grandeur

had brought the well outta ground the muscled men and she came upon them when they had split into teams and were rolling it and had not yet become competitive. the hands of her gone infant came back to her to see these men heave back and forth a vanishing. of her many fathers one had said ‘the deep train went even deeper and I could not wake’. he had said it to excuse his one day feat of linking unadorned toilet paper rolls to stretch a rat’s mile. her stomach had yet to go down and she was comforted by such literal remnants as thinking of the last place you had it.

libel

two white boys come outta shack each with a wrist one left one right being ****** at the mouth. their laughing I wouldn’t say manic but still not righted. like certain bible stories seem to tumble outta that book it’s the same with their eyes and ears. their heads each one shrunk so as to be united. I want to say here at least a ****** knows what it’s mocking. I only know one of’em and only as far as this thing being passed and told that he ain’t a foster but he was born in a pan and taken from the offices of the parent company his father got laid from. you think that’s the joke but had I not said white you’d have thought they were anyway. here come two girls grisly with month and I never seen two boys so quick to put down the shack they come from.

prayer

I like it best when my girl is pregnant because I get the sympathies. on her hand, she likes me drunk. at any one time, I can remember seven of our eight kids. this means of course one gets left home but also that not a one gets left grocery. I’d tell you their names but then I’d have to split this saying into parts. but I can tell you seven are boys. now and again they’ll slip on sister’s dress to **** up my math. a good joke I start with is that they take after their mother and if they take after me it’s with sticks. I change the batteries in the alarms for fire and carbon monoxide every two weeks mostly outta fear that I’ll lose them all and have to recount them to some fireman I went to school with. I don’t know if batteries are cheap or not, I don’t know anything about them, but I know I spend a healthy chunk of my portion to have. wife and I are keeping the ninth at bay the ways we know how. she don’t ask me and I don’t her. one kid a week goes with her to church and it’s up to me to remember who in my charge caught a fish the week previous. but I’m not wrong with god; no book is the bible, I believe that. at cemetery by which I am lack whelmed: I wish I had his memory.

nativity

wonder they ever told him grown, that black foster, how he'd been at three years dropped manger while crying for the congregates. straw in everything. back a throat, bottom a shoe. pop said he just about caught himself afire at work, straw sticking out his pocket. pop unable to split work clothes from churched. some wanted to resurrect a fuss about color; don’t go resurrecting a fuss and waved his hand he did that pastor ingénue. heard then I the word negress and after its saying the sayers looked about as if she would appear. this was our town after god and many were still making their own. this answers how the black foster needn’t audition. the gold I brought was soft on my thumbs and the flakes stayed in my nails weeks after. pop could tell for that time what I’d been touching so I’d cover when I could. we were quite a pair in our fooleries what with his straw and my gold. he stopped going on about the blacks and I was able to skip school with your sister the ****** mary. the town was never up for nightmares or for dreaming so I kept your share to myself until now how you seen mary fingered by a man with seven. heard him saying it's okay baby, this one's asleep.

holy ghost!

I will cut myself, Horror Film. will fidget my nethers a last time. maybe make the snow an angel with a third leg. which means I have gone outside. maybe my father will happen by you and put his beers together. but I will be gone. into the woods dragging my feet so some will think it took two to take me. I will whip branches about me and generally scuffle so the some will better convince the left. my poverty will be confirmed by your presence on videocassette. my father will hold you aloft and your tongue will droop above the depths of his hair. my father will claim a vengeance he owes on and the some and the left will follow him over the states of my angel and into the woods. when they find me I will say I had an in body experience; that the two men nearby sleep and it’s what we’re walking in.

haptics

little he knows that in holding them hoppers until they spit and before they go wing he is making hitch the upcome carriage of his *****. his future nudes are backtracking and the gravity of this has been diagnosed as your emphysema. he is your, nothing more, son. he will rub your back and worry his thumbs orphan. oh thumb; toe six. the way you deeply stand arms folded he sometimes thinks you have been replaced by a statue of his mother. it is then he remembers the fence his father built and the collective plank his father carried under his arm. you want life to be good again; your son’s low hand and the pups it could feed.

verbal abuse*

she has brought with her a shoplifted teddy bear. on a good night her age is seventeen. two days ago the voices in her head moved to her mouth. she has seven teeth that remain quiet. she fears so much how this third day will go. she has been told, and she believes, I am only in her mind. but there she is, at the sitting rock where we met, the rock I told her I could see things in. unprepared for her faith, I am unclothed. I am glad she has the bear and glad for my part in her having it.

