{ghosting}

 

~

my author spotlight on LULU is here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

~

my most recent full length collections are:

Eating the Animal Back to Life
Drone & Chickenhouse
earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from

and from them / some poems:

{naming ceremony}

I was born
impossibly born
addicted

to the sound
of footsteps.

god

loves the woman
who makes the bed
of his last

believer.

{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

{tautologies}

an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.

{grace period}

language keeps us from understanding the world.

spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male

white
emulation-delayed
male

writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-

infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.

{small ones}

loss goes unnoticed.

I made for you
a scarecrow
from the textbook
violence
of a midwestern
poltergeist
as lightning
took a step
from the baby
I crawled
beside.

be
not memorably
young.

{motif}

again, we have given the baby too much credit. these are simply the gods I grew up without. here is my son serenading the seizures his mother salvaged from the praying I do for my hands. here he is repeatedly not. here is yours the psalmic nonverbal. here they are shadows limiting death’s vocab in a tiny tent not crawling with legs of lamb.

{catalyst}

he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.

~

/ books, as such:

[eating the animal back to life]
10.00
315 pages
published July 2015

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

of which Kazim Ali says:

Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, kingsoftrain.wordpress.com. He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself and so the only place you can get his books is here. All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.

(from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)

~

[Drone
& Chickenhouse]
6.00
84 pages
published October 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html

~

[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from]
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/earth-is-part-earth-and-theres-a-hole-in-the-sound-i-made-you-from/paperback/product-22503167.html