It Was Not the Future We Were Running Toward. {poetry}
{source}
Bloodstained floor in a windowless room
A hollow fist to
hold your faith
And who are the emperors you would
choose to bow down to in
this age of cowards?
What is your lover but the
future of ashes and dust?
A mouthful washed down with a cup of warm piss
and then out into the desert because
lost is lost
no matter how pretty you try to dress it up
The words with no meanings are
the ones that will define us for
the rest of our lives
Your master will teach you to crawl
A heretic
A nihilist
A god-fearing rapist or else a suicide on
the eve of triumph and then our child
born eyeless and mute
And I had hoped to move past my own
private list of failures and out into the bright light of day,
but I was never anything more than
my father’s son
I had hoped to kiss the breasts of St Amanita,
but her husband was at the door
Our pasts refused to reconcile
with any version of the future
And this room and these bloodstains and
whatever news of your lover
The sickness he embraced or
the fear she consumed
Give him money!
Fuck her harder!
Gotta laugh, right?
Gotta pay to cum
And there has to be a solution to the problem,
but the exiles at the corner table
say they’re not so sure
They say gold is gold, yes, but they
ask What about the starving?
They ask How will we pick in a winner
in a nation of whores?
And the false king is stabbed or
the false king is shot but
this isn’t really news
A dead man with his mouth full of shit
is worth less than the shit itself
Nail him to the cross, right?
Burn his corpse to contain the poison
And was it Dylan who sang about this crap,
or have I lost the plot here?
’65 or ’66, or maybe it was de Chirico
Invented the future without even trying
Plugged in his guitar and
the room exploded in blood
The show was a success
but the funeral dragged on forever
Jugglers and sword-swallowers and
my sister had tickets, but
her boyfriend wouldn’t untie her
His wife wouldn’t give up
where she’d hidden the pills
Said it was personal.
not political,
and she was good in bed but
spent the rest of the day crying
Told me the missing child had been found
at the bottom of a shallow pond
five miles outside of town
Told me the mother had a job down at
some local strip club,
and I remembered her from high school
I could probably guess the songs
that she danced to
30 years of radio silence between us,
but we were from the same side of the tracks
We’d put in our time fucking on
the same dead-end roads
It was never the future we were
running toward, but some distorted reflection
of a grey and frostbitten past.
***
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A Flag on Fire Is a Song of Hope (2019 Scars Publications) and A Dead Man, Either Way (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).
***
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