[horseface]
you strike me as an invasive listener. I love your body. loving mine doesn’t mean I’m not okay wearing too many clothes. does this make me look alone? like, crucifix-on-the-dashboard alone? my mother fell for my father because he couldn’t find a finger to write with. horror movies lift me from poverty into a long period of healing followed by a jump scare. earlier, before you bled into a corncob, my brain had you as a spider spinning an infant. if it pleases god, I’d like to go somewhere time hasn’t been.
[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.
[notes to abuser]
I have had to tell time using only repetition. there is a tattoo I want on a body I don’t. I can see what you see in me. none of my sounds echo. I have a son. I prepare for him past meals that leave nothing untouched hoping he’ll learn to chew on his own. he has three rooms upstairs and three down. when his bed can’t move, he says something to a door.
[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.
[ice fishers of men]
exit music for stop-motion departures.
a son
a dying breed
of circle.
can light
perfect
a shadow?
[nature shots for baby]
mother’s inhaler is what you called the mirror mother held to size her mouth. I was in her purse when she was taken. I don’t know how it is I know things. bones in the stomach of god.
[debut]
the mechanics of the beheading begin in isolation.
exiled from what it bumps into, a form
aches
for scarecrow.
my mother’s dream doesn’t burn.
[anterior]
three sisters
old enough to date
enter a house
their father
can’t find. a bit of my mother
is seen
in this woman
going out of her way
to give satan
directions. a drug dog
on its last legs
inspects a used
vacuum cleaner, the lawnmower
of lost
men.
[praise act]
you pull a reddish pup like a sled through a town that surrounds you.
I think you are my brother but more importantly you think I am yours.
you feel not like yourself but like a tooth you belong to.
up ahead, we work together.
I pop myself in the mouth with our father to achieve a crisis of no faith.
our father?
he is made mostly of the words that display my words.
[care] for Timothy
when you are
visibly
healthy
I will sit blindfolded
beneath a tin roof
and wait for rain
that I might know
what you hear
in your drifting
basket
about which
pluck
the lips
of those
fish
I thought
I had come
to feed
[there are those we could not evacuate]
father sees the doll in a striptease window.
mother touches the doll
with kid gloves
that fit.
brother hears the doll
brushing the teeth
of its newer
version.
the doll’s feet stick out
from under a hotel bed
marooned
in the ceiling’s
mirror.
thinking the doll has vomited
sister gags.
[honeymoon]
he emerges from the driver’s side of his stalled minivan as if you’ve been given too much information. he holds a hammer in the looseness of his stung left hand. for a moment it seems he’ll attack windows. instead, he cries. his shoulders give him away. not a car horn sounds. this is a kindness. someone has an egg timer. I locate the itch thrown off course by my lover’s legs and imagine her happy. across town a silent alarm is pressed by the anonymous smoker of wedding cigarettes. the bomb squad arrives before the bomb squad knows it and you join
this bomb squad.
[deceptively simple abominations (vii)]
the twinkle in your mother’s eyes alerts god. my thoughts are abused. our fathers live separately. will we live, also, alone? surely. to any inquiry, I am checking for survivors. it’s a premature periphery, but a baby just floated by in an incubator. the townspeople look like candles on the water. chase is a kind of following. the upper body of the minotaur lost everything.
~
all poems by barton smock, from different collections available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
as long as others
have food
there is grief
to imagine
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.
infant boy, god gave your body all the bone it can hide.
bite me
when your teeth
are hot.
the contact high I get from sleep. an illness
that comes
and goes.
from ~The Blood You Don’t See Is Fake~ selected poems (September 2013)
[multitudes]
oh, here they are. the interested persons we will find later. for now, this field. my gestural father holding a broom for what he calls the welcome mat of exodus. if my mother is watching it is because she long ago dropped birds from a single passenger plane. if instead she is privately seen by god, then the whole bird thing was a bit of a stretch. in memory alone I am alone.
