NO SHAPE TO CRY INSIDE OF
The people started naming their bodies
GOD
a color
terrified
of waiting
mistaken
for the color
of waiting
~~~~~
TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.
can be purchased via:
paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
We are never more than our longing for a past life.
I am moved
again
by one
disappearance.
Angels
every night
take a shape
from a dream.
A mother’s, a father’s.
Smoke yourself small.
TELL 5PM IT'S GOD SOMEWHERE
poems, Barton Smock
125 pages
October 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock
Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.
can be purchased via:
paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
A reading, here
Teeth for people who kill an animal for its sound. Teeth for two boys fighting over the color red. Teeth for my piano playing sister agonizing over the childhood of my last life. Teeth for my mother and teeth in the cigarette box of an unshaken priest. Teeth in the bread, teeth in the blood. In the meal that keeps me on earth. Teeth. A tooth. A baby. Oldest thing that we hold.
A spider was given a way of crying for its broken time machine
Pain
moves god
around
You can say Palestine now
to a doll
of a doll
that is crushed
A white plate washed in heaven. Mirror with a broken heart. Nothing's ghost freezing inside of a star. Pray away the shyness, y'all. That chicken there dreamed its head off.
The cops are beating a guy who says mom mom mom and the cops in their motherlessness get more mad. Artistic, faithful, wtf. Some plastic in us that makes us want heaven. My brothers smoke cigarettes or faint doing math. Time is a sick angel but not the sickest. What this means to snow is Franz I don’t have the details. I think my love is real.
Eating fast food syncs nostalgia to the heart of grief. You can’t hit a deer that doesn’t get out of the way. I thought at first I’d lost my grandparents, my aunt, my my. But then they lost me. Dear afterlife, here is the moon. I order online both suicide and longing then wait for a song about drinking in a haunted house to end. We’ve never met and I don’t know how much I miss you. Everything god touches god didn’t make. There are bird bones unbroken in the breadmaker’s mouth. If it’s a bathroom machine and not just a bathroom, you can stand in there handing out slow cigarettes to people who can’t look at you. Angels knew there’d be children, sure. Detailed children betray us all. Stop loving my son. Take a miracle away from a photograph. Had those two left the garden with everyone else, imagine. What we wouldn’t need. Pain tells time by what god hurts.
I get sad and write on myself.
Watch hunger like it’s a tattoo god is practicing.
Is this the life to say goodbye from?
We have to give these guns to someone.
kingsoftrain 