the youngest brother loves his ladder.  the oldest is barefooted and sentimental.  the middle is marketed to your children and dies to put a stop to the glorification of suicide.  their father knows **** well what the world thinks of them so why would he stoop to reading.  the family bible isn’t a book because it knows nothing about god.  mothering is not the billboard that got away.

my mother’s pregnancy comes to me in a dream.  the scarecrow that has me diagnose its doctor as having attention deficit disorder is the same scarecrow every time.  the soldier eats her camouflaged meal.

for Alex*

a man holds a good book
as if his hands are cuffed

turns each page
if only to relieve
this, that, wrist

when late
he may
set the book down
to light, or drop
a match

his whole life, planned out
the lit and the dropped

he may pause
here and there
to smoke
to belabor

the end of his life
where he sees himself
slipping from the cuffs
which undoubtedly
fall, then disappear

into some
nightly sound
that wakes his wife

who disoriented
is thankful
she will be on time

     her first date
with a man
not yet
apprehended

father sees the doll in a striptease window.

mother touches the doll
with kid gloves
that fit.

brother hears the doll
brushing the teeth
of its newer
version.

the doll’s feet stick out
from under a hotel bed
marooned
in the ceiling’s
mirror.

thinking the doll has vomited
sister gags.

I can overhear myself relating to an older brother the eerie feeling I had when jogging past an abandoned shoe factory.  I am more nervous than I think I am and can sense brother’s multilayered disappointment in all things prime.  it’s my stutter surprises me the most.  as if it knows, beforehand, things will never be the same.  once a coward, once is enough.  born in a place that feared me.

I babysat for children whose mothers didn’t want to come downstairs. I was driven home by men so drunk they knew my house like a muscle. the children ate what I made. I taught boys how to fake an illness and girls how to ask for pets. I could change a diaper and smoke at the same time but then it got away.

a boy of five give or give years without a shirt holding a half empty soda bottle and blowing into it while scratching his bare big toe with his other and rocking the porch swing back further than front and he is the boy I see as I return after these many years to the house where I killed by accident my mother and he is the reason I turn back pretending I’ve come from somewhere still and waiting because he has riled in me a peace I haven’t had since that span of counting to 30 instead of 20 while my mother hid under the car my father had jacked up and left so as to chase a girl riding by on her bike wearing only ******* and a t-shirt which is dangerous and my father knew danger and loved warnings such that he would swear he would one day coin the phrase financial violence and he would be the first.

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as my mother took up the inquiry into what had died, I was made god.  father pretended to be my ***** and praised me for putting him in good hands.  my sister gave birth to a very large head.  what’s the first thing a baby does with its body?

blame the tree, what in it, burned:
a scarecrow on hands of straw and knees afire.
a pinball rabbit surrounded by ankles.  
a soldier’s kite.
you, who walk in circles.

brim of my hat.

days after **** is celebrated for having

no

anniversary / mom

stops looking
at her feet

~

days before I keep it from my ghost that I am in the wrong

person / dad

tells me that if I concentrate hard enough I can get god’s fingers stuck in a bowling ball

in hangman, how the head
is first.  in chess

how father.

my friend’s father had his legs break from standing after a day of drinking the father’s milk he said would take our guts to places not even babies had been.  friend took what of it he could into his mouth and left some there to smuggle into mine.  the moms thought we were kissing and his cracked a tooth on a cigarette.  my own swooned but kept composure enough to catch something in her stomach.  I don’t have an ounce of quit in me that’s not addicted to keeping quiet.  I know worry has some use but in these woods I’ve not happened upon any age of tree growing into another.

i.

when his fingers began to bleed, father stopped closing his eyes to pray.  

     the worst thing I heard as a child was how god made
not only
me.

it was either the suicide of my imaginary friends or the imagined
suicide     of my real.  mother’s hands were that way

because of the dye
in dish gloves.  

ii.

on this that has become the story of my prematurity
I’ll say    

the food we get has already been defeated.

iii.

the boredom of today’s children
has no depth.

touch a throat in a totem’s mouth.

iv.

your mother was a hologram of a voodoo doll.

when father
not father
as the gay
madman
first met
her     the bump on her head

was much
bigger.

v.

with a pocket knife or some other **** thing the word gargoyle has been scraped into every idle machine.

the drug addled uncles have a rare focus and take non-consecutive short naps.  

you can shake your head about the babies

they remember
nothing.

vi.

god is no more than a clipped moan
scrambles
the angels.

