August 22, 2022 / barton smock
some of these are different now but this is how they looked in 2018 ( from misplaced collection ‘paw five’
lost priest I come from a place where a school bus hits a dog and the bus driver barks and all her kids play dead boy in darkness blood is a movie and none of it yours the story outside a boy in a diaper covered in flour a sadness specific to elevators cocoon on every menu lightning storms in a wedding dress worn once and haunted by paper cuts going at her dolls with a fork too dark now over nothing to cry cavity a clock dreamt by a scar. the scalpel the ear’s idea. birthplace, hide your own. no animal harmed in the making of god. late poem one can only write so long about loss in pencil find my house, dog-on-fire the rapture grief is grief because it attempts to mourn the infinite. my leg’s blood becomes a branch. I breathe and think I’m eating. sole the spell we’re under for mocking the wrong ballerina it learned here to roll over there to be on fire childhoods of dog-breath and wand bornography it is common for the male cannibal to carry the skin of the due child fasting is a sin and starvation a commandment orphans are given home movies and edible pillows language is a head we bring it cake annihilatives as drawn, the boy’s alien and cow evoke rescue dream: a toothless sheepdog is spooning roadkill in a wax museum dedicated to famine go on, birth take silence from a baby annihilatives dream: a contortionist on a stretcher bulimics at a tortoise crossing annihilatives you drive a clown car into a crowd it is how you mourn the accidental burning of a doll’s body-sock and this I understand as a city kind of thing as a way to eat darkness among friends darkness from a stomach a way to lose blood’s password yourself in bread annihilatives the present happens at different times. fetus, comma, tadpole. surgery, please tell this mask my face went down on nothingness. annihilatives dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: a mummy obsessed with what doves eat dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: dream: sock puppets on oxygen annihilatives the brainwashed and the blindfolded will then switch children and you will spend a year a year at least throwing a slipper at a farm machine dream: grief a mile grave an inch… you won’t eat much and your eyesight will trade its crow for a bar of soap your father will fake his death to distract room service from his country roots and an insect inside a stick will die and the stick will live annihilatives go home, sadness - of exposure to birth annihilatives the first murdered woman was not killed by her sister. stop me if you’ve not heard annihilatives this dream again where no one likes me the overeater I sleep for empty grief has a swimmer’s stomach ribbon on a blindfold suicide is death’s unicorn ambulations poetry and suicide the two left feet of a child forced to play horseshoe horse a waste of strangeness supplication is voice the shadow of song swimmer whose blood has feathers childhood (i) the body of jesus pulled from the sea childhood (ii) I am, in the dark of an unwashed submarine, kissing his head like it had a message. curvature in my plainness a seesaw in her dream jaw her dreamboat’s jawbone in our daily belly in the church of rolling our own a film ghosting a film in a rug made of bread a tooth made of bread in mannequins where small things kneel that are living in claw-marks and in jigsaws of the crucifixion in crows balloons of the strangled a scream in Ohio is my elsewhere parade allow me, wind, my unnoticed resurrection and forgive my smaller ear. the sex we had saved to cut the bread of bilingual angels is now a ghost watching sleep improvise. church bell beats dog-whistle and rocking chair empties horse. the hazing of our assigned animals when it was said cannonball I heard cannibal and wondered where was my helmet my dad as a boy was bullied by evocation, as a man by the flawlessly deaf puppet to puppet, I only have two hands the future is all you see hills and stars for her date with the giant, mom is putting on her face. our time, invisible chameleon, is over. brain of a white mouse. whole children whose nights come to them in food wrote lullabies for cocoon and stuttered firsthand are they gone the cats of the doll-faced arsonist how does one earn loneliness, or slip from an overlong baptism roof love alien to me were the ashtrays failed boats of teeth for my angry quiet brother vacuum lose them all, dogface teeth were pills god couldn’t swallow physique pain a shadow’s bed-hopping rain puddle idea a boy in a homesick elevator conception lost like you my memory twice otherhood (i) loneliness the born artifact of my father’s rented dream. god the hobby of replaced machines. forgiveness the eldest stowaway and mistress of the seasick hologram. the monster you became to attain formlessness. mom a rabbit. her dying frog. hunger erased by what it loves. otherhood (ii) it is not real, of course the trailer park on fire, the accepted field- wheelchairs crossing without us god and time are the same age a child, an oven how both distract touch we got our hands on some fingerprints and did not feel poor the invisible man’s ghost, them polaroids of sister’s feet… dream differently, microphone ballerina dog whistle, nothing’s church-bell: my mother, handcuffed still worships wasp mothers, acoustic we are maybe inside an Ohio factory childless and ready for a refresher on orphan etiquette- word is