JOHN'S INFLUENCES

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JACKSON POLLOCK

Click image to visit the NGA Jackson Pollock Web Feature; for a profile of Pollock on the Guggenheim Collection website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here

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YVES TANGUY

Click image for a profile of Tanguy on the Cosmopolis website; for a profile of Tanguy on the Guggenheim Collection website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here

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MARGARET ATWOOD

Click image to visit the Atwood Society Website; for OW Toad, the Margaret Atwood Reference Site, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here

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RAYMOND CARVER

Click image to read Prose as Architecture, two excellent interviews with the brilliant Raymond Carver, click image, or to view his books on Amazon, click here

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BOB DYLAN

Click image to listen to a conversation with Bob Dylan on the NPR website; for the Interferenza site which includes links to interviews with Dylan online, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here

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the garden of severed hands, without end

what i never did was
invent the machine gun

this should count for something

we should be barve in
thr face of hopelessness

should be in love but
christ
the days are like hammers

my thoughts are either
bitter truths or obvious lies

do you see?

this town is dying and the money is all gone

we’re caught

we’re fucked

6,000,000 massacred and all we can
think to call it is history

all we can do is spend our
paychecks at walmart

listen

america doesn’t need you and
it doesn’t need me

there will be no revolution

there will be no equality

picture christ on the cross and
understand that he saw it coming

believe in the strip malls and the
topless bars and the anonymous women
screwing nameless men on the internet
because they will come to
define us

they will be the dogs that
devour your children

these cities can only fall beneath
the weight of so many corpses

savior

and there is the act of raping children
and there is the act of
killing the rapists
and how exactly will you punish
the man who pulls the trigger?

why would you want to?

what exactly is it he’s done wrong?

ernst prophecies the death of us all

and here we are
twenty years later and
the thing is this –

reagan sold the guns to the soldiers
and then they murdered the nuns
with them

and i am not a religious man but
i laughed on the day that fucker died

will laugh at the deaths of
all his advisors

and no one will be saved and
no one will care
and the history books will all be
rewritten

pages will be lost or thrown away
and millions of people i’ll
never know will starve to death

it will snow on
my youngest son’s 2nd birthday

a small act of beauty and then
all of the darkness returned

barnett newman’s the stations of the cross, approximately

or a memory of your face
on an afternoon when
i’m alone

when the sky is a hammer
or a fist or
a beautiful shroud

and i have words
but never the right ones
and so i paint

white on white until all meaning
is hidden
and all that remains is
the pain of loss

and listen

wherever you are
something is burning

whatever you do
someone will die

a highway will cut
the wasteland in two and
our choices will be east or west

the skeletons of dead trees or
the poisoned ground they
rise from

and do you remember
anything from history?

can you name
all of the saints or
at least explain why their
acts of martyrdom mean
nothing?

the answer is obvious
but you
have to open your eyes

you have to be willing
to see

truth without pain
will never be a luxury
any of us are allowed

we are all saints, we are all fucked

this place where the bodies
are torn to pieces
this small windowless room
with the door locked from
the wrong side

a young girl with or
without a name

a bed to tie her mother to

not a future
but a solution

an act of power that
columbus would understand

gold
and then christianity
and then nerve gas

the silhouettes of the dead
burned into city walls

call it a victory if
all you do is bleed

palo verde

but listen

this town i would call a desert
and the desert i would
call beautiful
and do you remember the
reasons for america?

did we ever need any reasons
for killing the indians?

planted their bones and
paved over the sacred lands
and raped whatever daughters
we picked up hitchhiking
alongside the highways

laughed at their tears and
poisoned the rivers

drove nails through
the eyes of god

a small act that
meant nothing in the end

suicide girl crawls to the water's edge

dust between your words
and the fact
that nothing changes

you were never beautiful
or you were never loved or
you are both

you are the last body thrown
into the pit

the first one chosen to be
raped by the soldier
with anyone's face

and i remember looking up
at the tv just in time to see a
man jumping from the
98th floor

i remember my son playing
next to me on the couch

the lies i told him
and the distance to the sun

the simple act of
putting fire to the cross

my hands without warmth
when all you wanted
was to be held

the ghosts of angels, singing

clean snow on the bones
of history

dogs everywhere
and cold windowless rooms

the taste of money

the sounds she makes

begs and crawls and
one of them says good girl and
another aims the camera

tells her to cover up
the bruise on her thigh and
after the woman has been murdered
the fetus is cut from her womb

saints hang like
witches from the trees

you are here because you're loved
or because
you have nowhere else to go

because you need money

a fix

and whatever the case you are here
and he is telling you to get undressed
and there are three others
behind him

