kingsoftrain

1/6/24

this dream where an owl as big as a mouse lives with a mouse in the mouse's hole and they share a scratched up plate that looks like something a microscope would eat off of and for once I don't really know who I am in the dream beyond maybe just in the theater making sure I don't drink too much because when I drink too much I miss scenes but inevitably I miss a few scenes and I come back to the mouse and the owl fighting over the plate and the mouse kicks the owl out and says this wasn't normal anyway and of course the mouse says all this without speaking and it's only when the owl doesn't leave that the mouse realizes the owl isn't real and the problem with this realization is that the mouse then thinks all owls aren't real and I can see where this is going and so can you and I told a friend about this dream and he said dreams don't usually have a moral or end that way and the real end of the dream is that I don't have friends and now we're both sad

2/25/24

okay so it's Sunday afternoon and I got gone a little early and this next week at work is gonna be A THING but I have some thoughts on thoughts that are inner and outer and they are about death and grandparents and marriages but I'm not sure that is going to be enough or even apparent BUT here I go...today I was trying to pick with my daughter a father/daughter song for her wedding in June and I KNOW it is a strange and gendered and traditionally odd thing bc we should ALL BE DANCING WHEN THOSE WE LOVE ARE LOVED but also fuck all that I just want to be face to face with my daughter while a cool song plays and that isn't wrong BUT anyway back to my original post point etc etc etc I lost sooooo much time last year and my daughter was in Ireland and I didn't want her to worry so I didn't really check in with her while I was sick bc I thought correctly she needed to be someone outside of her parents or something oh lord I am not being very progressive in my wording but STAY WITH ME so in thinking of a song I had Timmy on me last night and he was trying to fall asleep without having issues breathing and I somehow got on a strange groove of TikTok marriage toasts and I got sad bc everyone is rich and did alot of great shit with their daughters in other places and me and my daughter were always kind of in the same place doing the same things and that meant alot of toys and set-ups and battles and folk songs and me reading The Nation and The Weekly Standard to find some sort of median and GUESS WHAT there isn't one except to be an actual progressive and actual helpless progressive BUT ANYWAY it got me thinking about time and how time doesn't change except to say it's time to change and anyway our father/daughter song will be by Josh Ritter and I have to say something about me being sick last year and about Gen being sick this year and that thing is this...we are two different people who learn differently and have seen death on both sides and on the same side and she was there for me when I was sick LIKE REALLY FUCKING THERE and I will be there differently for her this year and I think that's why my grandfather died right after my grandmother bc they were there for every difference and worked really hard to make it the same for each other or something or something and after that my aunt died suddenly and she was if anything A DEFENDER OF FAMILY and I think she kept my grandparents alive long enough for them to be seen and that is an immortal thing how did this get here but also I know how this got here and am going to call it a place

My childhood was one of mothers and fathers singing in church, of outdoor dogs loyal and absent, of brothers keeping their teeth, keeping their promises, keeping score. So, a childhood of mimicry, closeness, and impermanence. I was cared for in small spaces and I worried about the bigger picture and who or what might take its photo. I wrote about death before death happened, and wrote toward faith while hearing the covered footfalls of god. Essentially, I copied. Then, death or the fear of death came for real where god did or would not. And, in that, my phobias, obsessions, and writings lost weight in a future based on past gravity. And, for it, were more seen. Purpose is abstract, but can render one precisely. I saw myself, and it was me.

I am drawn to blank space and, via poetry, I trade in how that blank space carries over from image into dream. Great avoidances, sudden things. The vulgar, the viral. I self-publish most of my work, and have had a few poetry collections published by presses. I am most excited at the moment about my collection ‘Wasp, gasp.’ which was just published in November 2023 by Incunabula Media, with cover art by my son Noah Michael Smock.

I am a father of four, and my youngest has a rare progressive disease called Vici Syndrome, so time is a thing that can go very backward very quickly. Self-publishing has given me the illusion of control over my hallucinations, and has allowed me to stop time with time.

To me, interrogating the following three things has guided me the most in clearing the correct space for my poems to land: God, death, and language. The existence and non-existence of all three is what allows those who are creator-less to create. You don’t have to know what you think. But you do have to give thought to its syllables and silence. As long as you’re still questioning, you’ll be able to creatively ask.

