By design too far and too soon, the always intensely casual documentary Bad Axe, as stopped and started by director David Siev, is somehow both uplifting and hopeless. It puts the present in yesterday and plants it in tomorrow. As for its loyalty to now and to family, it does catch the unaware collective who will wear a mask to mouth hate unrecognized but won't cover their face to keep others from getting a sickness that sizes the same world. A must see. Bring the right friend. ~~~~~ Beth de Araújo's Soft & Quiet is a doomscroll of hidden proximity that will tattoo insomnia on even the most thoughtfully awake. I'm not sure I can recommend it but know damn well it needs to be seen and looked away from in equal measure, and vice versa. Difficult and driven, it deserves all be present. Its one-take illusion puts its menace in so many real places that one feels followed, directly beside, winked at, and eye-level with peepholes marked for repair. As art and as document, it is too true to be based on anything, and is instead ripped into existence by an air breathed by characters who sleep beneath empty symbols and make nothing of vandalism save what's already been carved onto the surfaces of their untouched and wrongly examined lives. It's dark here, in the light, and we know these people. ~~~~~ Thomas M. Wright's The Stranger is a bewitchingly downbeat true crime thriller both anchored and spirited away by the eidolic performances of Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, each of which use a resigned urgency to centralize the haunted hinterland of retroactive pursuit. Edgerton eats worry in his sleep, and Harris sees friendship as starvation. Evil here grows older by being younger than time.
Time will never know how long it took for god to ruin the image. Ask me about distance. I was asleep and my kids were alive. In every city, his gun says the same thing. In Ohio they found bits of rock candy in the infant’s stomach. Angels go through eyelids like water.
Pronunciation deletes every other day of its past. Absence ships death the wrong god. My brother was buried without his ears and that night my sister swam
1999 the devil knows the past only as god and here I am unable to sleep in any space large or small that listens to the earth so instead I invent time travel but call it standstill and tell my brothers all of them that starting tomorrow no one is dead
Our television has been switched on in front of a shared lover. Last year, our sons were fingerprinted by members of the same dissolved swim club. We’re not friends. I do know that your dog lived one summer in the back of my brother’s broken ambulance. Two summers, maybe? Lost its voice afterward. They say a knob fell off a door and became Ohio. It’s not a joke I tell my son. He hears it anyway. Ohio is a sound. The bomb squad here showed me pictures of sleeping positions, then left. Say a word.
I read to god in my sleep. One sadness is longer than another. Touch talks the past into choosing the place. A mouse works to erase a boat. Not from the water.
We take one newborn from every search party. Loss isn’t a word, but can’t be replaced.
so I did this really long rather awkward reading from my last two self-publications but I do mean what I say or at least what one can hear of it: hard copies available, PAY WHAT YOU WANT: 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 PDFs at GUMROAD
Ghost and angel keeping between them their inside joke about bare feet. Glass brainstorming itself into a mirror. The tooth fairy losing a paper cut to god’s last baby. The job, home from nothing.
there the devil shoeless on the plastic horse the sand still here it couldn't eat
kingsoftrain 