanctuary

I don’t pray

I read a book to see a man do nothing

to see a man do nothing to a woman
I volunteer
for sleep
studies
and read
this back

to the lord

agewise
and younger
than stillness

the river, the room…

my dad
he tries
to cross
his mind.

has anyone
met me?

there were two people
both
in character
and god
was afraid
to wash
my heart.  no baby

in a mailbox
bled.

I think it’s a tuning fork.  I convince myself and speak to it.  the boy with me says it looks like a ******-up cross.  says imagine jesus got to heaven and was still part human just imagine.  the boy would be ****** if he were him.  next his mother is off her rocker and so on and soon the boy is muffled by where he’s hiding.  I’m okay with it.  I need some peace and scratching.  that’s my father’s, peace and scratching.  he’d set a shoebox with a live rat in it next to him whether he had one or not.  gotta corner that thought.  I look about, the boy has either shut up or died or is living quietly afar.  I sit on three stacked tires and fear a moment for my ***.  I brave what might still be a tuning fork.  I poke with it the place I was male then caress.  rain on the roof of my home makes the roof look like a lake.  one magic possum after another gives me depth.  I snap out.  the boy is circling me, he’s been struck by lightning, is in fact still being struck.  his hard-on looks to last.

as I come into someone else’s own, I agree to meet my brother at a clawfoot tub I hope is still there.  I fill a bucket with water and leave it with my wife for good luck.  I walk from the house in mild weather and become plain to you.  I pass the mud my father’s eye goes without.  I tire.  I come to in my brother’s arms and his badge has left a mark on my cheek.  sleep is like a slug I can’t overtake and then it is my tongue or in its privacy.  brother roughs me into the tub headfirst so I can hear the highway.  he preaches and they were followed by two sets of footprints until the footprints had to rest else they’d be too fat to die.  these parts you're money or hush money.

the madness of the couple
is a broken
showerhead.

the slimmest volume
of collected work
is a drop of water
lands, a drop of water
lands, no memory

is erased.

in time, I’ll prominently cover
the same topic.

death is never early.  take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror.  chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head.  invent a sibling schoolmates blind.  know poverty, know moon.  shampoo the elderly from a distance.  baby no one.  they have looked like hell since before you were born.

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell.  a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair.  a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache.  a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

from my mother’s side I had gone to see the happy blood.  I left her there, and she read without me her own lips.  I couldn’t tell if she’d been defeated by the box, its contents, or both.  I passed a bucket on wheels and a mop dragging a man for water.  I felt old; my dress, older.  I stretched the soft loan of my neck into the aisle the boy had made most of on his knees before the slack of his youth spent itself bone and pitched him the lesser length.  his sister or his young mother lifted him by his shorts and tucked his smaller parts with her fingertips as into the private mouths of even smaller fish.  a package of sliced bread fell from a lower shelf and relieved the moment its alien drama.  the boy convulsed as if he’d been allowing now recalled tape measures from the coil of his belly.  my mother yanked me away from the rent of that scene so quickly a star from my nose loosed itself into the ******’s acre, the white of my eye.

sister has to use her body to care for her body.  teacher of dolls. believer in the grenade become star.  her blood she is told could ruin her baby’s nose.  her thumb is a comma.  god’s is a crow.

the creature
that was to carry
in its belly
the lord’s
second
son

could’ve been
the horse
our mother
steered
into a crowd.  the creature

that was to **** itself
in our father’s
sleep

could’ve been the giraffe
we knew
as crucifixion.

the creature that was to groom
for our
viewing
pleasure

a stone

could’ve been
the ape
that buried
our dog
in television.  the creature

that was
to embody
complete
thought

could’ve been the snake
we bathed
in a bug spray
that would hypnotize
birds.

25% off all print books today on Lulu with coupon code of LULU25

~

my most recent self-published (Lulu) works are ‘shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner [& other poems]’ and a compilation publication of my last four works called ‘FOUR’, which kind of gives away the ghost.

please checkout my Lulu author page if interested.

