«
John Sweet
»
Somewhere
all of your teenage daughters
fucked by strangers in
anonymous motel rooms and
sold on the internet
all of your cities ending raggedly
strip malls and then warehouses
and then abandoned factories
the bones of ten million
slaughtered buffalo
and the myths that grow from them
the empty fields and
the missing children
this twenty year-old woman as
she pulls the trigger
and the sound the air makes
when her boyfriend lights
the match
the heat given off as
the body is consumed
and then how quickly it fades
how little is
actually remembered of the
atrocities we commit
how much pain
we pass off as love
A One-act Play For No Voices
this sunlight and these houses
and the shadows they cast
the snow scraped into filthy piles
down the sides of these
empty streets
the hills
the barren fields
all of the things that can be
fenced in or fenced out
and all of the ways that silence
can become a solid object
a weight to press against
your eyes or your throat and so
into this i place the sound of
someone crying softly in
another room
a wife or a lover or even
a woman whose name
you don’t know
and then the clouds move in and
then the snow
and still nothing is resolved
still nothing is said
you hold a beer or a cigarette
or maybe just
your head in your hands
you breathe while the clocks
pull everything forward
while the power lines hum
beyond the range
of human hearing and
you consider starting a poem
you consider driving away
you consider
John
Sweet,
b. 1968,
single
father
of 2.
Overeducated,
underpaid,
a
believer
in
writing
as
catharsis
and in
the
ultimate
futility
of
poetry,
politics
and
religion. Recent
collections
include
the
chapbook
FAMINE (www.leafpress.ca)
and the
full
length
HUMAN
CATHEDRALS
(www.ravennapress.com). He
will
gladly
point
the
finger,
but
refuses
to
accept
the
blame.
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