God still doesn’t know how long dying takes.
–
Red
says to blue: Every mirror is a door if you have an apple.
–
I’ve never been the first creature to eat my young.
–
I’d keep you alive
but miss
your ghost.
swallowing a hair in the house that birth built
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.
I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone
lightning
straightens.
(can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double
from poem Gameshow Fatalities, in book Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018)
~
if interested in reviewing, contact me at ghostarson@gmail.com
book is 15.00 / orders for signed copies can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
or via Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
~
REVIEWS:
~
interview by Crystal Stone for Flyway Journal
~
A swimmer doing a handstand. A wrist from the world of dolls. An Ohio squirrel sharpening a baby’s tooth. Doom as it strokes thunder’s hair. Vandals protecting the dreams of one beached whale. The earaches that learn of my son whenever my knees touch. The suicide recorded by the longest god.
In hell, you can draw a blank and nothing happens. I have proof. My dog is afraid of birds. My son has never fallen asleep in his wheelchair. I eat, and my shadow has a dream smaller than that of any fish. This is not hell. The past is abandonment
looking
for an equal.
Thinking it matters when, god tells us we’re dead.
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.
Glacial, this spiritual panic. But also, sudden. The bluest of left fields. I know the order of the last three deaths I was near and I know the order I put them in. I am up most nights either sick or wondering why I am not. Circa 1995 I was driving Gen home, it was late, and a cop pulled me over for a dim license plate light and he made us describe to him what we were wearing while he shook his flashlight as if fire had discovered him and had kneeled. It took some time to get home that night. Time, long as nakedness. As a kid I cried for years after hearing of the soul but really it was about this one toy I wanted to take to heaven. And now I have these four children who can cry backward. Who can die. Who can be secretly sad but even moreso secretly happy. Poetry knows we only learn to read once, and doesn’t know that there’s nothing younger than sleep. My hand has been a handful of hospital snow.
To worship god is to love the ghost of the alien you dream of killing. When I was a child, there were no children. All of them had guns. Most of my teeth hurt from forgetting
that blue
wants to be
a circle.
You can’t lose your memory in a thunderstorm
–
Every surgeon
but my son’s
surgeon
has
a lookalike
–
The plate in god’s head
is older
than god
–
Those cricket
funerals
took so long
to plan
from poem Gameshow Fatalities, in book Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018)
~
if interested in reviewing, contact me at ghostarson@gmail.com
book is 15.00 / orders for signed copies can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
or via Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
~
REVIEWS:
~
interview by Crystal Stone for Flyway Journal
~
kingsoftrain 