Skip to content
October 2, 2022 / barton smock

softspot

hunger pains
or the match
scrubbed across
my wrist
do you have
other sounds
a softspot
perhaps
as egg
for snake's
neck
as any 
angel
for angels
drowning
at a puppet
show
I still
choke
in the unstopped
car
September 30, 2022 / barton smock

softspot

has stork for any news of god's weight gain

headache for the avoided faith 
touch traps 

in the thumbs of unkissed extras

icicle 
for the wasted 
bone
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

waysides

It is not healthy to write about god. 
Childish to die alone. There is 

some happiness. 

Loss finds a way out. Few 
of the pill's 

bones break. 
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

rekeepings

I undream my mouth with soap and tape. 

There is not 
always 
a rifle. The invisible 

they can't 
sleep
I am so 
ugly
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

( misc. cities from ‘untouched in the capital of soon’

city 70 or 71

The short past of my body in the small
of yours

A baby chewing on its hand in pile of leaves

-

city 72 and 73

The boy has one mouse

All named
Cigarette

-

city 74

In its shadow grief the window

in the open
Mirror

-
city 102

Angels buy footsteps with pictures of the poor

-

city 103

Your mother enters god in the ghost you painted for death

~~~~~

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

*include address in notes section
September 29, 2022 / barton smock

( words toward some current films

Sissy, as directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, stops time long enough for its slasher sensibilities to overtake both homage and mantra with the faster sisters of fomo and isolation all while tracking the otherworldly un-mirrored performance of Aisha Dee as it duels for the same safe-space nostalgia and the right to say to everyone and to no one 'if it's not in the frame, it didn't happen yet'. Dee is exodus and revelation, and moves the end times back into the middle where belief must re-earn its brutal beginnings. Full of backhanded admittance and disappearing permissions, this movie is proudly and gloriously someone's fault.

~

An arrival numb to departure, Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil is an out-of-body duet unsung by people too close to partnership and camaraderie to see a single evil let alone name any tune not already on another's tongue. It is important that a film this alone remain within itself at length, or forever, and with performances and visuals that achieve both the hermetic and wild, it painfully and almost perfectly leaves itself an inheritance of inaction and etiquette enough to afford its callous but necessary payoff.
September 26, 2022 / barton smock

installment five of Lou Poster’s The Kindness of Strangers (at Schuylkill Valley Journal

Installment five of Lou Poster's 'The Kindess of Strangers' is HERE, at Schuylkill Valley Journal (svjlit.com)

If you like last thoughts on first things, the un-mourned during of then and now.

September 25, 2022 / barton smock

the soft of grief, the lost of art

A grape goes quiet above a photo of a woman who is pretending to eat for two. A mouth opens inside my thumb. I can't close it. 

You're here longer
than someone else.
September 23, 2022 / barton smock

2018, edits and doing away

RABBIT HORNS

A plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. Our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot. The dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. Anger has gone the way of the milkman. His doomed child with her piece of chalk. Her puppets all of them slapped into believing the mirror’s memory is for show. A mime bites into a bar of soap. A man not making siren sounds is pulled over by a man who is. After a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly. While thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree. My father in the shower holds a cigarette above his head. There are egg shells on the floor of heaven.

A GUN GOES OFF IN A DREAM I DON’T HAVE ANYMORE

Death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food. Father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore. In the trespass of elsewhere, two brothers approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast. I return to my mother's spot as it's a microwave.
September 22, 2022 / barton smock

( without link, fail, journal

just now 2022

aw man someone just reminded me of this song and I lived once in Palmyra PA third floor of a house wife and kids and in the winter it was cold and in the summer it was hot and in the winter I would have to knock the icicles outside into a bucket so they wouldn't destroy the cars below and then I'd melt them for some reason in the bathtub and we didn't have a showerhead and everything was carpeted and money was as scarce as it is now rare and in the summer the neighbors across the street would fight and my listening had a temperature 

2016

I don’t know what right I have to be touched by a gospel song. birth has a wrongness about it. I have four kids and they are cried elsewhere for being poor enough to share a blindfold. this whole thing is like going window to window with portraits of our invisible neighbors. I hear this man and no there is not a special place in hell.