life and death
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Poems
by John Sweet

 

 

 

houses burn

 

my hand silhouetted

against a twilight

october sky

 

everything is skin

and bone

and silence

 

and somewhere else

houses burn

and the people inside

refuse to leave

 

i close my eyes

 

the child smiles

 

i don't have enough

magic

to save her

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

one after kahlo

 

she paints her suicide from

memory, the clouds, the shattered

glass, the broken body

 

she calls her ex-husband pig

and she calls him lover

and he laughs softly and

always in the arms of another woman

 

they have no children and

she paints this too, an

emptiness inside a blank expanse,

a sky without air, and she climbs

to the top of the canvas

 

she jumps

 

spends the last brilliant seconds

of her life naming stars

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

your enemy's momentum, your lover's god

 

the house cold

and the dogs hungry

and myself numbered among them

 

the slow eight of jesus christ

in a dark room

 

too much silence to sleep

 

one hundred eighty pounds of fear

and the baby breathing

 

the doors open

and the doors closed

and the ghosts of all the hands

that have ever held my own

 

i asked for none of this

 

i made no promises

 

do you believe in america?

 

look at this girl

tied to the bed

 

look at the man behind the camera

 

at the ones who approach her and

at what they hold in their hands

 

and i hate mirrors

for obvious reasons

 

i wait for the phone to ring

but it doesn't

 

 

 

 

and i have a name and i

have a number and

there was a time when i thought

they would mean something

 

there was a time when

the wars mattered

 

not how many died but

how quickly victory

could be declared

 

how much money could be made

 

all of the beautiful things

it could buy

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

dolorosa

 

midnight in the

house of the dying man and

there is nothing to eat

but darkness

 

there is nothing to

talk about but regret

 

the suicides you've known

or the bodies devoured by cancer

or the names of the soldiers

who drove the spikes

through christ

 

the names of their wives

and children

 

all of the ways that guilt

ends up bleeding into innocence

 

and no one wants to see

the killers as human

and no one wants to stand for

too long in the room

of mirrors

 

sooner or later

all you'll see is what

you've always hated most

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

in the age of gold

 

and the children in the ashes

and some of them playing

and some of them dead

 

some of them remembered and

others as lost

as the ghosts of aztecs

 

and there are

the hands of mothers and

there are the hands of strangers

and there is the way that

pain is pain

 

the way a father’s voice sounds

as the plastic bag is placed

over the head and

tied tight around the neck

 

the absolute fear when love

is proven to be worthless

 

none of us anything more

or less than human

 

 

 

 

a line, (a blue one)

 

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