Tryna brave the belly of the beast
But this enemy of me
Has got hands-

I’ve never metaphor for anxiety
Like this one
Imposter syndrome-

I was only a dark forest away
from who I needed to be
But feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy
Are twisting clouds so forebodingly 

Mara’s army fires arrows
Raining streams of self-consciousness
Like I wasn’t ready to self destruct
on impact -
detonation

I laugh and share memes of self-deprecation
Social media the new god
Where we worship ourselves
By constantly trying to impress
everyone else

Venmo me Dopamine tributes
With the truth in a cave of
depression and
Isolation

Maybe Holly’s right
And I do need to be here
She shines the light
On the darkness
In the hospital wing
5th floor at Evanston
But I’m afraid I’ve grown too codependent
On this astral plane
I’ve projected
And romanticized
these Ambien nights
Only to awake neglected
Screaming out her name
In sleep paralysis
On a dark night-


When I’m manic
I try to live it out like I’m in a movie
Projecting inner struggles
As external conflicts
To make the scene more interesting
Until I’m in this final battle alone like Odysseus
Lost all my friends when the monster ate our ship and I took em for granted caught up
Between a rock and a hard place-
Depressed and Hyper-sexualization
when spring is here again

I’m in the first act dip
edging the ******-
Stimulating the simulation

Bitcoin’s easy if you try
So simple now - I’ll tell you why
It’s not complex - oh contraire
You can buy it anywhere

Cash App makes it really slick
And others too - just take your pick
Venmo’s fast, try both - compare
You can buy it anywhere

PayPal offers Bitcoin buys
Get some while you order fries
Buy on Coinbase from your chair
You can buy it anywhere

Use Voyager - or Gemini
Buy it low or buy it high
So many options, I declare
You can buy it anywhere

Use Crypto.com, or FTX
Buying bitcoin is better than… a kiss
Do it quietly, or with fanfare
Just buy your bitcoin anywhere

Binance, Celsius, or just use Strike
Buy bitcoin (safely) on your bike
Think for yourself, and stay aware
You can buy bitcoin anywhere

I’m going to each of my suitemates' rooms. One at a time, methodically. I pause, for dramatic purpose, until I have their full attention. Once I have it, I rushingly, excitedly, breathlessly say, “I’M getting pizza later, for the GAME!” Like a seven year old child.

Now, my roommates KNOW we're ordering pizzas later. They’re all “on board,” everyone’s submitted their order and venmo’d their money to Sunny who will actually place the order for delivery at 5:30 pm. But I’m excited. I LOVE pizza (and American, NFL football) and I love being childish.

My roommates, like my brother, sister and parents before them, know this and love my manic, overactive way of excising tedium. Besides, I won’t do this more than once or twice - ok, maybe three times today before the pizza comes.

Since you’ve read this far - allow me to opine, for a moment, about “self restraint.”

Have you read about how they’re using familial DNA to solve old cold-case murders? I think they should use familial DNA to track down whomever it was that invented self restraint.

It was probably some old Protestant. I mean, Catholics only have sin - it’s yes or no - binary. So without researching it (at all), I think we’re dealing with someone born after the protestant reformation of 1555 - but I’m flexible.

Anyway, they should track that person down, dig them up, beat them with a stick, and then rebury them, in unhallowed ground.

I hate self restraint. It’s so.. restraining.

#restraintsux

I'm doing a fundraiser for my softball team and if you want to help out please Venmo to here " @Bridget-Wagner-6 " it would help a lot thank you😁

It is a war now
She won't let me pay for food
I will win them all

I am dating someone
who draws me when
I’m not there,
and looks at the photos
I’ve sent him
in private.
He pays me back
every time I buy something
and writes a cute
note in Venmo,
and asks me to stop
by before work just so
he can kiss me.
He is romantic in
ways that I am not,
but I am grateful.

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.

can be purchased via:
paypal ([email protected])
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
Zelle [email protected]

/\
\/

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.

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.

can be purchased via:
paypal ([email protected])
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
Zelle [email protected]