~

some previous poems from my self-published (Lulu) works:

[segue]

the feeling
we’d not
been here
before

–

doom’s little hiccup

–

my brother
dead serious
that we pronounce it

hick
gnosis

~

[footfall]

a newborn wants to be a hand.

there’s the dream I have of heaven
and the dream
god lets me
bring.

my boy
has a crow
for a backpack.

~

[domestic inquiries]

the *** of the first person in hell

the number of animals
giving birth
in a field
where emptiness
burns

the logic of
if ax to tree, then scissors
to kite

~

[the explanation]

my brother the mud wrestler wants to know if we’re any closer to finding our father. I examine the droppings and say someone is feeding you in your sleep.

~

[ataraxy]

it’s a bit early
to be
reincarnated

son, this illness

it takes
our death

I kiss her stomach and god sets a seashell on fire.
Angels fake amnesia.

/ my death I was here to gather proof

/ my children
to paraphrase

his mother sleeps with her mouth open.  I have seen him tip an empty beer can above it.  when he has a crush on a girl, he takes me by the shirt and gets in my face as if he could spit me into being.  summer, we get our bird legs (he says, he says) to tiptoe on the tongue of god.  

he writes stories under any tree on its way to lightning.  the stories come from a lake surrounded by gravestones.  if bored with the reader, their text disappears.

I will have my own brand of insignificance.

-

to prepare for this character, I meant to gather household items I thought would together be helpful in making the sound of a strange woman saddled with an abundance of me time spanking the daughter of her distant but as yet unrevealed relative in a toy store but instead I was overcome by a pain much like the pain a man compares to childbirth and as such I slowed myself long enough to fashion from three sons a triangle with which I woke my wife.

-

you shoot yourself, it doesn’t matter where, but only if you see a homeless person, it doesn’t matter where.  

if you have a job, you’re issued a gun.

a widow
with three hands
has ten
doomed
acquaintances.

god’s tacklebox is too light
to carry.

think of it as your ascent into feminine indifference.

think of your son as the incurable
made
thing

on the factory floor
of my son’s
use.

a male mime
bites into
a bar of soap…

***
is a bruise
in a blizzard

on a tour of heaven, this tower would be the spacecraft they died in.

to the child your father became, some gravestones look like thumbs.

     a trumpet on a country road.
     a soldier with a heavy pack.
     an ambitious raking, Saturday, of dry leaves.

severed hands forked into the sun.

dear witness, I’ve never seen a fly drop like a fly.

(today only, 30% off all print books with coupon code OCTFLASH30)

from father, footrace, fistfight (selected poems, Barton Smock, June 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/father-footrace-fistfight/paperback/product-21672373.html


[the minimal class]

I orbit
the idea
of an animal
not thinking
of itself.

to err
is hunger.


[cipher]

aware of my body
as if my body
is on a raft.

a creaky deceit
I call
rafting in the ****.

    last night in a very safe garage
I promised a friend
I’d mention
the moon
in the period following
my last
idea.

my body eats me.
god dangles the body of my son
in front of my son’s
next
memory.

some are born
born-again.

    current trends include cloning.
the first person to recall dying
will be held aloft.


[patience]

the black market is a state of mind.  I smoke a joint in a barn and worry I will see a barn owl that will crush my barn owl dreams.  my worry walks me three miles where I meet a woman trying to sell a book in a graveyard.  I trade her the memory of our previous trade for the book she tells me is shy.  my other possession is a neglected baby.


[sequestration]

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 think of god
stopping by
the storage unit
the home
of his son’s
cross
and I try
to remember
for god
the four
digit
code
that he might
better
follow
a different
melancholy
thought-

for example,
how he
will not
in his
lifetime
see

in snow
his footprint

but alas
I am
as unable
to remember
something
I’ve never
known
as I am
unable
to be sick
like my son
is sick, yet

there are times
I pinch
myself
in front
of my kids
as if my body
has its own
family
I’m not allowed
to meet

my body is a word.

my son
a naked body.

my eden is Eden.

my word is southernmost.

my postman is a priest
confused     in a field
of poppies
who happens upon
a rusty     as created
knife.

my son is sick.
my son is my soap.

my triumph is a stuffed crow
hourglass
of the aforementioned
priest.