dear halloween
I’ve been talking
in Ohio
to gas stations

the first thing it feels
is not again

~

/ and, a note:  30% off all print books on Lulu thru October 10th with coupon code of OCTSAVE30

my most recent is there, titled **depictions of reentry

odd, this park.
no pigeons, no
mothers.

tall babies, taller straws.

a man
in scrubs
on a bench.

I've brought bread
and am suddenly
quite sad.
  
if you can't picture
how sad I am
think of your friends
leaning

into the door
of a cane factory
where you've given
notice-

think of them eating this bread.

when the trailer
became haunted

we split up.

mom got the bed, dad got the couch.

I the television
which had both.

does nothing
in hell
but draw

the kid shakes salt from his palm onto a dead mouse.  his girlfriend’s cat slicks itself as if its spot as a pillow in hell has been filled.  I can’t see the look on your face but my imitation comforts me.  I once lived nearby but had a dog and moved to be closer to it.  

    yesterday, the kid’s father sold me a mirror.  said I would have second thoughts.

THE BLOOD
YOU DON’T SEE
IS FAKE

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-blood-you-dont-see-is-fake/paperback/product-21206799.html;jsessionid=6D1872B449D8B58E2A7F503E518273FD­

new and selected poems / Barton Smock / September 2013

from self published collections:

mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels

all available at

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

memory (my

mother’s)

of personal
space

Design
a late
animal.

God is everywhere.
Obsessed
with birthplace.

in a stopped
train
if you listen
you can hear
a moving
other.  any man

in your bed
is you, but

taller.

[the book of boy]

/ be the buzzard a shadow stuck in a trash bag

/ be the knees full of milk

~

[boy in darkness]

blood is a movie and none of it

yours

~

[reader]

of everything
his writing
destroyed

~

[wreath]

i.

upstairs
the last
to go

ii.





iii.

door
is so
forgetful

~

[nostalgia while we wait]

no god. no wind.

sick son’s kite.

the pea

asleep…

I am told by the bulb of this reading light to fear my father.  to fear the midsize pig he holds to his chest.  I am scared enough to know the bulb is my father’s failing heart.  I am brave enough to be nothing but confused by the pig.  in real time my father is taping together the eaten film of a videocassette.  a film that yesterday had him jumping up and down.

in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.  because god is patient, the man has no *****.  the ***** itself is kept in a pine box three times its size while jesus is away.    

when my wife found out she was having a girl she told people she lived alone.

feminine, she cuts bread in the dark for my father’s meal.  I sit on a piano bench and play no piano one can hear.  my brother fears there is no soup under the dust he longs to blow on.  two miscarriages away from god leaving her alone, I am allowed to listen to a beautiful voice.  endearingly, I was a fat baby on a flat land.  the three of us are unified by the same vision of a wound our fingernails close.  the bowl has kept us from licking our palms.

/ a pair of scissors in one room or a gun in two. a thumb war’s lame spider. four rootless prayers drawn on an echo. four awestruck sisters caressing with their ears the undeveloped skull of an infant. melancholy’s condoms. flowers for the arm-wrestler’s inoculated phantom.

to him, these meals
are small
fictions.  there is

however
some truth
to his mother

the weigher  
of light.

let me not pray for the man who, when young, had ambition and traveled the short distance to heaven in hopes of capturing on film for the last time in its environment

god’s bed.

who returned home obsessed with becoming consumed by the inexact art of self-portraiture and was soon so beautifully trapped by aging that he grew his hair to his waist

where it was set on fire as he stood to bow before the accumulation of sight and sight’s potential.

most babies here are born without a trigger finger.  

but some
get through.

two men from church in my father’s house are having coffee.
it’s odd to see them out again-

my mother’s cups.

a potbelly
scarecrow
itching
its backside

on a tree
in a wood

where aliens
grieve.

surgeries
performed
in parked cars.  

the ghost
limb’s
     muscle
memory.
  
knowledge
of the child
lord

before adoption.

the woman wore goggles and held a fork.  

I was pushed
up a hill
in a stroller
by a lover
of snow.

in her books of bookish loss
her knees

are a nightmare
had
by the fork.

her man
shovels
his madhouse
meal.

at her back
the boy
is thinking
of a letter
and not
of the ghost
his finger’s
from.  the mother’s guess

is early
but correct.  always

this sobbing
at the base
of things.

the haunted clock
in tornado’s
house

the weightlifter’s flower

the rabbit’s
bliss

if he is not made of them wholly, branches, he will be soon. they are everywhere, and he steps on them, and they are arms from hell. he wears a child’s football jersey, torn at his size and his sorrow. he reaches into it and pulls out his heart, a red balloon given the what for, inside of which he blows his nose. he returns the heart.