We do not live in unreal times. We never have. The animal kingdom kindly gave us, gives us, god. The absurd is a manifesto that the dream erases while protesting the afterlife of sleep. You've seen the bodies, gone, mid-ghost. My receipt is a rib, but which one. Surrealism steals the past from nostalgia. It's not an escape. It's a sustainable staying. A personal ruin that ruins nothing. My love for transformation is unchanged. Angels hate art. 

Letter 081424 

Dear Ethan Hawke

In the dream I am reading to myself as a child from a book called all the places my suicide has taken me. It does not make me sad but I’m awake somewhere. Televisions are where mirrors go to paint. Mothers lose their sense of smell above too many unmarked infants. In the dream a surgeon emerges from the high corn and coughs up another’s blood. Above the dream, we’ve a surplus of resurrection. Mourning mourns a revocable loss. 

Death has more skin than god. 

Touch 
makes more noise.

This isn't anywhere any longer, so am putting it here. Chapbook from 2021, SKIN TO SKIN IN AN UNMARKED LIFE, formerly published by Trainwreck Press, which is no more.

~

Skin To Skin In An Unmarked Life

~

MY SON FORGETS HIS SECRET IDENTITY BUT REMEMBERS WHO I’VE TOLD

Grief cuts itself from the movie it wants to make about wind. I design, sometimes, hats in a dream. I don’t mean every word. I thought loneliness would be taller, that’s all. Not this god who knows we exist.

~~~~~
 
SOME OF THESE CHURCHES AREN’T MINE

I don’t have anything poetic to say about names beyond that we killed the animals in the wrong order. I remember a rabbit disguised as milk as clearly as my dog does a dream of a whale moaning a verse from its lonely size into a bullet hole meant for something smaller. I’m not sure that wordplay tricks trauma out of its inheritance, though suppose it’s possible that incompletely by accident the fleeing angels of our absence return harm over and over without a scratch to a satellite touching itself in a photograph developed by god’s avoidance. In a town for homesick people who use sex as a lamp, there’s a first time for everything except recognition.

~~~~~
 
AS IF SNOW WAS TOLD TO FINISH SNOW

Loss gets older and befriends its childless parents without knowing which of them placed a glass of toy water beside mirror’s bed for the you in all those video games where I stopped moving

~~~~~
 
BONES FROM AN EXTRA MOON

father making book covers in the nude

his longhand moving in the veins of a giant

his name an ant sleeping in the center of a band-aid

what if the end stops coming

a crow is not a star

the eyes know nothing
but know it first

loss is the salt of now

~~~~~
 
NO GREAT TURTLE TO STRAIGHTEN THE DEAD

no great turtle
to straighten
the dead
no
not here
in Ohio

an Ohio
that eats
its weight
in spiders
an Ohio

of slow
obsessions
effortless
sorrows

a lifejacket
on fire
a pebble
named
after blood’s
ear
a thunderclap

the late
crawl
of a dizzy
child

~~~~~
 
A SLOW LAND

in the mother’s dream
a brother and a sister
watch a movie
without a name
a movie that between them
is called
This Is Not
A Dream
there’s no one
in the movie
water holds an animal
and sometimes
there are buildings
that buildings
describe
death gets to name every baby but its own

~~~~~
 
FAR NOTES

In my son’s eye an unnoticed lamb has forgotten which eye

gets a lamb

-

was there a moment I was wanted

past life and all, was there

a nest a whale, has this

been me
in a mothered

before)

(looking at a pill while picking a flower

time
temporary

~~~~~
 
BLOOD NOTES

there is no earlier dream
no slipping
from the past

of every beast we haven’t eaten

-

god has two sticks
dog
and echo

-

all snow was born in a cigarette

~~~~~
 
BLOOD NOTES

Loss isn’t the only child of death,
but is the most spoiled.

-

Disappearance has its limits.

-

Animals
don’t waste
their pain.

-

Sex remembers death as the skinner of sleep.

-

Touch invents a past it can fix.

~~~~~
 
SECOND NOTES

a birthmark the shape of a bird’s cough
inside of which a wound
is bidding
on a shadow…

I don’t know when sleep became the movie I put on to fall asleep.

children are the past.

~~~~~
 
FIRST NOTES

sleep became sleep when it missed its audition for death. what keeps a mouth in place? think loneliness, say dream.

