stereoscopic distortions
john sweet
a series of poems for multiple voices
the way i hear them in my head
a set of clues
a collection of concrete abstractions
the truth and lies both but not the ability to tell them apart a series of poems for multiple voices not how i would like them to look, ultimately, but the closest i could come with the tools at my disposal
this is how i hear them when i read them to myself
circular motion but always moving forward
a series of poems for multiple voices
an approximation two voices or three, maybe more, maybe just one and then the echo of it
separation and then the overlapping
circular motion but always moving forward
the loving heart
in dreams of early afternoon silence beneath grey glass skies and the flight of swallows beside the river and outside the cemetery walls against the dull mutter of freeway traffic the steady wind scraping across the bare bones of the earth and there is no one here to apologize to and there is nothing to apologize for
there is almost sunlight and there is almost pattern
a cold wind through broken windows
the sidewalks that follow the streets that go nowhere and the wind in between the currogated walls of empty factories and abandoned warehouses the weeds in vacant lots behind liquor stores the idea of monday of thursday of sunday evening again and again and again
not a time of hope but hope remains
a landscape
ask for respect and you’re given the ragged ghosts of 500,000,000 innocent victims drink the blood of christ but all it ever tastes like is gasoline it’s some hard fucking work growing fat on the shit of happier lives
a century once removed from a century of greatness but this is what we’ve for longer than we can remember
roses, daggers, thorns
stupid fucker doesn’t know he’s bleeding or maybe just won’t admit it maybe won’t accept the basic bitter truth of mortality and here in this day at this moment i have never known anyone more beautiful than marie in those last luminous days and in the end there is always joy and in the end there is always pain and in the end there is only distance
there is only the choice between walking and crawling and in the end nothing matters but the weather in the end no one loves you without wanting to be loved in return
an illness and a long depression followed by suicide
blood for blood beneath frozen blue skies
an act of love on an on an empty highway
homemade crosses and plastic flowers and the distance from one abandoned house to the next said this is the place but we weren’t anywhere had pictures of christ with his eyes gouged out
wanted the gift of clean white light through translucent glass the pain of loss replaced by the pain of joy
and then i met the artist and shook his hand and felt the holiness of the moment stood where the body had been pulled from the river
barren fields and grey hills and i knew i was lost and i knew i was home could see out past the edge of winter to where hope re-entered the picture
said this is the place but you were gone
kinetoscope dream in the style of paul klee, lately deceased
sleeping town or a dying town in the first pale light of a late october morning and how do you tell the difference? house to house and something to say street to street, all locked doors and shuttered windows, all bodies in the act of turning away no laughter but the laughter of crows no love but the love of ruling by fear give the child a gun and wait to see if he lives to grow up
man with a microphone stands in front of the suicide’s house like there might actually be something to say
like 500,000,000 crows might still be hungry for her cold flesh
quiet woman murdered on her way to church, got two ways to go here, both her and me and you
got belief and got the truth
the knowledge that all certainties will eventually bleed to grey
like lovers begging for the truth
in the room of liquid glass, starving children begging for food upstate, end of winter, bright blue and cold I-86 until we ran out of gas
says this is the place but there’s no one there
said i want to go home and i smiled at her
and he is kiss saltwater tears from his girlfriend’s lips and i am writing her poem we are the empty spaces between past and future and there was cobain’s suicide and there is the promise of spring there is the theft of hope
there is the value of desire
he is laughing at the idea of ever leaving even as she closes the door behind her
end of the day in the season of ash and we are in the back hall fucking on dirty blankets in the room of liquid glass there is only time for regret there is only the poem i give her that she says she never wanted and the highway following the river small homemade crosses a sense of and faded plastic flowers space, of distance where the bodies and possibility were found
chromoscopic elegy
wakes up sunday morning and summer is gone grey skies and forest news of 28 bodies washed ashore, most of them children and most of them anonymous and most of us thinking of other things the true value of sunlight maybe or the places we can con longer hide the days we’ve lost forever can’t just keep standing around in this neverending desert just waiting for walls to build themselves
wakes up to late september fog, nothing to see but the sound of birds and, in his dream, he was drowing as watching himself drown with the calm indifference of a parent or a priest, but now he is a mirror now he is a weapon or a more potent version of whatever drug it is you use to help you fly opens his bloodstained hands and all of your small defeated days spill to the floor
an illusion
