Barton Smock's Blog

Letter 031825

Dear Ethel Cain

They are moving the body from star to star when a landmine made in a dot of blood yawns arisen somewhere in the white acre of my poet friend’s eye. Needing a past, my sister lets a snake eat her entire stomach. Father invents in the grey cinema a remote for loneliness. My friend becomes an angel obsessed with redhaired dolls. My father leaves the cinema wearing nothing but a seashell and spends the rest of his life dreaming of a doorbell that tracks decay. Three mothers we can’t place leave together for a nightmare where a fetus bounces into the back of an out of control pick-up truck. I keep changing what my mouth holds, but it all fits.

~~~~~

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD

Lightning and earthquake feuding in an untouched doom where two angels, birthmark and bitemark, still dream of killing their tattooed sons.

I know this place. Place is a bomb that other bombs find.

~

The tattooed sons are in love. Son bitemark doesn’t have a tongue; birthmark does all the ironing. Their dead child speaks to them through a fishhook that is always hot.

~

Faith is an eating disorder. Mothers faint in threes.

I teach my brothers to suck in their stomachs and a junkyard refrigerator becomes our clock. We smell like a dead child. We smell blank. We search online for images of hands and for the word missingness. Flies made of wind and glass show us to our food.

Our eyes go without.

~

Our invaders had no language. Your mother was suicidal until she told you how moved she was by her own birth. The needle had its moment of recognition. A fetus opened its mouth in a paint can.

Replacement can be a city. But here it’s a form destroyed for being described.

~

So many dead bodies, and no one has died.
City of the predicted present.
The sons count hoofprints left on a whale.

~

Under the moon of a flat earth, they’re putting pills in baseballs. We’ve our choice of police siren. My Ohio horse could be your Ohio deer. We could be resurrected more than once to identify a child’s body. There is a language image does not know. Words sound different in hell.

~

I hate this city and its two sold houses. Every third angel is just a baby eating paper and being healthy for too long. Pain has a doorbell that turns blue when touched and another that turns blue when not. The last time you had sex this caterpillar had a ribcage. I don't always die. Sleep is the ghost of waiting.

~

Image is nothing more than the memory that our destroyers strip to.

I had an animal
that was naked
in dog years.

Bitemark speaks birthmark.

Keep amnesia young.

~

Ask
the dark
the outside
gets nothing

Mad about bread
I broke
my birthmark

There was no bomb

A paper doll was shopping online
for a free
spider’s web

Our perfect blood perfect
bomb
weather

~

Bats lose their teeth over sister bitemark.

Blue
here and there
skips

an apple. The bird

can’t get out
of the lake.

~

A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like.

~

Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven

tooth and pill have the same ghost.

I can’t say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.

~

I drop my mother’s cup of fake blood as my father tries to find the movie scene that will give him his age. My thumb breaks in a past death. The mumbling of its break speaks a moral thing to the smallest body ever to be vividly isolated. I am hearing all of this through an eggshell that mom says belongs to the angel best known for keeping quiet about skin. Under my brother’s shirt there crawls a wasp that smells like god. None of the blood can be saved.

~

A ballerina bites my ear. I play dead but am not recognized doing so on land by a swimmer. I started writing because people didn’t watch the movies I recommended. Being kind to your children won’t work. Give god hair. Tell god it’s human for tattoo. A ballerina bites my ear because a ballerina cannot scream. In every Eden, a set of false teeth.

~

Real teeth, too, in Eden. I skip a rock and know it. Overhear with you how that baby isn’t going to shoot itself. Also overhear how terrible people often go to the bathroom more. Boy alone holds a dead rabbit over a junkyard toilet. Girl alone thinks it’s about to be alive. They’ll share almost nothing. A quick birth in a bitten place.

~

I speak the names of my brothers into the book of bitemarks. I have more arms and they more muscles and they more issues with their legs. I am so poor that my work does all the work. My tongue does nothing. It’s not possible to be obsessed with sex. With death. You’re born with a mask that no one saves. Everything makes god sick. Stop being alone.

~

I can’t imagine
knowing
my kids
are alive.

Ask the angel of birthmarks
if god
is cruel.

~

There’s no horse that a horse can’t be. The egg filled with skin came after touch. Tattoo before birthmark. How many sons you suppose god killed before that shit took. I cry on my brother. A very long line of prose comes to me about his most lost mosquito. Most lost mosquito.

