reading 11/15/25, from ‘angel tantrum’ (April 2025) and ‘tell 5pm it’s god somewhere’ (Oct 2025)

sorry did a rushed reading of my two latest self-pub collections 'angel tantrum' and 'tell 5pm it's god somewhere' HERE

angel tantrum, 171 pages
April 2025
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock

TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE, 125 pages
October 2025
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock

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From angel tantrum (self published April 2025)

Letter 030325

Dear Ethel Cain

I have so much to say about my father that I love my mother. Poetry is the untruth that is so empty it symbolizes emptiness. Dear Ethel Cain. The angel has a microphone and a mask. And a condom we don’t know about. Distance is a pig eating the feet of god. Sound suns the pink husk of the creator’s gasp. Having lost my thirst, I confront the naming of my brothers by the drowned. Also, forgive the body for its success. Gone from the writing is the imagery that would bait the birthmark into the shadow of a star. Don’t forget to starve the fish. 

~

CONSUMPTIONS

The turtle dreams of strangulation in a green emptiness

A star is the graverobber of god

I texted the writers not all of them

Writing is sometimes being drunk while putting a mouse back together in a mountain

We can kiss here
is an eyepatch
for your moon
tattoo

I don’t know why anyone would want to see anything

What if his son
stayed put

~

SHOWERHEAD

The brain is a thorn pulled like a fingerprint
from the rib of a star.

It’s usually
here
the baby
makes it.

Death will forget to create god.

~

HARKENING

I never have enough teeth in my mouth to love my brothers equally. They each have a tick full of blood to throw at a beehive. We form a band to hide our erections but only write one song. Because I’m the oldest, I’ll be dead the longest. Boys don’t call things what they are. Baseball and deer got Ohio lucky. We aim our piss and cry with our stomachs. Think Jesus did all that just to poison god. There are easier ways to get a sister. When shot, we take it in the leg. I don’t go outside anymore but here and there the unshaped crawl into my ear. The re-shaped, not so much. Boys and girls aren’t real. We compare school shooters. Blueballs, leg pain, the holier symptoms of swimmer’s echo. 

~

NIGHT LOSS

I reach into a dream and pull out no small puberty. Every sister is terrifying. Hundreds of frogs jump differently away from a pond with two shadows. I can’t afford a ghost but can a demon. It looks at my ghost. Then at my food. Days from now, an entire train is used to transport the bones of a single mouse. I think I’m asleep. A sound thinks I’m asleep. Writing isn’t that important. You could die here and everyone would know.

~

GOODBYE I’M HERE

A white sock
cannot pray
for the rabbit’s
stomach.

Look at stuff and die.

/////

from collection tell 5pm it's god somewhere (Oct 2025):

ADDICTION, FOR SCALE

A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god

/

I WROTE THIS POEM THAT YOU MIGHT READ THE TITLE AND WANT TO WATCH BEN FOSTER IN SHARP CORNER

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister 
who said god 
is a cigarette 
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice 
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry foreskin forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that 
All that having
to separate 
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time

/

WRITER THING

the eyes
in a sad
race
a game
of godless
tag

/

SWAM

blue hair crying 
in your wrist

/

LIGHTNING’S FIRST MOUSE

I was suicidal for years in my mother’s field of melancholy jellyfish. Our past changes the sex of the wrong person. Even time believes it’s god’s addiction to time.

/

VIOLENCES BEFORE SWEETNESS

designed lightning designed a pair of scissors from something sleeping in the thigh sobbing on the right side of god

designed sound designed a voice for god as a way for animals to tell jokes 

unburn
the angels

it’s my year to add a brother

designed these fuckers designed

designed a machine designed a map to cover with cornfields the umbilical cord koans of data abandonment 

designed sleep designed restraint blue

designed blue

designed my brothers designed they are white

designed skin designed pressing on prayer with the oyster bruise of a fingernail starved in a mirror by the invisible disciples of nakedness

designed death death I did this for