a mention
here or there
on the police
blotter, a chicken
scratch
on a giant’s
petition
to condemn
the church, kids
we lose
to birth
the hangman’s bike shop goes under
it’s been
grey apple
a slow
year
for the scarecrows of trampoline graveyard
I am crushing
pills
in that sleepy
window
where certain
lives
double…
/ suicide, it lowers
in a spotless
interrogation
room
a shoeshine
chair
for pregnancy, thing
of the present
the healed are chewing their hands beneath posters of fast food taken from the walls of god’s cell. poetry is dead. prose the bone placed in the bowl of a frostbitten dog. nothing burns. not like a baby’s ears at an oyster farm.
seashell as failure. bread my raincloud.
touching my face in a clueless dream
on sorrow’s
blank
horse.
I bum cigarettes
from the butcher
gave boredom
a fat
lip
/ death has been trying to guess my age
hick lore rabbit hole:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/hick-lore-rabbit-hole/paperback/product-22914385.html
pictures of god don’t sell:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/pictures-of-god-dont-sell/paperback/product-22977531.html
some:
[snakeskin]
by the time god gives you a daughter
he’s already met
the one person
in the crowd
he can make
disappear.
older now, sadder
I admire
love.
~
[her faith]
motion detectors
on the loss
of imagination
the dream
aware
of its fame
the toy exile of a lightning storm
the scene
anti
pastoral, deadpan
crow
in mom’s
blue streak
dolls
moved
by what
she ate
~
[georgic]
run the disposal for the fat-handed man who’s heard himself think. worship the out-of-body mother as you would a curfew from your past. ghost for angel.
~
[gatherer]
it’s enough to give a ghost amnesia, snow like this. we’re pretending to look for his daughter while sharing what he calls a milkman’s cigarette. throw a brick, say touchdown. I might have worked for a mirror. I don’t know where we are or how old his daughter is. lamb of the bunch. blood’s haircut.
~
[devotions for pilot]
historically, it has gone this way
birth
flashing
the present, my lap
breathing
~
[bring roach]
how long might satellites mourn? sickness took the lord. a scarecrow the pulse of a cricket.
not every image was worth the effort.
~~~
uglies: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6WuSKK8yNnngtdNlb5NfwQ
again
this baby
so okay
with dying
/ I was in the outhouse
praying
for deer
a thumbsucker
sold
on the second
coming
of invisibility, or host
of my father’s
most remembered
midwestern
gameshow
/ and my poems
they would not
flower
/ I quoted mom,
two eggs
to make
a phone
fate
will protect
nostalgia
a statue of my father drilling for scarecrow. immediacy as elsewhere’s double. my mother’s dream to play pool on an empty stomach. blow-up dolls for the drowned christ.
kingsoftrain 