this nightingale despair
all these days of bitter sunlight,
gets tired of saying i love you while
standing in the doorways of empty rooms
gets tired of the way the windows break and
the bones of ghosts piled up
in the corners
waits for winter like
his father taught him to and
the hills and then the river and then
the bridges that promise
nothing
the promises that lead nowhere
all country is enemy
country in the end
weep and retreat
find god face down in a pool of
holy blood deep behind enemy lines and
it’s good for a
small laugh if nothing else
gotta keep redrawing those maps to
make sure the poor & the
unwanted stay in their place
gotta keep reminding the children that
not all of them will survive
that no one will care
it’s been a long fucking time
since anyone’s death really mattered
the future as a broken mirror in an empty room
and you and i in brilliant
november sunlight,
all effortless grace and fragile hope,
all half-forgotten dreams
a city on fire or a
handful of ashes
someone’s lover found dead in a
stolen car at the river’s edge
i have measured my life in miles
and i have wound up nowhere
i have been the wrong person
for years on end
let the joke fill your heart
like a mouthful of blood
let the gun be aimed and the
trigger pulled with infinite kindness
we are nothing if not
merciful
the contrary
and when you died the first time
no one noticed and so
five years later you did it again
was sleeping when i heard the news,
fucked up and shot through with pure white light and
the children were crying for food
the question was obvious
wanted to apologize for the answer but
my tongue had been cut out
my book of maps had been stolen
93,000,000 miles from the sun and
moving in the wrong direction and when you
died the second time it felt like a weight
had been lifted from my shoulders
felt like my wings
had been nailed to the floor
woke up from a dream of jumping into darkness
only to find i was finally as blind as
everyone else
couldn’t stop laughing at the idea
that you were actually gone
these dreaming monsters
faded blue november sky with
contrails and silence up on burnt hill road and
what if god is nothing more than the
ability to tell the truth and what if truth
is nothing more than the road to beauty?
will you offer your churches to the homeless or
give your wealth to the starving or
will you continue to preach
the gospel of ignorance and hatred?
will you stop raping the children?
there is no end to the ways we can
disguise our lies as luminous truths
John Sweet can be found here: http://bleedinghorse.blogspot.com/
Read my recent review
of Sweet’s award winning book The Century
of Dreaming Monsters here: http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/book-review-interview-john-sweet.html