spiders

we got some kind of plague in our toilets mama.*  that’s my dad calling her mama, my mom. that’s him declaring another plague. week don’t stop until a plague has been pieced together by this man so named Paff Snull on the subscription stubs of any number of unread magazines mom uses to swat dramatically at imaginary flies and wasps and locusts depending on the week. this time though I’m ******* because when dad cracks his knees and ***** himself to fetch mama from silence, I look in the toilet up and it’s true and in the toilet down and it’s more. spiders grey and black and off white. with our low water pressure, spiders having a ball. mom and dad they get tents and tell me twice to get inside mine once it’s on the front lawn. I get told things twice because I was born thick and I haven’t the heart to tell them that after the first saying the saying of it is diminished. I mumble to myself in corners, sure, but it’s the same mumbling. our dog gets a separate tent and I sneak into it when dog allows. seven nights so far outta three weeks I haven’t. mom says it’s because of my acne dog don’t recognize me sometimes. ******* bit the meatsy of my right hand a month ago and my handwriting got so neat I was sent from school for cheating. it’s most of my summer and the house is still spidery. the dog has gone to the river to drink and seems okay with it. mom, dad, and I **** in the backyard in shifts. mom ain’t swatting anything, she doesn’t have to on account of the spiders. when right now I mess up my shift I find myself next to dad and he’s just some guy telling me them glass-full people got the joke on them because the water is contaminated. he’s so happy it makes me think I’m the devil to be grinning so big. long wasn’t the reign of Paff Snull.

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.

from The Women You Take From Your Brother (Aug 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-women-you-take-from-your-brother/hardcover/product-21988530.html



taunts

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.



in the rain

the woman she is holding an umbrella over the man she is yelling at.  the man he is blowing into the bowl he’s made of his hands.  a boy sits at their feet with his back to us and is bringing what we can guess is a toy to his mouth.  you joke he is laboring to light a cigarette.  in the rain.  



locals

the father tells his children how he is not surprised by how much they’ve grown.  they are healthy, after all, and he is not death. the mother wonders how it is common she lose the baby when she is not the last to have it.  my name is silent but no letter in my name is or the letters in my name are not silent but the word they make is.  perhaps her pain is political.  her pain is god’s.  



portals

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on spaghetti, I had two words for ghetto and poverty.  I was able to crush only those beetles slowed by your father’s fleeting shame.  we found so many stones it became impossible to label a single one as oddly shaped.  logic was that if the horse hung itself it would leave a note.  I had my doubts.  

while churched in the sounds of my brothers ******* on poverty, I had two beetles mother looked for.  you were so ghetto my other friends rubbed at me as if I’d come out of my father.  logic was that if a horse hung itself it would leave a note.  

     not here:  the stone that heard my baby’s heart.



wartime

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.



catholicon

into the wood
a man
whose daughter’s
hair
is a ghost
fighting a ghost
for her head.

whose daughter
has not slept.

such cures
the town
talks.

put the sick
every morning
on a different
porch.

use
the same
nail.

if one is awake
**** a crow
or *****
a stop sign.



empty imagery

i.

Adam had no memory of his first wife.  as created, he would look at Eve all day and feel nothing.

ii.

the vacation house was found to be owned by another family.  in it, my mother resisted arrest.      

iii.

my father was born with six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left.  he was not fond of either hand until later in life when the grandchildren asked him at different times during their visits if he had been tortured.

iv.

God created the world because he couldn’t do it on his own.  ah, note to self, *******.  person is place.  I might’ve killed a man had I not been poking holes in a poem by Barton Smock.  

v.

my brother says it’s part of his condition that he can only explain himself from the waist down.  he says he feels horrible in the back of his head and wants me to take a look.  he says I don’t know what darkness is.  before I can play doctor he remembers he has a story he wants me to write.  the outline of the story is off site.  in the opening scene brother recalls that a young man is blowing dust from a human skull made of plastic because it’s all the narrator can afford.
 
vi.

the head itself was an afterthought.  had god not allowed the soul to come up for air, beauty would have been spared our invention.

vii.

a single mother is a twofold mirage.  please argue above her quietly.  her legs collapse.  her child comes first.

viii.

your sister is the only person I’ve recorded to have been born without a gift.  I was told this in confidence by an angel masquerading as a small animal.  the size of which escapes me.

ix.

I am aware a sparrow exists.  not in a spiritual vacuum.  people are another hell.  

x.

excuse my friend his earlier joy in saying who do I have to **** to get ****** around here.  at age 19 a man exploded beside my friend and my friend went quiet.  to his grave thinking his own bomb malfunctioned.

Wasp addendum
More than out of and
Quote the finality, well to avoid...
A sting that churched a brassy man

Wasp substantial
Adding the heed, of couth and comparison
Does a reach for time, understand arousal?
Quiet time searching for youth, that knows the question...

