I smell 49. My blood can’t find me. Jesus was the first crucified to turn his heart into a spider’s web. Everyone I know on the internet is alive.

designed your phone designed for mine a thumb as the secret god of a hairbrush teaching blood to crawl

designed eating designed eating the bee stings in our smuggled bread

designed the injured designed the dead

from angel tantrum (self-published, April 2025)


RESPONSORIA

I said something perfect.
Your father loved you.

~

I swim and the body means nothing.
Nakedness. Hungry at its own feast.
I should’ve touched
more animals.
There are no bombs
if the dead give birth.

~

A sickness moving through the angels. One theory: Two guns in a dream tried to make a hand. A second: God had *** while pregnant. For the third, stay beautiful. Death thinks you’re still here.

~

A movie died and I wanted to write better.
You put a lake in a lake.
Whole childhoods
of an angel
went nowhere.
I binged
for my brother
body horror
from an invisibly
watched
loneliness.
Mom
gave us mom.

~

The last
beast
I wish
we knew
the order

There’s a crow
crying shape
under my fingernail
that looks
if you look at it
like a map

Angels make little dares
beneath god’s blood
angels
make little dares

~

I want to drink and cook.
I want to watch movies and not drink.
I want my invisible teeth
abused
by color.
I want my doctors to say seashell
*******
syndrome.
I want these meds to sadden drones.
I want fatigue. Hell’s rubber mirror.
I want my children to be so exhausted that they pray
to a ghost
that’s praying
to them.
I want your poems
your shorter
poems
to drive
death mad.
I want to crucify my tongue.
I want a wasp to crucify my tongue.
I want shape
to burn faster
than form. Nudes
to zoo
nakedness.
A fed raccoon.
Or a dog that believes.

~

A violinist puts a knife to the neck of a doll.
Stop drinking.

~

No one told me I was crying.
Here is what I thought:
It can’t get lonelier
than the birth of god.
My ribs had a message
for a toothache. Babies
are never
young.

~

God is still a child. No one knows how to help. Angels doing deer impressions think about stopping. Your mother and father are alive.

~

My youngest brother sends me poems and they are bruises on a radar that’s having a secret nightmare and I am afraid that if I touch them they will be touched. I’m not an alcoholic. My food eats prayer to starve me. I haven’t heard too many in my family say Palestine and it makes me want to trick them into saying pain. I hate my son but in a very sonlike way. Others hate my son because they think he looks at the moon believing god made stuff. I haven’t been sleeping. It’s okay. My insomnia is a keyhole in the shape of my son’s access to angels. This is a death threat machine. A bomb scare machine. Tomorrow, fake the earth.  

~

My son is sick and I want a gun. I forget three times in front of a ghost how to *****. We lie about déjà vu. I say dog. You, whale. The world destroys loneliness.

My stomach travels
with an angel
back
in time.

I miss roadkill. Freeze my brain.

Death becomes death when it forgives god.

~

I will always know what you look like and it terrifies god

~

I die and look for my mother.
I die and look for yours.

I die and my brothers don’t.
I die in Ohio to impress
with a bruise
an icicle. I die and my daughter

I die and my sons

I die
and which
of my sons

I die and god says
that is not
salt
that is movie
salt

Death gets over nobody, I die

there

I die on somebody’s birthday

I die bc pretty
Because I can

I die where
I die with a rich interior death

I die for rich poets who’ve time to be good parents

Love dies from god

I die and see an uncle trying to drink his eyes back
I die and you can’t
I die in a shadow from three thumbtacks

meant
for the savior
of a self
harming sister

I die in my father’s dead rabbits
all of them
die once

~

The poem says so little.

Food is a ghost that saves my mouth.

Hi, all my gods stop dreaming at once.

~

God was in the room that was later turned into god.

Did your loved ones get out?

Jesus wore a spoon around his neck.
It helped him sleep.