there are four children
laid out neatly on the bed

a fifth face down in the bathtub
and i'm told that
god is somewhere here too

i'm told that
the priest has been murdered and
i find that i'm happy

i sit in the middle of the afternoon with
snow falling down around me
and i wait for the house to get warm

for the ocean to fill my back yard

and i never had much use
for jesus christ
and would hope that he feels
the same about me

i have never asked to be forgiven
had nothing to say when
she called at three in the morning
to tell me he'd just left

had beaten the shit our of her and
was coming to look for me
and so i opened a beer and waited

two years and then three and
then five
and eventually all of the indians were
massacred

the planes hit the towers and i
sat with my son on the
living room floor

i told him i loved him and
he hugged me

we waited for the news of war

suicide girls in the crystal cathedral

this is all your fault
she says
and no one disagrees

no one speaks as
the plane hits the north tower

my hands on your breasts
and the sky against the windows
and this girl i knew with her
prozac smile and her
petty hatreds
the rope he used to
tie her to the bed

her stepfather on the phone

said he wanted her back

said he had his reasons and
by the time the police got there
the house was on fire

by the time the boy was found
he was dead

four years old and sorry
for everything
and the two of us saying nothing
as we drove to the sitter's

the cold silence of
pale sunlight on brown lawns

the city giving way to
empty fields
and guilty verdicts

not burroughs
but his wife

his addictions

a country of grey flags
flying uselessly over
used car lots and the bones
of 10,000,000 slaughtered buffalo

a room filled with bitter ghosts
and it's here
that she turns to me

it's here that she says
everything you've ever told me
is a lie

lets me touch her
but not like it ever meant
anything

eating the flesh

or that burroughs was a father
as well as a failure

or that the sun
can only consume itself

this idea that we are all whores

my hands touching you
one last time
before the plane explodes

and would you waste any tears
mourning centuries of
murdered slaves?

would you vote for a man
who swears his war is just?

or maybe all you want is to
fuck his daughter

maybe what matters more than
these butchered children
is money

is god

or consider who it is that
would have you believe this

the swimmer

these dead houses on their
brown lawns
and the fences that keep
nothing out

the sky bleached white in
every direction
cut neatly by
powerlines and the sound
of electricity

the memory of edie
who i never knew

who never stood on this street
where a fourteen year old boy
is being devoured by cancer

and what exactly are we
supposed to feel
after the suicides of
beautiful young women?

how high do we have to be to
touch the face of god?

and i am here in this room
with nothing but the sound of
a clock and i am thinking
that i have wasted
my life

i am looking at the scars
on the backs of my hands

i am coming to the
realization that there are no
deeper truths

wars are fought
for money or for power

a woman in missouri is
murdered
then cut open

her eight month old fetus
is removed and
what would you ask the killer
if you had the chance?

what answer
would you be looking for?

you will learn to live
with disappointment

constellation

talking in the room of truths and
smiling at how good the lies feel and
then the baby is born

is two hours old
when its father is blown up
seven thousand miles away and
all you do is scream that you
want to be fucked harder

and you act like silence is an
answer to every question

like anger is more than a gun

and the kid is silent in the street
and the car is pulling away

the bike is mangled
and every door closed

the horses starving in the far field

flies at their mouths and
the screams of crows and
what we've stopped saying is that
we love each other

what the president wants is
more money for his war

says democracy doesn't come cheap
and then counts up the money
he's made from the corpses of the
first thousand soldiers

he says education matters
as long as you can afford to buy one

and what you need to remember
is that poetry is as useless as religion

what you need to consider
are the girls you've known who
ended up working in strip clubs

the ones who were raped at parties
and left in the back seats
of anonymous cars

and what the sun looks like
after three days of rain
is a dream

pale yellow light spilling down
this street you live on
and the shadows
cast by november trees

the garbage
pasted onto the sidewalks and
caught in the ragged brown lawns

the teenage girls dying of cancer
in this shithole town i live in
and all of the factories empty

both of my sons asleep

whatever small hope
i have to give them already
waiting for the day it
becomes lost

the kingdom within

or maybe sunlight and
all of the things
it reveals

all of the shadows you
can hide in

these teenage mothers
and their fears
and the acts that you
pay them for

the pain you think your
money buys you

and this is what i do
this litany of anger and despair
and this is the street i
live on

a short road that runs from
the highway to the cemetery
and all of the young girls
dying of cancer

their skin
and their bones and
again
the idea of money
which should never be
confused with the concept
of beauty

the possibility of faith
which has
nothing to do with god

or maybe this is more
than you're
willing to admit

© John Sweet
Reproduced with permission

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