I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers. it is here:
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Also, I have in hand 10 copies of the same chapbook that are signed, as well as 4 copies of my Dink Press chapbook [infant*cinema], also signed, that can also be requested in the above manner.
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the entirety of the BASILISK chapbook is below:
KEENING
(i)
a week ago, sister bled to death on a rocking horse. today is the short memory of our pig farming father and the suicide of the knife-thrower’s surgeon.
(ii)
notes will be notes from when I was alive. all men, amen. oh infant, teacher of spiders. the future of adult bookstores. yes they are dreams and yes they go to church. lose a finger, it becomes a ghost. a paw and the children think maybe their mom is having a mother. I’ll sleep with anyone. doctors each from the birth of my past. animals denied the policing of crow.
(iii)
I wash my own body. put behind me the death of outhouse slapstick. a dog is barking at a tractor. an older dog, wearing sunglasses, lets the baby do whatever. only some of these churches are mine.
(iv)
flashcards for women in labor. predictions for memory. sheep.
the hidden breads of snow.
(v)
history is not a person. these are the kids it tried to name.
(vi)
elevator country. the hangings of nothing pregnant. baby knows a shadow that knows a shadow can tell a map what to do. can get a small library to carry books on men eating men in the right bathroom. baby is here for trying to stay. its tongue came out that way, stuck to its nose. a moral choice on behalf of its mother whose water we drank blind.
(vii)
I was having trouble remembering my dreams so I began to see someone who wasn’t. my demeanor was approachable, he said, but cerebral. he said we were in unfamiliar territory. he asked me if I’d mind looking at some pictures he’d forgotten to draw. jokes of the trade, he said. the first few dreams I think were his and were probably so by design. the two scarecrows, witch-hunt and crucifixion, came soon enough but were paired wrongly as husband and wife. their little klutz.
(viii)
I thought it was a movie about dancing and you thought it was a movie about the devil. our feet were warm. remember the alarm? worlds to which none were added.
(ix)
I imagine it puts a hole in a demon, this combing of underwater things to protect the toenails of painted men. mom is this void the last of its kind?
(x)
this was in my dream. and this. and she was there and she has two kids, a boy and a girl, and a husband, there he his, who’s killed himself. I kept saying, after every thought, behold. went home with a woman who insisted she was born pregnant. slept like a wolf addicted to car alarms. saw the saddest foodfight.
(xi)
the man lives in his car and his children live in a store that’s out of everything. his dog has forgotten how to eat. things are on what any good god would call a collision course. he shows me nude photos he says he can’t look at until he knows for sure that the people in them are somewhere naked. he wants me to work on writing with a sense of place. not me, he says. move grief.
(xii)
I was still new
to the angel
when I reached
gloveless
into the deer
for the baby
god
froze
mom looked for a large moth
to stick
with a fork, brother
made to strangle
a coat
(xiii)
pain had a son whose right hand became the receiver of a jailhouse telephone. whose left remained a seashell. pain’s wife a daughter whose shadow became a puppet when she’d floss.
(xiv)
/ seen shoving a burnt doll into a book return
the nobody
birth
reminds
(xv)
puppets for dental hygiene
god
the animal
on auto
pilot
(xvi)
the overmedicated bear cub
and the jawbone
from snake’s
nightmare
/ driven by flower
this moving
van
of loss
(xvii)
orphaned by imagery,
the vision
comforts
foresight.
writing
is a non
event.
ghost? my one
for boredom’s
three.
(xviii)
I am the least, no
I am
–
look what they’ve done
to the lightning, dad
to your scarecrows, mom
–
all the toilets were in the trees
the trees were taller
a flat
bird
how
the fuck, roadkill
was on
the moon
(xix)
a chicken with two heads. a burning bush. a cane only a dog could love. a barber whose hair, nevermind. an arm cast bearing the hangman’s faded autograph. invisible milk
and the nothing you bring to my godless poems.
