we went to soften the dog in the way we’d seen our sister softened.    

when her heart  
was still
a hiccup’s
echo.

her eyesight the sound of a drill.
her eyes
two holes
in a turtle’s
shell

     her eyes for seeing

the food in her mouth.

that I might long
to pine
as your mother does
for my father’s grief
I lament the loss
of my quiet desperation
by randomly marking
the pages
of a special
thesaurus.

they, as in they, say

     this is done so we might identify
     the defragmented run-on sentence
     that will keep your son
     from becoming a scientist.

perhaps a paper flower hides in the envelope it could’ve been.

invented for god, the topmost angel
definitely
proves

the angels below it.

the order of things
illustrates itself well
in the following:

     private / female / detective.

special to me.

his new right hand
has an extra
thumb

to date, it’s been found
twice
in the dryer

he is loved by father
but cannot
stay over

father is a reasonable man
full of possible
fishing trips, stories

of pregnancy, napkins

written on
by god

father met the boy
in a common way, through suicide’s

mistress

a woman
said to have forgotten
what it was like
to die
doing

what it was
my mother

loved

god’s dream
of dying
first

take my children

who at their most vivid
recount for me
my childhood

who disappear
from trampolines

I shot, one summer, both my hands at my brother.
the tree he climbed was the most realistic tree
he could find
in that city

and I
missed him.

seek poverty for the instant nostalgia it provides

the contact high I get from sleep.  an illness

that comes
and goes.

hats.

boy spotless, wrecker of the invisible home.  oh mother, scrubber of the radar’s blip.

speech, the blank
drawn
in paradise…

the parrot, the bone
left
for madness

the television in front of my murderous father is a city placed on outside arrest.  further coverage is dedicated to a new unharmed person from a race of desert people that materialized with her inside.  I join in spirit the manhunt for the victim who’s made off with the right to disappear.  I am holding a book I mean to worship and I hold it with two kinds of innocence.  my brothers cross shadows in the brightness of kitchen.  I have many brothers.  their teacups fill with god-taken tea and remain teacups.  the book is first a false god then tells me which of my hands.

a baby appears onstage in a kick drum.  the more I think of time travel the more it can do.  when I ask about the fresh blood you say I should see the ear muffs.  you say they are behind the snowy tv screen we made into a blanket for a dying robot and stared at to avoid the sight of your father the walking anthill.  my privates move in my sleep.  my privates are outside the governance of worship.  you can have me from the waist up.  my ******* are alone.  the devil shares a history with god.  in Ohio I am not a girl chewing the corner of a baseball card.

where do we go when we live

do aliens
have shadows-

inquiries
I field
from the child.

it rained in Eden.
this leaf is most like
a burned
hand.

put my good hand over the sun

be bright with absence

track the path
of a bullet
by swallowing
the small bug
meant to flee

with eaten
shade

[transformative melancholies]

frog
in the throat
of a lowing
cow

dad, smoking

two nearby deer
nosing that headlight
into place

poem is dead

~

[her father, his pipe]

all

them broken
babies
of tornado

drills…

eat, she says
to a fog
machine

~

[mom is using after the dream a home pregnancy test as a microphone]

I am counting
the realest
sheep-

my brother’s toothbrush
good as new

in my broken
hand

~

[the rapture]

grief is grief because it attempts to mourn the infinite. my leg’s blood becomes a branch. I breathe and think I’m eating.

~

ALSO

I have a new, privately self-published chapbook/exploration titled {the accepted field} that I’m making available for free for about a month to the first 10-20 people that request it. if interested, message me on here or at bartonsmock@yahoo.com with a physical address.

the stomach remains dumb.
the way she finds this out
inside a school bus.

the way her father with a hot towel on his head will swoon.
the way her mother after losing a child.

who wants to share
they’ve seen
but the mask
of god

I admit, I confess

as a painter
of chameleons

the art of the bruise

is lost

it came into the world itching to have one of your panic attacks.  your father

with his overexposure
to abandonment
called its body

bottled water from the town of torn muscles.

fear was a cigarette case and fear was also a lunchbox.  teeth

were part of a shadow
census
operating
in a flood
of milk.

it cheered horribly.  it cheered and a bug bite became a birthmark.

it is harder for my son
to tell me something
through my son
than for me to believe
in the vicarious
angel
stutter.  

     his disease
has nowhere
to go.

dear apple
in a paper
sack
there is
no

tornado

I know a woman whose shadow will never be the same.

–

we are eating from a bowl that wants to go home.

