"chapbook" poems
The slam poet in cords, in denim,
rambles from neon beer haven
to flybuzz brothel, cracking quiet
jokes about soup to shiny junebugs
in the relentless moonlight.
One hundred dollars in thirty-five bills
slowly retreat from wallet
toward water-cut whiskey.
He’s got a chapbook widely
available at frozen yogurt shops
across the metro; he’s got a
tour in the works, tri-county,
every middle school from
Shawnee to Seminole; he’s
got a collection of ex-girlfriends,
made up almost entirely of wizened lesbians;
he’s got an MFA from UNC Wilmington,
and he shouts this more than speaks this
from his treacherous barstool to the sleepy bartender.
One of the girls, she takes him upstairs,
and to her he says, Your freckles—islands
in the sea of your milk-white skin.
The night passes, warehouses are razed,
and he watches the loft apartments emerge.
The food trucks come. He parks beside them,
typing poems made to order out of his trunk. The
money flows in, crumpled and sweaty and
in one-dollar denominations. The Old Fashions
transfigure into Old English. And in his pocket
thesaurus he looks for a word. It’s not vagrant,
nor vagabond. It’s not homeless, nor wayward.
He lies in the long shadow of a Midwestern sunset,
starved and shaking. Up from the blackened
city shrubs comes an indifferent breeze and
just as he thinks the word Pauper, he dies one
on the corner of 23rd and Western.
Apr 15, 2015
Apr 15, 2015 at 4:14 PM UTC
She came down from Mt. Rainier
wearing khaki park ranger's garb,
a female Moses descending Sinai,
clutching a leather chapbook,
survival notes for a “Dangerous Life”.
Nightingales were songbirds for the grief,
as MS stole in like 'Frisco fog,
unnoticed by a comet-blinded public.
And when the awards came,
strokes of jackpot luck,
acquired enthusiasms soon were
dropped in excruciating back spasms.
She touted poetry as civic-glue,
paste for a populist purpose.
Olympia’s oracle rarely leaves the house,
curtains drawn, newspapers unread,
writing feverishly, as “The Body Mutinies”.
Feb 26, 2012
Feb 26, 2012 at 10:10 PM UTC
BUTTERFLY
A dangerous thing.
Inspirations' fragile wings.
Metamorphoses.
BARRIER REEF
Great walls dividing.
Vast cold deeps from Summer seas.
"Hail Metropolis!"
LOTUS FLOWER
Morning--Star-burst--bloom.
Floral crown on tranquil lake.
She walks on water.
SEAHORSE
Pregnant father sways
Rocking chair to Oceans' gait.
Champions patience's race.
BOMBYX MORI
White Mulberry leaves,
Veins of Univoltine wine.
Silk, worm's waste of time.
ORCHID
Soft petals open.
Easy like wild poetry.
Medicinal muse.
LAVENDER
How like a feather
Dancing meadows' Royal hue.
Perfumes the twilight.
OWL (Query)
"Who?" Rather than tweet
In the dark keenly can see
All her nameless prey.
DEATH VALLEY
Akimbo cacti
Off the scenic highway road
Flail in Hell's hot suns.
TSUNAMI
Deaths' devastation.
Chaos drowns all the petty
Wars and last concerns.
COMMUNING
These very mornings
I awe as the blue ocean drinks
The sky bleeding gold.
DINOSAUR
All you have are bones.
Our flesh once Giants : lies, dust.
My feelings extinct.
SUNFLOWER
A golden pinwheel.
Tall and proud, the face of day,
Burns bright love's bounty.
POPPY
Her rouge a deep dark
pharmaceutical Red to
kiss your pain away.
THE SWALLOW
Rain's graceful feathers.
The Spring's swift wisps' arriving
Two Tailed Brothers' Breeze.
ROSE
No other fragrance
But from her kiss--sublime songs
True Love's red flower.
AGUA
Siempre Vivir
Go quench your thirst and your soul,
'Cuz Life drinks for free.
IN SPRING
Orange breasted plume.
A Robin bird trills and swirls.
Seasoning her nest.
ASPHODEL SNOW
Gossamer winter.
The fractal window panes sigh
white breath of flowers.
LIGHT-YEARS
Space is Time is Light
it's speed can measure eons'
infinite distance.
Dec 4, 2016
Dec 4, 2016 at 7:11 PM UTC
ROAD
Where choices begin;
Some are quick to find its end.
Wise keep journeying.
CARPOOLING
The heavy traffic
An ocean's slow ebbing tide
Our patience drowns in.
METEOR SHOWER
Friday night space-lights
As we caress the hours
Streaks across the sky.
STAINED GLASS
Broken pieces shapes
The Cathedral of one's soul.
Stained light still shines true.
