English poetry by John Sweet

An image, traced

Too young to obsess over

Rothko's suicide

and so I consider Cobain's

I tell you I love you but

it doesn't feel like an answer

it doesn't taste like religion

and it's not the fear of

being forgotten

but the emptiness of entropy

I am tired of being needed

of knowing names

and I have forgotten my

father's face but not the reasons

he had for hating me

I have learned to

see myself through his eyes

have stopped

talking about my past

it was never what I'd

hoped it would be

All  and then nothing

stand there shaking like

Dali’s hands with the muzzle of the gun

placed firmly against the

base of your skull

tell yourself

we are not Gods

look at the sky

then close your eyes

keep everything you’ve ever

seen held close to your heart

Beg and I will be your enemy

Or the Minotaur in his old age

or god in ruins

no one believes the story will end

no one wants to dig where

the bodies have been left

43 corpses, butchered, mutilated,

parts shoved into plastic bags, the bags

buried in the soft soil by the river and

everything done in the name of

power and everything done in the

name of money and everything

done in the name of freedom

look

what matters is that I love you in

this age of collapsing buildings

what matters is that we hold each

other in frozen, sunlit rooms

that the never ending

space between us disappears

pablo

No house in the country,

 no country,

 no hope without

 the possibility of despair

it’s just history, you see

just the slaughter of the

innocent and the executions of

the guilty

famous women falling from the

clouds only to hit the

pavement with mortal force,

and then famous women painting

these brutal deaths

1939 maybe

and then 1993, the

baby born to junkie sweethearts,

my girlfriend still not answering

my calls two weeks after

the …….

cold sunlight on empty trees

pale blue skies,

pink clouds, brown hills

nothing beautiful, but

beauty was never promised

the future was

never guaranteed

just came screaming up over the

horizon like the fist of god

hoping to cause as much

pain as possible

Wide awake now

These kids out in the back yard, playing

in some burnt-out truck cab,

these bent and blackened spoons littering the sidewalk

diabetic cab driver just laughs when you tell him

about the woman you love,

but this is the last cold year before the doctors start

taking off toes, before the foot is removed, before he finally

dies like a dog giving birth

and the girl on the front porch just smiles when she

gets the news, and the spaces between her teeth

says it’s never quite spring,

says she’s never quite warm and the cars on the

interstate all seem like an answer

the days all end with the idea

of suicide, but then they start again

motel just off of exit 58 is torn down, pool is filled in,

but you can still buy the postcards on eBay

you can listen to van Morrison

while you drive to a cleaner town

you can sing about the dead kids and

you can dream about sleeping underground

it’s the fine art of nothing ever chaining

even while everything

you’ve ever known dissolves to ashes and rust