and it's not winter
and so you can't be dying
it's not prayer if you have no god
is this the poem that you wanted?
the days stretch like
power lines
the sky has no color
no beginning no end
but the air tastes like copper
the river is filled with
garbage
plastic bags are
caught in branches
i would tell you i loved you
but not against this
filth and decay
i would tell you anything you
wanted to hear on the day
lennon is murdered and then spend
the rest of my life denying it
this is how the war will be fought
once we've lost all
hope of winning
__________________________
the bigger picture: a meditation
or my son's black eye
after he falls on the ice
his beautiful face and his
angry tears and these rusted strands
of barbed wire strung between
the empty fields and the
edges of the road
the way that twenty years of driving
have brought me to this small house
to this strange life that
feels like more than i deserve
and what about this man found
hiding in his mother's back yard?
what about the baby he's killed
or the woman or the children?
his family found in
violent pools of blood and all
he has to offer is silence
all he defines is america
and it's here that
the february sun finally begins to
crawl above the hills
it's here that the light grows from
grey to pale yellow and that i begin
to consider the possibility of hope
not for all of us but
at least for the people i love
and maybe
this is how religions are born
_________________________
fear (2)
dead man in the car says nothing
and no one listens anyway
and this is how the days pass
this is why your children
hate you
not the failure
but the desperation
the poems found in an
empty motel room
the woman tied to the bed
doesn't look at the camera
dreams in shades of black and green
and she doesn't believe in america
has given up on the ideas of
god and power and i am
sitting at the window watching the
girl across the street draw lopsided hearts
down the length of the sidewalk in
pale blue chalk
i am thinking about
how much of my life i've wasted
pushing people away from me
am thinking about how i
would do it all again
given the chance
would read about the man found
dead by his own hand
behind the wheel of a borrowed car
would sit quietly with my oldest son
while the north tower fell
while the ones who wanted to live
jumped 98 stories into
open graves
clear september sunlight
blessing all of us
_________________________
a blessing
you either wear
the yellow star made of ruined flesh
or you spit on those who do
it's a truth from
before you were born
it's the crucifixion played out
every second of every day
don't tell me you've never
dipped your fingers in the blood
________________________________
the bigger world
strummer dead and
all of the tortured in el salvador
and the way that nothing is beautiful
in the first grey light
of morning
the parking lots ending raggedly
and the streets going nowhere and
this young boy lost in the
back seat of his mother's car
the way we say
the scream of metal
or the way we turn away from
whatever remains
the world defined by
the edges of shadows and
the smell of gasoline and this taste
of ashes that i can never
drink away
this ice forming along the
banks of the river
the garbage that gets
trapped in it and the man
found three months later in a
town he'd never been to
the note he left
that didn't say anything and
what i'm getting at here
is that i miss you
what i'm trying to do
is explain who i am
all i ask is that
you believe it matters
_________________________
spontaneous untitled poem #3 in a series of 3
summer until
we forget everything else
fires burning out of control
six hundred miles to the north
and the air stained yellow
the bones of the disappeared
digging their way
back up through the soil
maybe
or maybe seven years later
their rooms have become shrines
and their pictures are
heavy with dust
maybe a man has confessed
and been executed
and the days continue to pass
the hills continue to circle
these small meaningless towns
and what if i touch you
and you pull away?
what if the need for medicine
replaces the need for love?
i tell you that i'm not
the bleeding horse and you either
believe me or you don't
i walk through empty halls
and out into unforgiving sunlight
and the day is beautiful despite
all of the pain we cause
is beautiful possibly
because of it
and this feels too bitter
to be anything but the truth
by John Sweet
