Nothing is working.
Here are some photos
of my children.
I need them
like I need
them.
I wanted to write very one long beauty that had a small shadow a bomb’s shadow that did not belong to death but smelled like sleep one long very
beauty.
Nothing is working. Don’t have kids
who write
Some CITY poems from my self-published collection ‘untouched in the capital of soon’
untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021
collection is pay-what-you-want and can be purchased
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com
~
city 13
God wasn't there when image called off its search
city 14
A photo
eats better
than a mirror
city 15
I don't imagine that I'll ever be
as angry
as every
third wolf
city 16
The detail that got away from death
was almost perfect
But I should not
have understood
your poem
city 19
Time
an exit wound that god closes with our need to miss a creator
city 20
Death
still thinks
my son
is fast
city 21
Future is the part of the snake the astronauts eat last.
city 32
sleep cries itself to death
I wrote
a poem
similar
to the poem
below
You love
another
city 36
A running shower that prays impossibly on the body of our lowest sibling for the return of a bomb-maker's homesick drone
city 37
An angel burned for soundproofing crows
city 40
The dream on its deathbed
sees a film
on emptiness
city 41
Animals pretend to live here
But don't
eat much
city 44
Keeping the baby despite its perfection
city 46
A paper airplane on fire in a helpless mirror
city 57 or 58
A puppeteer rubbing her hands over a book of spells for the untouched
A shy thief whose items change shape
city 59
Practice
forgetting
city 60
(how to starve a microscope in god's museum)
city 69
Crow, with seashell
city 70 or 71
The short past of my body in the small
of yours
A baby chewing on its hand in pile of leaves
city 72 and 73
The boy has one mouse
All named
Cigarette
city 74
In its shadow grief the window
in the open
Mirror
city 77
Occasionally the odd ghost that worships
blood and glue
city 78
I can't always find the year I believed in god
city 79
Instead something joins the body
And two
places
Die
city 80
How quietly they eat
This far, even
From the birdwatcher's strangled son
city 81
I forget to eat and god says I am swimming
city 115
Ballet or the lost
mind
of a snowstorm
city 116
Oh how gone it is the ghostjoy of lighting a mother's cigarette in a dream that gets my mouth wrong
city 121
My memory isn't what it will be.
Povertavoid, avidsad, handbefore.
She wants a flowermysonisdead.
city 122
We get our thunder from snow's dream.
A baby
invents
kneeling
with a fork and an outlet.
The wind is slowly eaten
by what
city 123
There's not much to know, really.
The puppeteer sleeps all day
and the fisherman
all night.
Hide your hair in your mouth.
city 126
I can't be around people who know how to swim. It's not, I know, the best way to start a city. God wants to be alive all the time. Everything in my body is recent.
You’re dying.
Tell me what you see.
Whatever happened to me isn’t happening now. I can’t take you there. I can’t take you there, but I can be a place. Bruises hold auditions in hell. Every newborn beast sets a record for going the longest without touching the earth. My son was here before we knew he was sick. I don’t talk much. Silence is a color that form hides from shape in a dream where god feels loss for more than three days. There are creatures in heaven that will follow you out.
in this photograph
of god
killing god
that no one
took
how many children
live
to guess
God wanted to leave a mark.
A mark. Not a god-
sized
mark.
I thought poetry would keep me from writing.
I do everything without my body.
I was pulled
from a sound
my mother
couldn’t make.
The longer the waiting
the faster
the aftermath.
Your kid is dead and was seen
dead
by thousands.
How many
likes
make
a past-
Pick up a gun
or scream
I’ll find you
I take my pulse three times
before I know
what I’m doing
kingsoftrain 