I am not one to placate beggars of description and hardly know where I lived besides.  early on I picked up a stone and my friends passed it around after I threw it.  few went braless.  *** was something of a docile raccoon cub in a half globe of ice.  fathers all were barked down from the same tree by the same poets.  in the previous I will be refusing to enter the trailer home of my ninth grade love where for all I learn her hound might still be waiting for its ******* to fall.  I will inspect only what is already true.  if in the following you do not come upon a series of blank pages just when the getting is good than my publisher was chosen too quickly and my brilliance is of less remain.  as I am well versed in parental infighting I have little vote but to edit my mother and abridge my father and say they were kids looking at an ultrasound of an empty stomach other than my mother’s.

I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent.  listening to his radio was a long way off.  you sat early.  you called me mother before I was ready.  if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream.  I looked at stars and you were a toddler.  our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned.  he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of ****** abuse.  you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.

a dusty toad gives my father fits.
my sisters run through cobwebs.

I pluck ticks from our dog and put them to my ear.
I think of my blood in dog years.

     it is good to be old.

to step once and smallish away
from bare backs and on them the spiders.

sack race. minotaur.

(the stone)

a before
and after
picture
of absence.

a boy in a diaper
covered in flour

a sadness specific to elevators

cocoon
on every
menu

a piece of teacher’s
chalk

writes
to my brother’s
gut
of he

who swallows
fire
to cremate
god
the *****

donor

beauty is the beginning of beauty.  a man and a woman wait together for a stripper.  you know the man like an intimate thought.  like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door.  the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides.  the man is aware he’s the devil and this makes him god.  the woman is unaware she’s the devil and this makes it easy.  the stripper is watching a horror film and it makes her want to have a child.  she decorates her home then tries to remember moving a muscle.  the blood you don’t see is fake.

the man and woman didn’t feel ashamed until they put on that show for the snake.  hell, it wasn’t even a snake but primarily a rope that couldn’t facilitate their double suicide and then it was a snake from one’s imagination, yours or mine, torturous.

I have what is called my father’s face.  my son has a hand because my son holds a stone.  the mother stomps her feet in the name of the holy ghost known for running the orphanage into the ground.  the sister sees god but does not see god shove a dead bird down her brother’s pants.  the brother believes in god so god will cure him.  sitting on this swing has made me fat.

she is not crazy, the mother, this happens:

her children die, in a bathtub, silly.
her husband, on a banana peel.

later, she calls about the tent.  the police take it down.

she says nothing to them until they leave.
a boy stops walking, says lady, and whistles.

each day until her daughters are grown.

the *** machine has begun to breathe on her own.  father ***** a brown bruise into mother’s half of my cigarette.  I could be doing a handstand in a prison yard or watching as my cell is turned upside down.  brother uncurls a finger from his made fist so deliberately I know he means it to be a hard-on.  I crush my eyes with my eyes and try to remember the name my son gave to the loose tooth we hung together from a doorknob.  was my son told me the puppets need our hair.

there is no light in the darkness
that is not a worried man.

I can tell you nothing you know.

my sons are two.  my sons play faith.

under my wife I am a shadow of joy.

-  

(over which I smuggle the thoughts of my acquaintances)

one-way bridge.

-

my hands are weak or would not be called hands.

when mother collapsed
god had a plan.  it included
the double life
of my father’s

ankles.

-

some I sanction, some I don’t.
some are **** creative.

suicides leftward of the unlit life.

-

I put my fist in your purse and leave it there and you let me.
we mass produce

eye contact.

we are both small, about love, about to bang
our heads
on the poor.

we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet.  we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks.  the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others.  we limp beside any creature that limps.  the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other.  our father is two mathematicians who argue.  our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave.  our guesses mean little because they are facts.  at school we are voted on and kissable.  if you see us coming, *** is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket.  details belong to god.

the doctor
wore secretly
a nightgown
and poured
a glass of milk.

     his wife

disappointed
she had not seen
a ghost

     remained his wife.

