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December 2, 2023 / barton smock

thunder hears nothing and this is the number of drinks it takes to like me

I dream myself into a fact about god

How to heal
your sick
son: Wait
his whole life
to miss him
then don’t

In Ohio
we kill
our dead

November 30, 2023 / barton smock

in slow pain dying the wrong death I am asleep outside of a church founded by two forgotten search parties

Body
isn’t far
from boy

Silence skips my son like a letter

Mirror ain’t deep but mirror can hear my unclear twin
breathing
erased
ice

Scrape god from a sentence that god has read

November 28, 2023 / barton smock

a frog howls its frogness to the totem mouth of grief

Before I can name what eats me
it eats me

Rabies and roadkill are two gods away

A dream sequence
skips 
my brother’s
death

A frog howls its frogness to the totem mouth of grief

Here is how to create a spider: Rub sand
in your eye
while your eye
holds its breath

No two gods
are god

The exploded foot of an angel
The microphone left in hell
November 28, 2023 / barton smock

we’ll know by cobweb the childbearing age of ghost

A lawnmower and a chainsaw
while sharing 
insomnias

make 
a quiet 
horse. 

I am not a tactile writer.

God fills my son with sand.
November 25, 2023 / barton smock

I left in your movie the book of my drinking

I’m poor. I’m poor, too. All last week, the wrong year. I am alive. I’m sorry. I am not in the right place to touch god with plastic. Eat someone who knows the future. Don’t tap the animals.
November 24, 2023 / barton smock

marker, don’t read, just want to remember what I’m thankful for, snapshot

cool when people are like Lulu isn't real publishing and then they are like my friend says I'm funny so I am offering instructional classes on how to be a comedian here's my paypal

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rich white quarterbacks who couldn't take two seconds to believe in covid talking about the softening of society in response to another rich white quarterback who golfed like so hard with Trump shouldn't make my radar but when they do I'm like is it Thanksgiving yes yes it is

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not afraid the clumsiness of expressing remote imperfections anyway glad some are allowed to go back to the most bare definition of home but some can't so be full but also be empty

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I get drunk and say stuff like my brothers are strange and great and I could be a better father and I didn't need to be so distantly kind see what I mean anyway love your family and humanitarian pauses should last forever

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should I believe amnesty international or celebrities asking for a friend whoops former friend

/

sorry I'm trying to distance myself from my writing by writing
November 24, 2023 / barton smock

most towns have a week that starts on the day all the dogs play dead at once

Grief is sorrow with bones. I did things slowly, then. I could enter a room without an empty room knowing. I didn’t have kids and there they stayed listening to the hunger pains of drone operators. There are bodies death cannot experience. Being poor just means you’ll go up stairs that are hiding from stairs. Fuckers say weird stuff about whales. 
November 23, 2023 / barton smock

I read with my body the later works of touch

None of us know how to move. We’ve been here since god went to get god. I see a stick and you a stick in the shape of a gun. In my first dream I’m a bird that can’t breathe and fly like that for years. It’s selfish. Some are kidlike. Even in size. 
November 22, 2023 / barton smock

little fact has its only dream

The silence
is fake
it’s that
good
November 21, 2023 / barton smock

I drank, it did not snow, and we cried as one over the theft of the window-shopper’s hunger

Rain
writes
to god
mostly
about
skin

A mirror 
traps a mirror
Our proof

is the same