~

I make in my writing such silly mistakes. Some people vote on who should be given the award for best cigarette burn, and some just smoke. Air is not in the air. I pluck a blue string and your paper cup turns the slow star of your mouth into a coin-sized hell. My son was born above an elevator. There’s nothing in god but a hummingbird and a trapdoor. Poor, other, birds. I don’t get the dark from my brothers.

~

Tell me how your mother went.

We’ll say
the far
amen.

We’ll say
to dog
how hunger
is like snow
Hurry.

Y’all with your nakedness

deadnaming god
Y’all with your carpenter’s

voided
mirror

Idk

I miss my cousins.
I’ve lost my brothers.

The invisible
in Eden
who gets over
their surprise

~

Belief is the angel that can name its bones. In heaven, we learn where we first saw god. Franz I didn't know what I was reading. Sometimes it's my turn to be two animals. To sleep, I chain my dog to the axle of an overturned church van and enter the church. Franz, Kazim, Camonghne. I will probably tell you I'm poor then show you my collection of milk bottles still empty from the crucifixion. I don't have an Ohio dog. In Ohio, touch is the fast food of angels. I am sad of course about the van. The way it deered a deer to mock the runway of hunger's banged out gait. Here is how dumb angels are: they think the peephole my brothers use can hear death. Love dies so slowly that you think people love you.

