kingsoftrain

from self published collection ‘father, footrace, fistfight’ (poems, June 2014)

http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/father-footrace-fistfight/paperback/product-21672373.html

book faith

the mother is first a toppled statue
and then a runaway
with a pillow
whose father
died
out of context
on the stone steps
of a large library
hours before
it opened
all because
her cotton ball
stopped
beating

I weigh, wind, almost nothing

closer inspection
reveals
my lover’s cigarette
to be unlit
as he waits
outside
the madhouse
I rob

dream’s hour

the long married man and woman nightly swallow string from the same ball of yarn. the man is pleased to have recently weaned himself from flashing the public by way of privately showing his tongue to the aquarium pets left alive. the woman is pleased to exist as god’s only means of communication with her husband. the two keep to themselves until everyone in the world is crying and then share a moment with their talented baby.

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.

good clean fun

mouth pain.

dreamboat.

screen door
as hyphen.

god
as no
contact

with the inside
world.

pathos

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

boat

there is a god but don’t encourage him. my father means it tenderly. in his attic a painting of a park scene has in it a woman without feet sitting on a bench. without feet because his young mind couldn’t settle on them bare. in the end it seems the wild dog has licked them away. attic that in a drought of weeping became a basement. our poverty was given an oar. my past has a past.