a yellow adherent hangs from both nostrils, as two ropes being cut at and then loosed from his brain. the first keeps an arm from heaven; the second he catches and loops twice to put on his neck. one is never out of the woods here, and he knows it, knows here is Baltimore, Ohio. he has watched the people, some of them, leave; their happiness would be better called remission.

he is giddy when he comes upon a man wearing only a barrel and he tips it with joy and makes better his headway home. the rolled over branches shriek and wake the man who nakedly bails. the branches up their shrieking.

his mother he has no dementia of his time in her womb. why for **** the despondent are given captions like ‘blank look’ he can’t say for in his mama naught but canvassing eyes. she’s what he calls ‘at grocery’, shaking a coffee can she’ll buy because a done melon can’t hold pennies. she often at the neck is saddled with two toddlers but in his projection now there is just one making miracle of not kicking the coffee can into another’s back.

any girl that occurs lets him take her with his tongue only as she seems to know he was circumcised and after that much paddled.

he starts thinking on dad and dad’s laughing when mother’d say boys be home before dog because that’s how it sounded from seizures and of course rock candy in the summer. the barrel splinters beneath him to be forgotten and his legs go to bleeding stilts.

his last things by his face are insufficient; rock candy, barrel, and twin. I talk on the barrel, I don’t need it, not anymore.

you have children.

they come back
with people.

when the note was partially read
on-air
we thought
in unison

hell

I could’ve written
that.

by now I’ve done everything I’m innocent of.

that’s either an angel
or it’s your mom
doing a hand stand
in nothing
but white
knee highs.

cloaked in drug use we were not led to believe, the twins
were spared.

though a first born
god doubts
his recollection.

there are two kinds of men.
one is your father
who says

there are two kinds of men in the world.
the man who marks the door
and the back-up
he has to live with.

I am reading
about a piano
when you begin
to play.  

-

I will continue
to wish
you were dying.

-

you say
to pictures

me, before I was taken.

-

you have one story involves a failed grenade.
I wish two, you wish
ambitiously
none.

-

forgive me, death, I am drunk.
sober, I sell doormats.

-
  
in our imaginings
gutted baseballs

became

the skulls of small animals
through which the wind

called heads.

-

in daytime, you inspect
a dark stone.  you tell me it could take

all night.  

-

in heaven’s garage
they’ve yet to make
a horn
that works.

-

if I leave, it is to write this poem.

we had to **** many animals.  my father, every month, cursed a pig its lack of horns and cursed the out-of-town buying of dogs.  I took my sister once into the basement.  I blindfolded her with a black sock and told her careful there’s a pin in your hand.  mother would come from that basement pulling at her shirt and I’d nip it at the neckhole with my teeth and I could feel each nerve around them firing.  the whole of our ordeal was indeed terrible but people would talk as if they knew what they’d do or knew what they’d not.  talk as if they’d know it if they saw.  it come up for awhile and tried to live with us and I can’t say it wasn’t nice having something to put your finger on that wouldn’t thieve your sins.  I fed to it lemonheads and it seemed happy but even I admit one can overdo it on the lemonheads.  it was father made it go back in the basement because he’d tired of telling people it was his brother and pretty soon his real brother would be coming to visit.  was a visit would last the length of his brother’s life but we didn’t know it then.  the devil went its own way at some point during my uncle moving in.  we were all of us pretty clumsy and it could’ve been the noise we made.  I remember being grateful for my uncle’s heart of gold and how he wouldn’t accept our apologies saying it’s just a bunch of stuff I don’t even know I have.

leaving the theatre, he tapped, twice, the hood of a parked police car, lifted lipstick from a drunken woman’s purse and squared himself in a store window before shooting himself with his hand.*

his first film, completed, by the time he was eighteen. roundly praised. from there, a many colored thing. russian women, guns under suits, and cameos of indians with indian names. at twenty three, nostalgic for twenty one, his seminal ‘my white father’ wherein a mute albino would be upstaged by mimes. further brilliance followed. mostly in quotes, such as “babies are full of grief”. women ate from his hand and their eating progressed. one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her. a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others. the woman divorced him and took with her the man. in the midst of attending to the list came the advent of black and white which added a much needed plot to his smoking. his peers double crossed each other in small houses. he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled. his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet. in 1973, his doctors, grey from vietnam, convinced him to go under. his last film was silent, and many complained about the lighting. he cried, in his mansion, for the windows he did not put in. he would not often entertain tourists but when he did they asked about his mother, her ghost, and if the east wing was really haunted. he would on those late nights produce a letter his mother had sent him only yesterday.

he was in love with his sister, always had been. after she was mauled by the dogs he had set out for his father, he made walking his home. every now and then a hotel of running. last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication he did not

the death row scene, the little saw his mother used for the cake, the mysterious basket moved from bike to bike.

