a homesick poem
by John Sweet
sunlight and crows
a sacrifice
a clenched fist
dripping blood
these are not options,
this is the
proper sequence
we are believers in
the wisdom of ghosts
of fairy tales
we are believers in
a void of
our own making
wealth and
self-righteousness
power from the
end of a barrel
who are you to
criticize
until you’ve taken
your first life?
between defeat and despair
first week of april all brown lawns and
grey sky, threat of snow that
never quite arrives and
what i miss are
leonora’s pale breasts in the mexican sunlight
do you remember 1937?
are we still killing for the
same reasons we were then?
seems like it was all pretty funny until
we realized that everyone
who’d died was someone we’d known
let all sounds be the sound of freedom
these houses and
the spaces between them
these streets all heavy with silence
in the early afternoon
trees and the shadows of trees
and the ghost of de chirico
a kingdom of dust
for the lucky few
can’t be god these days unless you’re
willing to bleed and
maybe that’s how it always was
not every cripple is a prophet
not every prophet understands
the necessity of hope
picture yourself as the desert
and your life
finally starts to make sense
upstate; a surrender
in a fog of numbed-out pain and
creeping cold
in a collapsing city in
a dying kingdom
a future built on ruins,
and what is there to say about it?
you’ve wasted your whole life here
taste of guilt mixed with
the texture of ashes, right?
the dead among the living and
all of us blind
all of us halfway down the
road to being forgotten
anonymous houses & abandoned factories and
each day shaped by dull light without color
each moment meaningless on its own
and then when added to all the others,
and so breathe
don’t breathe
gotta make a choice
either way
gotta stand up and be counted or
lie down in whatever
shallow grave you’ve dug for yourself
there will always be a despair
greater than your own
this kingdom of rain, these corpses on fire
crows outside the suicide factory,
first light of a dull grey morning
screams and whispers
echoes
there is no future in being holy,
you understand
there is no future at all
the present is always with us, the
past never remembered clearly and when i
tell you i love you it
sounds like an admission of defeat
when i get out of my car, the parking lot
is littered with the bones of angels
the machinery has just begun
to grind into motion
each day starts at zero, and then they
all move backwards from there
everyone i hate, and the reasons why
man with the gun says
there need to be changes,
but he’s just as dead the rest of us
he’s high on the fumes
of burning children
he’s trapped in the shadows
of his father’s fists
a slave and a whore,
but fuck it
no one comes to this town to
live up to their fullest potential
no one talks about better days
until there’s no hope of
them ever arriving
you learn this early, and then
it just seems like something
you’ve always known
st. nicole, lost in the labyrinth
the suicide season again,
and all your fucked up lovers say
it’s the sunlight that ties this noose so tight
they say it’s the fading warmth of
a half-remembered past
that blurs the future to a dirty grey, and
what can you do but agree?
your father never liked you, sure
left nothing but the gift of self-hatred
when he walked away from the burning house
and how many years did you wait
before you went looking for him?
how easy do you think it was
for him to forget your name?
opened the door to his shithole apartment
with shaking hands, with a blank stare,
and told you he’d never had any kids
told you his wife disappeared
back before the war
made you start to doubt you’d
ever been born
BIO
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A DEAD MAN EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery) and No ONE STARVES IN A NATION OF CORPSES (2020 Analog Submission Press).
