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
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