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
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
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
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