the open mouth
of suicide.
the sex life of zero.
the tits of mom’s housebroken rabbit.
an astronaut’s
idea
for a cooking
show.
clown in the body of mime.
the pallbearer
developing
pictures
for death
arm muscles
lost
to prayer
recent readings of own work:
6/27/2017 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sapnBxOjtU
1/28/2017 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7m0wl4V8ug
11/4/2016 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHCJHzPvrc&feature=youtu.be
~
recent self-publications:
{paw five}
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/paw-five/paperback/product-23198602.html
{the boy who touched all the eggs}
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/the-boy-who-touched-all-the-eggs/paperback/product-23225174.html
~
offers:
have two privately self-published chapbooks available in hard copy for free: {BASILISK} and {the accepted field}. make request to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
~
recent poems:
[chronos]
god exists because my body was never found.
a lonely boy
hears fire
yell. I point
and babies
crawl.
[beheadings]
poverty is nothing more than jesus pouring milk from a soldier’s helmet into the nest of a delirious and elsewhere bird. how long have you had that invisible mirror? I can’t taste blood. fever is my mother’s crown.
[vertices]
a female bodybuilder is yelling at her father for refusing to turn off the mower. a half-naked boy on a bike coasts past them both in the direction of a woman who’s professed to have a snake that’s all ears. I am in a third floor apartment crookedly hugging a window air-conditioner I nightly dream has fallen. my kids are together on a bottom bunk under a blanket stabbing each other with a pair of scissors from the mailman’s last meal. the neighborhood widows lean on separate swing-sets and shape their memories of toy pianos. I can hear it now my brother saying that any and all travel is anti-childhood as he explains to my mother why it is that grief gives god closure over exit to the subconsciously alone.
~
thing:
one day my son is dying, the next he is not, and the next he is. day four: prayer is dismissive, but welcome. whose past is how we left it? body is delivered twice. beginning and end. nostalgia and wardrobe. middle eats everything. it snowed and I thought my blood was melting. could be the way you reason that happens for a reason. I was a kid when mouse was a kid. there’s no hope and I hope.
/
his weight a cricket on a piano key
/
disability as competition, jesus. and then these over here are arguing about the use of the word, disabled. here we will coin transformative indifference. a body is not a teachable moment. as a parent, I think I’ll take the shortcut. meanwhile, I have a glossary of terms you’ll never need that you can read beneath a dog-eared, thumbless god.
/
sickness in the young is god’s way of preventing nostalgia from becoming the god I remember
/
there is sickness by repetition and sickness by living once. echo hasn’t the chance to go deaf. you breathe and say god gives out no more than that which I can handle. the next breath is mine. god gave us god.
/
I was beautiful but now I’m ugly. (now) being the most recognizable symbol of the present. this is the silence I speak of. my son says (more ball) and you hear (moon bone). he is very sick. his moon has bones.
/
aside: we don’t come out faking our death, but are born because birth can’t sleep
/
it takes four juveniles to recruit his thumb. his fist has been called: hitchhiker practicing yoga in a junkyard. I cannot visit the instant ruin that forgiveness creates. because I want to.
/
magician, maybe, on a rabbitless moon- oh cure. oh silence afraid to start a sentence.
/
aside:
I study lullaby
and lullaby
bruise
nudes
of the mourner
who won’t reach
my dream
going to things makes me feel poor. to see if it’s empty, god enters the room. on a list of your father’s weaknesses, goldfish are at the top. mom will eat anything. tinfoil from the mirror’s stomach.
a mule
tortured
by a ghost
that faints
the fingers uncurled by river are to be baptized on a breadboard in the kitchen of mom’s hair returning. a baseball enters a bear. on an angel’s mind are nothing’s laundry and the notes of invisible suicides.
the missing apple. the hole in my cheek. the evidence that freed hunger. the calmest child whose silence left the church. the many barns of the stripper’s bloodied horse. the scarecrow praying for a bad back. the one-eyed grief counselor. the past. our faith in rehearsal.
kingsoftrain 