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November 30, 2025 / barton smock

the beginning

I hold myself in the dark

That’s
the whole
poem

You want a mirror, a god
of the anti
rare

Father, mother, a cry

( baby
shaped
things
November 28, 2025 / barton smock

unicorn feast

Asterisk to the spider’s eager pageant, Jesus waits at three doors for his father to get out of surgery. Cops put in handcuffs an unshocked boy and lead him to a room made of rooms. Ask for the mother of anyone. Ask the cops for our love back. Our love of how they are captured dying on an earth of runaways. I drank in the dream then drank in the dream I was having. At least cursive looks like eating. Cough, wrist. Angel, burn your way through the keyboard of touch. I did no singing in this world. 
November 28, 2025 / barton smock

stoppage

The childhood of my childhood

A cigarette lounging in a dropped hand on the grounds of an invisible cemetery

The funerals
thought held
for stones
November 27, 2025 / barton smock

genius

I put a dog in a goddamn poem and a poet wrote me saying that dogs don’t do that. It wasn’t every dog. Let me drink. Let me be brotherless in Ohio cutting my hair with my wrists in a prisoner’s dream. Beauty and body sound the same to the dead. Don’t love me. Here is a story: I put a dog in the backseat of a bloodless car sneaking snow into heaven that once wouldn’t start so we pushed it past a sheep so still you said fuck that sheep picturing itself as a mother in the mirror of an assaulted angel. Probably. Write, say. There are beasts that like nothing. 
November 27, 2025 / barton smock

I described you to my friends and they all called their moms

I know your son is dying but is your son dying in the next room. Touch is touch because we’re born asleep. I’m out of details. I thought I could drink myself into you caring about the poor. Invent time and god will say it already happened. I have everything once. I work on my vocabulary in a poem about snow. Fucking fucking snow. My brothers aren’t awake. That’s not loss.
November 23, 2025 / barton smock

the beginning

Reading in code about disease-erased sadness, I left in a cornfield an epileptic no one liked. Deer and dog forgave Ohio its obsession with god’s manufactured patience. The horse that screamed scrame and my math teacher heard a glass of milk praying for my sister’s rib to break. We loved little. Doubled over orphans and weapons weapons made.
November 23, 2025 / barton smock

collection ‘naked in dog years’, self published April 2024, new cover by Noah Michael Smock

Worked out a new cover with my son Noah Michael Smock for 'naked in dog years' (April 2024)

naked in dog years, 55 pages
April 2024
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock

~

from 'naked in dog years':

GARDEN POEM

Adam had a gun and Eve said do something with your mouth. God asked the gun to make nakedness. The gun heard loneliness. The animals ate each other because there was no fruit.


FUNERAL POEM

With each
new dream
I’m dead
longer
to the same
people.

I learn their language
by knowing
what to say. Mine

by sleeping
naked
near a god
whose creator

is a changed
creature. I get

about as far
as a bullet
dragging
an angel. Sound

is a small
collector.

Sound
is a small
collector.

November 19, 2025 / barton smock

body

I am so unhealthy and so ugly that I go online to find images of the bugs that brush her hair. You could be dying, and I’d be impressed by an angel. I don’t know what I am to autofiction nor what autofiction is to a mother who puts her child underwater to keep it from the rain. I dare you to be godless enough to convince god there are gods aplenty. My shadow buys a tattoo with a watermark. None of my children own a gun. I think there were two tombs. A world where that’s more funny than sad. Blood, bread, beast. The cow’s communion of ghost milk. If I drink it’s to the cigarette that mutes my strangulation’s alarm. So late was blue to being a color, ah. Everything gets away.  
November 18, 2025 / barton smock

unicorn debt

A mournfully urgent child in the darkroom of our undeveloped nakedness

In one word
Describe time
November 16, 2025 / barton smock

moral narcissism at Tom Snarsky’s Pier’s End

Thanks seems often too sincere, or something? I don't know what to do with others. Tom Snarsky is a poet and a person and ace in both. He had something to say about a small poem of mine at his substack Pier's End here.

Subscribe to Pier's End. Snarsky speaks to saying in a way that few can voice.

Here him read for the I THINK I CAN'T SPEAK FOR EVERYONE HERE reading series here.

I wrote toward his work Light-Up Swan here. Get this book, and all before and after.