~~~~~

SIMPLE GOD EXITS CHILDHOOD MACHINE

My handwriting is described as a suicide note written by a scarecrow and my brother’s as a tattoo scratched off by a god trapped in a silent ambulance. We’re on different parts of the baby. I cry my pencil into a detailed sleep. My brother cries me out. I recall a same life. He recalls a current. The baby is our brother, then our sister, then both. We see it in pieces. Every creature knows how long we’ve been here.

~~~~~

EXIT

We moved, and they shot us.
We didn’t move, and they shot us.
We cried, and they shot us.
We slept, and they shot us.
We had children, and their children shot us.
We were childless, and their children shot us.
We bathed, and they cut us.
We cut ourselves, and they shot us.
In our dream, you wrote about us.
They shot us
in our dream. Shot us in their.

ALCOHOL MACHINE

Death gathers info for the bomb. A baby

is the childhood
of a line break.

I have bones
in my sleep. I have babies

in yours. Pregnant

in hell
one is like
a sore
thumb

tracking
the genders
of angels. This movie

is a crier.

Time and god are both the god that swallowed time.

EXODUS MACHINE

Shape’s
false
amnesia.

God’s last life.

Angels unforgettably conscious.

ORDER POEM

We’re seven babies away from god finding out that no one has heard the ocean. I say pain has an angel and you say it has a ghost. We eat for the last time. Some blank grief that not even a mother would save from a staring contest. I eat like a devil. You like a devil on a skateboard crying over the death of a ribless boy. Poverty is neither dream nor transport. I step on a nail in my scarecrow puberty and you bend yourself to rabbit, grocery cart, wheelchair. I run the shower and say things about your body into a coffee can. Birth is wrong about people.

DEATH POEM FOLLOWED BY A POEM ABOUT DEATH

We play rock paper scissors to see who gets the gun. I’ve already pointed my hand at your stomach and I’ve already apologized like a fever for saying that your prophets needed headache medicine. Jesus was looking for his sister. He was on the cross and his father got the day wrong. The problem with pain is that it knows when to stop. A friend lifts the baby and says I don’t know what you’ve been feeding this thing. It has more memories than god.

BLACK MOUSE MACHINE

(for Mark Lanegan)

Snow grief
and star
grief

so rarely
die

during the removal
of thunder's
stomach

that I thought
twice
and killed
with no help
from god
a red

fly
on a blue
train

BODY MACHINE

Angels choose ghosts for god. I’m lonely when you’re here and not when you’re not. For emphasis, don’t read this if you’re not my brother. If you are, don’t read this aloud. I’ve never been to a strange place. My son writes a story about a cannibal eating the mother of the antichrist. I want to fix the devil. The story goes deeper than I want it to. I drink all day. My sons are alive. My sons tell me they can be alive in their sleep. I want to test god. I give a pill to Adam and he waits for my signal. When Adam dies, he dies thinking his stomach is where it should be. My longing isn’t ready.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE VOID MACHINE

No one can dream about god. Water can’t be touched. Time makes itself into a seed that grief never plants. Death fails as a garden but not as death. Cheekbone, ransom, kneecap. I was sick for awhile and now want to love things.

FIRST MACHINE

I seashell myself into the wreckage of the angel’s elbow. Death’s memory and god’s memory are switched at birth. I lie to my mom. There’s a pill that makes me not take pills.

Had a strange weekend that saw my youngest son, who is medically complex/fragile, in the hospital with pneumonia, rhino enterovirus, etc, and was on sepsis watch for a bit. During all this, my newest published work was released by the elegantly dark Incunabula Media, title of which is Wasp, gasp.

https://incunabulamedia.com/poethicks

Am very grateful to David Mitchell for letting me do my thing, and for working with me on the cover image of the work, which is original art by my son Noah Michael Smock.

Also need to deeply thank the number of poets and artists who said something toward the work before it was spoken correctly away. Such speech is below and I've put it inside anything above me.

Praise for Wasp, gasp.

Reading these poems is like assembling a kaleidoscope in a dim room and each jewel that finds its place lights up a glimpse of a spectacular depth. This collection of words is brilliantly surreal. Unlike much writing that's brilliant and surreal, these pieces hold their contents with tenderness. After a while, the love shines through as more important than any sense one might make of lesser things.
-Kyla Houbolt, poet, author of Surviving Death

The worlds of these poems are apocalyptic. Is it the past searching for the present or the present searching for the past? How does one reconcile all of this life but trying to find the words. Touch, god, owl, moon, son, daughter, Mom, Dad, brother. Sex. Ohio. The movies. Baby. Death. The things we brush up against that tell us we are living / that tell us we are also dying. The insidiousness of religion, but also the saving grace of belief or worship. It is clear that Smock worships the word and the world the word can build - a boat. When I read Barton Smock’s work I never want it to end and I always want it to end because it strikes me deep in my heart. He writes in birthplace 76 I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours. These poems - a child stunned to find themselves an adult, the search for answers seems meaningless, and yet here is the word, building a ladder out of the muck. Here is the word continuing to make sense of all that has been lost. Of all that will.
-Jane Stephens Rosenthal, poet and filmmaker

This is powerful stuff, ripped from place of dream and nightmare, love and song, a deeply personal voice is given form here.
-Jon Cone, poet, author of New Year Begun

To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king.
-Benjamin Niespodziany, poet, author of No Farther Than The End Of The Street

Smock leverages paradoxes, non-sequiturs, and wordplay to pulse out euphonious theophanies. With each succeeding poem, he intones nightmares and dreams the reader awake.
-George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below

Barton Smock knows something that time also knows, continuing & carving out his own path within a rich tradition of surrealist-absurdist poets blazing a poetic path seemingly out of thin air. Smock’s poetic is filled with a stark heart & curiosity which leans on the unknown as much, or more, as on the known. This is the voice of a seer. The voice implores, becomes plural, rages & laughs & cries & asks. At times, a lost & reluctant prophet who heeds that "some places exist only after you reach them twice." Smock sees the deepness within himself, and perhaps, within all living beings in unison. And this may be one of my favorite gifts of Wasp, gasp—the poet’s way of approaching himself & this very existence with the same amount of integrity, imagination & nervous wonder. Wasp, gasp is a poetry of astoundment which I can foresee standing the test of time simultaneously with Al-Khazneh, Machu Picchu & Stone Henge alike.
-Daniel Cyran, poet, curator and editor of Anvil Tongue

I have lived in Ohio, and experienced its liminal qualities. Both an antiheaven and an antihell, it has the peculiar promise of being illegible from within and without. The narrator's body in Wasp, gasp is also illegible in this way, vibrating slowly between life, death and something else. In this space made by vibration, another something-else can emerge, in sonic play and folding images. God and dog circle one another then flop onto the ground, roll around. I know the demands of a liminal body in a place that won't hold it, what that might create. Barton Smock invites a reader to enter that zone too, the place that is a mode of being, one form of secret (or secret form) revealed:
The more internal/ the life, the longer/ the past./ A velvet cricket.
-Jay Besemer, poet, author of Men and Sleep