~

Our dying reminds satan that god started too early. Angels have perfect stomachs. A friend of mine who doesn’t like my writing asks me for a suicide reading list. Gender is an insect that remembers being young.  

~~~~~

angel tantrum
poems, Barton Smock
171 pages
April 2025
cover image by Noah Michael Smock

Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email [email protected] for free PDF if interested in reviewing.

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designed lightning designed a pair of scissors from something sleeping in the thigh sobbing on the right side of god

designed sound designed a voice for god as a way for animals to tell jokes

unburn
the angels

it’s my year to add a brother

designed these ******* designed

designed a machine designed a map to cover with cornfields the umbilical cord koans of data abandonment

designed sleep designed restraint blue

designed blue

designed my brothers designed they are white

designed skin designed pressing on prayer with the oyster bruise of a fingernail starved in a mirror by the invisible disciples of nakedness

designed death death I did this for

designed a seasick photo designed a darkroom to keep the empty trap from dreaming of god’s unsurprised stomach

designed we designed a terrified mirror to sleep with the angel who imagined our seeing

designed your mother’s mouth designed a grape all could eat from memory

You died and ever
thing
was left

designed I designed a thumb and with it started the scarecrow’s collapsed church of celibacy

designed my doglike creature designed for a deer a memory using only those sounds taught to god by cars driven at night by blow-up dolls mourning the pink life of mimes

designed we designed a drunkenness that could breathe for a hole and the hole filled us with crickets and teeth

designed the cricket designed a classic hummingbird too stunned by the non-miracle of beast to leave the pecked eye of christ for the prayer of stillness darkened by a specifically timeworn crow done with being three times the size of god

designed god designed the same creatures as god

I had my honeyed life

designed my weakest son designed, ah

designed my passing designed passage through tapeworm’s nightmare of permanent stars

designed this poem designed the idea that a cricket could leave something in the future and get it back

tattoo
a wasp
its father

You cannot count people whose fingers are worried. Eternity eats a clock in paradise. Touch can’t write. Bliss is a trap. Imagine having the perfect day. Perfect forgetting. I really wanted to like that book. Some rice, some wristcutting. My son disappears but only when I think about him. I sang in church and spelled words correctly. Jesus got close to passing out but in the end had to fake it. I held small jobs in the basements of movie blood warehouses. When not dying I felt odd setting in a hospital an alarm that would trigger no meaning. Wim Wenders is a no notes name. God isn’t much. Silence in the bomb’s empty stomach.

God recorded nothing

came first
plastic
then
immoral
loneliness
then
said a whale
to a whale
scratch
your eye
with mine
we’ve seen
for weeks
god
pass
for silence
in the apple
death
of brief
eels

I scroll
To where my son
Isn’t dead

Or past
Or past

designed our brother designed a bathtub that couldn’t hold itself in any position long enough to keep god’s gaze in the injured overlap of stillness as paroled by a creator stuck in a shape-addicted form

designed our sister designed her sister as a crying joke inside of a third sister whose hearing loss created the moon

designed the moon designed an egg to break the ribs of the moon

ADVICE

Be born.
Forget.



TO WAR

I will not watch god watch my sons eat nervousness



BESIDE A FIRE I AM DRINKING MYSELF TO DUST

Borders change the silhouette of god

A crucifixion scene where I am too slow to stamp out a cigarette on the surface of the moon.

My awe a spider erasing its own memory in a cube of ice.

Blink
And you'll miss

Microscope.
Endless child. Ghost
at the water fountain.

Outside of the dream a wasp drags mournfully its own hovering as if it could have in this world a single nightmare for a tormented pair of scissors struck angelic in a field of hair. Outside of the dream, communion. Audio of my body’s interview with the cannibal. What else. A price. An infant’s barber, sad as an ear, whose money we remember to have.

I was writing in the dream to you about the dream. A quick note, really. How to replace a lightbulb. Treat a deer bite. How you should never let someone cut your hair while it’s raining. A little story about your mother selling baby teeth at the crucifixion. Not yours. See pic.

There are so many ways to drink and so many paths to your uncle sleeping in the second to last car on earth. Echo trails off to become a widowed expert on the reinterpreted dreams of its unmade phone. Eels translate for lightning. Children injure themselves in one vehicle accidents. In their small lives I hope their presence has understood an immoveable god. You keep a little water in the lungs of the doll.

I was suicidal for years in my mother’s field of melancholy jellyfish. Our past changes the *** of the wrong person. Even time believes it’s god’s addiction to time.

is there maybe
a way
to come back
from my living

a rare
disorder
wrapped
in a cigarette

safe
sad

a skin cell
dead
to the face
of god
an angel

designed
by an angel
a baby
walking

too early
an egg
cracked
in a star
please

can we put
in our arms, that

(something small
(that walked

AI ruins reincarnation. I have tried to be seen as blue without the choking. My son looks for his won body. His own. *** breaks three lightbulbs in the chickenhouse. I first thought an ******* meant something was trying to get in. I stayed up nights longing for the swimmer’s re-kissed ears. Is your mom happy? A ghost knows where it is by snowfall and by crushed cigarette. My dad was crying and I had to pretend I hadn’t sat on the arm of the couch weird. My son bites his arm then presses a button on his speech device that erases the words from a prayer uttered in a time machine. I didn’t **** myself bc I never did.