and then the last things we said to each other that day which will end up being the last things we ever say to each other the house on fire in the corner of the picture
walked away from my father’s hospital bed with the last letter she ever wrote me in my back pocket
the picture found creased and stained in the back of the glove compartment wrote the poem on the back of it but never had a chance to show you
thought about growing up but never quite managed it thought about growing old and he is fucking his secretary in some hospital parking lot and i am thinking about the punchline
sense of distance and hopelessness weight of passing days
we are bleeding together in separate rooms there is no great shame in being less than holy
rotoscopic christ delusion
father’s daughter in sunlit fog says we are all naked says
we are all holy
found you hiding in the sunlight said
this is all there is forest’s edge and the baby is missing
found you 30 years after the moment had passed
car is on fire listen
i have no memories of you in the winter
dechirico evening at the end of september and a world filled w/ crows waiting to rip yr heart from yr chest
have some use for gold but none for god and father’s daughter says the war cannot be won
train in the distance and chekhov dead and then carver and it’s simple
train the distance and the killer is found in a field up on top of german cross rd
the poetry of loss
no one knows who shot him or maybe no one cares
father’s daughter crawls naked to the desert’s edge
maybe the days pass by like anonymous houses on fire
powerlines against a dull yellow sky and that the car is on fire that no one cares
wanted to tell you i loved you but i was afraid
there can be no point where all truths intersect
and i wanted to breathe in all the beauty you breathed out
wanted to reach the point where all truths intersect
enemy
in these days of frozen white light i forget your name i lose my way i hear the angels i know the song not words but an explosion of light and blood a flood of despair so good so good so good
stereophonic love song no. 2
ghost town afternoon at the scorched and bitter end of summer and he is standing in the middle of main street listening to himself listen i am a shadow thrown hard against a dull white stucco wall and you fuck or you get fucked she says and then she laughs 25 years spent staring at the sun 25 years spent digging graves for lesser men seems like an idea just waiting for a religion to grow from it one of us hopeful, one of us stoned other one asked don’t you ever get tired of dying and no one answered
other one asks don’t you ever get tired of dying and no one answers
memory of a train whistle vague idea of being in love sound of birds maybe maybe cicades maybe just a distant shout from miles away carried on the sticky breeze end of september she says and the sunlight breaks your heart feels like a religion moving past the need for a god or a smaller moment
feels like a smaller moment , like the slow circling of hawks in a chrome blue october sky
the need for grace in your life running up hard against the utter lack of beauty sleeping hands holding a dreaming gun the last true age of gold already here and gone
horse, dreaming
in shades of blue like jesus christ and dim yellow sunlight, lie bleeding in the shadows cast by lesser men or swim in the screams of missing children let lovers slam doors let religions be built from broken windows and smothered babies days of laughter but no real joy let the river rise up to swallow the poor and the weak in the good heat of june wishes but no clear vision pale blue skies and the temperature in the 20s
pale blue skies and the temperature in the 50s a lifetime spent crawling towards the unreachable edge of this ever-expanding desert do you see how the story ends?
the discovered world
learned how to take it up the ass and smile while cameras were rolling and the drugs helped wash the taste away and
and the days and the years and everything left behind the
the way time sped up the way time slowed down and the time it took for the bruises to fade the way the days passed in a motionless blur the cracks in the ceiling and the taste of dirt the taste of spit but it helped wash away the pain of passing days and the bruises faded and the drugs never really quite worked and
and the taste and the drugs and the pain of being washed away
taste of the pain washing away and the drugs and the times she was a good girl and all of the days spent slowly bleeding to death
and the man said good girl and he spit on her and it tasted like the drugs like the days washing away
the heat of the lights and someone crying and what she thought was that maybe this mattered and what he gave her for the pain was the illusion of truth
she wasn’t crying but she was learning and
there was always the truth there was never the past but there was always the truth and everything mattered and nothing at all
everything mattered and everything mattered and
abandon
and with nothing between us but sweat and the promise of blood and with august crawling towards december says this is only business and the sound of laughter and the gun which is really the ropes which are too tight but smiles says a little harder says suck this lick this and it all tastes like salvation
curtains of the motel room thrown back to reveal an ordinary afternoon to show blue sky and highway the shadows of clouds across lush green hills and the pain is to be expected
hangs a cross on the wall says we will fuck until we’re holy
the promise of more is the drug
nothing to hold us here but hope
asks what are you afraid of?