(xx)
that, or a seven day vigil for the one he destroyed
(xxi)
having one word for my voice, I would read to death from the book death borrowed. my armpits were those of a mannequin thrown from a horse. I gave no birth. I ate what I could of the kidnapper’s dream. upside down fish. crippled fish. boatloads of black sheep
puzzled
by the eclipse.
(xxii)
killing the firstborn is so yesterday. let’s be lonely. maternity leave for clowns. ant farms on airplanes.
(xxiii)
to the man who enters this poem looking for a gun. to the woman whose animals pray. to the giant with a memory like a model airplane. to the boy burying his sister’s bloody nose. to the bottle-fed scarecrow. to the dollmaker on the bridge and to the doll-god of country eggshell. to the possum and to its babies in my brother’s ballcap. to god’s only with god’s disabled. to a shadow’s early work.
~
OVERTURE
curfew, pregnancy, dream-
this plan
to stop
talking
~
SECRET
I occur only to the animal that wants to die
~
BASILISK
angel: I know
my son’s
disease
is lower
than pork, that suicide
means god
has a say
in how
we’re prepared…
also, that above
the lake
in which
my father
sees
a strange
fish
there flies
a burning
bird
~
SCOURING
two birthmarks
one
temporary, one
invisible-
when god
was young
~
CRY SHAPE
it comes up in conversation how his dogs, blowjob and retard, were killed during a bout of baby-proofing. biters both; like mirror their mother. she is only god in that we sent her a son. he says this, and also this: the act of swimming is a creature that comes to my knees. we bring him the raccoon. no raccoon, no moon.
~
PURSE
memory selects its future and trauma stops to eat. we are in the Ohio of dieting apparitions. oh, some cigarette made to last. a buried joystick.
~
MOUSING for RA Washington
history doesn’t repeat itself so much as curse the language it just learned. this is their there. escapist fare for those still fleeing. and I thought my hands were loud. one headset per foster home. shadow envies prayer. prayer has lice and ghost
a bathroom for both dreams.
~
PLANE
as violence
might recall
nothing’s
gospel, I wear
a mask
and poke
your baby’s
eye-
forget beauty, ah
/ the description of a monk in the notebook of a nun
~
EVACUATIONS
the dollhouse needs a second bathroom and those responsible for the film I’m watching have nowhere to hang the astronaut
~
NO MEANING
give death a sign. pumpkin seeds to the weatherman holding his throat. nostalgia a reason to ejaculate. a gas mask to goliath.
~
WIZARDRY & ABUSE
fascinated
by the ear
children
I’ll not
kiss
~
A LETTER, SILENT
a letter, silent
dropped by a word
into window’s
bible
–
cot, diving board, empty pool. southernmost
search
for earpiece.
–
medusa
her headless
horseman
~
FLIGHTS
i.
a brother
on the roof
with his raft
and the white mouse
his baby
takes
like a bottle
ii.
the coming
of radar’s
crow, the lights
of illegible
ambulance
~
ABUSE IN THE MUSEUMS OF AFTERTHOUGHT
you’re not small enough to be alone in the world.
old ghost-brain
gets a bike.
~
UNTITLED
“you are the secret watching the private act”
– from Citi, by RA Washington
ruins are for playing tricks on the past and god is the mugshot newborns love. hand is smaller than the hand it knows of. I am here for the nudes of the amateur basilisk. look at me when I exist.
~
COMER
I am looking for the mark on my body that will tell me how near I was to you when I fell asleep. we can’t know where touch has been. the third animal to which I pray
was it always
deaf
~
ARK AND HERD
dreams my dialect coach never had. birth and the boring outcomes of immediacy. oh grief, the first to mourn the fast learner. it’s your story, but you can’t name it resurrection, your spacecraft, without considering the mortality of your audience. I sleep crooked while watching ugliness. I love my brother like a leg but he brings to choir exit music for nomads. what does god think of the future? we carry the virus that killed our ghost.
~
AFTER THE POEM
the point
was to describe
you
to the image.
to go
in sleep
from bear
to bombed
bear.
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