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mating rituals of the responsibly poor

poems

Barton Smock

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blind copy I call often on the disappearance of my sister. she is the ghost in the town of my shadows envy. daily use, reading or writing: friendly fire. blind copy. when her ball cap was given to my father he returned me this:

I think she can survive without it. she went once from her window to the window of the neighbor boy whose dream had him believing his parents dead no matter what they did. she knocked the following morning on our front door. and later showed me the tree which was not so high. I marked the day she became my younger by sleeping. if I love women, its something I shouldve done a long time ago.

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museum for boys I have faith I will one day have this memory of occurring to god. presently, I exhibit expatriate tendencies in the shadow of my mother. I entered this museum for boys hidden in a mirror on a time delay.

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the silence of god I am not one to placate beggars of description and hardly know where I lived besides. early on I picked up a stone and my friends passed it around after I threw it. few went braless. sex was something of a docile raccoon cub in a half globe of ice. fathers all were barked down from the same tree by the same poets. in the previous I will be refusing to enter the trailer home of my ninth grade love where for all I learn her hound might still be waiting for its ball sack to fall. I will inspect only what is already true. if in the following you do not come upon a series of blank pages just when the getting is good than my publisher was chosen too quickly and my brilliance is of less remain. as I am well versed in parental infighting I have little vote but to edit my mother and abridge my father and say they were kids looking at an ultrasound of an empty stomach other than my mothers.

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here, brother, are some notes for Noah I may have already saddened - a sameness in the parrots we care for - our suicides fight for position - we twin the parable

this one: she pushed the baby carriage and in her going made quite the parabola / the baby bounced but was dead the baby

bobbed - habitually I displace: the ether / a gods trenchancy -

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the academic scholar of woe whose grave I would visit uninterrupted

whose stone now is a lonely letter f

who wouldve partnered with me to abandon my freighted usage of lonely, - of heart, of amateur eulogist

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passive knowledge fang in the dull tooth of my womb

this sadness I did not inherit, that I cannot pass on, does not make me human but some third, fourth incurious beast loitering in the belly of a ruined, or half built ark

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social logistics the man began by pointing at the spots on the babys head and then he looked to us as if we were to answer for each. he turned the babys head carefully- it mightve been an old globe to him. he apologized more than once for his age pocked hands. his apologies were unsettling, each one moreso than the last. his assistant minded none of this and sat reading an upside down newspaper while curling and uncurling her bare toes at no discernible prompt. when the baby squealed the man went pale and dropped it and his coat opened and we saw his naked wrinkled middle turn to ash and we saw the baby scooped up by the feet of his assistant and then saw the baby fit in her mouth. she never moved from her chair to do the scooping or the placing and we were horrified as she righted the paper and silently admonished the man for being momentarily vacant as to the whereabouts of her shoes. he went to his fours and

nosed the shoes to her feet and we said amen to the tail of his coat. the assistant then stood and as she did so the man made swallowing noises

and because wed said amen together we were able to form a search party from which we periodically broke to masturbate.

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upward mobility the condition of false remembrance in regards to experiencing anothers dj vu- once mine, had I planned for the past

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on sexual preference i. chemo makes of each bone a wind chime which in poetry would be some first house beauty but in the body of my father no ii.

it is cruel to hang anything above a babys crib iii. I can only guess I was happy in the womb with how my mother looked

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moral hazard the man Ive only just met sober but have arm in arm week one through week three been jolly with is for the sake of his mother revising his life cycle from

porn, sadness, balloons to

sadness, porn, balloons *

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it is either my attention span or my nakedness in concrete poetry that keeps me from god (when a scar of thunder / outs itself / I am blue) or bluish (like a sock in a blue coats pocket) * by the of a sudden time the man is tolerable he ha(s) a number of rethought balloon

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responsibly poor three teeth fall from the mouth of my lover. I catch them in a dark rag. my lover hops in place on the leg she calls ecstasy. she lifts her skirt and with it pats her chin. I fold the teeth into the rag and the rag becomes a rat. I place the rat in a patch of sunlight and there we watch it die. we agree its dramatic. we know the rat will again be a rag. that the teeth having been something else will reappear as teeth.

