anyone with sight was put here to warn my son. the past is the past of no sudden moves. the future is the language god uses to hallucinate. if I remember correctly, memory is the safe word my father avoids to make his presence known. touch is the cage in all things mom.
1976
her ghost
on standby
my mother
throws a phone
at the man
reaching
for his gun
while my father
closes
in a prison
yard
the white
bible
he’s named
the gospel
of the bad
knee
and swears
to carry
my voice
and with it
me
I am not a warm person. different gods, none exist. did this really happen? the things I counted myself as a person passing were longer than I thought. someone kissed jesus on the ear before he could get from bad fish the poisoning that took your mother from hers. now is the act of stuffing a picnic blanket into a basket of doll grief and then is the fossil of suffering that bones invisibility for daring to redress the father of great avoidance about the loss of behavior in his boys of sudden things. what I do I don’t when gutting a stork.
~
mine are here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
~
and, some poems from my latest, ~ Eating the Animal Back to Life ~ :
[the alien wept but was not heard weeping]
not all
drones
dream
of you
[themes for patience]
I am half
the survivor
I ate for.
I took my son to a bowling alley and gave him an egg.
my daughter’s sense of touch
was so delayed
she lost sleep
thinking
of all the things that had turned into her hands.
communion was god’s plan to leave heaven.
[truancies]
pain is under the impression it’s on the move.
the brain
a fire
that cannot
spread.
in a world of non-competitive
seizing
I show my son
how to waste
his hand
on the hand
signal
that called away
vandalism’s
angel.
[heyday]
after many nights spent praying to my mom, gender was my only option. by some miraculous failure of successive thought, I watched as I vanished before I could become the living proof I needed to circumvent nostalgia. does god still control himself in front of children? you made a robot from the parts of a peeping tom.
[background stories]
in one car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. in another, my sister takes photos of her dog. dying is a chew toy. be as unmoved as your attackers.
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.
touch is a sign of weakness. my father opens his mouth after speaking. meanwhile, miracle, it occurs to me in separate car accidents that bringing me to my son in god is less an undertaking than that of arming the man who transports a stopwatch to a cemetery. do we live the lives of those experimenting? beauty is not alone. suppose it knows.
we keep it like god
the wheelchair
you’ve outgrown…
I myself
leave
the feast of absence
to clean
my tongue
that it remain
not unlike
a room
in your mother…
if I fail
three times
to haunt
a word
oh well…
I have nothing to shake
from death
their doll
death
the distance between my brother and a random sister
if
what they struggle
to share
is darkness
their childhood
blanket…
–
realistic depictions of my mother watching films
–
also
for a shy
god
my mother
divining
from belly
mud
trends
in angel
fashion
–
me
liking only
the me
I see
in mirrors
Kazim Ali, on Barton Smock’s Eating the Animal Back to Life:
(from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)
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.
~
book is here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html
~
some poems from said book:
[opening line from a year with mother]
it crawled out of me and knew your birthday
[scarecrow and the lottery]
I can’t make heads or tails of your fervor. I can’t make body. I put a hole in my father and through it watch my mother eat her weight in god. I want what my siblings have. each other, game shows, memory. indigenous amnesia.
[extramural (iii)]
the fireplace is on drugs. get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.
–
on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold. jesus-on-a-stick. the crown of thorns, extra. I close my eyes. I dare the brain. the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.
–
brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful. I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams*
*dreams only
–
everything happened in 1985. words don’t mean. numbers mean. tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.
–
the wind is asleep. it sleeps outside.
[extramural (v)]
the people are looking for something that tells them what to show. my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees. at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends. a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth. grief is a good listener.
[Franz]
two girls replace two boys and continue the good work of making a cripple sandwich.
I become a woman to watch my mother die.
father
he jumps
less and less
rope.
things come in three raccoons
to rearrange
a rabbit.
a baby avoids the plague
like a first
word
amen.
brother gives hell to my sense of place.
sex as something that has an end.
evidence of god
provided
to beings
of proof.
I will offer that I had children
because I myself
could not
shun
authority. post-harm
pick a word
you’ve heard
me say.
kingsoftrain 