was he wanted a dog and was told to go through mom

(it:  torn from nothingness to live in this world)

/ attraction
the voided
bird

I call this piece

mime
reacts
to roadkill

I guess I was eating
on very little
sleep

sister was here
she pointed to a crow
saying

best tell
that bird
brother

the power’s

out, what it felt like
to her

us laughing

was that god’s
chosen
alternate

had made a stomach
could turn babies
into commas

the mother fixes nothing so she ain’t gotta hear of it breaking again.  the father saves on the sly for a rabbit.  the brother lives long enough to see one of his eyes challenge the designation of his sister’s foresight

as a miracle
of brevity.  the neighbors argue over whether it’s a migraine or a headache.  what one tells the lord, another tells an angel.  the god is the god that teaches a snowman how to have a stroke.  the animal learns to speak by having none recall what it plans to imagine.

lose them all, dogface

teeth were pills
god couldn’t
swallow

in the house that doesn’t go to heaven
my father lives
the life
of a stowaway.

tell the tornado how poverty has too many gods.

/ the walls have ears.  I have

my collection
of roaches

wrapped in foil / someone

will take my word
what firewood
was.

of the body
I would rather
be
punching bag
than funhouse

in the hour
of things
or a thing
for hours…

-

I am not silent
bud did
from my father
inherit
the alphabet
most women
use

-

we meet
the same
beginning, recall

-

memory
had its mind
made up

I lost it
like a child
loses
a bee

the dot of my life

[Adonai]

as if asked to bathe an angel
father drops mother
from an open
first floor
window.

with little effort
my brothers move a trampoline
over her body.

I talk over
with two actors
in prison garb
how to shoot the scene
having only
one phone and one
pane of glass.

all were rich
father included
when the window was closed
and he was on fire.      

~

[mall nuns]

a chicken with its head cut off
takes part in a melodrama
fit for a swan

-

both halves of my daughter
live thinking they are survived
by the other

-

mall nuns.

just nuns
taking a shortcut.

-

my daughter uses a pencil
when pretending
to smoke.  

nesting failure

makes her sad.

-

I spend my days seeing things.

as if
youth is a museum

-

poverty isn’t

~

[virtuoso]

mommy I am stones.  I am in the blacktop river.  my veins have been used to unpiss cows.  like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are.  the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten.  they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move.  I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed.  I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing.  if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t.  there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped.  I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

~

[cinema]

when as a father
one arrives early

one is lonesome

and given
by no one
the task

of remembering
the empty lot
roped off

and daughter
needing both hands
for the rock

~

[podium]

a toy tugboat
in an unfilled
baby pool

a dead spider
beneath it

I could talk nightly
on these-

my dreams would look for missing children
my dreams would turn to salt

~

[proximal]

this is the holding father
bent from the weight
of his child    

ear to eardrop

a hospital tree     in aftermath
hunched to the loss
of discovery

this is day 39 of 40
observations

each day I have so many
children     to name

differently

I don’t remember the first time you were here

anymore     I am blessed
to see your toes

hear a storm
when the storm
is distant

I open out from another’s dream.  I think on the word deflower and the terrible way we use it.  my female wife- this much is the same.  I’ve been here before.  nothing happens.  she makes coffee with her phantom limbs in a story of yesterday’s news.  this morning I’ll drive past my daughter’s daycare and my daughter will wave to a secret building.  the heat that gets to others is god.

in the blue church of my father’s thirst

I wear it

(hunger)

like an eye-patch, and emerge

starless

from the uncooked blood
of my shadow

when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god

the flame
the phantom
limb
of my
informer

pain
as the upkeep
of amnesia

my arms had ears
hundreds
of baby
ears, crop

of silence…

don’t itch
what the brain
can reach

i.

the inventor of ear muffs
slipping from his mother
to duck beneath the belly
of a carousel horse

his mother with her cotton candy
and his
pressed to her cheeks
calling

as he covers his ears

his name

ii.

the inventor
of the time machine
unbeknownst
to many
or

to all
save his best friend

the inventor
of real time

a murderous fellow
famously
early

brother peace and brother quiet
dot
the same
neck.

so far, my hands have remembered being hands.

if on a balloon
a face
is drawn
you too
can call
it sister

whose dolls
have biblical
names.

no person was made in the harming of this creature.

hands off, angel,
the baby’s
glove.