there came a cow from the nothingness that drank nowhere’s father and sleep is death’s babysitter last blue thing choking inside a whale / sucker from the world of hands no system food on my plate, I am always one suicidal hairdresser away from my past… lead your lives, touch darker farms food saved from a house fire - the cult following of nostalgic paranoids - a star, this deer as it prays for moth morale image made no beast. think of it- death was human would you say, mouth that god made a deal with nothing fealties mowing the lawn dad swallows a bug. sister is folding her eyelids back and brother his diaper stays on. mom on a small map is making noise. the animals are what god sees in animals. soon a birthmark on a tooth. snakes are made of nothing I don’t know why it is that this thing in my father merely comes loose when in me it disappears, but am grateful that my mother can hear him getting ready for church no matter the rattling of my hunger at the weepy shapelessness of spoons. campestralia i. hailstorm a midwestern cairn for cracked eggs hiccup the small afterlife ii. figures, maternal step naked from a.m. houses scream to be collected, we’ve all seen the rooster reenter the clock iii. birth, go to heaven- god is time’s way of showing history that death has no experience iv. and the pestersome bat asleep is the cross of Ohio crows the blank does nothing in hell but draw transformative melancholies frog in the throat of a lowing cow dad, smoking two nearby deer nosing that headlight into place poem is dead father with his stomach missing a fishhook left in a dream a peeping tom’s basilisk holy ghost I have a camera sets a trap for silence an animal you can borrow a full-grown scarecrow death’s first parrot I have children, a suicidal thought that can love up to three a pilot’s paper seashell parade for sorrow I miss blinking access verses a classroom, a house but never the ghost of a church - the boys they play scarecrow loves horse, and the girls the shepherdess on a boat names her dog - hey, distance lose the baby (says the empty box) pairing my body at three years old is being carried to a mailbox by my mother who blizzard or no puts her ghost on the map holding the baby a deleted voicemail of a boy asking his mom how to prepare a past meal. my handwriting an insect I want the best for. dream and the moth it won’t finish. the mud on god’s cheek at birth we are given a ladder we can’t see. our feet bare farness the last robot to name its baby. two smokers back-to-back in the high corn. the spoonfeeder’s ferris wheel. litterbug’s shadow. vespers them raccoons out there is tarrying* up yr bible - *tearin - border: my eyes can’t stop what the back of my head is eating mirror: a godless hyphenate - my man is a body whose moon is vacant - they is out there to flood sightseers with basilisk porn - in the valley of my choking the fingers of my father are going dog’s-collar purple - out-the-way churches. and acne viands no person was made in the harming of this creature. hands off, angel, the baby’s glove. lording she puts down the book once it begins to read like it remembers being written. it’s my book. do you know this man? his sight returned while he ate. boys play freeze tag to sadden birds. dying at home bring little, for I am a small room. my clothes are yours and have always been lonely. from nowhere came beauty to avoid god. bruise, ye from nightgown to blanket. be kind, history to those in my dream. committal leafing through the milkman’s picture-book of outhouse graveyards happy to taste the gum on the buried shoe reverie a learned behavior god a tornado warning and hearing a ghost town, this a cigarette from the purse of a past / mother shift asleep I am headless in a clawfoot tub the half-awake boy on my chest the disoriented pulse in the hand of god tin give childhood some time let vengeance travel / say it wrong my name while whale watching rattle forget, sorrow your anniversary in case you’re not alone two koans deader than his animals that could speak to language? doll traffic it is not a darkness to call it the demon’s untouchable telephone I’ve referred to worse and anyway time is the gospel of disappearance in stories, my brother has a tail and speaks mailman perhaps there’s not enough to do the tree has horns peal the sculptor’s son dreams of acne a sister so light so moved by shadows… mom a statue good with faces later fights our lost way of thinking forgave different films tell / my death I was here to gather proof / my children to paraphrase questions for shadow god as spotlight unmanned or not anklebiters what in the history of blood has blood discovered mom is hanging laundry from the future regret is still looking for a god I learn cocoon and boyishly cross my legs the lightning when you saw it was it clean form a creatureless forest in the minds of men with shovels; a field. / birth outgrew its crooked coat cognate to build something inside the church they had to close the church those who wouldn’t normally disappear were said to be helping shape began its story with veal and ended with the man dad choked for nine months I imagined foreign injurious objects and my brothers spoke from a sandbox of seeing a late deer on the roof of a nursing home dreamlike weaponry it’s no small animal that the world came back for us so, bullet only god himself can enter the church of the easily missed so make of boy a stray being poem to present oneself so falsely- be happy for the work apple in