Alien’s heaven
poems
Barton Smock
June 2015
pilot light
baby, baby talk, and pilot light.
kitchens everywhere,
god is alone.
no brain
father smokes to make something disappear. he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected. when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil. mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears. terrify no one your childhood knows.
son
it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn. it drew with daylight. when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth. we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise. its pain went everywhere. it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes. its mothers had fight.
knees
visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke. leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad. my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays. sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.
yearly
our collective identity is a sick child. some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless. people are for others. are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from. the child prays. the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination. we pray. we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost. I trace a finger to put my finger on. the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once. nothing in the world is the world.
boy and gun
it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.
the recent absence
of nothing.
vernal
when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft
spot
for god
race
says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.
says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.
says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.
area
somewhere, the mostly boy body pretends to be explored. we are not we. my mother ruins a sketch of my mother. my father smokes two packs a day because online he was called prematurely haunted. the name of your existence
is
priest retires to make umbrella for jack-in-the-box. (her bus
is rain)
barbaric terms
each twin
slower
than the last, she spits
over my dead body
baby
after baby
out.
as news
of the massacre
spreads, the young
call it mother
by word
of mouth.
longing* *for Gen
the baby boy stiffens at the sight of unrolled dough. we say he is pointing the way to god. crippled by the sadness in her hand, his mother keeps a claw mark like one keeps diary.
closings
trespassers
shoot themselves.
your son gets hired
by city
to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.
my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive
turns on.
a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.
my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures
using only
redactions.
god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.
I am far too animated.
your body is the notice
eyes
give.
ins
night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler
-
father
half eye, half oil
-
self, self panic
bloodless for Noah
my brother was blinded by a crow.
I’d tell you the story
but know
you hate it.
*******.
brother’s darkroom
became
the crow’s.
breathing spells
I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.
I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail. told mother
it’s not suicide
unless you ask
to be born. I had a hand
for the year
father
went quiet
a hand
for the year
father
went quiet
for good. had dolls
over which
dying
out of character
held sway.
intelligence
magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.
a bird, a high window. sound of a brain cell.
hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.
as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.
bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.
harm is harm’s audience.
disability jargon
i.
when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees
ii.
homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to
iii.
eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self
concord
cap gun. swag from an uncle’s suicide.
the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.
voodoo dolls
in isolation. isolation
in its prime.
altar
the baby is too light. its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break. its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach. some of the boys bail. some don’t. the mother’s nickname doubles as her real. the baby is not called bricks.
zero
when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill. years go by and I am zero. the number arrested for suicide.
basics
because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub. something slides from his belly and becomes wedged. his dream business goes under even in dream. he makes eyes at CPR manikins. his son, his life, pushes for legs.
preparedness
you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.
it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.
it’ll put sheep
on the moon.
outlet
depression is a non-starter. depression is depression unknowingly cured. it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy. I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say. I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished. it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.
viewership
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.
pressure
the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way. I had children until I could only have four. what I say to self-harm is pay attention. my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body. (we have stopped talking
but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth) poverty myth: I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned. real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting. full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.
high
mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.
father, I can’t bury
my face.
in lieu
of the lord’s
dog, raise
the lord’s
bone.
the mice
the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect. she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other. both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen. sister gags and it makes him think about gagging. now no more, these were the heart of the note.
signal
as my face
will one day
correct
my body
I expose
the elements
to my
ugliness
-
my son is my search
history
-
headlights
when headlights
emerge
emerge
from a period
of non
worship
-
(wave your arms
long enough
you’ll have sticks
for arms)
-
they don’t
happen
in my
lifetime
the terrible
things
I’ve done
observance
when drought came
to my brother
I left
for the city
where I found myself
blanketing
manhole covers
with my coat
for women
who gathered
on rooftops
with men
whose daughters
had been killed
for jumping
rope
peril
I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.
take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.
I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.
stay small, future.
persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.
no devil
the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world. hell was always the preparing of hell.
inseparable
mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us. father is choosing an ice cube to bury. myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.
masters
I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist. I am alone. I am brief stay of bullet. god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process. when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside. I miss mom. gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.
was
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.
gauze
the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew. her insomnia
has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill. her milky eyed
-
husband
revs a tow truck
to death
in a heavy fog. it is possible, humanly
-
possible
-
there’s nothing
to see here. that her god
-
is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s
spirit
-
animal.
image
and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body
leads god
to inquire
godless
godless
balloon
animal
root effects for Miles J. Bell
like he’s laying
yellow
on his road
out of grief
brother
takes a drag
and keeps it
until his head
is underwater
is what they call
with apples.
his eyes
have always been
two poverties
unexplored. he is old, alien’s
heaven
he is old
but not before
he knows it.
the alien wept but was not heard weeping
not all
drones
dream
of you