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responsorial we are in the wooded areas when the taken baby returns to the crib our numbers decrease unnoticeably think a stage curtains hook or the many palms that draw a womb to kick (of slow black dogs long with youth / of a shadow beneath a snake where even) silence trails off

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unshod a man whose face seems newly paroled switching a pebble one hand to another beside a telephone pole beneath a pair of sneakers strung on a wire- parked cars they have him surrounded

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a summer of record highs boy in a loose diaper standing on a cement block

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chasm for Timothy your illness dreams a kingdom it cannot people takes to sky and there meets death. tell me they talk.

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night shift under the boys pillow she slipped an empty pack of cigarettes- the kind her teddy bear smoked

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raiment we are not here to enshroud the myth of the woman who swims naked- we are here might our sons mourn the stickmans belief that his wife went to pieces

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sustenance

tied a string to a stick and called the stick dog.

for this, the boy received a beating half of which he shared with the dog so he could eat in peace.

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after the diagnosis of your youngest your heart becomes good- the older three notice

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items the note is from your mother and tells you your father is coming to town and plans to bring you to the circus. the money is for your mother from the last time he visited. the poster has never been unrolled and was given to you by a friend of your fathers you had no doubt was the strongest man in the world. the spoon is for those times you have no heat. the dictionary is fairly new and belonged to your brother. he

circled the word phantom twice, retard once, and underlined

strife. presumably before he died. if you happen upon my half sister you can give her the picture youre going to use to recognize her. Im looking at it now. its definitely her.

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2 0 - - will have you know, brother Ive endeared myself to vandalism. when undercover, and in danger I lift from one of your letters the phrase

I deeply miss deer. my sickness has returned from its pilgrimage to the year 1985 and has unfortunately been documented as an acquired taste. when there is a god or a nesting doll I hushedly petition that it entertain the tenets of our sister the startled futurist-

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economic remembrance this home where sane brother and virgin sister ate sliced apples played pool and swam only at night a home so inadequately haunted we invented a previous family mother, father, a lame child all three suicides it was the lame child we dwelled on so much so our real mother sent our most current father to the backyard with a shovel brother went mad to see it and sister began to throw up in the mornings then disappeared and left two notes one confessed pregnancy and one bulimia I lied, too but am not poor and will not say a brother

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went mad overseas start with your mothers handwriting I love my own because when her children were naked saying so was a sin instead, she called them rare

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yesterday wine a stone lifts from the pools bottom a few twigs keep straw for mannequin neighbors tend fence vine- seeing double our wives share a towel step over the low water of a sprinkler left on

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age I swear my guts darken dad as I am in your spot looking at the sea- mother insisted again on heels but has changed in other ways- you mustve walked to get to those places you stood but its the standing I recall and the quiet- the length of my life is abnormal but goes undiscovered

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padded room soon after heaven took so much we stood in the padded room where once our mother stood- shreds of gowns still unsettled teased our hair grey- nothing between us we hugged as two late arriving wraiths- you bent for the head of a black pushpin but thought better to leave it whether eye or mouth wed have to see the doll

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erratum the bunk above mine I call deathbed is my brothers- he has his own way of thinking

showerhead is spotlight he argues often with sister about the staircase two times of three she pushes him but today she is tired and agrees by saying

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silly backward staircase and I, as ever unable to break the heart of either sleep for both as they watch me eat

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stylistic device

the anxiety of my body arrives before the patience of my mind - my soul is a pop gun or is convinced -

I Apologize For The Eyes In My Head Komunyakaa - for the aftermath of witness

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devotee I wanted to help my father finish the book- I could see he was thinking of a title by the door light of an appliance. - later my mother admitted it was not unusual to find a carton of milk in the dryer. - illness: he began to speak of his favorite tree which appeared only at night when he spoke of it. -

also later: he was reading, not writing, that book.

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auteurs I am in your house being you when the boy enters my house with a sack of ash to tell my wife he has come to avoid a whole personality - my wife is one to believe she was carried by child - listen, a babys cry is the oral future of what touches the brain

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southern forms i. no more can you see into another than at your age have a stroke to mirror my fathers. ii. deep into the assignment of my youth I was said to be bowing when in fact I was dipping into the thigh of Jesus repeatedly with a brush. iii. we havent always been godless. how this persists as comfort is a vision a fox has of illness. iv. to fox I apply a certain wakefulness.

