from self-published collection / Misreckon / Dec 2014

from self-published collection Misreckon (Dec 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html

-finds-

electric chair
for a discontinued
mermaid.

heaven, as captured
in the near
death
experience

of your
decoy.

by a grief counselor
turned
author

pop-up
books
on penile
implants. a pair of gloves

for god’s
hand.

ultrasound
of a hermit’s
mother.

Nagasaki.

-the clock-

the woman wore goggles and held a fork.

I was pushed
up a hill
in a stroller
by a lover
of snow.

in her books of bookish loss
her knees

are a nightmare
had
by the fork.

her man
shovels
his madhouse
meal.

-banshee-

the baby’s appetite for its birth is jaw-dropping. in store for god, we have nothing in the house.

-advanced-

she drinks to the image I have of myself as a naked man on roller skates who continues to have the fistfight he’s late for. she drinks to toast the pain she says she stole from a pregnant unicorn during a longer than usual drought of immersion. people keep us together because they are bored. when sober, she returns to them the delirious boy who on his bedsore back carried a pair of skis throughout the only entire summer of his youth. from her father’s memory she eats for the both of us without touching her food because her mother was the bulimic god could taste.

-losses-

when brushing them, she asks god
for help
her teeth
are puking.

later, when caught
smoking,
she says
she can’t
keep
from wanting
the cigarettes
to be
shy.

because of who she isn’t
I’ve had to baptize
many
dolls.

-system-

as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.

-dosage-

due to
a propensity
in each
to apply
face paint
while disoriented

my father
routinely
changes barbers.

because I believe
in the apocalypse
I swallow cologne
to silence
my blood.

it should be harder
to be happy.

I give you my sister

who has tried to flush
her prosthetic
nose.