I say star
son says coma.

we are indoors.

shadow?
ditch

scarecrow?
footage

snow?
snows

through the end of October, any monies I receive from the sales of my publicly and/or privately available self-published books will be sent to a poet friend of mine who was injured while clearing debris for others after Hurricane Irma.

as part of the above, I have a privately available self-published collection of selected and new that will exist for two days (10/30 and 10/31) that is titled {soft facts}, 315 pages, $10.00

it is available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)

in this context, we are rednecks for free association.  we worship the male witness of the bone burying dog.  we wander from working televisions to say amen and to call it typical the baby’s behavior.  god is a perfectionist.  fasting a weight class.  we have each of us a bad hand briefly that drops a baseball.  our bald spots pass as bite marks beneath squirrels in the priesthood of sleep.  there’s meat but we’ve had better.

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.

I am in the house owned by your hospital where my son tells me I’m to be injected with a sickness to fight the sickness I was born with.  in relation to my previous longevity, my son stays for only a short while.  as he leaves he wipes the frost from inside the front window so I can see my mother’s open mouth.  the kindness my son shows me leans me against a wall and it is here I gather the strength to sleep standing up.  the man who lives with me is tolerably angry as my son’s face reminds him that he was once a great sketch artist.  he makes a promise to draw me in all my glory once I heal.  after hitting me, he blames it on the lack of furniture.  I stumble outside, not dramatically, and am shot by my mother, or by someone who heard me come in.

but for this letter, the word is silent.

you are not yet
my maker.

his observations
exhibit
decline.  hers

display
animals
that forgive.

everything buried
is buried
in god.

the brain
as it designs
a plotless
thing.

mommy I am stones.  I am in the blacktop river.  my veins have been used to unpiss cows.  like my father after me I don’t want you to be my mother but you are.  the men catch me with the fish they’ve eaten.  they slap at me beneath a robe to make the robe move.  I recognize my photo shopped savior as airbrushed.  I blind whole neighborhoods with snowplow models of their choosing.  if you receive this it means there is much more you haven’t.  there are ashtrays no one makes anymore and tumors we don’t call phone-shaped.  I am beautiful in the baby you sing to.

a short period of poorness is already underway when I enter to promise my dog and nod to my wife.  dumb in the mouth I announce I am thinking behind.  my shyness is a chair sent from a distant church.  the one man in the room tells me I have a purpose and confides that he too is a rental.  I’m just here for my unmarried wife who was recently overwhelmed by the human response of our dog.  being that the women are slow to evoke, I’ll have myself know your sons are on a flat surface having a nightmare nightmares notice.

if man’s interpretation of god leads man to interpret man, we are lost.  my neighbor is crying.  that’s not her house.

calls me by cupping his hands and hollering.  is convinced he needs delayed attention.  senses my immediacy and waves me off.  his hands go into remission.  his hair darkens.  darkens as grass dryly chosen by a nearby frisbee.  we are here to celebrate.  three years without driving.  three years backing over a bicycle his daughter could not abandon.  bookmarks and powder.  brain a busy insect.  seasons placed on torpor’s waiting list.  the recent wars have been a clarity.  people want what we have.

her parents ask her to babysit the boy of the couple they’re going out with.  her brother knows the boy as the one who doesn’t get to read aloud in english class.  her parents want her to eat but she ate in her sleep.  the other couple has problems.  her father isn’t jealous.  her father is ugly.  the first thing the boy does he does with a pencil.  a thin line moves across the white wall that in her dream is a tooth.  food comes to her brother in small portions.

blood starts in the nose.

my body is on other things.

dream
is to boy
what taste
is to tongue.

her go-to
word
for hangman
is god.

eat little, not less.

*** as something that has an end.

evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.

I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority.  post-harm

pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.

ten men beginning to show outward signs of starvation are standing shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the small window my son is looking through while balancing himself on an exercise ball in a room I am convinced expands.  I am not allowed to have this dream.  when my wife whispers, I whisper back and god continues to be here by choice.  repeating myself means I’m here when I wake up.  son, ball, room, window.  ten ******* minimalists.  I am not supposed to admire the travel writing career taken on by my son your surgeon.  I am saddest knowing my wife’s dream is not the same.  ten women and the chance I haven’t done it.  were it the first year of my probable eleven, god is the lie I’d pick to get out of the room.

sad is the man convinced he will one day beat
to the mirror
his reflection.  sadder still

the cognizant woman.

how the saying
of nada
tamed
my mother’s
tongue
as in

being nothing
your father
has
nada

and my sisters and I
would momentarily
wild ourselves
verbatim
to bang
on a thing
with a thing
until father

in the a.m. and late with poverty
would enter what there was
to enter

     and how flush
he would be
with fiction

mouth pain / in a clean / house

–

the weight
of sister

–

the passwords of worried creatures

a stroller’s
body
of work

–

treeless (quiet)

mother attracted to jobless
occupied
men.

a belt once used as a tourniquet.