TAI CHI
Dawn's ceremony
Wet grass tickling bare feet.
Wave away the night.
FRACKING
Jonesy punctures black
Points in caves, Great Mother weeps
Wells of poison rain.
NIJINSKY
So divine his grace
Words not made to embody
Ballet when God speaks.
MY WINTER GIFT
Skin so Downey white,
Like a cold glass of fresh milk.
Unwrapping Christmas.
FRENCH KISS
Such buttery lips
Silken creams, wrapping our tongues.
Sweet patisserie.
VATTO
Gang signs, ink, and blood.
****** in a low Beamer.
Cool kissing his gun.
ROSARIES
Madre genuflects
In brown countries of her hands
Old beads, sweat, and faith.
DRIVE THRU WEDDING
Romance thru sunroofs
Hallelujah honeymoons
Marriage number two.
HOT TIN ROOFS
A light Summer breeze
Cools cacophonous bodies
like hot stars at night.
NOSTRADAMUS
Doomsday Soothsayer.
His visions doth entertain
Medieval profits.
CHINA
Man's golden lotus.
A wealth of divine knowledge.
Heavenly on Earth.
FIREWORKS
Our toast to Heaven.
Chrysanthemums igniting
The night's colbalt sky.
ORIGAMI
The creases of us
Tales of dragons and white ships.
Neatly folded sheets.
BON VOYAGE
Like wide sails that cup
The high winds of this marriage,
I'm at love's mercy...
OSMOSIS
Blossoms in spring time.
Bursts of Japanese kisses.
How to love haiku.
HOMONCULUS
Ultrasound preform
Whose quickened heart is my own:
A mandragora.
12 STEPS
Most Alcoholics
Who drown in their own thirst know
How deep "empty" hurts.
Dec 4, 2016
Dec 4, 2016 at 7:22 PM UTC
There's a unique "Island of Lost
Poems" somewhere in Texas, tucked
away in a corner of an office,
actually on a desk in a poetry
editor's home. They are there: the
casualties...a handful of poems,
a small avalanche of chapbook
contest entries, submissions of
varying lengths from haiku to epic.
They got lost, separated from
their envelopes, no SASEs to
identify them, no names or
addresses on them. They rest
stranded in a topsy-turvy pile,
unread, untraceable, unclaimed.
In a day or two, they will be
tossed in a blue and white
recycling basket, and then
ultimately transported to a
shredder.
A question remains about these
exiled anonymous works as they
languish on the "island."
Who sired them?
One might wonder if there could be
a poem by the next e.e. cummings
or Bukowski or Nikki Giovanni
somewhere in that nameless
shapeless hill of hope, perhaps
a work of passion and politics -
a masterpiece penned in outrage
and alienation, a brave new "HOWL"
just waiting to become the first great
poetic anthem of the twenty-first century.
Jul 10, 2015
Jul 10, 2015 at 1:36 PM UTC
Apr 28
Hi all !
Having a great time here in post-modern poetry.
We’ve been on the island since Sylvia Plath croaked in ’63.
It’s been a bit smoggy, incoherent and gratuitously cryptic, but the prison-guards are super-nice and they let us write Haiku once in a while. There’s this MFA creative-writing place just up the road from the gulag, it’s really charming. They publish a chapbook that 4 people on the island read. They also host workshops, like How to Find Your Authentic Voice and Pushing Language Beyond the Boundaries. Last night we saw some non-identity-politics-driven verse in the nearby wilderness reserve. It had beautiful plumage and made totally weird sounds. (Hey Dylan, you’re remembering to feed my muse, right? Don’t let her out after 5 since she might stay out all night. She does NOT like the free-verse abstract work. Feed her the structured message-oriented stuff to the right of the editorial literary-elite. Thanks ☺ ) Anyway, we’re trapped on this island so if you find someway to get us off, do your best.
PLEEZ tell the editorial prison-guards that we are working on our English Lit MA degrees.
P.S: send the Maya Angelou and Adrienne Rich books soon !!!!!
Love,
Rita Dove’s Bookshelf*
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 8:48 AM UTC
my first non self-published work is available at **** Press...I can't post a link here, so you'll have to search it. (a chapbook titled Infant Cinema)
am asking that you help it do some work for the press. it's six dollars.
some reviews:
Barton Smock’s newest book is filled with enigmatic poetry honed to the barest minimum of language, without a scintilla of excess. In one poem and elsewhere, Smock states that he “does not want to be seen as a person,” and the scant information he has shared in various publications and the rare interview certainly reveals little but that he is a father, husband, likes movies, and writes daily. Yet in infant * cinema, poems that first appear as fragmentary and surreal dreams, prayers, visions, or confessions still evoke a completeness that lacks nothing, wants nothing. Smock reveals a world filled with grief, death, suicides, disabling conditions, and a family’s complex relationships across generations. While the poems mention “lonesome objects,” “melancholy,” “numbness,” and “collected sorrows,” Smock’s masterfully minimalist poetry leaves the reader intoxicated by a rush of original details and bleakly exquisite imagery.
