(themes)

(themes, all from July 2015 publication ‘eating the animal back to life’)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

themes for counterpart

my dog dies
and I take
its place.

because he could be anyone
I use my dad
to get laid.

christ had two sons
his daughter
ate.

themes for arrowhead

if the damn thing is a boy, let it have a knot in its stomach. if it’s not one twin, it’s another. if a girl, find a woman who’s been to nothing and back.

bring me a fat tick from the dog of baptism. owl from the hair of god.

themes for abandon

the father is a one-man show
of seasonal darkness.

the mother is clockwork.

the child is the child born
wearing
a tight
shirt.

the loaf of bread is the hot heart of nightfall.

the cut is a city
attracted
to a blood drive. the blood drive

is god’s treehouse.

themes for orphan

you will never be
a virus

–

the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named

–

masturbation
as the seizure
had
by hologram

–

the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down

themes for fugitive

as ahistoric
exit
music

plays

you leave
the beast
in the bitch
of its
amnesia

–

themes for prey

–

infant cinema

themes for lamb

dreamt
I was nude
on rice
beach

–

dreamt a mother had gone to the desert
for fish

her son’s
fish

could eat
while swimming

–

two martyrs
share a camera
both

call
touch

–

dreamt sleep
was the eye’s
blood
relative

themes for slang

the blood
the spiritual
eyesore
of the woman’s
body
mirror

–

here is what it said, it said
I think
I have
a mother
whose hands
he tells
apart

–

christ I’m close to my face

themes for caricature

a broken raccoon
in the black hair
of a toppled
trash can. god

saying
the tie
goes
to the eardrum.

father and the stick he swears by.

mother
braless
unplugging
an iron. the washer of the foot

that will touch
one bag
of an erased

home run. and. the soft

anorexic
the washer
of the anxious
gay.

themes for depiction

though the man says
it’s all
porn
in the fire pit

he holds
in disbelief
the sadness
of two
cocks. dog is as dog does

to the dying
of its language.

themes for patience

I am half
the survivor
I ate for.

I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.

my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking

of all the things that had turned into her hands.

communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.

themes for fat

I puke sand
into the infant’s
mouth
in low
praise
of the male
form
made

famous

by a statue
that sold
not
for its representation
of a dominant
existence
but for
the delicacy
with which
its creator
handled
the angel’s
erection

themes for power

alone
I can cover
two handprints.

the rooms my father enters are bugged.

mother is dumb from pretending
to hit her head.

talking is hell. hell belongs
to a little
devil

that shrinks.

you throw a cell phone at a dog, okay.
pick up the phone
and find
the dog.

let god think
he sees
our puppets.

themes for uncle

dad loses a brother while drawing a straight line for a haunted circle

–

I tell
two jokes
well

in the shadow
I’m in

–

no one replaces my father like my father

continuing themes for uncle

wrapped in a sheet from my mother’s bed, I make my way to the outhouse to show my brother there is a future in smuggling the skin of god. my father is scraping leaves into an empty pool and the earth with a rake. if death speaks briefly, I am in two places that cannot exist without exposure. gone long, it spoke once on the loss of loss.

themes for country

I am at the truck
getting ice cream
for the overly
nostalgic
girl
who refused
to cut through
the cemetery

themes for tongue

the woman who doesn’t believe in light
can fix your mouth

–

I have no double
to love
my triple

–

the man with no teeth
borrows
a ladder

themes for mitochondrion

your son’s disorder
is used
by some
to draw
a straight line, a sleeping
circle…

–

my soul is eating all my food

–

agenesis
of what
of nostalgia’s

panic

themes for afterlife

you can
in fact
eat your silence
forever

–

I don’t want my food
to tell a story

–

talk to me
of light, of mother’s

milk, talk

is for the hungry

–

ask my hands

–

it is always dark
in the baby
you’re having
and in the dream

I’m

themes for scripture

in our own way of toying
with the disappeared

we name
weekly
a new

inside animal.

that something comes when called
separates

the lonely
from the missing. if it matters to god

let it matter
to god
the eraser
of lightning. in this Ohio

one is always a day behind being destroyed by the past.

themes for sister

be the abuser you want to victimize. repeat your father’s compelled evocations. if fat, absorb your mother’s least favorite hiding place. if not, borrow your brother’s future. plan it around a mirror.

themes for transition

I used my nearest
sister
to strike
my brother
who’d wasted
the last tooth
of his horse
meant
for a slingshot
on a meal

for a scarecrow

–

the power
to mother
went out

–

father
compared
puppets

–

our heaven of socks and string

themes for reunion

the lost baby
for a moment
is doom’s
afterlife.

