three fathers

December 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

man drowns in
a burning house

sleeps and dreams that
he wakes up
in his wife’s arms

dreams that he
never wakes up and
all i can tell you is that
twenty years spent walking
these empty streets will
get you nowhere

the man you find in a
one-room apartment in
the most hopeless part of
the city of butchered dreams
is not jesus christ

he says you look familiar

asks to borrow a twenty
but doesn’t
offer you a drink

sits in a faded chair
watching a silent television
while flowers grow from
de chirico’s bones

sleeps
through the afternoon
and wakes up
forty miles away

wakes up
on a kitchen floor
groping for air

not dead yet but
dying

slow song with piano and accoustic guitar

December 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

sitting at a red light
twenty-one years after lennon’s murder
with the radio on and
the rain falling like a memory of itself
and i am not lost but in exile

i am the father
my own father never was and
my hands are cold

i want power but have
only words

and my list of grievances grows
and the war drags on
and i’ve been told that not every
slaughter is a crime

i’ve been lectured on the evils
of money
but never by those who have it

have slept on drunken floors
with nameless women while
the raped wrote their own versions
of history and i have never been a
believer in stories with morals

i am sorry for the weak
and the starving
for whatever good it does but
i am not a brave man

i will drive home and
kiss my wife

will read to my son then
put him to bed
with the knowledge that he is loved

not every failure i fear
is my own

rust

November 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

i give you a dress
a stone
a handful of broken glass

nothing that’s ever
enough

and i catch angels
with my bare hands

i pull their wings off
and leave them to bleed
and the days pass slowly
and forcibly

like poured concrete

like rust

two years now
since my father died
and i give you bones
and white light
and a dozen reasons to cry

i drive down
deserted country roads in
the last fading minutes
of the day

i put knives through
the throats
of crippled children

i wait for a sign from
any god

the days like empty confessions

November 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

and if i say [i]november[/i]
maybe you picture a grey sky
hung low over darker hills
and maybe this time you’re right

and what if all i have to offer
are these carefully chosen words in
a world full of the sick and
the butchered?

there are worse things than
hearing you are no longer loved

there are reasons men give
for raping their daughters but
none of them matter

and i am tired of being damned
by the fools who want to
force god’s cancerous weight
between my ribs

i’m sorry for tyranny and for
the ignorance that leads to hatred
but i am not the cause or
the cure

this is what i
want my son to understand when
we no longer speak to
each other

it’s what i never understood
about my own father

a coward
is not necessarily a
villain

a starving dog in the right hands
is a weapon

left alone it will only die
or devour the world

voice of the burning girl

November 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

we are not old
or dying
but afraid

we are the voice
of the burning girl
after she has dissolved
into nothing but
faded cloth wrapped
tight around old bones

and as the wind finds
all of the holes
in this house
we turn to each other
for warmth

we compare faces
and names
and whether or not
your sister will come live
with us when she finally
pulls herself from
the tar her life
has become

and the killer is free

the trunk of his car
empty
and waiting
and the baby asleep
upstairs

one of us will have to
be the first
to break his heart