October 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
your name called out at
the exact moment
a woman’s body washes ashore
three thousand miles away
or a man pulling poems
from the bones of old lovers
obvious things
my wife and her fears
my lack of faith
my lack of money
the possibilities of
highways and of walls
the idea of starvation
of sunlight
through rainsoaked trees
and what if
the unborn child becomes
a weapon?
what if the ocean is bottomless?
don’t believe for a second
that any of this poetry
don’t think that
killing the killers is
the same thing as justice
and maybe
it doesn’t have to be
maybe christ’s death was as
meaningless
as anyone else’s
can you accept this
as the truth or
do you want to see me bleed?
consider your answer
maybe all that it
makes you is human
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