~Donna Snyder, author of Poemas ante el Catafalco: Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu Press) and I Am South (Virgogray Press)
Infant Cinema can only come from the mind of one writer, Barton Smock. I’ve been following his work for 10 years, and the only thing I’ve come to expect for certain is that I will be transported to a world thick with an atmosphere of vivid imagery, and seemingly juxtaposed and ironic concepts. Infant Cinema is prose that has all those elements, and reads with heightened poetic force.
~Joseph Jengehino, author of Ghost of the Animal (Birds and Bones Press)
Apr 16, 2016
Apr 16, 2016 at 1:34 AM UTC
20% off all print books on Lulu through the 18th with coupon code of LULU20
also, I have three remaining signed copies of my chapbook [infant*cinema], published by **** Press- will send for free to anyone interested in writing a review- make request to [email protected]
~
some poems, recent and from available collections:
[asker]
I’d put something
in my mouth
and my nose
would bleed
and mom
would press
my ribs
and know
like that
the name
of the boy
buried
a horseshoe
-
return is a drug
hunger
a choice
-
and the lord said one of these animals is a writing machine
and the lord
he turned
the woman’s
shadow
into a garbage
bag
and the man’s
into water
-
sister dragged onto some dance floor
a scarecrow
-
pregnant / is what you get
if memory
remembers
to eat
~
[plain sight]
a hearse emerging from the shadow of a school bus
/ a mother
trying
to return
a baptized
mannequin
/ that poorly
lit
bait shop
star
~
[example]
after leaving its memory to the hibernating bear, the insect died. I don’t know what story you’re trying to tell. the angel has three fathers. the angel was born to blackmail a ghost. this bald ************ thinks I need shown how to chew my fingernails. the mask is my elevator and the pig my coffin. I have a sister was made to make an egg disappear. a father who’d shave to give the thing in the stomach time to plan its escape. the angel vomits into a pink wheelbarrow. shows affection.
~
[residua]
the hymn
in all its
cephalic
worry
has me thinking
bathrobe
while saying
statue / why
always
this dream
I join
others
to find
a small
body / death
had a spoiled
child
~
[distant]
the child you won’t have because the child hates surprises. the story, your mother’s, of the pillow that struggled like an owl. the werewolf, humble, and afraid of clowns. the ramblings of a newborn. the twin boys of Cain.
Jul 15, 2016
Jul 15, 2016 at 11:25 AM UTC
first you
must imagine
a shiny poem
new born
printed
like moses between
two-pages
of bulrushes.
Somewhere in a chapbook,
peruse the scattered leaves
in some independent book seller.
Where they treated their books like
prospero’s books at the end of The Tempest.
You will find –
only the young
buy from amazon
the old
long addicted
to poetry’s
chimera-hallucinogenic-elements
of ink and paper
must touch the chapbook;
Run down the isles
with their finds
careful not to make the gaze
of all the unread
poetry books.
How dreadful
the unspoken wail of unread poetry
they snort like chained dragons
speaking fiery sonnets.
If you should go that route
be careful never gaze directly
into their burning orbs
of controlling metaphors.
Then the poet
in you will turn to stone
like the gaze of basilisk.
Claim you treason-treasure
wrap it in your burlap bag
and juggle it home
not stopping
at a kansas city fountain
to eat a couple pages--
how crisp is the book
in your messager bag.
for poetry is
a fix for lotus-eaters
that graze between the stanzas
and when you get home
you climb
into your bed
and take that mysterious chapbook
and hold it
tenderly as the moon arises
in the window
of your apartment
and read deep
as all your candles
recede toward their bases
descending
as the flickering of flame
and wax
begin to pool on candle stands.
still you read
as metaphors kiss you
like boundless winds
for the poem unfolds
before you all
its tropes
sing-like sparrows
and then its images
build new stairs
in your inward mind
as lines proceed
up the sky-stained sky of infinity…
..and still the words speak
and you must obey
and follow
until
the last page turns
and luminous ink letters
emerge
from all your
pores.