and i wasn’t married but dreamt i was driving down a pale grey hill in some Italian village w/ my wife next to me dreamt she knew and then you were kissing my eyelids
dreamt a sense of overwhelming loss
then the sunlight solved everything even in the moment of salvation the sense of loss is overwhelming
the afternoon lost and the moment gone
says you are not my god even as she gets down on her knees
gyroscopic dream, later revision
and i remember the late great j christ smeared with filth and nailed to his existential cross, remember how he laughed at the news of bukowski’s death
said we are all holy in the church of broken hands but he was no van morrison he was no mike scott
i remember being 22 but not 34 i remember being in love
remember hating the world the simple joy of illusion (of delusion) when i grew tired facing the truth
and what if you’ve lost the keys to all of those childhood rooms you locked behind you? and you will find out too late that all yr life is blue sunlight and october clouds and what if all you know how to do is pray?
hung there in the breeze said make a fire of all the things in yr life that will never burn said it was a strange thing to keep giving yr holy plastic god so many reasons to hate you and when he finally died it only got a few seconds at the end of the 11 o’clock news
how long will you wait for an answer?
THEOPHANO
god’s face
god’s cupped hands pouring out thick poisoned sunlight over your broken heart
broken smile wake up no air to breathe no words wake up admit that the idea of hope has everything to do with wealth and power believe in walls wake up turn your face to the sky turn your face to the sky imagine your entire wasted life spent crawling through a room on fire
ASTRONAUT
in the drywater halflight of october
beneath the dustcolored sky sun is god’s face
girl smiles says god is not a reason
in the pale blue room she is crying the house collapses
in this house the walls hold no hope
like october leaves she is like october leaves
end of october, sun is god’s face
falling from a hole in the sky
the house collapses like october leaves falling
the house collapses
from a hole in the sky
grey light in a pale blue room in a dust-white house where yr father hates yr mother and it was the half-light of it was the pale yellow 4 p.m.
end of october girl on the bed said the sun was the face of god
said my skin tasted like honey
and bare trees in a barren field
said there will always be better drugs and a house falling from a hole in the sky felt like the yr father overdosed but this was before you were born
felt like the girl you loved was the son of god like bare trees in an empty field said god is not yr father’s ghost said hope is just light spilling from a hole in the sky
frost on the windows in the first light of day
said yr father was dead in the first light of day
said yr father was the face of god wide open skies and frozen skin and she asks you to close the window
his house on fire beneath the wide open october sky
sixteen years of medicated depression
and she says she loves him but
and then the suicide
the drugs don’t work and sixteen years of silence
says she loves him but he isn’t there says the sun was never hope middle of october and god is dead honeyed sunlight from a hole in the sky and you lick it from her skin first taste of fear first taste of fear sunlight spilling from her open hands
some of us here but some of us missing
pale grey and cold and some of this memory and some of it lies
sixteen years of silence and the way some of our lies will become the truth
yr father who is dead the sun which was never the face of god
dead man’s fingers planted in a barren back yard
king falls through the hole in his lover’s heart
dead trees in a barren field
crow devours the sun
crow devours the sun
sun is the face of the woman i love we are high above the trees and rising
in the broken bell of negative spaces
cathedral in the forest, she says this is the place but what about the bodies i ask but what about the war and no she says says this is the place and when her sister got tired of fucking christ there was still pollock there was still picasso this dog tearing out the child’s throat while the father sits inside getting a blowjob on his couch laughed at my empty anger said there’s still cortez there are still his bastard children and the eternal idea of rape as necessity and what about bosch she asked asked what about faulkner not tired of life not high on immortality just the shock of all those semi-corpses at the edge of the room this city her father died in spread out around us this wishing well at the cemetery’s edge carefully manicured lawns and vacant lots overrun with weeds and i believed her said this is the place she said it never was but i said and she shook her head said the sun never shines but i showed it to her said her sister just disappeared one day and she never knew her mother only the boyfriends and only the uncles but the sun i said the gentle rain of pollen smell of gasoline and lavender but the house was empty
there was still picasso but this was in between this room of illusion in some ruined house bloodsoaked flag flying outside some anonymous factory in the desert and she said this is the place but where are the bodies i asked just this pile of worn shoes just the bones reaching up out of the sand these wolves in their uniforms and she smiled said all wounds have meaning but this was in between skeleton hands holding broken needles and she said the sun never shines but i showed it to her told her i was practiced in self-hatred
asked what about faulkner then tried to remember your name when i kissed her lips
i was practiced in self-hatred in the subtle art of despair of drowing as a pre-ordained right and we are here at the edge of the map and we were moving west towards the empire of illusion towards the last great ocean when she said that’s the place said it’s why i love you asked do you see now but never really wanted an answer was just hoping the future would matter as much as the past
tried to remember the taste of your pain or any of the reasons you gave when you left was tired of talking to ghosts the subtle art of despair
sound of static and of dust and i thought i recognized you in the crowd but you were already dead
stereophonic distortions Š 2014, 2015 john sweet