Two wasps spooning in puberty’s microscopic dream

A newborn’s eye as a moth
of blood

Glass of milk
afraid of god

Adam makes bread for his sons. A mosquito collects mosquitoes from Eden. Everyone I talk to knows my mother. Shy x-ray. Shy tadpole. Brain a headlight packed in snow. Sorrow is sadness that believes in the future. This is what I thought my blood was doing. The afterdeer of it all. So what. So what, angel. Your mime my abuser.

Churchbell, fetus, ceiling fan. A frog hops out of my brother’s dream and lives instantly. Seven men pull a child in all different directions out of a car perfectly owned by their wrecked father. If you don’t sleep, your body will remain too crooked to crucify. Many of my poems are not called 'cleaning my son’s back'. Here we are.

I come to in the middle of eating. I am making a sound that drags an ear through the stomach of an angel. My sons catch fish with silence. My daughter sings them to a cricket left in a human mirror. By the time our loneliness reaches god, we’ve been created.

for Andrei Tarkovsky

It takes three ghosts to end the present. Outside it smells like not touching you. I don’t go anywhere without my bomb. There’s no place on earth on earth. I don’t take photographs I can look at. My body has never been a body to your quieter mother. I drink myself into walking. Three ghosts eat the mouth of an angel from the back of the very spider that called god with a handprint into hand’s only dream. There a tooth, and trainsets. Inside the movie there are two rules. We’re alone. You can’t miss it. Don’t look at photographs that answer to image.

I watch with my son a slasher film and we become unknown at the same time in our revelation that the poor would time travel to the exact place of their exit might they be more creatively poor. I am furious still that attraction in Eden began to matter. My brother hates the human body for what a machine can do. I don’t think my angel knows I’ve died. Don’t think my brother.

My brother can’t get that dog injured by fireworks to leave the church. He has me try different names on the dog but I don’t think it likes being called. The dog isn’t ours, of course. Hard to know if that goes for the whole dog. I dream I write a book that can track sadness. God has been the same since eating plastic.

An ambulance filling with doll bones hits a dog made of the wrong echo. A swimmer’s skull leaves itself to the math of passing through god. A tattoo artist, who once longed to show roadkill to a star, peels in the moonlight the white apples of tortured stickmen. Bringing them back won’t bring them back. The angels knew for three days where Jesus would be. Faked amnesia thinking they’d stop.

Might a man come across the man he’s imagined, the man creates god.

My son, born sick, isn’t always.

A machine in the ghosted and are these yes the agreed upon animals. Error prone infant, my mistake is gone forever. My favorite action movie is classism and ours is a silent one about god forgetting to save her progress. I thought it would be the eating that would be hard to devour. Obsession is a border. Sometimes when I babysit apocalypse you die behind death's back.

Time thought there’d be fewer of us

blue hair crying
in your wrist

Know, unreachable
scar,  

the dress
rehearsals
for touch
run late

A crushed moth in my mother’s throat is dreaming of a red lightbulb. The silence of our hair is too much. I say to brother break the same finger seven times you’ll hear a churchbell. Eyesight changes what seeing owns.

A minotaur, a unicorn, and an angel walk into a bar. Stay terrified. Your feet will bare themselves to abandoned rabbits.

a wasp drops into jesus.

Anything you do to my mother
you do
to my mother.

Eclipse, the painter’s toothache.
My uncle

cuts hair wants to go to space and says

Nothing ever became art that had even only
once
ruined
the hand.

Hell had already a garden.

All we see
we’ve watched.

a color
terrified
of waiting
mistaken
for the color
of waiting

The people started naming their bodies

Birth never gets its person. The title of this poem was once Babies no one can lift and the churches that hide them. I keep thinking of that flood, and how it had to have killed children blissed out on breathing and how it had to have betrayed those animals drunk on a quieter water. Ah drink, ah brothers, a toast: To the life I spent on my impossible disappearance. A thought everyone will end up having is god watched me die the longest. They don’t’ have a sister. A comb with her hair.

Weirdly gentle pictures of my sons

Found by a woman so strange
She strangely

Cannot die
From being

Who is the angel for the angel of death

We are pain’s first memory

They were alive
when he left

A man kissing a man behind the ear
behind a tree
no god made

A thumbprint above the front door
of the house of a hand
surgeon’s bread
making child

The frozen pea
in angel’s wrist

they are spam and were yesterday and will be tomorrow and god will keep loving you because she is dumb anyway you're dumber than god is what I'm saying

The comb
born
too early

How long the hair cries

You've been killed and they are eating
the body of your son.

What time
can do
with a crumb.

The fiction of the ambulance ate the prose outta christ

I’ve never been alone for three days without calling
creature
creature

Ghost
hates
the wild

I was very angry at the noise that made god

the eyes
in a sad
race
a game
of godless
tag

bodies don’t last long
in heaven
a study
was done
the circumcised
smoke
too fast
I don’t
love data
these babies
letting god
take shape