PRIVATELY SELF-PUBLISHED WORKS (hard copy, pay what you want): Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean, 124 pages poems, June 2019 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp $BartonSmock MOTHERLINGS, 52 pages poems, June 2019 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp $BartonSmock an old idea one had of stars, 58 pages poems, February 2020 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp $BartonSmock rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages poems, Dec 2020 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages poems, Sept 2021 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages poems new and selected, May 2022 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock apartures, 125 pages poems, January 2023 can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2 or CashApp: $BartonSmock *All collections are pay what you want, BUT be sure to include your mailing address in the comments of the order, and ALSO be kind...for instance, if you are ordering 100+ page book of poems, like, $5.00 is probably not a kindness. Also, all my work is posted online on kingsoftrain.com for free. Any questions, including inquiring about a free copy for review or free PDF copy, can be directed to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
God forgets things before they happen. In third or fourth grade, I was pulled out of a bathroom stall by a boy who’d been nice to my mother and I was told what should or should not be in my stomach. There was another boy with him. A city named Empty and a city named Goldfish took turns burning. I missed the future. The past, more.
Flashlight tag in a church. I sat in a back pew and kicked touchingly at a form I was sure belonged to my brother. Brother stayed quiet and put. I kicked him twice more, harder, trying to find a rib. Nothing. Came that little moon. Came that egg from paper fog. Time was ending. Our youth counselor limped out of somewhere, rubbing her elbows, testing an eye. Brother said where his body was. I felt left.
Alice Diop's radiantly grey Saint Omer is some unwatched, new, unknowable spectacle. A stationary doom that travels back in time to change place. A doom that takes time with it. The film is full of transcript, detail, explanation. But its magic is not uttered, and says all the quiet parts in a found language. Its rooms, its bodies, its faces, make of image a plagiarist. Its distance gets inside. You'll stand, and feel returned. No heart of gold, here, in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale. Just difficult people feeling small. Fraser plays Charlie as goofy and scared and watches as they become the same thing. His performance finds not only common ground but also an earth to step quietly upon. Hong Chau, as Liz, gives an outing both open and inner, and for all the air sucked out of nonexistent rooms, her performance makes place hard to leave. Morton and Sink hit different keys and I was glad that both seemed beyond grace notes. I saw no lingering, nor excessive helplessness, nor loving of what helplessness there was. I did see these characters eyeing the exit immediately and then some deciding to stay, and others deciding to stay until their staying was exposed as a decoy for lost absence. I saw people pausing in doorways, brightly going, brightly gone. Not everything in the film is a perfect fit, and the ending both works and doesn't work, and is probably not what really happened. But it wears well the wearing down.
They gave me the room with the crying window. I called my dream coffee and the maker they couldn't find. Some imagery pre-cornfield: An ambulance coasting behind a slow horse. Bloodshot lightning.
I was writing this poem when you came in. I didn't look up in time. There are people you will never know. And most of them are alive.
Sleep is the spacecraft we built for Death. Save the animals that see double.
I can't talk about my body in front of others. I don't believe in god not even when I don't.
My shapes. My colors. My my. My shapes. My colors. My my. I don't feel like a person. My colors. My my.
I miss not thinking of my body. I miss young pain. Pain that didn't ache, didn't overstay, that welcomed god but did not invite. All this haunted eating. Age 47, and the writing should have gotten better. Far appetite, melancholy is a lonely loving.
kingsoftrain 