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May 21, 2025 / barton smock

gesture,

gesture 5, in three failures

I let a kid punch me in the stomach might my brothers ride their bikes down a hill and later I let two kids pull me out of a bathroom stall might a bike upside down in my dead sister’s room stay upside down in the photo of that room held up by my living sister who claims it can doctor god

~

Death keeps time by the far amen of the face. You have to be very still in your clothes or they won’t last. God is two dead creatures looking at each other.

~

What doesn’t happen in the current dream

stays
in the next.

I roll my own wasps.

Curled in a junkyard tire, the sibling christ blesses oil spots real or no
May 19, 2025 / barton smock

today a tenderness toward me had me welling

Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on
May 18, 2025 / barton smock

our dreaming draws amnesia away from the same ghost

Are you willing to leave them alone on the earth for their last twenty years?

I doubt with presence my absolute hereness.

Amensia.

I believed inquiry would mean I had a
Question.

No one likes your gesture sequence of
Poems.

We left the water
To leave the water
Guessing.

Don’t get mad at babies.
Be nice to god.
Tender soldier, there are birds

That bury teethmarks.

The ground is too soft.
Your hand will die.
May 16, 2025 / barton smock

tell your children every day you don’t remember them

In this church there is a toy phone on top of a toilet seat. I miss trapping god with nostalgia. I miss amnesia. A boy is a bell is punching into that fatherless space created by any shape born into a world of swimsuits. Oh fury, moon of hopelessness, the astronauts need nudes.
May 15, 2025 / barton smock

gesture,

gesture 4

Lakes laze through the last showing of the angel’s invisible shadow. Fire thinks itself unburned. Thunder hears a slow thing. I don’t want this to start. Lure the image out of god. A ripped-up squirrel at the end of the world.
May 13, 2025 / barton smock

gesture,

gesture 3

Old poems, I’ve made my cry to the world. Puberty’s pop-gun. Gender’s low star. The short dream of touch meant to abridge the skin’s ceaseless letter to any angel that remembers blood. I’m not home. God’s teeth are very small.
May 11, 2025 / barton smock

circle, with exodus

No newborn can reach existence.
Sleep knows memory
cannot fix
an eggshell.

( into a field
fled water
from the spine
of the lord )

Erections turn the stomach to salt.
May 10, 2025 / barton smock

I wrote this poem that you might read the title and want to watch Ben Foster in Sharp Corner

I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry foreskin forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time
May 9, 2025 / barton smock

addiction, for scale

A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god
May 8, 2025 / barton smock

gesture,

gesture 2

It’s too easy to have what you’re born with. Touch implicates itself in the theft of miracle’s diary. I keep the idea long enough for beauty to interrupt. Asked by three people at once have I ever been drunk, I answer to something lower. An eye is a cigarette made of tears. If I miss a shot, or if a brother steals the ball, an uncle’s ankle explodes in two hells. No teeth, but we lost bitemarks on the reg. Our bruises had five thousand people turning in their own blood to hear the devil. Lord take my child while he is pretending to be the child of someone else. God, blink so often that image has nothing to stare at. Whatever creatures walk out of Eden we’ll leave them out.