Jul 16, 2018
Jul 16, 2018 at 1:45 PM UTC
two poets,
came together,
after, much word love,
they had a vocabulary.
bought a tortoiseshell
thesuarus...and a golden pen
then, lived,
in a self written chapbook..
deliriously happy.
forever, amen
Jun 12, 2014
Jun 12, 2014 at 11:49 PM UTC
Untitled 2
by Unknown 2
created from cut up poems at the Jigsaw chapbook debut event (May 27, 2017)
Not being able to fit in and be normal, I fought back and choose to accentuate my differences instead. To take away the sting of the humiliation of being different, I choose to beat my recriminators to the punch. Over the years this freakish, differing defense became the mask, the performance. I perform the freak now to fit in. But this is not an insincere masquerade, but rather one of the many costumes I wear, a reflection of slivers of me. I protect the darkest parts of me by shielding it in light. Trying on different identities
So much so, you’d never suspect I am hiding something. The best place to hide is in the open, where no one would think to look.
As he reached into her robe
She giggled, and handed him his lunch.
“Go to work,” she said.
She sits behind me squawking with an adolescent banter that must seem dire
Her intensity of voice speaks the same thing I had secretly wished for years, but been too afraid to say
“Please pay attention to me.”
Speak, I did, for the very first time
This awkward message of youthful adoration is not exactly communicated articulately
Her only response is, “God, I hate you. Please shut up.”
If I am already taking risks with my life, then I will not be silenced
For once, I will not back down
“You love me. You just don’t know it yet.”
Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney
Jun 2, 2017
Jun 2, 2017 at 9:35 AM UTC
Untitled 1
by Unknown 1
created from cut up poems at the Jigsaw chapbook debut event (May 27, 2017)
Why did she do this to me?
Why the **** am I always left alone?
Why am I always so ******* cold?
I have to get out of here
You’ll just have to pull harder
I have raged, cried, smiled, trembled, and laughed.
And you are as pathetic as you are courageous
Scarred, but whole.
I am alive
I’m you
Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney
Jun 2, 2017
Jun 2, 2017 at 9:29 AM UTC
1. ****** Heels.
2. **** Haiku
3. Icarus Kush
4. Spiritwalk
5. Seahorse Haiku
6. Stained Glass Haiku
7. Etc Etc
Sep 24, 2021
Sep 24, 2021 at 7:55 AM UTC
30% off all print books on Lulu today with coupon code of LULU30
my newest thing is called ‘four’- it is not a whole creature but a combination of my last four publications. clever title. I am sorry it’s 12.00- I am always sorry. it is available on Lulu, along with others.
and, some poems, from:
~
(---)
a palm reader
with mouths
to feed
does
my mother’s
nails. I overhear
I love
babies
but god
they live
so long.
-
my brothers will tell you
I avoid
capitalization
eating
in front of others
threesomes
-
who was it
asked
-
from whose memory were you erased?
~
[warm body]
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
~
[fathers]
to see a stone
as ruin’s
pursuit
of aftermath
one must share
this dream
of arriving
on earth
to pray
~
[prose]
god was created to remember everything. so says the rock to the tooth starting small.
-
there is a gallery of unfinished work and a space for the baby to crawl through.
-
her feet stick out of the mirror she’s been using to give birth.
-
lost: frostbite. lost: space suit.
will work
for feeding
tube.
-
holy asthma
holy
crossbones
-
old hat
this human
head.
~
[black sites]
we indeed
are deaf
from going
****
the floor is writing on the earth
it is better
than having
roaches
childbirth
comes to
in a bat
dying
in a pillowcase
for what
the weeping
flightplan
of a drunk
stork…
what tree cannot reach
mother scratches
with a broom
~
[cries]
we are
each one of us
the smallest
person
on earth
one is never too old
for god, never
too old
to surveil
the deaf
/ I know from your palm
what your hand
will drop, mother
cooks only
meat, father
is every
nightmare
she has
of her exodus
from apologue
/ having populated
the myth
of ******
the baby is empty
~
(also, in the non self-published realm of credence, **** Press published in April 2016 my chapbook [infant*cinema], which is available on the **** Press site)
Jun 23, 2016
Jun 23, 2016 at 12:28 PM UTC
Ha, I neglected (despite my intentions when I began writing this) to spell out why exactly I ever took up my pen/cil to write.
(sonnet #MMMMMMMCMXIV)
He asked if I've a book out (cuz tis sense),
And when I said "no," like in sheer betrayl
I did not care much, he knew that detail
Was not much to me, eh? And thinking hence,
O wherefore did I ever write? Why thence
Work over-time to fund a book t'avail
Ha! not the world cuz they don't care, in pale
Scuse--vanity? when glory is pretense?
He's got a chapbook published is't? In poor
Scuse I've a pile of mouldered dreams all do
But mock. Yes, marriage and a book in tour
Of MY work; stanzas in the thousands too,
Done up to suit my taste--none'd buy as twere
'Cept one or two friends. Laugh at me, will you?
26Apr19d
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019 at 5:25 PM UTC