(another slight edit)

leaving the theatre, he tapped, twice, the hood of a parked police car, lifted lipstick from a drunken woman's purse and squared himself in a store window before shooting himself with his hand.

his first film, completed, by the time he was eighteen.  roundly praised.  from there, a many colored thing.  russian women, guns under suits, and cameos of indians with indian names.  at twenty three, nostalgic for twenty one, his seminal 'my white father' wherein a mute albino would be upstaged by mimes.  further brilliance followed.  mostly in quotes, such as “babies are full of grief”.  women ate from his hand and their eating progressed.  one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.  the woman divorced him and took with her the man.  in the midst of attending to the list came the advent of black and white which added a much needed plot to his smoking.  his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  in 1973, his doctors, grey from vietnam, convinced him to go under.  his last film was silent, and many complained about the lighting.  he cried, in his mansion, for the windows he did not put in.  he would not often entertain tourists but when he did they asked about his mother, her ghost, and if the east wing was really haunted.  he would on those late nights produce a letter his mother had sent him only yesterday.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs set out for his father, he made walking his home.  every now and then a hotel of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss

     the death row scene, the little saw his mother used for the cake, the mysterious basket moved from bike to bike.

as the idea
is without lord
it will outlive
god
and be nothing.

artwork is clarity enough
I suppose
but the drugged

they alienate
the unthinkable.

No god called me into this poem.
No god
calls me out.

brother calls late tomorrow and leaves a cut off message on the machine.  earlier today he left to you his temporary cure for the ailment iteration.  the depth of your sister’s bible remains too much for your dog’s mouth which is something you’d forgotten until now.  now being not the best critic.  the bible itself is wrapped beautifully in your mother whose hands are still broken by recent events.  events that evoke transcription.

it speaks of me

the past

like I’m
not here

he drops a knife in her lap and calls her a butcher.  it is beyond cute

the way his stomach
becomes
a third
fist.  her cigarette

is a portal
takes her
to the baby
can ****

the air
from a room.

as long as others
have food
there is grief
to imagine

a third subtle breast.
a handful of grave dirt.
the palm the coin abandons.

the man
mother irons
from the moon.

the languid hurry
of father’s care.
     his old sweater.

we believe in the coming
of the white fly-

in the demotic ear
of angels-

that we will enter
the lottery
of ****, else rock-

and clutch
at the neck
of god.  

or swat.

from ear to god-bitten ear
you
are poison.

in my youth
I was quiet.

there, I said it.

the food is not a dream
but here it comes.

because I wanted to see something other than my mother blowing out the tip of her finger, I paid two drunk brothers the same amount to turn and stare at each other.  after a couple gay jokes and while I abused myself with body language, one of the men became blacker than seemed possible and the other man sang him a song.  every day of my life is yours to believe my ears.  

I love my mother but her sadness is that of an invisible woman with the power to shrink herself.  suicide doesn’t exist until it happens and by then it doesn’t matter.

father became the man his possession foreshadowed.  mom had a purse full of spoons.  brother bathed any form quiet enough to make the kitchen sink.  I began to believe.  I began to hear in the rock

the thorn
it spoke for.  over the nest of a bird,

the nothing to eat.

we draw god’s attention away from what we’re having by showing a short film shot by your youth in which a godlike figure creates the world’s first womanizer.  we kiss and our kiss goes from being medically fragile to being medically nuanced.  instead of paying our water bill, we fill the tub with sugar and wait open-mouthed for what can dig its own grave.

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.

The shape you left open so you could ***** on your walk with god.
Our uncle's blood that went back in time to skip us.
Horse twilight. Bombed omens.

I took a toy car from the fire and put it on my wrist.
The far ambulance

of your drinking...

Name in Ohio
no one. Arson

doxes
angels.

I am walking up a hill the dark is trying to move.  my mother has a way with words.  my mother has a baby.  reading is a kind of crying.  the baby is crying because the baby has lost track of something that possesses nearness.  there are two babies.  one is always blind and one is blind when it eats.  never lose a tooth you can swallow.

i.

one crow
watches another.

your father
lifts

the patch on his eye.

as a daughter, you believe your mother
when she says

love only
what lands
what thinks
it can land

on its shadow. love only

the second
crow.

ii.

you are weak
but hold
that man

like a ladder.

what they mean  
means
there is one place
to hide.

I come from the woman
who knows
they’ll come
for the baby.

my four children, I need them
to hoard
awareness.

often enough, bad men do nothing.

some err on the side of believing
a woman
is an unfinished
man.

bad night, sitting on a swing, I can look or not look
at a star-

is your mother a one-man fistfight?

my father came out of nowhere.