-

( the wellness of my mother
  does not need
  my mother
  nor does
  the wellness

  of yours )

-

if you see a white mouse
in a dark city

a light
for which
I have kept
vigil
goes on
in my son’s head…

had we one mouth. had our teeth been field workers swept into a bar after a fight. that we could find them. that we could tell our wives where to look. had we not been dragging our shadow by the foot. had the ground not shrugged itself lower. had it opened. had we cut the palm, not the throat, of death. so that when it prayed. so that when it tried.

had they not banned, so early, the dogs. had my best friend a suit. had he not talked so much about getting one. had it not been his hand I seen come outta the earth to take its pick of hats from the wounded. had I not laid his fat sister. had I gotten money for it. called her fat and not loved her for standing upright what was another’s tale of composure.

getting on
in years

his body
weaned
of its addiction
to being
vital

the artist
begins to realize
he is one
man.

catching up
seems impossible
without god.  father

or no,
his person
proves another.

have recently self-published a comprehensive selected work taken from the fourteen full-length, also self-published, collections of mine from years 2007-2014.  the book has a title, the women you take from your brother, and is 351 pages.  a PDF of the work will be sent to any making such a request of me at email bartonsmock@yahoo.com

link to the work is below, book preview is book entire:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21758824.html

it includes work from the following publications-

the paper dolls have been cutting your hair
Grief Of Arm
Angel Scene
mating rituals of the responsibly poor
Ahistoric
Aggressive Kin
Hallelujah Lip-Synch
in the asylum we’d sun ourselves with angels
think ******* nothing on a farm machine
abandonesque
Stork Blood
town crier
We stole not the same bread
PLEA

sample poems:


lacuna

Ohio 1976 I was given a word.  a helluva word.  I went unborn.  a word my mother swallowed.  a troublesome word.  nervosa sans pretext.  my father slept until his sleep became self aware.  he paced.  then gave me his word.  stood over me.  

Ohio 2013 you ***** on my shadow in an abandoned building outside of which a pregnant woman bikes herself into a garage door and bloodies her nose between sound and horn.


the gospel

I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight.
I make the bully too evil.

I shy from death
to be made
its lure.

I have a wife
board
what else
a train
to transport
the sadness
a *****
can’t.  

     my son
wonders
aloud
if all females  
are mothers.

if animals, talk.


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.

worried he is becoming one person
the boy with cloth scissors
escapes the watchful eye
of the puppeteer’s
child

and proceeds
unmolested
to the most
active

imagination

     his sister’s
before she was
expelled

my sister is a room god leaves alone.  she hangs a sign on the door I cannot read.  by the time I can, I am watching my younger brother roll his ankle wearing high heels.  at night I hear him swallow repeatedly.  another tooth gone.  a boy with a stick is a boy with a wand.  kids die in their sleep because they are boring.  because they dream of things that can really happen.

a mention
here or there
on the police
blotter, a chicken
scratch
on a giant’s
petition
to condemn
the church, kids
we lose
to birth

for Aidan*

my son at nine years takes his easel out to the deck to paint from his dream moon above lake.  in spirit, I tell him it’s about to rain.  I am afraid aloud my words will run together.  in the dream he saw eighteen moons.  it won’t remember he’s painted one.

the imposing figure read silently from a magazine of immature fictions.

an amulet predicted itself grey.

a symptom presented my sister to a non-speaking heroine who by all accounts had been only mildly *****.

a boy, having recently written to the head of the household about dirt clods being mysteriously removed from the backs of toy trucks, could be heard sizzling as he dissolved into the memory of his father’s cooking.

a trophy room made trophy sense.

in a decaying spaceship

where the writer of mindless violence          
has been herself

something horrible
like something
you’ve seen

could happen
to a clothed baby

but
based on past history

hasn’t

and the baby
used
is used sparingly

and the baby not used
gives little thought
to its hands
which speak

prettily
about thumbsucking
to publicly
murdered
angels

They found a dog on the moon with a mannequin’s hand in its mouth. They drew it together from memory but in the year it took them a photo of the dog had been taken by god. Art wants to invent time, all the time. In a poem for my mother, a baseball is being grown in a beehive. In a poem for my father, I eat an egg roll in a cornfield made of paper. In a poem for both, I am old enough to count the rings on the oven’s burners. Love changes love.

