I miss the radio being off
even when
it’s off.
Forty baseballs going dark.
I lost someone
and lost their death.
Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.
In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.
As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church
–
I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep
–
No animals were created in the making of this harm
Do as nothingness has done
and cover
that scar
with god
–
There is a room
that knows
where you die
The television is always this close to placing the perfect image on the grave of its grave. The children love loss, or anything they find twice. Never both. It’s as if I am trying to remember what kept me up at night before I was born. The baby cries but cannot weep. The cat has this look mom calls changing ghosts and then there’s less and less cat to forget. I have misspelled a word more often than you’ve died. Are you gone, or nowhere?
THIS THING AND THEN FROM THIS THING:
rocks have the softest shadows
poems
Barton Smock
237 pages
Dec 2020
~
CONTENTS
pages 1 through 41, DIETS OF THE RESURRECTED
pages 43 through 80, from AN OLD IDEA ONE HAD OF STARS
pages 81 through 167, from ANIMAL MASKS ON THE FLOOR OF THE OCEAN
pages 169 through 208, from MOTHERLINGS
pages 209 through 212, AFTERNOTES
pages 213 through 235, New Poems
~
13.00
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-1
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for PDF copy
~
WORK FROM THE WORK
[ diets of the resurrected ]
In the mouth of one who opens a sentence with the word verbatim, there is a sorrow searching for the breast of a shadow. Overheard is not the name of an Ohio street. The baby is no cook but is the only knower of what my eyes will eat in the dark. No one in Ohio laughs when you say bornography to your sister who says orbituary. One can be pregnant and study the wrong children.
~
Ohio sexuality:
X mourns outdated baby monitor by scoring a commercial for rabbit mascara
~
When it gets cold, we tell each other it’s okay to use a photograph instead of soap. It is not common for language to keep its word. If you’re poor enough, snow takes the pulse of the moon. We don’t believe in the soul. But ate something to bring it back.
~
Poverty created the moon as a place for loss to process God.
It helps to have no one.
~
Dream supply:
A pile of white leaves in the corner of my father’s mind.
Wind and skin, or the angel’s
forgotten
spells.
No longer a fire hazard
the wagon’s
grey hair…
The suicide of God’s first.
~
My son writes to me about the piece of glass they can’t find in his ear. He says it is like a dream. That he can describe its shape between the hours of this and that a.m., and its size to a newborn making a grocery list. He says they have people who look like him, which helps. Like her, which doesn’t. My writing isn’t even close. Aponia, I write, and also, ballet. Everything in the cold is cold.
~
The coordinates a son’s illness leaves for God. Cigarette
and a mother’s
secret
typo. Camera the consoler of miracle. Elevator worship. Our food’s invisible dark. The gag reflex of his favorite astronaut. For whom we carry
goodbye.
~
Every life is long. Honestly, I think I just wanted to see my handwriting. I sang for my children. Never cooked for my mom.
owls okay with needle sharing
would explain
Ohio
trees
Loss gets older and befriends its childless parents without knowing which of them placed a glass of toy water beside mirror’s bed for the you in all those video games where I stopped moving
Darkness never gets to every creature. I like that it tries. A cigarette taking sad thoughts from a ghost made of breathing. The ant-same memories of a toddler.
God doesn’t change, and knows it.
