father arrived
with a convincing
deafness
in one ear
and a broken pair
of handcuffs
he’d named
the left hand of god-
mother had called him from sleep
with a birthmark my mouth
it came into the world itching to have one of your panic attacks. your father
with his overexposure
to abandonment
called its body
bottled water from the town of torn muscles.
fear was a cigarette case and fear was also a lunchbox. teeth
were part of a shadow
census
operating
in a flood
of milk.
it cheered horribly. it cheered and a bug bite became a birthmark.
give me
the gift
of sorrow
the strongman’s
pencil
–
in the purgatory
of spaced out
animals, piss
on the short
straw
–
tell me I’m not surrounded
–
show to my brother
youtube videos
of our mother
sleeping
on her father’s
back
–
say something in my sister’s mouth
–
scrub me
from the shoemaker’s dream
with a rock
the rock
I deserve
~
my author spotlight on LULU is here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
~
my most recent full length collections are:
Eating the Animal Back to Life
Drone & Chickenhouse
earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from
and from them / some poems:
{naming ceremony}
I was born
impossibly born
addicted
to the sound
of footsteps.
god
loves the woman
who makes the bed
of his last
believer.
{themes for orphan}
you will never be
a virus
–
the animal’s moment of bliss
before it is named
–
masturbation
as the seizure
had
by hologram
–
the cyclone
that makes a baby
you can’t
put down
{tautologies}
an infant with still hands is said to be fingerpainting in hell. a man who wears a hat to bed is said to give god hair. a boy who strings up dead rabbits left and right is said to be fighting a toothache. a girl who punches herself in the nose is said to be a plain woman who on roller skates entered a strange traffic of hearse and horse as two of her mother’s footsteps.
{grace period}
language keeps us from understanding the world.
spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male
white
emulation-delayed
male
writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-
infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.
{small ones}
loss goes unnoticed.
I made for you
a scarecrow
from the textbook
violence
of a midwestern
poltergeist
as lightning
took a step
from the baby
I crawled
beside.
be
not memorably
young.
{motif}
again, we have given the baby too much credit. these are simply the gods I grew up without. here is my son serenading the seizures his mother salvaged from the praying I do for my hands. here he is repeatedly not. here is yours the psalmic nonverbal. here they are shadows limiting death’s vocab in a tiny tent not crawling with legs of lamb.
{catalyst}
he has the look of a woman with a place to die. he grounds my father with a sickness reserved for flying creatures. he owns nothing. his people are a hospital my mother calls one too many. his prayers replenish absence. he counts in the garden an invisible populace whose dreams my dreams were having.
~
/ books, as such:
[eating the animal back to life]
10.00
315 pages
published July 2015
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html
of which Kazim Ali says:
Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, kingsoftrain.wordpress.com. He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself and so the only place you can get his books is here. All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.
(from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)
~
[Drone
& Chickenhouse]
6.00
84 pages
published October 2015
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/drone-chickenhouse/paperback/product-22390933.html
~
[earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from]
9.00
98 pages
published December 2015
~ earth is part earth and there’s a hole in the sound I made you from ~
new collection of poems, 98 pages, 9.00
book preview on site is book entire…if interested in reviewing, will send a copy your way, make request as such to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
I don’t care that you know I’m ending the year on the word ‘from’.
some poems from said collection:
~
(—)
licking its wounds it is still an animal.
what does it mourn?
the lack reach of my tongue?
me / me I have
lost my sense of a peopled earth.
~
~ warm body ~
her nightmare
from the era
of hibernation
revolves around
a baseball
made
by her husband
from the cobwebs
found
soaking
in the mouths
of babes
(mouths)
dry
from dreaming
of the sponge
bathed
by god
in the egg
of a spotless
crow
~
~ drawn ~
because in its guts, poetry knew it was born of two miscalculations. creating god was all for nothing. I think I make my parents lonely.
how many last words are there?
I don’t mean to suggest
my weapon
is heavy.
before every meal
a voice tells me
in its best
voice
impression
that some bombs
don’t
go off. this means eat.
bait is a bird from a brother’s birdwatching dream.
it is sad like seeing a fetus
in the dark
is sad.
have we failed to water god?
the virgin boy is waiting for it to dry, it
being
the puppet’s
toothbrush. his lover
a practitioner
of moral sadness
knows the body as a representation
of surgeries none perform
and the future
as historically
inaccurate. where we’ve met before
I’ve narrowed down
to isolation. was there I last lost mother
with her hacksaw and chair
dreamily approaching
a tire swing
as if the human voice
on any land
letting go
of god
could raise
a tree.
to those of yours
who’ve died
I give
my prayer
of being better
in one-on-one
situations. if god is god,
let me become
the woman
I got
the idea
from.
what is it
dissolves
in the mother’s
foreseeable
presence?
faith
a flashback
god
is having.
I am kicking myself over the surprise my brain ruined. nearby, a man misremembers his trip to heaven while a woman blames herself for making it doubly hard to leave. the size of my death is the size of any deer would die for a sugarcube. my father can’t find what he’s wearing that isn’t his. mother she is off buying foods that share a ghost. I call to my sister but know openly she hasn’t been deaf from the day god believed her legs were part frog. I have not heard of the spoon that has a past. something in my stomach wants to see a star.
kingsoftrain 