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JOHN SWEET
ash wilderness and when you can no longer win the war you start raping the prisoners start shooting them dead in their cells or hanging them in the courtyards letting the crows have their eyes small victories to give to your children and what your breath smells of is rancid meat what your lover becomes is a whore the barrel of your gun pressed hard between her legs and the way that you smile at her pain the way that being human is all you can ever do these failures that add up to your life 4 p.m raped every day for seven months and no one believes you because maybe you're overweight or maybe unattractive maybe your pain is irrelevant and i've been told that poetry is a shitty substitute for the truth and i've been told that the holocaust never happened i've seen pictures of kim phuc smiling like she'd never been set on fire and what about the man who took the picture? did he help put the flames out? does he understand the mind of god? or maybe what i want to talk about is this man who buys crack at the edge of some country road while his grandchildren watch from the kitchen window while his son fucks a fourteen year old girl in a motel room fifty miles away and none of this is your fault i know and none of it's mine and so we sleep the sleep of the just we make noises that are mistaken for prayer they save no one but they sound so fucking good crazy horse you need to spill a lot of fucking blood before anything will grow you need to have the ability to rewrite history whores turned into gods and idiots into saints and you need to forget about the sand creek massacre about the children butchered in their sleep and then the ones sold as slaves and then the pregnant women kept in cages for the safety of the nation and twenty years later i still remember the look of contempt on the face of this kid when i told him i had no interest in dying for my country and i am still far from perfect and i still have no use for god but i think that there may be some truth at the heart of our myths i think that my father's death was no more or less important than the death of christ i believe in the space that exists between honesty and faith tremolo you grow thin eating the bones of ghosts and no one loves you no one speaks when you walk into the room am i close here? being killed for your beliefs doesn't make you christ and being christ never helped anyone and listen i am sitting in a cold fluorescent glare when april calls to tell me that a friend of hers has died i am thinking about rothko's suicide and about the brakes on the car the way the house is falling apart at its own relentless pace and i am thinking about nikolay soltys and the unflinching ease with which he murdered his child and his pregnant wife and admit it what you want to die is watch his die slowly and in excruciating pain what you don't talk about is the fact that it would solve nothing there is always a point where the truth no longer matters there is always a dog chained to a tree in front of an empty house a woman bound and gagged on her lover's bedroom floor his hands curled into fists and his wife out of town and the way that none of them are happy whatever reasons they have for arriving at this point the objects that will need to be broken before any of our pain can be left in the past john sweet, 35 and counting, angry, bitter, etc etc, hiding in a pissant town in upstate new york, a believer in very little. a follower of the writings of j. pollock and of the words of h. frayne. too much education, and still a shit job. recent publications include the chapbook Enemy (www.pinkanarchkittypress.com), the full length collection Human Cathedrals (www.ravennapress.com) and the electronic chapbook Silence in the House of Truths (www.tmpoetry.com). |
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