this human noise

poems

john sweet

regret

you start by hating

who you are

and who you aren't

you listen to three

teenage girls in the middle of

the street

screaming at each other

you watch the baby

sleep through it

think about the sister of

someone you used to

consider a friend

about her husband hitting

black ice on the highway on

a february morning

the truck that

destroyed his car

the way you haven't

seen the sun

for three days now

your fingers cold on

the first day of june and

your car sitting dead

in the driveway

your wife

visiting her family

two hours away and

without the promise of

return

all of the days

you've wasted not

telling her you

love her

kay sage resurrected on easter sunday

dead leaves in the

first days of spring and the

sunlight showing where exactly

things have gone wrong

the names of objects lying exposed

between the

shadows of bones

and there is digging in the dirt as

a symbolic act

and there is the thing itself

addiction or starvation or

the simplicity of standing lost in

a clean white room

of staring without recognition

at your own past

and what we have in common

i think

is the need to be clean

the need to shape a language from

flesh and bone and

now that i've made it past 27

what i fear is being dead at 44

at 49

what i fear is growing old and

all of the useless anger

that goes with it

all of the sad fucking injustice

that i'm powerless against

the unbearable weight of

motion

letter to michael

cold white light and the

shadows of powerlines and

the illusion of motion

the names of forgotten lovers

that no longer sound

like prayers

the names of seven children

found murdered

in a house in california

the names of

my own children

everything precious and

so easily destroyed

absolution

you have choices

he says

you can either write to hide

or you can write to reveal

or maybe he says nothing

the machines are silent

but the sound

in my head enormous

the clock on the wall

pointless

and maybe what he does

is lie in the

bed without moving

maybe what he does

is die

it seems like i

remember it this way

obvious poem for obvious reasons

the snow melting at the end

of february and

the garbage revealed

the skin peeled back to

find the cancer

can you taste it?

ashes and black blood in

the back of your throat

a boy with a gun and

another one dead

four years old and his mother

on her hands and knees

and the sound she makes as

the rope is pulled tighter

the way he just lies there

while the television blares in

another room

his silence

which says everything

lust

always these same fucking streets

with these same silent houses

the way you

mother's boyfriend swore he'd

kill you if you told

the dull pain of sunlight

or the simple bliss of getting stoned

my hands

which were too small to hold

all of your pain

such simple acts of failure

mural

or you hate your mother

or your father or

maybe both

you slash your wrists at

the age of sixteen

blow your brains out eleven years later

all of these brutal attempts

at self-expression in a world filled

with battered children and still there is

the flight of birds

the silence of empty highways in the

last purple light of september evenings

and later it's the winter of '56 on fireplace road

where pollock watches his studio

from the back door

waits without hope for his hands

to reinvent the world

and you tell me that

you could never stand his work

and that those who kill others

deserve to die themselves

and you're found swinging in the room

of hanged men in the week before christmas

almost half a world away from your home

and when i'm fourteen

i approach morrison like i would a god

and when i'm twenty-five i can

finally see him as pathetic

and there's a woman in a small town i no longer visit

who will never forgive me for this

there are the men who

fathered her children then left her

and maybe the children hate them

or maybe they just don't care

maybe a two year-old girl in another neighborhood

is locked in a heated room

in the middle of august and left to die

and you ell me that this is what

you expect from welfare mothers and then

you talk about the niggers who live

down the street

about how you're not prejudiced

but you believe in the truth

and it's a song i've been living with

my entire life

it's the man downstairs

teaching his wife to bleed

it's my childhood spent in the watery light

of a dozen anonymous bars surrounded by

false prophets who can no longer

stand what they've become

and you are found on your balcony

dead of an overdose

or you're found in your living room

or maybe you get yourself clean

only to end up shot to death

in front of your home

and your blood is real

and spilling everywhere and

twenty years pass before i wake up in

the middle of the night to the sound

of my son crying

i have nothing to offer him

but the past

the need to sleep

in the stand of dead and

dying trees behind

the gas station where no one

is raped and nothing

is loved

south down

any number of pitted grey streets

past empty houses and

crying children

past starving artists and the

plastic bags caught in weeds and

the cigarette butts ground

without mercy into brown lawns

or the sky where it gets

caught in february's branches

the river where the

drowning boy is

always being found

where this

fourteen year old girl is last seen

by two of her friends and

what if all she leaves behind is

one mudstained sneaker?

what if the killer looks like

everyone you've ever known?

nothing in this world has

any meaning

beyond the obvious

blind in the hall of mirrors

not a war

but a stolen child

a house set on fire while

the baby sleeps

your letters

which you sign love

and the fact that you're gone

the way the dogs lap up

jezebel's blood

the way dismas is forgiven

then crucified

his eyes

which the crows devour

his savior

who dies beside him

this desert we call home

dreaming the virgin mary

sunlight on the act of rape

blue shadows across

naked flesh

and she is saying she

loves him

she is crawling to where

the boot has crushed

the baby's skull

to where the face of god

has appeared in

the mess of human frailty

a miracle he says

and then places his hand

to her wetness

when the baby is born addicted

what is the song when

the baby is born addicted

and who buys the

flowers?