-

what the ghost does over and over is bring suicide into the story of angel.

-

when you have no one, creation devours your discovered hungers.

eat fast, and let god believe.

~~~~~
 
THE CHILDREN DON’T LISTEN TO RUMORS OF THEIR HUNGER

The children they dig a hole and give the hole a name and a backache. They ask was I ever their age and slip a housefire-in-a-seashell under the pillow of an endless angel. It’s not what I say but in truth the older a thing gets, the younger its god.

~~~~~
 
COUNTRY SILENCE

has a father worshiping a balloon animal and a mother caring in her sleep for sleep. has a sick son relearning in church how long a past life lasts. has you writing this beside the ghost of a fish to a god whose thoughts on children have changed. has in it no maker who hasn’t already made field recordings for those who miss emergency rooms. has in it owls lost in the attention span of the gentle. owls born with all their teeth.

~~~~~
 
INTERIORITY

A mid-day animal on land dumbstruck by the holy effort it takes to forget god. The nocturnal grief of apples. Alien and angel having a quiet moment before abducting from the high-dive our least favorite swimmer. The naming of the star my cigarettes worship. A pawprint sleeping on a heartbroken whale.

~~~~~
 
BLISS NOTES

I live in the future with an animal known to predict nothing.

It runs out of food when I forget what it eats.

-

In my wrist, the heartbeat hidden from me
by my ears.

-

Eye:
The first fossil of my blankness

-

God only takes suicides.

~~~~~
 
SLOW MISSINGS

fog’s invisible feast, a flashlight

kissing the itch on the face
of god, the toy

baths our machines worship, the hunger

that returns my ear to my father’s
stomach, the soundless

fasting
of owls, the first camera

that knew what would happen

~~~~~
 
ATTENDANCES

A palm overtaken by the long audience of touch, a hand

left for god
by a spider, a child

packing snow into the dream of a mother’s knee,

a shadow
eaten by a rock, a rock

eating nothing
in a church, the angel

assigned
to a lost
microscope, the order

in which
we’re imagined

~~~~~
 
ABLEIST JOKES ABOUT THE MOON
 
Tracing his toes, my son breaks a bone in his finger.
 
It’s scary because things mean more in a simulation.
 
Somewhere in his body his body wonders
if it’s unguessed by god or by ghost.
 
Bath. Both.
 
Sabotage time not yet

~~~~~
 
LOCATION NOTES

It was sick for three minutes and lived for eight. I haven’t seen a picture in so long that I’m not sure you’d know me unless I was there. The dream is using us to remember god.

-

We weren’t alive long enough to stop pretending we’d lived. If you don’t have something in your hand, don’t get a dog. I open my mouth but am still saying star.

-

The interior life enters heaven here or there in a bitemark. No splinter leaves a painted church. Distance is one meal. Longing, a puzzle.

-

The deathplace. Our losskiss. The inventors of déjà vu dropping everything for touch. Touch with its borrowed memory and urgent past. No one mistaking noon for none.

~~~~~
 
LOCATION NOTES

Darkness never gets to every creature. I like that it tries. A cigarette taking sad thoughts from a ghost made of breathing. The ant-same memories of a toddler.

God doesn’t change, and knows it.

-

Do as nothingness has done
and cover
that scar
with god

-

There is a room
that knows
where you die

~~~~~
 
LOCATION NOTES

As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church

-

I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep

-

No animals were created in the making of this harm

~~~~~
 
LOCATION NOTES

In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.

-

Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.

~~~~~
 
SCARED OF MY SON’S BODY

there is in fact a time

exactly like
the present

~~~~~
 
AS ALONE

as aliens needing god

~~~~~
 
LAST NOTES

again we speak

(they are making
it now)

the forgetful
weapon

Letter 081124

Dear Ethan Hawke

I don’t write to anyone. I am hated. In photos I am the photographer’s ghost. In the dream I wear a girl’s bathing suit and someone shoots me in the foot. This is how I learn to swim. Thigh is a perfect word. The way it dies in the mouth. Mouth is dead. Who can tell. Only god. In Ohio at every fair the young say eat me until I’m young. We make jokes about crowhio and about the baby’s stomach born without an inside voice. The spider in my ear comes out a wasp. I don’t want my kids to see me do anything. Spiders get toothaches and angels, erections. Wasp is on its own.