I discovered a new part of me.
A part that loved mornings
and that found beauty in my surroundings.
A part that enjoyed watching sunsets
and romanticizing a simple stroll through the park.
A part that believed in positivity
and finding the good in everyone.

But that part of me is no longer here.
It disappeared around the same time you did.  
All I could think of is getting you back,
of getting that part of me back from you,
so I could be complete again.
Until I realized you did not take that part with you,
you did not take anything.
That part of me was hidden,
because you taught me how to love everything,
but myself.

Four years later and I realize
I have nothing to thank you for.
I found myself with you, and found myself again without you.
In the end, you made no difference.
You were not and never will be essential to my life,
for I do not only love mornings and my surroundings anymore,
I now love **myself

she is much less than necessary

laying in the dark, she is
replaying dreams and conversations
she remembers from 2008,
each clueing her in on why
this cycle began in the first place

she is much less than a necessity

and every once in a while,
when she becomes suddenly
and urgently in demand,
she is there
and she is his

but she is much less than crucial

the cycle she is living in
is made up of worrying
and waiting and tapping
her foot and holding
her breath
and then--
she is relieved for a moment,
maybe two, because for that
short amount of time,
she is indispensible--
and then suddenly she is
worrying, waiting,
scratching at her knuckles
and running out of air

she is much less than necessary
she is much less than important

Be wary of the
paradoxical, neglected sentience among the departed minds
Seek the route which makes accessible...an absolute truth
oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus
The composition of life
The creation of awareness, drifting from your nature
live irresponsibly, expose the fear to danger
it will devour the inessential anxiousness
and set yourself free
release from obligation,
release from routine duties
the masquerade of conditioning
no longer possessing you
bare spirit,
confront yourself
See the illusion, its deception
of your perception
remove the veil and feel
intensified anguish of the acknowledgment
of authorities dominance
to invent and forge manufactured minds
to divide us, impregnate the beauty
with depraved psychosis
then label it with sanity
taint them with vanity
to take the present moment
as an opportunity to breathe
here and now, everlasting liberation
reality, what is sincere?
What is truth?
It’s an option you determine
sight, holy sight
creating this world, this dread
this opportunity to break loose
undress and **** the reality in camouflage
reborn through a perceptual experience
the wilderness is within
the blinking 4th dimension
will soon carry us away
to an enigmatic change in sensory perception
the ego, self importance, it will pass away
is there a choice, a selection of setting?
When you zoom out of earth
examine closely the size of this
universe, we are microscopic babies
from the womb of infinite mystery

And the emptiness now
lets the memory howl
and bang its head
off the sheer walls of never—

Engulfed in consequence as it rolls in
fog or smoke?
In any case—

lonely

looks like this--
numb and cool and slow-moving
grayish-white fingers
reaching for molecules of air
while the reign of suffering comes like fine drizzle
over
springtime over....

Desire perishing in a crisis of will
In the thickets of panic—
bronchial spasms expand seconds
at an open window
Choking, congestive, failure of heart!
in the face of what it means to be...
not being

...as I came into this world
breach and not breathing
to my mother’s horror!
Alone
Scrapping, gasping, grappling for breath

I love life
I LOVE--   life!

Love—
inexpressible, inessential fool of a child

Love ripped apart at the v

close proximity word-compounds are sometimes the hardest to invert onto themselves, to craft a chiral pivot, notably due to the suffix-blindspot of the non-differentiated prefix antonym, even more so, when guarded by close proximity of words such as hubris / hiatus - esp. when was begins one's logical approach, inducing a misnomer tangle - due to the overtly laden verbum similis; and these little schematic squares of extremely confrontational, but also the more so extremely cohabitable ref. points, will always be harder to master, than say: a rigid rhyme schematic of a sonnet.