******* circa 1989.  

1989.

posters of found children.

a reality play.

any information leading to the exact time the prediction was made.

willing to create social network
for pets.

a dog much like the one I lost

that the two  
can fight.

I made for an action figure a family tree.  my mother came apart in the doctor’s hands.  my smallness entered the smallness of my god.  a side effect of ****** recognition.

the zero courage
it takes
to be
in pain.  or to be

for that matter

born.  it has devoured

by now
my son’s
vow
of silence.  but he had

didn’t he

a moment
while the animal

ate.

her nightmare
from the era
of hibernation
revolves around
a baseball
made
by her husband
from the cobwebs
found
soaking
in the mouths
of babes

(mouths)

dry
from dreaming
of the sponge
bathed
by god
in the egg
of a spotless
crow

the town is wiped from the face of my face.  a volunteer pokes himself in the eye.  becomes the rescued map of my brother.  I take my slippers by surprise.  I reach into a sack of masks.  the first is made of cloth.  is yours.  the second of plastic.  is mine.  when one is murdered, the others read the burning book.

my friend approaches the microphone with a grocery bag on his head.  I don’t know how this will turn out.  not long ago he ran over a fourteen year old girl minutes after she vandalized a stop sign.  my friend has lived everyday since and everyday previous with the fact she survived.  I phoned his wife recently but she had already left him for what he calls a microcosm.  I am hopeful I can love what he’s done with his hair.  he sent me this flower for mine.

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.

a would be mother
with an english phrase book
boards a train
she thinks is a train

jesus meanwhile
on tiptoes
circles a tree

a motivational silence
within a nondescript
third person

propels both

though by
some miracle
only the hands of jesus
remain curled

death makes two beds

father and son give food a choice

mother mothers moth and math

I count
for a cannibal
brother’s
bugbites

nowhere to go to have stillness removed

we wrestle sometimes in the junkyard over who gets to guard the lullaby machine. we share an image of our father making a throwing motion while above a necksick dog. of our mother dropkicking a pumpkin to egg on the nothing y’all can come and get. we aren’t close but chew together loudly and lip-synch the hymns we know. spiders forget the sea.

brother masturbates with an almost invisible dedication.

mother
yells
from the river

that all rain
is highway
robbery.  

while reciting
proverbs
for mitochondria
I pass the time
wearing
my father’s
shoes

for the footsteps
in his head.

it goes to bed hungry
with nothing to show
for the work
its creator
consumed

it learns to read
by talking

its ugliness
is believed
to have put
in the sleepwalker’s
mouth
an extra
tooth

pulled
from your life
of trying

after passing many dogs
with more skin
than fur, that seem to be
the starving men
of my dreams
if the starving men
of my dreams
had been brought
to the same place
to die
if that place
were me,

the man who sold
my brother
a gun

goes

as a father
praying over
a solitary
son

to his knees
in front
of a larger cage
and I see
the smallest elephant
and I keep
seeing it
as if I’m the only
one who can
though I know
it’s there, the sound it makes

like nothing sick, nothing animal-

I am not the brother
I’m the size of.

we give softness
to the man
whose age

staggers us, we give the man

status, world weary

authority…

we are severe women, I guess, with

been there
did nothing

faces

I ain’t been talked to in so long my wife’s kid thinks I have amnesia. ain’t been touched since Ohio’s ramshackle symbolism swallowed up some ***** donor’s shadow. I went yesterday to a funeral for a woman’s ear. told people what I was wearing was a bedsheet belonged to the man in the moon. told myself I had this microscope could see a ghost and that I’ve only ever lost an empty house. I don’t know how old I am but I know what year I want it to be. before dying I saw it flash how I should have died. low creature. tugboat.

father an optometrist inspecting a replica of a totem pole and mother an eel collapsing at the thought of a play performed in a stone.  

and there, at the bottom of grief, a cup of dirt with nothing to bury.

mother is chewing gum like something fell asleep in my mouth.  I say dog for both dog and puppy.  pray for things I know will happen.  a rooster through a windshield.  a dried-up toad in a deep footprint.