October 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
rain
somewhere
animals caught in
baited traps
or the air thick
and yellow
the sun shapeless
and the pieces of
a sixteen-month old girl
are found in a city
five hundred miles away
the smell
of battery acid
like a blanket over
everything
and the rooms in
this house are familiar
the bodies found hung
from the trees outside
have names i’ve
heard before
and i don’t
live here anymore but
maybe at some point
in the past
maybe before
the first tiny hand
was dropped into a
food processor
and now i live
nowhere
while faceless men
decide my future
fucked
but not quite the god
of starving dogs
this by itself a
reason to live
October 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
in the blue and the purple light
on the shadowed sides
of these houses
in a room with a cracked window
and the ghost of edie
crawling naked across the floor
i am my father at 34
and his own father before him
i am the face my children fear
and the voice
and the raised hand
i am the emptiness and
the absence of warmth
and america is
its own form of violence
the boy is dead
next to his sister in the
back of the van
the father drives
with the radio on softly
with dylan’s voice dragging itself
through my headphones
as i sit at the foot of the bed
watching april sleep
and do you remember
the hill of fifteen crosses?
the girl you fucked there and
the way she couldn’t
remember your name?
and what about the man who
tells you you’re not a poet?
what about the way war feels
from 10,000 miles away?
all of the butchered
without faces or names and
the reasons you choose to hate
the people
and some of them i’ve known
and others have just written
to ask for favors and
in the end
there is only this street as it
crashes into the highway
this back yard turning brown
in the cold grey air of
september
in the blue and the
purple light of early evening
this house too cold to
ever be a home
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
you think about words and
about the places they come from
you think about meaning
about these small beautiful images
that the poets polish like valuable stones
that are worth
the tiniest fraction of nothing
and against them you place your
grey slabs of self-hatred
you talk about the burning girl
long after her ashes have grown cold
and you remember reagan
as a monster
as a vampire
but you have reached
a point in time where no one else
wants to speak the truth
about the dying
you have become
a man defined as angry because
this is what fear looks like
when seen from outside one’s own skin
and it matters that you love your wife
or at least it should
and so you act like it does
you walk an uncertain line
between making promises and
telling lies
you end up thinking about words
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
blood on the sheets
and you laugh
blood on the walls
the daughter
in the mother’s arms and
both of them dead
the boyfriend picked up
800 miles away
says he loves her but
can’t explain the gun
can’t explain the rope
around gorky’s neck or the
poet’s need to pick at
these open wounds
the ay the buildings burn
without reason
the cities where they
begin to dissolve
into suburbs and strip malls
your smile in
the weak sunlight of an
august afternoon
the way you taste
all of these things
held together by the
sheer force of anger
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
each day like filth
scraped from the eye of god
each moment pure
and i offer no explanations
when i tell you that
both are true
i eat dinner while paul hill
is put to death
i have seconds
and how is it that
in all the years i wasted in school
i never learned about
the babi yar ravine?
in whose blood are the names
of all the slaughtered
written?
picture the world reduced
to those who would invent the machine gun
and those who would use it
picture mercy as
being allowed to die before
your daughters are raped
remember that malevich had his reasons
for painting white on white
remember that pollock knew them
that he dreamed his own death
and does anyone care when a
pedophile priest is murdered?
is the world a better place when
his bones have been
picked clean by the crows?
it gets to the point where
every question is only a means
of avoiding the truth
where august becomes september
and none of us
can offer any comfort
and what i think about is
this waitress on her knees in a
dirty bathroom with her
pants undone and a stranger
standing over her
what i think about is
how good hatred feels
all of the ways it can be
turned into power
September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
at some point
america is supported by
nothing but the bones of
goebbels’ children
at some point
the starving have nothing to eat
but each other
and august of course
dissolves into september
and a seven year-old boy is hit
by a car while playing in the street
in front of my house
and what if no one
knows where he lives?
what if dali wakes up in a
room on fire?
at some point
there has to be a distinction between
reality and art
a woman’s eyeball sliced open
or a baby found dead in
a plastic bag on a street corner
my son drawing airplanes
at the dining room table
his smile
when i tell him a joke
all of the days i’ve wasted
waiting for
the future to arrive
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