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 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
gesture 1

The white crow of lost memory warns the wrong past. A baseball shrugs into my brother’s ribs. I fear Jesus, and weep for Adam. Make my knee in the ghost gold sea.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
I would cry for my mother.

I would ask my father
to cry for my mother.
I would cry for my father.

I would ask my father
to cry for his brothers.
I would cry for my sister
who said god
is a cigarette
in the cosmos.

I would cry nailgun cry unkissed heels

I would cry for my brothers.
I would cry in other words thrice
For myself.

I would cry on film for god for god on film

I would cry for the drink drinking that the drinking ends

I would cry brevity

Cry ******* forecry

Cry rest
room rest
moon

I would cry for god all that
All that having
to separate
the naked from the naked.

I would cry for my children
Cry Genevieve

Cry Beverly

Cry name, knowing name
hears not

Cry ghost for the ghost
whose ghost
thinks dogs
are real

those dogs, with time
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
No newborn can reach existence.
Sleep knows memory
cannot fix
an eggshell.

( into a field
  fled water
  from the spine
  of the lord )

Erections turn the stomach to salt.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
gesture 3

Old poems, I’ve made my cry to the world. Puberty’s pop-gun. Gender’s low star. The short dream of touch meant to abridge the skin’s ceaseless letter to any angel that remembers blood. I’m not home. God’s teeth are very small.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
gesture 4

Lakes laze through the last showing of the angel’s invisible shadow. Fire thinks itself unburned. Thunder hears a slow thing. I don’t want this to start. Lure the image out of god. A ripped-up squirrel at the end of the world.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
In this church there is a toy phone on top of a toilet seat. I miss trapping god with nostalgia. I miss amnesia. A boy is a bell is punching into that fatherless space created by any shape born into a world of swimsuits. Oh fury, moon of hopelessness, the astronauts need nudes.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
Are you willing to leave them alone on the earth for their last twenty years?

I doubt with presence my absolute hereness.

Amensia.

I believed inquiry would mean I had a
Question.

No one likes your gesture sequence of
Poems.

We left the water
To leave the water
Guessing.

Don’t get mad at babies.
Be nice to god.
Tender soldier, there are birds

That bury teethmarks.

The ground is too soft.
Your hand will die.
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on
 May 30 Will
Barton D Smock
gesture 5, in three failures

I let a kid punch me in the stomach might my brothers ride their bikes down a hill and later I let two kids pull me out of a bathroom stall might a bike upside down in my dead sister’s room stay upside down in the photo of that room held up by my living sister who claims it can doctor god

~

Death keeps time by the far amen of the face. You have to be very still in your clothes or they won’t last. God is two dead creatures looking at each other.

~

What doesn’t happen in the current dream

stays
in the next.

I roll my own wasps.

Curled in a junkyard tire, the sibling christ blesses oil spots real or no
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