I come in from the car.  I look at the kids.

there are still
three
of them.  I unbutton my shirt

and put on another.  my daughter, my oldest,

has kissed her hand
behind a curtain- but I am not

to know.  their mother

stays in the car
each time

much longer.  in a few moments, we will huddle

at the window
watch her
not light

a cigarette.  her daughter

is also
that strong.

jesus on the cross

my sister is sometimes obese.  she has mild heart attacks in cramped third floor apartments.  she gets beaten by schoolmates who impersonate hospital staff.  I am always going to see her it seems when she is in someone else’s bed.  it is to this thought she has recently clung.              



jesus in the tomb

my sister keeps me from sleepwalking.  she says I am her dream of being skinny.  she has lost so much weight already I am almost too happy for her.



scripture that may one day represent scripture**

we are able to buy food, but here’s the catch: we eat it.

the fore-
cross
becomes head
with blank
look
the smallest
blank
look
trying to swim
from a face-

my tongue is heavy
in the dream
like a burden-

the crosses
flanking
become shoulders
of man
afraid
that I
entirely
fear-

but there is a tunnel
dreamt into
mother
hillside
that is not
finished
that from
I emerge
where from
I went
to confess
myself
attached.

the phantom butcher hides another pregnancy test

–

an egg reminds me to bathe my teeth

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth.  the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet.  the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention.  the silence my mother kept quiet for.  the second afterlife of a single breast.

the two play tic-tac-toe by prison correspondence.  the mutual doctor they once met through is now famous for being there when god was in labor.  I love my research when it brings me to my mother’s stone because my mother’s stone is without epitaph and because beside my mother’s stone is one engraved with a phone number which predates what everyone is doing.  I call the number and nothing.  the two unfold a couch into a bed and go their separate ways to check email.  their little devil details the car that didn’t get away.  I want this little devil so badly it murders the actor I look like.  the two stand in front of a movie poster and stand there just as they’ve planned.  a beauty shop closes its doors sending beauticians into a street crowded with beauticians for open carry.  I send Emily to search for Emily when Emily was pretty.

i.

deep down, I’ve always wanted my brother to knit as if he too would be beheaded

ii.

mother chokes

on the pill
the dream’s
light switch

iii.

I have also seen
the opposite

a ghost
into
a person

iv.

the late swimmer, the fossil

moves god
to brush

desperation
as in
desperation
in the disappeared
eye
of its least
loyal
member,  

witness
as the failure
of god
to preach
to the choir,  

and abuse
as a testament
to the animal’s
frequent
submission
to the IQ
of poverty

father was visited one night by his terrible stomach long enough for it to mumble no one has to know I’m here.  his brothers were all red sheep.  his daughter from his first two marriages has since gone on to assess accident vehicles.  when I was a boy I’d tell her one breast didn’t like the other.  she’d cry.  twirl a baton.  her baby brother would call to her from the front lawn and I’d have to go under her bed for the window ladder because she was wearing a skirt.  her mother was said to be able to floss with cobwebs.  her mother entered my thoughts with video game controllers that had taken the brunt of nosebleeds.  everyone was soft or painting books in an after hours library.  afflicted with hush, my father ventures wholeheartedly into the phrase it’s all ***** in a sandbox while aware of the baton as anomaly.  poems provide the mediocre privacy of poems.

triumvirate

the fulsome    
curse word
that deformed my tongue-

the teeth
in glaze
of remnant
soap-

and the shadow
my mother’s finger
left
inside my cheek
which I coaxed
into cigarette

and scrubbed with.


divine instance*

regarded by a daylight raccoon
a man tries to think of nothing.

the raccoon’s eyeful of hunger
a far off religion
the dead of which
orphaned only
a few.

the bent pipe of its back
the gnomic antique
of a raided circus.

its claws
the common salvage
of row fire.

    so fully raccoon
it might’ve been
earlier
what now
it would fight.

snow, we let it fall. our cigarettes nod off. ear shaped mouths fill with cake. our mothers open windows, and worry. lovers leave a bed, unmade, on the moon. a stolen truck swerves to miss a charging bike. a young boy, mid angel, says he can feel the blood in his body. he says it to a girl and she punches him. I wish to remove the clothes of every figure we drew as children. a blind boy with acne makes light of god and god’s face. we call the boatman’s wife from different hotel rooms. our sisters refuse towels and we put our hands in and out of a glove. our uncle

we can hear him ******* on a broken lawnmower. we pass our father and **** him for taking, already, the cat’s frozen head from the madman’s shovel.