and when the fever breaks

i will find you

where the weeds begin to swallow

the highway

i will hold you as

the birds fly from your

outstretched hands

but who will close their eyes

and count to ten?

who will be the first

to approach the body broken

at the water's edge?

and you're tired of choking on

my questions

and i'm tired of

starving on the answers

my wife turns away

from both of us and in

the back seat of a moving car

in a town too much

like my own

the baby opens its eyes

all it knows to do

is scream

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

the blue

cold in the sun and

blind in less obvious ways

the hours i waste

staring into the past with

bitter clarity

ten thousand poems defining

not myself

but everything around me

a list of reasons why the drowning boy

is better off dead

a pile of stones to throw through

the windows of houses i

never want to stand in again

and i believe that love reflected

becomes anger

and i believe that both are

impossible weights

i apologize to

everyone i've ever hurt

and i accept the fact that

apologies are meaningless

i offer you

the woman who loves pain

and the world she gives birth to

after she fucks the god

of starving dogs

what it looks like is

wherever you are

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

the drowning boy at 35

sorry in the shadows of a pure blue afternoon

and then maybe it's ten years later

maybe this idea of

the past devouring the future

without warning

this woman found naked raped and dead

on the railroad tracks

and the phone in my hand

the sound of it ringing on the other end

your voice like a stranger's

or your silence

the way these things matter

long after they no longer should

the way the killer laughs as he confesses

lights a cigarette and starts talking about

the other ones

says their names and then tells where he

left the bodies

and all that really matters anymore is

how much i miss you

all i've ever believed in was staying afloat

these people that i love

turning so easily into weights

marrow

consider

the logic of it

a junkie mother who sells her

child to a pedophile

because she needs money to score

do you see how

brutally simple it is?

do you see how easily

christ’s throat is torn out?

listen

belief is a luxury

a starving dog is either something

you feed

or something you kick

we are all

someone else’s god

in the end

poem for my sons, route 38 south, mid-july

and having no one

to forgive you your sins

you invent god

you build freeways and

shopping malls

and fill the trailer parks with

battered girlfriends

and there are days where

the sunlight is so pure that

all of this seems beautiful

there are moments that

mean too much

to set down on paper

the simple act

of closing my eyes and not

forgetting what i've seen

the knowledge that

none of this

needs to matter to

anyone besides myself

nothing to call it but

religion

burning, drowning

the way she says she

wants to fuck you

and that no one needs to know

the way she says she has a friend

says they have an idea

your smile

which is nothing anyone

could ever love

empty room

the wires like scars across

the face of the sky

and the sunlight caught in the trees

every window a blind eye

every hand

the memory of a fist

and what is it that makes you cry

here at the end of june?

how many times did you wish

your father dead

before it actually happened?

and what i remember is your story

about running 800 miles to

get away from a man who beat you

only to end up with someone

just like him

what i remember is the taste of

your sorrow

the stranger at the door who

said he wanted you back

the way that

every minute of every day

was wasted waiting

for the last word to be said

how beautiful you were

when it finally was

smaller acts of heresy in the pure white light of may

and so

if you're a dog

you fuck other dogs

if you're a junkie

you sell your children

you burn what you can

and you learnt o crawl

through the ashes

you drink the piss of god

and what it tastes like

is love

what it makes you

is holy

faith leaves

no room for doubt

golgotha

believe in poetry

or believe in war

believe in both

or in neither

curse god

fuck his corpse on

the slaughterhouse floor

understand that

without ugliness

there can be no beauty

understand that money

is more powerful

than words

and more obscene

lick the ass of

anyone you love more

than yourself

it gets easier

with practice

theological poem

tie the man's hands

behind his back

put the hood over his head

and tell him he's going to die

laugh when the piss

runs down his leg

you're a god now

the sea of cortez

the silence of where it is you are

the shadows of

ordinary objects and the way

they disappear

the way the clouds move

like cancer

across the face of the sun

and i am not

a believer in priests

but in the atrocities they commit

i am not a believer in churches

or in the dogs who burn them down

at some point you learn that

nothing is sacred

that nothing is so holy it cannot

be reduced to ashes

look at the aztecs

at the priests skinned alive

in rooms of gold

consider the women and children

butchered in their sleep

at sand creek

by a handful of drunken soldiers

remember that

all you can do is wait

the bleeding horse considers how to begin his autobiography

the way neither parent

will take the child

the way the trains run all day

and then all night

floorboards vibrating

and the trucks as they downshift

and the mother calling

for money

the father

nowhere to be found

his girlfriend

who says she's pregnant

says she wants to get clean

and then the guy she's fucking

who supplies her

the dogs who devour the bodies

they find by

the side of the road

these things we do

to stay alive

Home