Issue 12

Fall 2002

John Sweet

 

John has a new collection of poems out:

 

approaching lost - poems by john sweet

$6 postage paid from

Via Dolorosa Press
Hyacinthe L. Raven, ed.
701 East Schaaf Road
Cleveland, OH 44131
www.angelfire.com/oh2/dolorosa

cash, checks or money orders (made out to Hyacinthe L. Raven)

de chirico's lament

standing in this room i
thought i'd abandoned forever
i become a stranger
to myself

i remember de chirico's lament
and how he dragged his feet
approaching the bleeding
remains of christ

i remember why
i've always hated poetry

and the window isn't open
it's shattered
and through it i can still hear
the screams of the burning girl

can still smell the breath
of the men who
turned away from her and walked
back home to rape their wives

and i find you on
the back stairs where i
left you six years ago and
you've forgotten my name

you've been married
divorced
and married again
and you hold your children
out against me like
talismans

you show me your scars
and i turn away

ashamed not of your pain
but of having been the cause
of so much of it

 

apparatus, revisited

or consider dali's severed hand
and everything it might
possibly mean

consider the fact that some men
have a physical need for war

that they have their reasons
for calling me a coward
but i will not be jesus christ

will not be the
patron saint of starving dogs or even
the prince of swords reversed

can you see that america
was inevitable?

do you understand why hitler
will never be killed?

picture a house surrounded by
unmarked snow

a girl found
naked and raped and murdered in
the basement

picture a woman's bound remains
found in a burning closet

a father injecting his own son
with poisoned blood

i am only giving you one
version of reality
yes
but one may be all of us deserve
and i am thinking of the
simple beauty of an empty
sheet of paper

am thinking of my unborn child
and of my wife's silent fears

and what i've become is a man
defined fully by
the things he cannot touch

 

february 15th, early afternoon, the poem left untitled

not silence but
the uneasy shudder
of the wind

the sound of a man
found hanging in his cell
three thousand miles away and
maybe i smile

maybe the salt of
february
is all i taste

the threat of snow
momentarily transformed into
the threat of rain and
i think i've been in this
town too long

in this house
and in this room
watching the passing days through
a pane of warped and dirty glass
and i am loved despite all
of my failures

i am afraid with or without
the presence of god

and i can show you the body
of a woman forty years dead by
her own hand and can only
hope that you understand
why it matters

i can bleed as honestly
as any forgotten martyr but
i choose not to

not every act of freedom
is meant
to change the world

of all the words that matter

what i get sick of is
the search for hidden meaning

let the bleeding horse die

let the burning house burn

the same man has been
trapped inside for twenty-two years
and you will never save him

his children are grown

they have their own children now
and their own illusions
and their own forms of denial

they remind me of myself

and do you remember o'keeffe
slowly going blind
in the new mexico desert?

do you remember my father and
all of the dogs who wanted
a piece of him after
the machines were turned off?

or the men my own age making
empty threats
that i turned away from

men with or without futures
and we are all still mining
this same dead piece of land
six years later

we are all waking up with the
taste of ashes thick in our mouths

with our lives defined by
second-hand cars and bank loans
and bills that can never
be paid

and what's not exactly clear is
whether this is self-pity
or anger

what keeps me awake at night
are the fates of
all of these missing children
and the fact that blind faith in the
god of atrocities is
not enough

the fact that faith in a savior
who couldn't even save himself
is a bitter joke

my gift to you on this
final day of forgotten ghosts
will be laughter for
its own sake

poem for michael giberson, who asked for one

a blue sky reflected darkly
in a brown river
and pollock all but forgotten in this
age of secret wars

the graffiti on the retaining wall
nothing more than an inarticulate version
of my own useless anger

and it's been two weeks now
since the last body was dragged out of the water
and identified
and i have already forgotten the name

remember only that he was
identified by a distinctive tattoo
and what i end up thinking about are
the men who organize riots

the ones who scream WHAT DO WE WANT?
into faceless crowds
when it's obvious that the answer
is power

what i end up thinking about
is your latest letter

about the vast empty spaces between
guilt and relief and
how easy it is to get lost there
and i understand what you're saying

i've built my life
around my wife and son

i have no use for stories with morals

have no strength to mourn the
brutal death of every stranger

will not waste my life grieving for
all of the atrocities i
cannot control

© John Sweet

 

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