pain is under the impression it’s on the move.

the brain
a fire
that cannot
spread.

in a world of non-competitive
seizing
I show my son
how to waste
his hand
on the hand
signal

that called away
vandalism’s

angel.

boy, you will think smoking makes a pearl in your gut.  there will be three doctors like writing shacks constructed from memory.  to each you will deny the existence of a one-way baseball.  prognosis is a curse.  when you are curled by infancy I will toss objects through a tire swing.  by the way I am your father no one likes.  pain is not the last room the world has.  to be fair, pain is the last room

with a toothbrush.  knowledge is a sick woman.  she takes out her breast in a snowstorm.

that first darkness

dad
walking backward
while puffing
a cigarette

/ the click
of mom’s
fractured
foot

my mother I made her
black

so I would be humble.

I went as a soldier
into the silence of women

and found it lacked the peace
afforded hell.

I gave my only word
to my son, and he went off

with his sister.

I returned from the war
(took up with a man)

I was born with.

strip baseball

I was never allowed
to see your arms

where so many birds
had been

jeopardy**

I am pushing a bike uphill, my brother
is pushing
a wheeled
horse-

we are late for the birth of my sister’s doll.
for the tea that protects us.

to my daughter who thinks me moral

I keep only
the animal
that has bitten
at the legs
not jawed
by the trap

to my sons who wish me home**

    the bread crumbs
were eaten
not by birds
but by a starving
boy
with a lost voice
who’d wandered
from his home
in a delirium
brought on
by a toothache

[two koans]

deader
than his animals
that could speak
to language?


[roof love]

alien
to me

were the ashtrays

failed boats
of teeth

for my angry
quiet
brother


[rattle]

forget, sorrow
your anniversary

in case
you’re not
alone


[firsthand]

are they gone

the cats of the doll-faced arsonist

how does one
earn
loneliness, or slip

from an overlong

baptism


[doll traffic]

it is not a darkness to call it the demon’s untouchable telephone

I’ve referred
to worse
and anyway
time is the gospel
of disappearance

in stories, my brother has a tail
and speaks
mailman

perhaps there’s not enough to do

the tree has horns

an overhead crow

flat on my back
in the loft
of my uncle’s
barn
where I
thought to please
my father

and resolved
I would not
be like
my shadow

she who
upright
confessed
so loudly
that her heart

flew

into a quiet
sky

     and she collapsed



angel scene*

when on the path
some small
unnamed
creature
senses
the oblivious
coming
of a man

and wishes
in its own
animal way
to be called
into ash
or bush

Q: what do crows eat?
A: they don’t.
Q: do they eat stars?

-

a fight with my brother

ends

when it’s my turn
to fake
my life

-

as a language, our food spoils

or mother
makes
the same
dish

-

where does my tongue die?

how am I not a dream? I am not a place. I can’t say rabbit but can robot. my god knows one story. those I count when I’m sad are those I count when happy. grandfather means pipe-smoke and grandmother an outdoor pool. their daughter is a lamb-haunted horse. I see Ohio as an ear but still I ask what happened to the ear in question. I don’t sleep unless I need proof I never. I am older than the brothers I scare. travel is my sister’s vehicle. my dog is chewing on a rubber hand. it can’t be dark in both.

as a father, I can’t imagine being a parent.  the inside fastballs of my youth loosen the blood in my nose and water fountains become locales of low tragedy.  consistency is a sense only grasshoppers make.  as a firstborn, I was set gingerly on a swing.  when my father’s bare feet left him they became fish.  hiding from my mother is as good for her self-esteem now as it was then.  some no higher than my knee seek violent alternatives.

I couldn’t sleep without first notifying you of my whereabouts.  

they tell me my son
is my school-age
son.  

they tell me his health belongs to a sketch artist.  

     animals of the poor, it is not my life to give.

make your cry to the lord of obnoxious minimalism.  

*****
all you want
underwater.  nothing leaves

the imagination.

odd prank
the minimalist
pulls
on death

the having
of a slow
son
whose mother
reappears
in the grocery

storm

not much happened.  after I was born, father stood outside of a church and watched mother go in.  before I was born, they had eleven cigarettes between them and smoked maybe nine.  

not much happened.  my brothers joined me on a bike ride.  we made visors of our hands and squinted into the sun.  we looked for a hill.  I’m not sure what they saw.  

a boy pulled into a house by a spotted arm.
an increase in sadness.