carry the kids upstairs.

pause the credits.

put water on for tea.

whistle.

leave a comb, lose a pigeon.

wonder the deep couch in the drawn bath.

find it strange.

use my razor.

don’t worry.  as a favor.

it was easier / in the whale / god elsewhere

god perfecting / the alien’s

coffin

–

fish and bird
loose
in the same
mirror

–

moths / of a softer / ma

on the day
you were, I felt
I’d been born
far enough
away
to bring you
this moment.

it existed, briefly, as a fly.  as my want to be
not on the wall
overhearing

from my son’s brain
all about
the five, six
months without

disorders
of muscle, and cell, and.  the five, six

months
an insectless
time
of the word
****…

terminology is exactly this fog.  is knowing
he will not be lost, but will
be referred to
as here.

you recall
yourself
inventing

my disabled son won’t have a disabled child.

for comfort, I have
this baby
being carried
prematurely
in the hand
of one
hoping to enter
an underway
snowball fight.

my hangover
imagines
again

a future for those I want dead.

[dying brother with microscope]

last night
a horse
left Ohio
and waited
seven seconds
before
clopping back

(all cats had my sister’s tongue)

angels
had fingernails

and fish food
taste

~

[palimpsest]

illness
as diary
we

are underwater
where eating
was discovered

(this is our
joke
that on land
god is waiting
to cut
a birthday cake
for the non
born
the non
below...

our grief comes in pairs
to the animal
it looks
most like

~

[easy]

a ghost and an angel compare childhoods

(we’ve all
let our food
get cold

umbrae

for Genevieve

your prayers include a terrible notebook, an invalid friend, and a man believing separately that we are here to place turtles upright. when you walk into the ocean you walk into the ocean on your hands. you do this to protect your knees. many think you are magnificent and these many you are on the verge of telling about the Saturdays that bore you and about the spider you repeatedly squash. the resurrected spider that is not a gift. if you could you’d give your youngest son a woman he could either swim through or swoon inside. a woman who could put him to sleep and rock in a chair the boat of her belly so untroubled to be thinking twice about twins. you’d be sad, or sleepy, and get to choose.

before I go to war

     the dark readies in the oven.
my father washes with a wet sock a knee exposed.
my mother

wears one dry sock which she removes
and makes into a puppet. or an oven mitt.

both
silence the hand.

idolatry**

a red wheelbarrow, maybe-

but not
so much
depends

on a poem
about it

[boy musics]

we’re counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed *** shop in Ohio when I tell you my father is gay. it’s too late for crow and all the deer have been hit. you have just read me three poems by your dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister. a vacuum is running below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.

~

[tube feeding]

the boy who in the middle of performing a handstand finds god just as she’s creating the oceans after being overtaken by a herd of ghosts

~

[in a cornfield a trombone case full of ****]

we buried a god in Ohio today with a ouija board and a map. pain is a different god altogether. smaller mouth. no belongings. I remember becoming a dog with more clarity than being assaulted on a bus during a rash of housefires. sister says that from here on out television is the devil’s paint and bends herself into translating her mother’s poems for grief, the doomed sycophant of language.

[fealties]

mowing the lawn
dad swallows
a bug.

sister is folding her eyelids back
and brother

his diaper
stays on.

mom on a small map
is making
noise.

the animals are what god sees
in animals. soon

a birthmark
on a tooth.

~

[would you say, mouth]

that god
made a deal
with nothing

~

[god is silent in every language]

mom is driving. mom is washing the spider that closed her mouth. sister has a stick of gum but says she doesn’t. dad is half-asleep and cutting the fingernails of the babies he dropped. there’s a scab on my arm that looks like my brother’s nose. we pass church after church. sound horn for buried bees.

the narrative that haunts my flood story never has two words for the sticks I rub together.

the mother treats her mouth like a net she’s failed to eat through.

no one is talking to the pregnant angel who can’t ****.

The present is the language god uses to tell the future there’s no present.

To swim is to let John the Baptist draw on your body.

Touch is the hand’s trapdoor.

an orange cat
touches
the earth, this

my dad’s
dream…

and this, the nail’s:

a palm print
on the hoarder’s
window