the rooms in this house

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

st. garbage, resurrected

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

speaking freely, but in the wrong person

September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

you think about words and
about the places they come from

you think about meaning

about these small beautiful images
that the poets polish like valuable stones

that are worth
the tiniest fraction of nothing
and against them you place your
grey slabs of self-hatred

you talk about the burning girl
long after her ashes have grown cold

and you remember reagan
as a monster

as a vampire
but you have reached
a point in time where no one else
wants to speak the truth
about the dying

you have become
a man defined as angry because
this is what fear looks like
when seen from outside one’s own skin

mapping out the here and now

September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

blood on the sheets
and you laugh

blood on the walls

the daughter
in the mother’s arms and
both of them dead

the boyfriend picked up
800 miles away

says he loves her but
can’t explain the gun

can’t explain the rope
around gorky’s neck or the
poet’s need to pick at
these open wounds

the ay the buildings burn
without reason

the cities where they
begin to dissolve
into suburbs and strip malls

your smile in
the weak sunlight of an
august afternoon

the way you taste

all of these things
held together by the
sheer force of anger

alchemy

September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

each day like filth
scraped from the eye of god

each moment pure

and i offer no explanations
when i tell you that
both are true

i eat dinner while paul hill
is put to death

i have seconds

and how is it that
in all the years i wasted in school
i never learned about
the babi yar ravine?

in whose blood are the names
of all the slaughtered
written?

picture the world reduced
to those who would invent the machine gun
and those who would use it

picture mercy as
being allowed to die before
your daughters are raped

remember that malevich had his reasons
for painting white on white

vallejo, with apologies

September 2003 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

at some point
america is supported by
nothing but the bones of
goebbels’ children

at some point
the starving have nothing to eat
but each other

and august of course
dissolves into september
and a seven year-old boy is hit
by a car while playing in the street
in front of my house

and what if no one
knows where he lives?

what if dali wakes up in a
room on fire?

at some point
there has to be a distinction between
reality and art

a woman’s eyeball sliced open
or a baby found dead in
a plastic bag on a street corner

my son drawing airplanes
at the dining room table