[another nude]
in such times, it is constantly 2am. a friend pulls carefully at your ear. a friend’s thumb is a hologram of a thumb. you are being told that what you’re about to be told is highly confidential. because it’s dark, and because your bed is the prize winning bed of a formerly dethroned insomniac, you are nothing if not empowered to listen. your friend’s tongue redacts the parts of your body that have been marked. this is done in secret. what you’re hearing right now was scored some time ago. when things were the same.
[word of the devil’s death]
my mother and father cower under the kitchen table and my brothers are dead. my father has clammed up since asking me to tell him something he can take to his grave. this last week I’ve mastered placing my ear on the table in such a way I hear what I am supposed to do. impossible things that are no longer terrible. dispatches from a simpler region. for example, hack your roommate’s youtube account. also, poison the non-pregnant. my baby sister laughs with me when I say some of these aloud. she believes the table is possessed by the devil’s ghost. her beliefs are clear and specific. the ghost thinks itself the actual devil, and will need a good amount of therapy.
[men statuesque]
I am struck by the urge to pray.
my trauma has yet to occur.
the stress my father knows
knew his hands
as he waved them in front of nothing
on a tarmac obscured by speech.
night is a ruined crow.
I see the city as possibly bombed.
[steganography]
every day is a scar’s birthday. this is how I am able to start most of your sentences. I praise your god, you worry, and worry keeps him from finding out. on the day you started talking the rooms were horrified. the termites fled your blood. a cold stone appeared outside beside a stick. the home’s most loved dog died without spatial awareness. your mother began to compose a series of poems by Franz Wright. for inspiration she put her hands in the dog and in doing so dropped a sack of black groceries. a thing that changed over time rolled into your father’s mouth.
[the wave]
we let the phone ring out because it keeps the babies quiet. we have this dance we do to straighten side leaning semi-trailer trucks. the sports we play require that one’s sickness occur only when it’s run through the others. we limp beside any creature that limps. the great romance of a complete thought is something our parents plan to leave each other. our father is two mathematicians who argue. our mother says her feet feel as if they’re still in prison for what she’ll take to her grave. our guesses mean little because they are facts. at school we are voted on and kissable. if you see us coming, sex is a small unplugged television on top of a small casket. details belong to god.
[fixture]
dying of young age, your brother nurses at the breast of the stage hand’s version of a mother. the stage hand is off arguing with a lamp on the impossibility of attracting moths. beside a tall cake, a groom with lockjaw and a stiff neck has to take life’s high point on faith. if you remember, brother made for the groom a bible so light it could be held by a cobweb. and then it was.
~~~~~~~~~~
from ~father, footrace, fistfight~ selected poems (June 2014)
[future stabbings]
you take photos of men and women who aren’t all there. you post the photos while your dog barks. you doze on a hot day. your mom calls to tell you about the spider in her eye and while she talks you look for your dog. your mom thinks you sound desperate though you’ve said nothing. you go outside and see your dog in the backseat of a parked car. the car is not yours. your mom has the hiccups and says the first part of goodbye.
[dog years]
the longer
I grieve
the more
[crystal]
a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.
it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.
you know your father
is a night owl.
[mendicant]
this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house
–
to some
you’re the giant
you’re not
–
hearing isn’t for everyone
–
a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…
–
hurt
what you know
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
from ~Eating the Animal Back to Life~ full length poetry collection (July 2015)
[uppers]
god gets fucked-up about which hair to harm on your head. in some, this goes on for years. I have a lucky razor, a father who’s blind in one hand, and a suicidal thought that scares me to death in front of cops. my last meal came to me on a toothbrush.
[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
[accession]
starvation
is the invisible
cannibal’s
birthmark.
water
is nothing’s
blood.
~~~~~~~~~~
all books available here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad
the childish
babies
of loss
older
than we’ve ever
been
the quiet woman mothers a silence gone rogue
and names
her kid
to death
if I had an animal
I’d poke it awake
father
and cut myself
in front
of your mother’s
dream
