{this & not}

thru March 19th, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books AND free mail shipping (or 50% off ground shipping) with coupon code of BOOKSHIP18

mine, self-published, are here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

*book previews on-site are books entire. will send free hard copies to any interested in reviewing. free PDF to any requesting. all requests as such can be made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com

~~~~~

some recent poems:

barn musics   ~for Maurice Manning~

as blind
as hair
yeah that’s
your father
spelled
into baiting
hosanna’s
cricket
by a red
a gaslit
mouse

~

starless musics

I drop
down the back
of my brother’s
t-shirt
a wasp
and for years
he has
dry skin.

there are words
our mother said
that we’ve used
to protect her. this day

(to that)
gunshot
means gather
eggs. sleep

is your shepherd’s
prison.

~

devoured musics

map
in dream
what you can
of heaven

be the hurt
child
who fascinates

(birth) spook

thunder
with the soft

horse of male

privacy / my angels

are graves
in a country

of wind

~

body musics

for fear I will want to be the son of every man I meet

I give god
enough
to imagine
me naked

* and failed / comes field / out a mother’s / mouth

~

milk musics

newborn
with back pain.

(the cigarette that takes the pulse of our ghost)

it is raining

on the feet of god

~

1995

and poem looked to me like the eyesight that stayed behind. claw and wing were the oars of my father’s blank craft. every boy in Ohio was a girl in a bookstore caring for the latest creature of a flat god. sadness hadn’t yet moved on from its stick figures and mothers were still blowing into perfectly round balloons. pale dog drank from a paint can. color could see, and see only, the future. a pinkness left my brother for the wrong kind of milk. sister had been hugging those angels

couldn’t bend their arms. zero

(that wizard
of the non
event)

was buying up land.

~

she wash in horse

everything but the barn is red. the barn is the shape of red. one can jump from its roof and never land. deafness, my proven ladder, puts her mouth into words.

she wash
in horse
her father’s

hands

/ of a grief misplaced by loss