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v. my father admits in his bed that some mice are alive when he bends to the earth a cornstalk and lets fly. he confides of everything he is the most guilty of hate getting him places. I have to find the mouse that means other mice. vi. (above this plain a womans privates thunder / below it there are those whose tears are a newborns thumbs) vii.

a mare kneeling in a bed of maroon straw intuits doom as a color as optic Apocrypha viii. subconsciously, I am holy and by holy I can offer not being seen in the grocery as my father squints into a handheld calculator.

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ix. to fox paw this thorn from my mothers apnea

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for Mark Hogancamp the junked tee vee behind the dollhouse sofa junked because it made you ache not like walking for the first time in heels more like a misused tooth, or good reception

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for John I put the shoebox to my ear and hear nothing. I give it a shake. in it, my stepfather curses and I breathe closer to my quota a sigh of relief. I place the box on a higher shelf where I plan to leave it for three years. five years pass and I mean that. I can no longer reach the shelf and need a footstool or something similar. I stirrup my hands and there they are suspended. I step back from them. a cat meows or my stepfather sobs. I am bogged down. I am under my mothers heart. when I finally use my hands in the manner Ive meant, my fingers break and I land on my back. the box falls and the corner of it finds the cup of my stunned and still suspended hands and the fingers hold for a moment and then they are weak and then they feather the box sideways to my chest. I lift my head and see my stepfather jolly to be on the set of a show hes the star of. he is smoking a prop pipe and pretending to read a book I remember my mother being buried in. a few episodes into it I realize the show is missing something and so supply grief.

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for Timothy i. therapy please push this toy car. it is going to the beach. in this activity, one makes a flower from the parts of a hand. it is obvious: people have time. if I sob, it is so you know to turn your head.

ii. daydream if art, be sure to place the couple carefully on the donkey have them pass a sunned whale neither see.

iii. I cant make myself cry without you I give instruction, I say sad things, I put my ear to a belly of disparate pregnancies.

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iv. a therapeutic image of your likeness ( foreign as ones wonderment in coming across types of mitochondrial disorders or the oral beauty of reading ahead nicking oneself

on chevrotain )

v. terminology

mouse inoculates deer

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for Ben Mirov as this poem was being written

written a word that stops long of being sufficient another poem was being read and by its end was about my brother - if you need to contact me I would be moderately happy to know -

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the poem being read predicted a lake surrounded by death- in fact it is something it still predicts - result: one in three brothers betrays the fourth - my son may never walk but when he kicks on his back these are what we call his bicycle legs

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expanse I have a friend whose father, though imaginary, was able to get work driving a cab in the country parts of Ohio. if I close my eyes I can see my own father lost in some wooded area naked and wearing a cape. the cape is deep red and my friend is female. when my mother reads me a book without pictures I can tell when shes rewording the phrases she finds plain. how she reads ahead while reading aloud is something I hope to one day mimic. I do worry about the books I claim to know as perhaps there is a sadness in them that remains untouched. plain things are often sad things. I would ask which causes which but for the unlimited amount of time we have left.

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peace winter when the snow weeps on a warm arm and red dogs deepen and cats all colors are redeemed at a towns vanishment there will be a church thieved of its folding chairs and a man standing for heaven at a time when its crime rate lowered

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companion I am looking to be sad whispers who else but the blind man in the poem previous

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hearings i. an aerial view of parked white vans parked impossibly close ii. a hinterland boy packs snow into his mothers mouth to keep it open iii. only a snake uses the jawbone of a snake

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common grounds i. two boys skipped school to fight in a field. we who stayed took sides. I somehow became a leader which mattered only when the boys returned. their original quarrel ended in that field where a scarecrow interested both- ii. boys whose names imprison me.

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most times it is fairly safe in this town to walk without concealing the spray can found in fathers toolshed - our love for the spray can while not well documented runs wrist and wrist with celebrity worry - a cement wall scraped in passing by one with a stick is the love we have for father -

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for mother we scale back on pillows and lie face down on blank sheets of paper or watch television - most times we pop the keys of a ribbonless typewriter

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the gospel I lose the fat hero to thoughts of my own weight. I make the bully too evil. I shy from death to be made its lure. I have a wife board what else a train to transport the sadness a penis cant. my son wonders aloud if all females are mothers. if animals, talk.