defense of snake, this is my mom’s curling iron / ghost a vacancy I cannot dismiss no kids in Eden door to door we are selling knock-knock jokes I am the body travel came with war footing a parrot sawed in half by peace or quiet notice hooked on silence, oh sleep / long before its descent into me windowless the museum of weight loss brother puts the basketball under his shirt so he can light my cigarette. we born to miss animals. infancy who is my brother? a boy fishing from a ruined helicopter - where is my sister? being seen by a ghost - am I alone? dumbfounded by rest - has anyone called my mother? these tracks belong to the animal drinks from your father’s bowl - is there a name? for some words - tell me there’s a church. small to a turtle boy lord boomerang, the toy of the lonely and the gospel of the weak dog... perfection is bad art repairs the past misses your child also god is silent in every language mom is driving. mom is washing the spider that closed her mouth. sister has a stick of gum but says she doesn’t. dad is half-asleep and cutting the fingernails of the babies he dropped. there’s a scab on my arm that looks like my brother’s nose. we pass church after church. sound horn for buried bees. tongue a prop fingerprint from the object’s dream of being touched or a pig that gets fire to keep a diary acolytic it does what it can the world to belong. I saw a wheelchair chase an ambulance. babies don’t know they can’t be alone. we peopled this. beauty you look like someone who’s not famous god before he died under god we are photos of a dreamless fact films for headcase i. amnesia the perfume of a dead ghost ii. sleepwalkers for a more christ-like hand signal iii. blue hound at a pilot’s grave a spider, worried this cloud from a father’s mouth before it is ruined by some kid who’s learned recently her shapes and not to smoke levitations mom is trying to iron a spacesuit car horns they foil hypnosis in the past I am describing god to my attacker I don’t take good care of things. I can’t even give you examples. reflect, time, on what you’ve done the insomniac the conductor of the sleepwalker’s train the centipede a sort of wrecked spider bunny-eared watersnakes… god took all my mom’s ideas reading and writing which one of us did loneliness hear coming? dead child the future the past both are ready to talk mom is using after the dream a home pregnancy test as a microphone I am counting the realest sheep- my brother’s toothbrush good as new in my broken hand her father, his pipe all them broken babies of tornado drills… eat, she says to a fog machine the more I sleep, the more there is of the future I can dream my son’s weight in birdseed bird the swimmer’s bread wreath i. upstairs the last to go ii. iii. door is so forgetful each ear is an only child shaped by a scarecrow barber known to cut straws for quiet angels satan awake and watching his bird feeder a memory I roll from my mother my father sketching the ghost of a stone nostalgia while we wait no god. no wind. sick son’s kite. the pea asleep… reader of everything his writing destroyed the book of boy / be buzzard a shadow stuck in a trash bag / be knees full of milk sympathizer the many plain sons of god their parking tickets declination in forgetting how many to save, god wants to know are you still seeing things… I remember the animal, the appropriate mask… once held, is the baby less wild is the room in the room poem remember to rub them, the hands of the slow learner. and to say their prayer the one for the bald princess & her child’s perfect somersault gutless data it is always a neighbor of ours tries to schedule amnesia and gets put down for suicide. it is always me on a farm machine hasn’t moved in years writing a poem for mom. it is never a mediocre ventriloquist marries a better. theaters of removal I have for appetite a pair of scissors and for despair a silent vase. I have a louse like a flower and a crush on a doll. I take my meals with a three-shouldered angel. the head of my abstract dog is highchair real. food is a ghost. I rake the hair. straying mom takes photos of things we are near. a piece of gum that won’t bleed. a plastic bag from the head of a carousel horse. the circle’s dark past. unrisen this oven this chapel of the television’s right to privacy… which paw for mom’s mosquito bread the outright sadness of his vanished physique far be it from me to stir the madness of fish. age allows that we are younger for god. sleep is a shadow’s bookmark. absences imagined while losing loss a dolphin the shyest mourner witch in a swimsuit after’s daughters the disappeared inventor of the present her reflection in surprised water hell on moon the building we enter to worship the church. stones of boated nights. a somehow seasick deer. the swimmer a storm-cloud from the land of grief not a fish here can go missing imp the man digging in his yard is looking for his dog. this is my lucky window. in this much silence, a baby could get a tooth. a mom a finger if a car door slams. the man digs and the ice comes for its heartbroken road. wounds move in a deerless world. born disguised as as if I would know upside / this talk of home / bush of the hissing baby / snow that can see blood in the dark / events my body held / first haircut, broom, crucifixion animal masks on the floor of the ocean mouse, teacup of the missing stork- owl, lamb of night- this was god. he was sad and everyone noticed.
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