Barton Smock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“We do not live in unreal times. We never have. The animal kingdom kindly gave us, gives us, god. The absurd is a manifesto that the dream erases while protesting the afterlife of sleep. You've seen the bodies, gone, mid-ghost. My receipt is a rib, but which one. Surrealism steals the past from nostalgia. It's not an escape. It's a sustainable staying. A personal ruin that ruins nothing. My love for transformation is unchanged. Angels hate art.”
— Barton Smock
~~~
Blue Mind
and when the creatures came back they were all the same size and my son was still sick and I put my ear to my mother’s and asked for the maker of god-painted sound and my son was a hole and I was grief in a gravedigger’s dream and we ate I think apples there
Snow
say even god / would leave / this church
to step on the bones of a star
Soonisms
Healed by a microscope, the angel burns my missing son’s hair
in the mirror’s
invisible stomach.
I am in the blue school of that first shooting.
Ohio radio treats fatigue as an error from sleep’s past.
Art is a moon rock in a gun shop
And death
God’s refusal
to age.
Reading
inside
an apple
by the light
of a tooth
where nothing
has belonged
to god
city 138
There are days nothing happens to Adam and there are days nothing happens to Eve. It doesn’t take long to lose interest in the last thing known to have used god as bait. Touch is the bird of nowhere. The outside can’t survive outside.
liftoff
the scarecrow loving puppet put a pop gun to the head of the soundman’s lamb.
-
my last meal
was my mother’s
voice.
birthplace 64
We leave our son in the attention span of an angel. A window misses a window. I terrify a softspot with the skull of a squirrel. Salt, surgery. The owl’s muscles are bored.
Garden Poem
Adam had a gun and Eve said do something with your mouth. God asked the gun to make nakedness. The gun heard loneliness. The animals ate each other because there was no fruit.
~~~
“Soonisms” previously appeared in Poem-a-Day on poets.org.
~~~
Barton Smock is the author of Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press 2018), Wasp, gasp. (Incunabula 2023), and several other privately self-published works, the most recent of which is Naked In Dog Years (2024). He writes at kingsoftrain.com.