I don’t think I can be kind anymore.

alone time
is patience
as melodrama. the second coming

of my father’s belief
is a memory
that talks to itself
while saying
don’t make of me
a habit.

dear godless koan,
my wheelchair has an ashtray.

themes for rehab

memory proves god
in that it proves
god
is lazy.

she oversees bathroom breaks for the crucified.

I was born without a twin.

themes for moon

dad says we live on a rock from god’s garden of near death experiences.

says throw a fucking baseball.

–

I could not see through my father
so I put my hand there
and it became a baby
with all its fingers

–

I was not raised by scarecrows.

had a toy that answered to wolves.

themes for contact

mid-cigarette
my sister
remembers
to smoke.

god hops
in place
on one foot.

most of our health
is rabbit
health.

not for nothing
the look on your face

boy

when you’ve nowhere
to put a baby.

also,
the drawings that didn’t make the bible.

themes for tattoo

to tell god
he swallowed
a thunderstorm
you will need
a seashell

–

I say to the boy
that before
this brain
of his
there were other

brains
the angels
thought
were bugs

–

malnutrition
can close
a wound

–

on the moon, my name is Noah

themes for sobriety

outside the garage door
of a cement building
I break no bread
with the silence
of my nose

what a clown

–

the wound’s depth
leads me
to believe
in a part
of my father’s
leg
I didn’t know
I had

–

mother’s pain
is other
pets, the devil

is the devil
forever

–

this egg on my face
is from the eye
of yours
that hatched

themes for woman

prayer
dedicates
for god
his time
to memoir.

fiction is the blood of a short person
spilling from a tall.

I enter again the room of the screaming man
who was screaming
when I left.

silence is par for the quiet.

themes for tail

the nonfiction section in my father’s library of sleep
is faith

–

mother comes to me in a dream to tell me she’s thinking of pulling out

–

epilepsy isn’t something you can see. clearly, it’s the snake
one tries to give it to

–

when people are gone, they’ve gone to ask

themes for sea

the prodigal son of simplicity

–

the pill popper’s
demographic

–

the mouth
as it keeps
the face
from parting

–

the canyon
of where
not
to snort
the ashes
of risen
sheep

–

paper
and the cup
it’s being

themes for scorpion

there’s the god I remember.

I’m fasting
for two.

themes for gut

sister
she bleeds
in the bath
thinking
we’ve finally
run out
of water.

of the cheering
mothers, my mean
ass
mother
wants to be alone
with the two
it took
to cut a baby
in half.

myself
I take it on the nose
the baseball
my father
doesn’t
crush.

themes for supply

thing is, my eyes are rarely bigger than my stomach. mother says I have a face for makeup. I babysit often. victims, mostly, of tooth on tooth violence. my brother drinks to our father’s medicine. water that’s been walked on.

themes for exile

its father tells god how it was briefly haunted by two ghosts that began to see each other. it doesn’t mention by name the who’s who of having babies. by the scar of milk in its belly, god accepts on cruelty the continued presence of the left handed coalition of something in the water. a good mother burns what’s been devoured.

themes for hand

I feel nothing
for her
but also
nothing
but-

she is
then
a writer, partial

to now, and to now’s

book.

is
then
prayer, loyal
to the past
most

current, to the believer

who contacts
touch.

themes for hotel

mom would start in on god so fiercely that we became preoccupied with doors. we got to saying and I’m taking the baby with me at the close of anything said with passion. by the time our speaking allowed for speaking parts, you’d think a cameraman had asked to use the bathroom. father had his moments. being thin is an adventure. this egg has given me an idea for a different kind of chicken.

agewise, I was closer to my parents than most of the kids I knew of.

themes for shadow

when toothpick young you see a snake go mad with second nature and a sponge dragging your mother through nothing’s data

themes for mother

shake a broom
at the sky
then make
the ocean
watch

–

have a kid
in the next

life

–

to a highly
visible
other

become

attached

–

marry
and ruin
sight
unseen

themes for star

in a small attic
a boy
on all fours
being weakened
by a spider’s
dream
is putting
an ear
to the roof
of his sister’s
dollhouse. for making

the wrong
sounds
for animals
poor sister
was lowered
into the baby
you were born
to lift
by two
scarecrows
you’d think
were separated
at death
for the way
they don’t
carry on.