all this current talk of protecting free speech,
cf. with the writing i'll cite -
well, so much for a freedom that can
invite both the sophist and babbling of
slanging slurs -
      all in all, in defence of the "freedom" of
speech, is just as well, a: freedom for
idle talk - and if not idle talk, then simply
politicised intrigue, that once gained
the ears of salon ladies at liberty to an alt.
to ****** arousal.

and how did this come about?
   oh... well, what people talk about now,
is what people thought about in the 1920s
and the 1930s...
                  
as heidegger points out, regarding a herr
oswald spengler - der untergang das abendlandes
(1918 - 1922 vol. 1 & vol. 2 respectively):
the famous suggestion of a *decline of the west:
paragraph opening -
          why is herr spengler in noting
a decline? not because of the heroic optimists
being correct with regards to this apparent
decline - modernity as the unfathomable
stretch toward a status quo eternity -
and with darwinism, the theory of relativity,
the big bang, quantum physics -
there's about as much worth of a question-worthiness
these days, as there is a needle's worth
in a haystack of airy tumbleweed answer-unworthiness...
these former optimists of the decline
   have turned into ardent pessimists of
there even being a decline -
      
the oeuvre of psychology did the most damage
in the end -
   still mingling with an archaic sophistry of
astrology, tarot and the voting ballot -
       no shred of a doubt that we live in a one
way street of: answers & denials only, please,
questions & doubts, ooh noo noo noo!
         we do not live worthy of a question -
since by question we mean: ridicule being
the only appropriate answer deserved by
asking a question.
              
    it came with the change of hiatus between
   the two factions -
   once the optimists took to hubris -
                   the pessimists take to hiatus -
if we called them heroic optimists -
we now call them optimists in hubris -
  once we called them lunatic pessimists
and ultra-religious leash bearers -
     now we call them: young people who
forgot to take chances, risks, and thrills...
  cushion padded wet charcoals that
have as much potential to burn as -
                               a dolphin getting dry.

and aphorism 105 (VI) does just that,
   100 years ago by my circa approach -
'the west will not go down, primarily because
it is too weak for that, not because
it is still strong.'
  which is why i ask: is free speech anything
to defend these days, when free thought
echoes so many years later,
  and what is now considered "free" speech
is merely idle superstition regarding
a "revival", the last supposed push?

there's absolutely no honour in kicking
a maned dog,
                    and in that act: of kicking
a maned dog, or giving a bowlful of bones
for a toothless dog to nibble on
is just as well... might as well spoon out
the marrow and give the old hag of the west
a pâté to slurp...
        yes, orthographically speaking:
very pedantic of the french to bend the macron
into a circumflex -
sure, ain't pretty, but i can assure you:
i'll be technical;

what the west can be thankful of is that it's
the first culture in decline,
   and once a culture is in decline,
among so many others, the others follow suite -
like a spread of cancer,
or any other plague -
     it probably begins by the european
decadence in not respecting antibiotics -
  infesting themselves with superbugs -
or thereby managing to craft some sort of
immunity to them...
  and they say that ****** if baah baah baad...
big pharma never kills, does it?!

i'm still confused on a close proximity akin
to thesaurus logic of synonyms -
i.e. decline of the west = heroic optimists of the decline
        (it must surely happen!)
or is: decline of the west = pessimists on hiatus?
                  i.e. it will never happen!

ah! that's what it was: i was thinking of hiatus
but wrote hubris instead... d'uh dum dum...

  i.e. the roles have changed -
now the pessimists are engaged in hubris -
                      while the optimists are on a hiatus:
the whole - i told you so...
             the whole i told you so since the 1920s
is irrelevant these days,
   given the great america never again ended
at the beginning of the 21st century...
                    the monologue from the grand ***
degraded from the grand satan is hot puff and
cinnamon smoke...
          
       once more: what is relevant about what's
being said these days? as much as was a passing
observation in the 1920s?
          i hardly think so...
   the so-called freedom that only gravitates
to idle-chit-chat and poseur antics of bravado?

