{lowered}

recent readings of own work:

6/27/2017 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sapnBxOjtU

1/28/2017 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7m0wl4V8ug

11/4/2016 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHCJHzPvrc&feature=youtu.be

~

recent self-publications:

{paw five}
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/paw-five/paperback/product-23198602.html

{the boy who touched all the eggs}
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-boy-who-touched-all-the-eggs/paperback/product-23225174.html

~

offers:

have two privately self-published chapbooks available in hard copy for free: {BASILISK} and {the accepted field}. make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

~

recent poems:

[chronos]

god exists because my body was never found.

a lonely boy
hears fire
yell. I point

and babies
crawl.

[beheadings]

poverty is nothing more than jesus pouring milk from a soldier’s helmet into the nest of a delirious and elsewhere bird. how long have you had that invisible mirror? I can’t taste blood. fever is my mother’s crown.

[vertices]

a female bodybuilder is yelling at her father for refusing to turn off the mower. a half-naked boy on a bike coasts past them both in the direction of a woman who’s professed to have a snake that’s all ears. I am in a third floor apartment crookedly hugging a window air-conditioner I nightly dream has fallen. my kids are together on a bottom bunk under a blanket stabbing each other with a pair of scissors from the mailman’s last meal. the neighborhood widows lean on separate swing-sets and shape their memories of toy pianos. I can hear it now my brother saying that any and all travel is anti-childhood as he explains to my mother why it is that grief gives god closure over exit to the subconsciously alone.
~

thing:

one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is. day four: prayer is dismissive, but welcome. whose past is how we left it? body is delivered twice. beginning and end. nostalgia and wardrobe. middle eats everything. it snowed and I thought my blood was melting. could be the way you reason that happens for a reason. I was a kid when mouse was a kid. there’s no hope and I hope.

/

his weight a cricket on a piano key

/

disability as competition, jesus. and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled. here we will coin transformative indifference. a body is not a teachable moment. as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut. meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.

/

sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember

/

there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once. echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf. you breathe and say god gives out no more than that which I can handle. the next breath is mine. god gave us god.

/

I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.

/

aside: we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep

/

it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb. his fist has been called: hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard. I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates. because I want to.

/

magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure. oh silence afraid to start a sentence.

/

aside:

I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise