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

Carried
by a parent
one becomes
a ghost.

I can fall asleep anywhere.

Crucifix, cop car, etc.

Mirror,
the photo’s chapel.

Days my son
forgets to walk.

Kids toss an egg as high as they can

Run, or don’t

Distance makes touch in the skull of an angel

Beheads god in front of a star

Poetry didn’t save us
And we weren’t smart

Emptiness uses the unfed to see time.

The angel of dearth
Is the dead
Twin.

A comma is in a bird.

Thunder forgets
its god.

Television, our widowed star.

I’m in all of my dreams.

Driving home from my mother’s shattered arm and mirage-eaten back, I convince myself I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ve only been on this earth twice. My body doesn’t look different in the dark. I could be living in a man who's lost his loved ones. Behold I see the deer deformed in the same spot that it was last week and know I can twist my shadow toward those deer in the nowhere I’d be.

There is always a mosquito on my wrist

I learned
so early
that belief
became a cat
checking
my pulse

I thought of something
the other day
mom

I don’t know if it happened
A little girl
got sick

swallowing
band-aids

That’s a weird way
for the body
to get out

of communion

I made that joke where
ever
one with
the nostalgia
of goldfish
was everyone
left

That girl was on tv
getting tickled
by a man who wanted
to still
be in Eden

Mom I saw the car
No person
it said
plainly
is here

Some boy
next
if not
for time

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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A couple short poems from the collection to convince one of nothing:

A CIGARETTE IS A STAR DE-AGED BY GOD

Our nakedness had little to do with the most immediate creatures deciding not to **** us. Eating grew on the tree of loneliness. A cigarette is a star de-aged by god.

ANGELS WANT BODIES THEY CAN LEAVE

There was a second story told where Jesus got sick quietly and died watching his mother rub her wrists together. Angels want bodies they can leave.

I don't sleep anymore.
I can almost see
god seeing
a child.
My stomach remembers every olive.
I have two phones
but no favorite.

An arm cast
in a long
heaven
raises
not from birth
a hand

100 bodies
learn to count

The mirror remains an unfaithful marker
of those Ohioans
presently addicted
to the speedy
sameness
of decay

Re-hungered

a needle
boils
its nearness
to the doll’s
backbone

A cornfield made of rain

A ruined ghost
showing the palms
of my mother’s
hands
to infants
ecstatic
with eyesight

The low miracle’s most vanished
pleasure carried to its invisible end

My unreachable
mother, new

and unreachable.

All the bodies I’m sent into are in pain.
A caterpillar bellies across an hour that’s been touched

by the last
butterfly’s
moment…

I know that’s easy. I’m not here
for the writing.

I bring wine to the table but also my will to place the blood piano on the front lawn and play it for the vomiting passersby. Touch writes the unreadable bible on privacy. Fill a baseball with the stop sign’s blood. One death is hard to process do you think Death has a story about a particular life? In the afterlife of your gone-ness I am de-blued by shock. I write stuff like that because I can’t write more than three times with my wrist. I know you’re tired of me carving belief into the face of god but please **** the golden poet who knows we can’t eat food. Howl non-starlike into the flash of the eye-prone before. Dear addict ask image what god did only once.

I’ve put my hands on my brothers hoping they will want to equally die. In the dream it was me checking on me to see if I was faking sleep. You can change the mirror’s past with the face of god. In the dream they find ice in my stomach and shatter notions of conception concerning dying glass angels. **** my aunt again I dare you. Eden had to be super small.

gesture 7

Loneliness spreads into regions of sleep never before undiscovered

When I say my son is dead you can’t say if he is or isn’t

In a field of handpicked *** follow not the glow of a sobbing fingernail

Recognize time when I see it

In the movie hidden by me watching god

In the movie hidden by me watching, god gets in the ambulance ever time

In the movie hidden by my watching

Their poor happiness

The child running after a wild tire they’re poor

Poor acne the handwriting it becomes

Angel acne a bone popping out of an echo in the ghost of my soul

The handwriting it becomes when put by the handless

On that tire gone

God of hands

gesture 6

enough
about me
these gaps
in your grief

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

Before you were born you listened to your own unrecorded grief

Diagnosed gods
test weapons

Today a tenderness and so on

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A squirrel eating a star in the mouth of god

gesture 2

It’s too easy to have what you’re born with. Touch implicates itself in the theft of miracle’s diary. I keep the idea long enough for beauty to interrupt. Asked by three people at once have I ever been drunk, I answer to something lower. An eye is a cigarette made of tears. If I miss a shot, or if a brother steals the ball, an uncle’s ankle explodes in two hells. No teeth, but we lost bitemarks on the reg. Our bruises had five thousand people turning in their own blood to hear the devil. Lord take my child while he is pretending to be the child of someone else. God, blink so often that image has nothing to stare at. Whatever creatures walk out of Eden we’ll leave them out.

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.

House,
A light socket finds the first tooth of god.

Church, I am too old to imagine the waking hours.

Sleep,
Being in the water
when the song
is heard.

A neighbor points me in the direction of himself as an amputee. Information isn’t my strong suit. Excess of angels, tyranny of nostalgia. I dug into a tree a grave for a rabbit’s foot. Talked year after year in an echo that had my children tapping out of televised fight events. Violence is a language that rewards godlike pronunciation. Everyone knows where they were when nothing encrypted the pathway to racism in the shell of finding its mother. My drinking keeps changing the age I started drinking. Jesus gets crucified so many times that a one-of-one pop-up book of god using for a pillow a doll based on death doesn’t arrive in time for the book burning. I am late to my life and the television longs to be frostbitten. The toys have no memory. Even less when they explode.

Sleep’s house is a debt that denies three dawns. I changed my mind about ghosts. They are the tombstones of angels. My mind seduced a star that was alive. Sound can’t **** its brother if I am ******* on my cuts in a cornfield. Today I wrote a resignation letter in invisible blood and the wind ****-shamed touch. Sound has a shy daughter. Two sisters named Cain asked me to dream.

I don’t have an opening line.
The godless
Snow eaten
By a red
Dog was close.
Of the things my sadness
Notices,
Your suicide
Is second
To your second
Suicide.
My blue
Jokes
Deepen
Hair.
What I mean is
The undead
Lack
Sorrow.
Wait, ghost.
Wait, Sylvie Mix.
A guy I knew in high-school
Was shot
By his son. I don’t think
It’s great
That I know
He had a son.
Go, ghost. A cut
On a thousand
Bods.

As forever’s divine infant, god inherited permanence. Think about that for a second. I cross my legs in front of light bulbs. Our food catches up to us. Shape is just rain wanting a past. A room is a line break a film is a room. I can’t move. Bring the deer inside. The horse is so small that nothing but a moth fits in its mouth. The deer is washing the feet of a doll. Bring me the doll it is crying. Bring me the crying of the doll. Turn something on. Turn on toothaches in the wild. Start a car made of toothaches. I don’t know what poems look like. Don’t die in poems.

My uncle
Lost god
In a bet
Came home
Asking
Had we seen
A man
Or a woman
Taking
His clothes
Half of us
Said man
The other half
Started drinking
And got
Naked
Longer
Each time
This poem
Wrote itself
Death
Is a radio
What was it
Before

Dear Ethel Cain

Ants don’t cry or think about teeth. I got this star tattoo that cost a lot.

I worship too quickly.
My gods think they’re still alive.
Am I the world my children worry over.
Am I the worry.
My job is a soap fattened in hell.
I send my brothers songs sung by women
In the language of my voice.
I didn’t drink until I missed being sick.
I love my father in a way only my sons will understand.
I love my mother shhhhh.
Being quiet is the childhood of silence.
Hear underwater
Touch
Starve.
Or be
With sightseeing
The lord
Of your phone.
I’m sorry if that was your body.

TRY, RUIN

I put all my knowing in the hands of the known
thinking things wiser would **** me in peace
the roots of my going expanding alone
where drinking sings finer to pill popping beasts

you placed all the growing in a garden so burned
a leaving built into your still lover’s teeth
the pace of your smoking so slowly relearned
our drinking spilled into the pillcrusher’s feast

oh bombs made in heaven too perfect to drop
  I still think the angels are ******* with god
the mirror a creature that image resists
  unmoved by the seeing of its own basilisk

The poem is as old as I write it. For example, this poem is too young. Come back.

Dear Ethel Cain

My belly drew circles around me. A scarecrow with cancer made peace with paradise in a cornfield of melancholy. My parents fell asleep but neither one before the other. Some bad kids formed a church then left it so they could pour glue down a rabbit hole. A short period of drunkenness found a mistake in a star. I didn't know how many rabbits to pray for, so I just prayed for one.

i write **** lyrics sometimes and it's so fun and i really just want to sing into a tape recorder like a detective then drive into a lake where I don't even die all the way

VOICE APPS FOR CRUCIFIXION SURVIVORS

Fasting in the pawn shop
Of my father’s early sleep

My sadness like a dog’s thought
In the pop-gun stage of grief

Three pills left to choose from
But I can’t leave them alone

Dog tells me to lose some
Like the sticks dreamed into bones

Oh the mouths of my longing that sing no hurt
Oh the bells in my body that ring no church

--- giving god a seashell
god can hear an apple cry
--- I guess it’s up to me now
keep the angel’s fossil dry


MY BELLY, HALLELUJAH

in a meadow is the navel
of a god I can defeat
a shadow on a table
set with food it cannot eat
my belly, hallelujah
and its field of empty meat
a killing moving through us
slower meals of absent sheep
I don’t lose any waking
though my hair has slept a lot
alone but pulled to making
dare these cigarettes ask for god
if you think that you could sing this
in the angel time of ghosts
my stomach let it ping bliss
to delay the tattooed crow