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.
from self-published collection Misreckon (December 2014)
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/misreckon/paperback/product-21954246.html
respite
history is a timeline of appetite. I have rubber bands at the ready for when my mother yawns. I cover my baby brother like a grenade. he was born without the potential for further muscle tone. father calls what I do context. I appear like a bruise into a delayed game of hot potato. my sister’s hands are an oven mitt’s dream. I know you’re a hitchhiker and your girlfriend a cannibal but here we suck our thumbs.
ward
the zero courage
it takes
to be
in pain. or to be
for that matter
born. it has devoured
by now
my son’s
vow
of silence. but he had
didn’t he
a moment
while the animal
ate.
clear heads
while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.
fascinations of the upright
above
a ramshackle
transmitter
is my father’s
bright
mind.
the angel’s mouth is a mouth to feed.
a man
packs a baby
in snow.
shitstorm
he beats the mother and calls it practice. the washer breaks and he throws the clothes into a full tub and stomps on them while smoking a cigarette. he provokes my image to send him back to his rightful nose. my thick skull is high on my spit.
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.
skip
the boy balances a basketball on his head outside his father’s bar. his mother is somewhere a girl set to play the moon in her school’s version of talent night. his sister is giving birth so calmly her midwife is a male blown away by the fact that it’s only her second time wearing the blindfold I wore to fish. his brother is in therapy to process the loss of others who think we’re gods when we smoke.
nuclei
my mother as a young woman once attempted
in the car of the train her father took to work
to eat her hands.
it was a story she put an end to
but not before
I lost a tooth
putting my baby
brother’s
feet
in my mouth
to keep
them warm.
my brother as a baby
was far
too small. one might say
he had the brain
of a snake.
wrapped in a sheet from my mother’s bed, I make my way to the outhouse to show my brother there is a future in smuggling the skin of god. my father is scraping leaves into an empty pool and the earth with a rake. if death speaks briefly, I am in two places that cannot exist without exposure. gone long, it spoke once on the loss of loss.
dad loses a brother while drawing a straight line for a haunted circle
–
I tell
two jokes
well
in the shadow
I’m in
–
no one replaces my father like my father
it is god’s job to keep the world flat. I stand on a wheelchair to change a light bulb while my brother goes down a hill on the sled sister disappeared from. my parents are the bread and body of arguing sweetly. they eat only when there is more food than can be thrown away. I am hoping the sled does for my brother the nothing it did for me.
the blood
the spiritual
eyesore
of the woman’s
body
mirror
–
here is what it said, it said
I think
I have
a mother
whose hands
he tells
apart
–
christ I’m close to my face
the book is a mourning vessel for what its reader stands to lose. I have a father for every type of silence.
from the double vision of a dead parent’s dream shiner
to reflections
on the body
art
of departure,
long live possession.
a demon with three days to live is given to my father’s body. in this, father finds luck to be neutral. mother is a good explosion, brother is a bad. when the dust settles, sister can see the baby in her stomach. it is my belief and it is also god’s that our food is the food we forgot to poison. to pray, I am left with little more than an animal’s halo and two representations of what you were not seriously clawed by. in your sleep, you move me into mine. a finger shows itself to the back of my throat.
when what we thought
had entered
our father
left
we used him
as an alarm
god is coming
and mom
is vacuuming
stones
kingsoftrain 