the below is a tentatively titled and finished companion piece to my recent chapbook, infant cinema (**** Press, dinkpress.com, April 2016)
infant cinema can be purchased here: http://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock
shut-eye (in the land of the sacred commoner)
~ poetry and god share the same quick death.
I’m on what you’re on; the eighth day of the world.
~ it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.
~ existence is the wrong inquiry.
I was destroyed by an angel
for having taste buds.
/ a pinkness
went on without me.
~ if touch is all it can manage
the hand is poor.
I am the new face of baby doorstep.
when lightning has emptiness to burn
feed the fasting doll.
~ I am old and nothing brings me joy.
I did good things but I was asked.
drunk outside of a dog shelter I am likely to remember a library pyros love.
my uncle he is probably still west of me able
to open a bottle with the mouth of a living frog.
~ and what would forgiveness do?
my kids were never born. yours they hide from the number of people god made.
when dead, I was not a bird yet my mother asks what kind.
I can’t tell by looking if he’s seen the future or seen the future again. I strip
when my stomach hurts.
~ it puts me on my stomach
this grief you have for the switched at death
–
god’s color has returned
–
the male animals in the grey barn
knew
–
first
~ I want to say it is yes yes
puberty’s painted egg, the island
clock, the genitalia
of alarm…
I want to say it is orange
like bees like not all
the hymns not all
condoms…
~ he says we are men not because a raccoon chased a bone into the factory of shadows.
he says it’s me or the bag of trash and gives me a knife.
he says before I was borned we took the same bullet. he says mouth.
I kick he says in my sleep and it puts a belly button on a bird one bird.
he says them animals ain’t so wild as a dog in drag
and your mother is the outside world.
~ the robot is a ******.
the baby it goes from baby to baby with no message.
–
I want your work to matter.
~ subtitles, ghost pollen / I sit
facing my father
he strokes a large bumblebee…
~ eating behind the mirror’s back it was all hick lore to me
a scratch in scar’s nakedness, a loss
of infancy awarded only to the deaf who dug up the ears of god for nothing more than the sound
of depression going blind in the garden of the hairdresser’s
hair
~ death my way of saying goodbye to god
–
had you lived or enjoyed amnesia…
~ when asked I say I see on the floor of a mudhut a *** toy having a seizure.
I kiss the feet you’re the future of.
~ not for devouring the mannequin but for eating the seeds, it was
(in a coloring book for cigarettes)
beaten
by a baby a baby could love
~ I go with dove to high
dives / I am on
the pill the swimmer’s pill / for nine
months I’ve hidden a rabbit from no one’s
hormonal christ
~ it was for healing the hand of the plain hand that I was touched / well blood
on a bread crumb massage me a brainwashed worm / well comb
all you want the eyesight of god / swallow
a hair in the house birth built…
–
can’t this once a thing die in the sanctuary of its double
~ hell is a book.
she reads it in a room that’s alive.
attic or no, I want to miss my father.
~ nakedness,
give it time to recover
~ into something from his childhood a man is born. never
far off what crawls her way.
~ she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.
I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone
lightning straightens.
~ church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.
~ in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.
~ this is me praying for a photo of my father’s last meal.
me
praying to have the allergic reaction my mother faked.
for proof of animal suicide.
a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.
~ and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.
~ / I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?
/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.
/ year eight:
~ my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.
the dog is a heartbroken wolf.
~ she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.
the egg is dropped and the owl ******.
~ when did your caterpillar become a syringe?
I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.
something touched is something mourned.
~ the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.
~ praise headgear, worship eyewear.
adore nostalgia, forgive
memorial’s constant vigil.
say god three times, then
say mirror.
~ this is what you mean, kiddo
what you mean to a bomb
/ it doesn’t help god
that god is awake
~ for what does the torso pray?
the cocoon is music to the mannequin’s ear.
sister she ain’t been calm.
~ when grief was password and not codename
when gift horse was horse fly
when baby little baby shorthand went all stork-****
(on who)
to remember god
~ outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside
was this boy was discovering god’s thumb is never clean. a boy whose mouth
was never here. all those I’ve met
I’ve left alone.
~ asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.
I’m so fat I’m fat in the dark. I compose
at my lowest a crucifixion story
from the basements my father wired.
~ putting the meat back together in an unfilled pool
we yawned at the same time / brief
painless the unmothered
between
~ as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…
we are the dead we’re here to return
~ by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.