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the word worried he is becoming one person the boy with cloth scissors escapes the watchful eye of the puppeteers child and proceeds unmolested to the most active imagination his sisters before she was expelled

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for I so loved my son

he settles on a word not because it is right but because his exhaustion has developed an independent streak and has abbreviated its calling to terrain. I

talk with him about the origin of praise and he imagines a woman swimming solo in a cirque. he looks me over as if I too am held together by my clothes. any sentence I come up with begins the female form and ends. though painful, I rub my knees.

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mating rituals of the responsibly poor i. in a letter to my son:

there is only so much knowledge I can stand. in his letter back:

I was finally able to draw a mouth. I drew first a box, then lied. ii. a gutted refrigerator rocks in a junkyard. either the door has jammed, or she is pregnant. iii. when silent prayer came into fashion my daughter said her first word and told me what it was. iv. anecdotally, they were Mr. and Mrs. Nothing and eloped.

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atavism her arms gone thin- her gait these two dark fish chaperone recalls me to the delirium of a prison yard cat- her stomach though bulges is an upturned bowl of milk- it that would normally disappear before my eyes disappears after

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sleepy, tenable town I put a make believe woman through hell. I worship the devil. I worship the devil because my dog drowns in a water bowl.

I pass the time writing holy, holy. I condemn my body as I need proof.

I say to a particular no one a boy after my own heart. Im not sure what makes mother power off the television. she moans afterward as if it is the great work of her neck. I keep an appointment to be blinded by a window washer. every other word of my fathers autobiography is not so strange. if I hadnt pissed myself in second grade, Hector might have. his brothers wouldve beaten him. his unborn sister wouldve been premature on purpose. I can count on your hand the Hectors we know. it could be that mother worries we are wildlife. she wrote once

depression is a dog whistle. I missed dinner sounding it out.

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between me and you, youre the private sort of person women like.

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separation you sleep on your left side because of an iffy heart. the man sleeping beside you, zippered into a dream life, represents poverty. you dream only the overpass. each stick on the fire is alone; a single promise of a

dogs return. in the early goings, it was a magic to put camp before

fire. in these later, poverty needs no introduction. you want to say something to the child you did not become but are sick on the talk you were born with. this nonfiction- not what youd imagined. I slide the man from his bag. my mad hen pecks upward.

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suicide lectionary the stones die and turn ghost. I ask them to mention my throwing arm. traditionally, one sings when around water. I walked early- two to four weeks before my mother began her lifelong affair / with baseball.

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primogeniture a skinny boy with long hair mid koan leaves me his imagination. my mother shaving her head with a lollipop.

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epistle a fist camouflaged as a bird, a very baby, bird is born in a pile of bricks. I open a door for a woman because online a photo has taught me I stand as all stand for napalm. home for good with papers shes convinced tell her what shes like in the workplace my mother, my mother like an artifact of her own paranoia survives. (I am a response to a world Ive yet to receive)

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recreation my father knows a midget. its not my fault. the two of them share a cigarette outside of a house theyve never been inside. its winter. I scroll across Ohio on a sled with makeshift sail. I associate sorrow with the very short. I associate my father with sentences that end abruptly. I wear the mark he meant to leave on the world. I understand. it is forgivable. there are harder things to get in the way of. a mirror, perhaps. a hand on a bible. my own hand, which tells mother Im adopted.

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chimera to watch the fire I make my way to a hay bale. a certain misshapen bale I first called

scarecrows womb but now

jesus hill. this is the kind of time I have. * my sister believes her left eye doesnt exist. that it is the shadow of her right. because of her many beliefs, my father has placed himself inside a pacing man where he curses like a censored linguist made to collect a towers rubble. * in my dreams I am charged with a notch of black tape and the sloth agony of a womans nipple.

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* I pass a finished tree with some color left in its leaves and recall my uncle swallowing his ribbons from the heyday of flame at the height of what mother called

intake

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dulcet a memo on the origin of coming full circle reaches only half the population. our name for what is not here, is Michael. Michael hears himself buried. my boys make myth to call him Murmur. my boys keep a ghost farm as more than a hobby.

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mating rituals of the responsibly poor poems December 2012 - Barton Smock has a wife and four children. They also have him. current writing subject to change at kingsoftrain.wordpress.com -

other books at lulu.com: the paper dolls have been cutting your hair / Grief Of Arm / I think I cant speak for everyone here / Angel Scene / hiatus newsletters

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