Wasp divine
Kiss and kindred, the tools of solemn tone?
Enchastened with a host, too cursory to be orders vision
We hear the spoil of the wind, become a new loan

Wasp merciful
Craving a thought, to tell a tale kept
By the unity we foresaw, a heard bliss still...
Was a chance meeting with a yearning fate, bereft?

Wasp earthen
Where souls intertwine, the taste of home
Is a careful wish, foreseen in the earning?
Or should might, take the time to intend guidance as done?

Wasp witnesses
The tow of commonness, in the voice of salutations
Memory served, the break of justice in a winds shade
Here to fore, timidity is a challenge, for a truer intuition...

Weird words of working men
Collar wearing ******
Peacemakers clanging swords
Breastplates of hate
I watch us all get churched
On the ways of cruelty

I can’t stop crying
Cause love used to be
So beautiful to me
Two men holding hands
To friends kissing publicly
No shaming

Now there is violence
We break the silence
With days of silence
But it never seems
To stop the screams
And suicides
Children hang out
Flailing lifelessly
The memory haunts me
Even though it is not mine

Pale boy loves a brown boy
Sweet proclamations
Of their affections
Poetic exultations
Holding each other
As their salvation
To be loved is a wonderful thing
To be touched is a mercy

But fire burns to close
To the core of fury
Angry faces hide behind
Masks
We ask
For love
But brutality
Is their response
And now the saltine sorrow
Overflows
The ocean grows
As one more love
Is demolished
And the world becomes
A lot darker

Good, My response
To her passing back
The sand blown
With the eyes of
Aesthetic in mind

Why that word
I thought as it
Vaulted off my tongue
With concepts of
Prison in mind

Sharp it flew
With purpose,
Purpose and poise
Like this time
Was the Million

Her ears shrugged,
Shrugged at the;
Assault of lies
That rested in my
Relative well being

With Life tuned
And voice an eighth
Churched praising the
Inevitably frowned

I pondered intently
The origin of should
And why green dependent
My; Lies of Good.

Before my deoxyribonucleic code has been sent
To my mother by a male parent,
I was on his land of sand,
As barely apparent.


(spermicide)


2. Then, I was finally sent
Into my female parent,
On another land,
Barely planned.


A couple of months went that I spent
In my mother's abdomen rent
On that green land,
Barely planned.


Then, my rentee went to that land,
Flying to the land of crescent
Where I was to be meant
For a big moment.


(embryonic)


5. The event happened, the end of the rent,
Under the flag with the red crescent;
I was by a Jewish name penned,
On the fifth May after Lent.


Falling into my mother's hand,
Still without any dent,
Back, I was re-sent
To motherland.


On that land, red in discontent,
White until the Lent's end,
And green at Lent,
I had one parent.


I had no knowledge when he went,
But I was without a male parent,
With only two women, a grand-
And an abnormal parent.


His furious leaving left an advent
As my mother madwomaned
With a schizophrenic scent,
To madhouse "never" sent.


The balance keeping us under tent
Was our draconian grandparent
With an infinite financial grant
That let us live on that land.


For alms, we walked to granny frequent',
And I loved her as my parent
For that little attachment
I barely experienced.


The further notions I experienced:
I was sent and sent and sent;
Nursed, schooled, churched,
And kindergartened.


But even before my childhood could end,
I found myself hard to befriend;
Playing the play of a dement
With an unmatched brand.


A playful kid, maybe too vehement,
Among others, a crazy element,
I was, but inside silent,
Over-vigilant.


I liked to observe others' comportment;
What was that I have been meant,
What made me outstand
Like an alien, mutant.


Step by step, I wished the end
Of flying dishes and plant'
At my domicile rent,
End of the torment.


(pubescent)


17. I wished to vanish from the torment
Of social-antisocial banishment,
But I saw no escape slant,
Only in my poetic lament.


Though, before those sad lament,
I tried to see my life and mend
My heart with compliment,
Some failed love event.


Minutes, days, months and years went,
A lot of school skills that I learnt,
But the best one in my hand
Was the ability to pretend.


Even if I swam well in crosscurrent,
I wished to end, leave that land;
Searched by my male parent,
I planned to visit his land.


Then, my mother went to madhouse mend,
For what, I was by my university banned
To work that went well, but I meant
To start or end a life in sand.


(twentified)


22. So, as my twenty-first birthday present
Finally, I Africanly citizened
To know my descent
And the crescent.


Beyond the French and Arabic accent,
I manned myself on that land
Where I was landed and
It's not yet ended.


Changing the cross to crescent,
I could be happy and...
But people prevent
Every event.


I'd been married as I planned,
But my fam is an accident
As my birth in an extent,
In this actual land.


What to do, socially I try to pretend
That I am indeed an element,
But my DNA was meant
To disappointment.


