city 121 My memory isn't what it will be. Povertavoid, avidsad, handbefore. She wants a flowermysonisdead. * city 122 We get our thunder from snow's dream. A baby invents kneeling with a fork and an outlet. The wind is slowly eaten by what * city 123 There's not much to know, really. The puppeteer sleeps all day and the fisherman all night. Hide your hair in your mouth. * city 124 Pop-up books about sleep. The rabbitwater ocean. No one is the one keeping god alive.
So, my brother Noah Smock wrote the below kindness about me a few months ago, in regards to my poem SOONISMS being featured at Poem-A-Day, and I said thank you and cried to myself and to others but meant also to put it somewhere for good. Also, please check out the work he does for the Baltimore Community Toolbank HERE ~ What Barton says about this piece: 'I hand-wrote this poem on a small piece of paper while worrying about the long and short lives of my children.' Barton has been writing and putting in work as a self-published author for years. He has built an audience when and where he can. He's done so around a *few* other commitments (namely working full-time and being an incredible, committed, engaged father of four). My brother is also the biggest supporter of anything I've ever done. He regularly donates to the organization I commit myself to daily. He shares any victory of his brothers broadly. He is kind and giving and only curses when he's cooking or driving. My life's pursuit is to make him laugh so hard he falls to the floor. This little story is the perfect description of who he is: When he was eight, his younger brothers wanted to play king of the mountain on a dirt pile located at a construction site near our housing complex. It was the 80s. Construction sites were playgrounds of endless possibility. But on this day, Older Boys were already playing on the 'mountain' we wanted. So as the oldest, Bart was nominated to Go Talk To Them. I don't know what was said, but an arrangement was made: Yes, we could play on the mountain *if* Bart let one of the Older Boys punch him in the stomach. So Bart looked briefly back at us, then stiffened his gut to accept a single blow below the ribs. He hobbled back to us, holding his stomach. Through clenched teeth he said, 'You guys can play. I'll be right there.' poem is HERE
An oven too small to be left on. An ear that makes an animal-sized hiccup. A bidding war started by god for the children of our unprotected hypnosis. A miniature loneliness. An error-free nothing.
[ABSENCE VISION] wherein the white soup of thought that could not sustain the brainless pilot of paper airplanes was drawn from my son’s unheard ear might memory attend foresight, the church of loss [CITY VISION] Downloading the horror movie that shows your penis takes a long time in the city. Others are a grief I came alive to miss. [MOB VISION] soon is a baby studied by the scholars of now who in their prime predicted that jesus would be in the scarecrow’s future the darkest bird [GIST VISION] I woke up in the tree again The house itself had left run once more the crucifixion on tv
Today for a good seven minutes I couldn't remember the name of my son's disorder. In dollhouse hell an eye used a clock. I left myself a stone with feathers.
I started to care about form. Sleep could not sleep. One brother turned more blue than the other. I drank myself into three gods but didn't ask. It was late and then it was now.
rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages poems, Dec 2020 untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages poems, Sept 2021 PAY WHAT YOU WANT can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1 or CashApp: $BartonSmock \/\/\//\/\/\ excerpts FROM [rocks have the softest shadows] Lone high, Ohio: stars, I guess and a trapdoor for a certain kind of turtle and stars for sure ... Lying to the basilisk: You spoke to me through an egg for so long that the back of my neck changed moons. If I think hard enough, I can still see your mother putting in her mouth the glove her god treated like a baby’s hand. I cook a mirror. I cook for an orphan made of sleep. Will our breath always be the bone that didn’t make it into the wing of thirst? If it’s a boy, pick for an alien a flower. Dogs forget their human year. ... SWAN AND SWIM NAME EACH OTHER SWIM AND SWAN Sadness never gets around to introducing its young. Poverty hates magic. Unless they die, babies make movies longer. Angel is what I call my plan to catch a ghost. \/\/\//\/\/\ excerpts FROM [untouched in the capital of soon] DOES ILLNESS KNOW THE WHOLE TIME WHAT IT'S LOSING so obvious was paper cut’s love for scar night wouldn’t hurt a shadow ... NEXT NOTES Saturday I wait to care for my still sleeping brother as a tennis ball sighs its dog back and forth on a television screen. Who can sleep, with all this care? Patience is a midwestern agony. It doesn’t last, but death can’t watch. ... city 36 A running shower that prays impossibly on the body of our lowest sibling for the return of a bomb-maker's homesick drone city 46 A paper airplane on fire in a helpless mirror city 60 (how to starve a microscope in god's museum) /\/\/\\/\/\/
The babies came out silent Our talk was over It might still be meal two or three Meal one: the slow cry ing of having had a toothache on the moon
Why in Ohio is it still this thing you said A leaf is in pain A footprint isn't
toward the work of others - ~~~~~ through a small ghost poems, Chelsea Dingman The University of Georgia Press, 2020 Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from…
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kingsoftrain 