given that not much is questioned,
   and whatever is questioned has lost its allure
to be fresh, to be alarming,
   all the questions asked are plagiarisms,
a dead-end, in imagery: a library with only
one book in it (i mean, a library brimful with
books, but all these books are the same book);
which makes these times so
answer-unworthy - is that they come so
easily, and are usually borrowed from
the same anglophonic sets of ideas,
regurgitated chick food from the peckers of
their parental guardians.
            
         well, if you live in times when people
have that idiotic audacity to ask a question
like: what's the meaning of life,
  why are we here, how did we form, etc.:
   all these inessential "essence" questions -
          and about as many historicals gaps
of memory lapse as a drinking session with
oliver reed in between...
               the only question goes something
like this:
   and ? found myself walking around the house,
walking by a mirror, ? peered in,
   and without a narcissus to mind
to slowly build a curiosity that would turn
into self-love, ? exclaimed: !,
   after which ? steadied by pace of questioning
adding the much needed: ?!
                      
what's as good a questioning dynamic / schematic as
you're going to get, these days.

There's something I desire like
Dripped honey on strawberrys
It's scent delicate and ravishing

We are the universal harmony
Through which human warmth
Survives hidden from cosmic wind

Celestial incantations float airily
Beyond everything inessential
Being joyful of the incidential

And we should treasure each sip
Thoughts running in time like grass
Reflecting lifes own  peace endlessly

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

I have mere recollections of
******* cocktails being served
Under the starless sky
Because the stars allure the poets
And the poets mistake them for shooting stars

Another thing I'm reminded of is
Envelopes with pink and gold glitter dust
It's better to keep them untouched
Because touching them means food for thought
And food for thought is mistaken for inessential complexity

The last thing that comes to my mind
are the old chandliers in the hallway
And it's better to not look up while walking
Because blinding light would result in a catastrophe
And a catastrophe would restrict my recollections to these few elements

Oh, i hate so much the noise,
the slamming of doors and
the cracking of bones.
The disturbance of air
caused by inessential cries,
disdainful sighs,
treachereous lies.
The purpose of many
are useless talks,
which poison thoughtful minds.
Only scratches of scribbles,
forging silence of words,
which sound so much tenderly clear,
than insipid shouts
are dear to my ears
    and eyes.
Couplets and couplets -
    my lifesaving droplets,
      that heal me of noisy venom.

August 11th

How am I so smart to endure my head's turns or locks inside a box.

With some worth forgetting.

My erecting
inessential to come, we've all waited.

The diet of cowards.

The invisible exercises in...

New Guinea
New York
Japan
France

Gaining

Exonerated

Senators.
Wives.
Daughters.


Over years or weeks.

A lot to hold in. I'm here.
A lot to hold on to.


A pint.
Three.

Jigger.


Fly into roses, Broken Wing Heartache.


Later on...


It is only one small amount of sweat.
A pool filling and shifting with each of my breast's breaths.

Now maybe I can tell myself why I care.

It is you.
A leg paler.
A chipped smile.
A new thing with nothing shamed.

Time for a movie.

A bright future.
Fuzzy dream.

Picture you and I waking.
Picture the naked light.

Witness your hollows.
Amount short.

Void transaction.

Pay once.

Enter the transaction void.



Two beers and one or just one shot of one fifty one later...


Do the days go by and call your name?


No they don't register a mood.

A look see.
A look see reveals all of these new found memories.

But our memory is low and hazy.


Baby.
Oh beautiful showmanship, tell me...

Of love.
Of youth.
Of my eyes.
My hair.

My unbroken bones.

My perfect *****.

My golden hair.

My tan.

My ability to hold and stay

not too warm or dry

not too cold or wet.


Your tomb.
Undisturbed.

And now I wait.

For you to warm.

Oh it is you.

Only you.


I will recite also.

In regrets of my open heart.