(at present)


27. Seen these verses, it's abhorrent
As well as writing a lament,
But as a birthday present,
I wish a Happy - End.

You say you love me
Just not my choice
What I hear is
                     your ignorance
What I hear is
                     I love you,
                                 all of you
                     Except the parts
                                 I do not want to love
                     Except the parts
I refuse to acknowledge because
they do not fit my frame
of reality
        
Do you not see the importance
of this part of me?
I would not choose
         a life of supposed immorality
         contrary to a lifetime
                                             of beliefs
         causing turmoil and
         inflicting pain on
the ones I love
I would not choose
         this confliction of
         body and mind
         residing in a life
         of constant discomfort
And yet
         here I am

I endure the pain
         of you rejecting
                     who I really am
         of judgment cast
                     by churched minds
         of sympathetic looks
                     saying Oh you poor,
                                                         lost soul

You poor, ignorant soul
You are blinded
         by your unblinding truth
Refusing to accept
things that may fall
                                 outside your preconceived box
                                 structured by misinterpreted men
                                 two thousand years ago

You can only see
through the cracks
         of the wooden slats
A view not wide enough                                                                              
to see the disentanglement
sgdexenre
s  d  xer
                     g   en e
of ***
and gender                                                                                   
A view not wide enough
to see that a person
is not determined solely
         by their given body
because bodies are temples
and temples need to be built
Temples need to be whole
         inside and out
Temples need to be refined
         after they are first built
                  Cut out rotting timber
                  Fortify with stronger rock
         and carve on the outside
         a reflection of the beauty
         lying within

Sunshine with a memory
For you, a silent opportunity
In a stranger's smile, the thief of worry
Has a callous sake, a gift to those that seek nativity

A role of simplicity, if not seemly kind
The searching and adoring reach
Of sincerity in churched thought, is a wieldy mind
Of patience for mercy to step forward, and claim each?

Behave yourself, a promise to keep
Has the voice of uncertainty
When if, is to be a heart in the leap
Of such, to verify vanity is much more than a key

Have, and hello...
So fine, adjusted to curious mores
Nary come a well-wishing same, in spare owe
There is always the option, of determining lives worth

Falling asleep, in the sun
A wind of sparer tows, to remember a fate beyond...
Sulking in the needs of another, welfare of whole, come
Has a burden let, been the sake we knew, of a graceful some?

She said,
'these people'
please people, knock her off the pew,
the few who churched me,
showed me,
the way to find humility.

She called those people, 'these people', god alone knows what kind of people would say a thing like that.

Inkling, not a pact
Searching for once upon a time
Visits of the luck of another, a breezier fact
Has come home to roost, with a tear, trying

Birds of common ecstasy, the truth to overwhelm
A soul with provision, the tact a child makes
When pennies come up short, for a rain and hand so little
Known for the scope of anger we display, is this idea, sakes...

Life to love, a churched feeling
Society at large, with a handsomer gesture
Told to limits we few, in the light of sacredness, sometimes reeling
With a torrid sense of what is askew, to astute curiosity's

Life in a hug, that shewed the obvious
Where salt is to excuse the don't before isn't, the tomorrow
Of a collapsing trait of dismay, long before days keep and 'us'
As if a lowly eye had the moments to tell, a challenge is to borrow?

Can't, the powers that be swear a tolling bell to seem to be, pain
Wanting a shadow to remember itself, won't a harrowing rename
Found, the stir of simplicity in a callous sake, welling to begin plain
The total of pride in a secluded secret of virginity's live, and let fame...

The littlest reply to an age old question...
Said for a capable mind, rest and recuperation with a friend
Is ours to typify, a stare of heed and perplexment, at a kissing
Bandit, that stole your heart for your today of vice's, again...

Halt, and see the excuse
Have of a well worn jacket
To accept the day, with these we lose
The notion of use, that came from baring heat's limits

Need in pockets, with a clamor for youth
Thread and exposition's lint
For the same side of a house of yearning, a look aloof
To the sedition of a smile, you have yet to land, or meant

Quiet weather we are having today
The tale of succor and brief exception, to still a friendlier
Season than what we are accustomed to, a habit to say
With elan, you can become the best of save, and a host trendier

Speed has your eye, the count of purpose and hello
The truth to be gleaned in a sweetened tooth, the brace
For acceptation, focused eyes on the moment od though
Will a pretty eye save thee, when lurid many, make space

Coming from now, the thought to seed nowhere with a key
Paces and distant could, the problems of promises that would
Is a blaze of silence or the dote of amenity, the fashion we seek
When presumed innocence has a fruitive plane to discuss with the world?

See the excuse, see the avarice in a rolling breeze
Wishes in hand made futures, the pout of panic to climb the known
And find the kindred of spare and special, become a churched heathen
Told to expect the will's of all, the price of poise is a mind blown with seem to own