kingsoftrain

Lulu is offering 20% off all print books with use of coupon code JANFLASH20 at purchase checkout.

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my books are here:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

my most recent is {earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from} here:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/earth-is-part-earth-and-theres-a-hole-in-the-sound-i-made-you-from/paperback/product-22520444.html

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/ poems from available collections, below:

{a fabrication}

I walk with a cane I do not need. the road I’m on is unnaturally level. I have what one might call my feet on the ground as I pass a still life with strollers unattended. ahead of me, two women are fumbling with the beginning stages of their assault on a crippled boy with a phantom brain. the boy seems to be consoling his ears with the hidden roar of a tank. old man that I’m not, I hear the babies being put behind me.

–

{object permanence}

rabbit
named
vertigo

–

{my son the rapist}

online I find instructions on how to make my own scarecrow. I wake my sister and have her put on her pajamas while I take the overcoat my father is using for a blanket. when we’re an error of a mile from home I have to push the ATV with my sister on it. she is crying about flooding and I’m telling her what the scarecrow will look like. she wants it to have a cape. because my son isn’t born yet, there’s not much to like.

–

{taunts}

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.

–

{diversions}

when I was old enough to come home from school and take a nap but young enough to be the only born, I lived with my parents in a black house on a block no longer known for the brightness of its children. we were there for such a short time not a story burns from its recalled exile. no, not a dog digs in the dollyard of my adult sleep. but there are nights when the bones of my most afflicted boy are the bumps that stir his siblings to spoon each other and in the morning I tell them how their grandfather, propelled by the moth in his mind, walked three times into our door to rid his head of his god, of his wife, and of the secret knock they shared.

–

{1998-2014}

ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.

thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers

one heavenly, one earthly

never had
to touch
a woman.

the pain is not tremendous.

lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.

–

{creative types}

a dog is not barking. father, no mystery. mother is telling a woman that what the woman has is a child of god. I’m in my room like the sort of thing exists in certain parts. porn, doghouse catalogues, the animal that saw god finish. my real friend has imaginary muscle control. I want to touch him but am not sure how much my fingertips have. my brother’s sanity is how a baseball bat makes it onto a crowded subway. in the dream, my father irons my mother’s back with his palms and his palms are scarred. in my friend there are magnets.

–

{southern treehouse}

as my sister
inspects
her breasts
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

–

{outside the body it is always procession}

I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my fucking kid.

her father quells cocaine.

ants are quiet.

–

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

–

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall. sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

–

{lists (ix)}

the right hand of god squeezes a bar of soap until it becomes a crow.

there’s nothing wrong
with your son’s
black
heart.

before I had a cock
I told everyone
I had a tail.

–

{themes for lamb}

dreamt
I was nude
on rice
beach

–

dreamt a mother had gone to the desert
for fish

her son’s
fish

could eat
while swimming

–

two martyrs
share a camera
both

call
touch

–

dreamt sleep
was the eye’s
blood
relative

–

{angel crime}

zookeeper reads obituary

–

{helpings}

she can see the beginnings of a boy in her husband’s abandoned poem. a skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven. god is in the air. her daughter is taking a pregnancy test to prove one can get food poisoning from hunger.

all I seem to lose is ghost fat.

–

{themes for caricature}

a broken raccoon
in the black hair
of a toppled
trash can. god

saying
the tie
goes
to the eardrum.

father and the stick he swears by.

mother
braless
unplugging
an iron. the washer of the foot

that will touch
one bag
of an erased

home run. and. the soft

anorexic
the washer
of the anxious
gay.

–

{onlookers}

I blow into the infant’s mouth as if I could prepare an echo for what’s about to happen. in my dream I am turning on a flashlight that thinks it can scream. in yours, reincarnation is all the brevity our lord can stomach.

–

{maker}

when I think about you

I don’t

–

{believer}

sadness
has only
the followers
it takes
from melancholy. a dog

a dot
of a dog
see it
master
the secret
farm.

–

{trick blood}

the bottle takes what it can from the baby’s mouth. the stirring motion delivered to the hands of a misfit prophet. the knowledge of my father’s people that god is too old of a lover to get satan’s attention. the silence my mother kept quiet for. the second afterlife of a single breast.

–

{segue}

the feeling
we’d not
been here
before

–

doom’s little hiccup

–

my brother
dead serious
that we pronounce it

hick
gnosis