Strange that father holds his chest in staples later than I.


I spoke of you.

To blood ancient and blood to see.


You know.
Or you don't.


I.
Here in new clothes.


Waiting beside the museum.
Under the cold window.


For you to interfere.

As close as I am.


And then you apperceive.

Love.


You appear love.

People are flies today.
They swarm and buzz
and get in my mouth and nose.
They're like cigarettes
or biscuits -
Hard to quit -
inessential -
I have to try it.

People are everywhere.
Get out of my hair.
I retreat to my private lair,
not a care in the world
but loneliness.

People are like a cheese board.
They make me dream,
something else about biscuits
and go well with a few glasses of red wine.

So many cheeses to choose from
and not one of them is mine.

Its true, a poet is a spiteful man
with inessential worries,
who gambles words,
to clutter minds with fabricated stories.
His job is simple, so banal -
to cheat imagination,
to design and conjure phrases,
that are prone to alteration.
His words are quite speedy,
born at the edge of ideas,
where feelings fall onto abyss
and walk on the boundaries of what's real, chased by dimming hopes and fears.

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.

Time shifts and flips beneath your feet.
The world revovles at a high speed.
Men are in constant fidgeting,
knowing not, what they need.
It is a job of a broken man,
sitting puzzled at the bank of a dried up river, hoping for a good catch,
to speculate on chances *******,
friends lost,
money spent,
feelings trashed,
and values tossed.
I "love" this time, of followers,
sheep-minded folks, desperate for a shepherd, just as Israelis of ancient begged for a king, because every nation had one.
I have to admit, that man is a puppet after all,
of other men or other idols,
of his own image or his own soul.
It is wise to stop the first urge.
It is wise to deny the first impression.
It is ok to stay at bay, while others swim.
It is ok to stay alone, when others dance.
So, uncool is cool!
Do you get this, fool?
Cause you have no time to mull over what you do.
Rip off the veils,
throw out your amulets,
admit you are weak and mortal.
This is your chance to get near God,
to become the master of your own thoughts.
What for, this pomp?
Of faceless mob,
which very soon
will go to slump.
Its inessential outcry
and denial of truth
seems childish goof
with no real proof.
Wait till its plans get destroyed by death.
So, is it wise to get excited?
Is it prudent to get depressed?
Neither way will bring you good.
Neither path will lift your stress.
Wait for incoming blessing
and if its about to befall,
we'll find out the turn of fate.
Does a little misfortune break
your stance? Does your world stand
on crippled legs?
Beware where to put your faith,
it might have shifty floor or ugly face.
Dont trust beauty, it's always camouflaged. You'll pay a fortune for a broken egg.
Imagine when pretty face gets spoiled by a spot of dirt on a tip of nose. It will change whole plot. Heroes will die and villains emerge.
Someone will sit at the bank of a dried up river,
pondering over a lost chance,
hoping for a good catch.
If you do something, do it for its own sake. For the artistry of moves, complexity of thoughts, delicacy of forms and deepness of meaning.
If you'd had something common with holy, you could have  been enlightened
to see that nothing is as it seems.
You could have heard God soothing
to your ears. You could have pillaged your ship built on ancient lies and would have drowned to the deepest bottoms. You would have wanted to be in a free fall, have nothing to stick to, nothing to hold to, no one to rely on. Then you would have relized that freedom is in falling, freedom is in drowning. You might splash the colors and spit the words and call it a self-expression. But you are only a subconsciousness of a sleeping oppression. You can be a fool, but still talk wise. You can be an ugly, but still look nice. Do you have something for yourself to suprise. Before audience gets bored, ready to rise. Unleashing craze with devilish eyes.
Everyone today is  an entertainer.

Be at ease,
Bend with the breeze.
The tall fall
Bigger chances higher
Target clearer
Unlearn core
Hacking the inessential
Meandering Mess

Shortest distance
common sense
Between points
A straight line