Just Waiting to Be Something Else. {poetry}
{source}
Can’t spend your whole life just
going over cliffs
Can’t keep calling up the dead man’s son and
asking for his father
no matter how funny it is
Listen, we’ve got the entire shit-heap of December to
crawl through still
and then January after that
We’ve got the war to consider
and my smartass son looks over my
shoulder here and asks, Which one?
And I never have an answer
People die in horrible meaningless ways
every day
so just accept it, okay?
No symbolism, no significance, just big ugly
piles of butchered meat
Just rape and genocide and flags all stained with
the filth of blood-thirsty dogs
Are you with me so far?
Slogans aren’t the same thing
as actual ideas
Politicians are no better than
children who torture small animals
but why waste time talking about bleeding, you know?
Just shut up and try to stop it
Just send postcards home from the
deserts and the slums and
the fucked-up nightmare of Disneyland
Don’t breathe, but
don’t hold your breath either
Find that middle ground where
no one will hate you and
then realize you’re still hated
Not much of a punchline
I know
but you can’t keep putting your fists
through bedroom windows
without getting scarred
Can’t spend every minute of every hour
with one hand over your heart and
the other covering your nuts
and what about these people who won’t stop
whining about The Moment Of Truth?
Fuck them
Truth itself is a lie
or at least an ever-shifting illusion,
a fault line to build your pale eggshell house on,
and now that I’ve begun to grow old
I can finally see that I was
never quite able to grow up
And I remember the car crash but
not where we were going when it happened
I stand in the backyard, watching
the fire spread from house to house
A small moment in a small town and
a small town in a world of
pilots and gunners and bombardiers
Impersonal killing as big business
Rhythm guitarists and songs about Jesus and
an endless stream of teenage groupies
learning the concept of fucking as commerce
Gotta kill the president or
you gotta kill the pope
Gotta get that 15 minutes for yourself and
I remember the summer I was 25
Knife in my hand and running down
Nanticoke after some asshole who’d tried to
stab a waitress, and I
remember the feel of sunlight on my face
Remember a song by Catherine Wheel
stuck in my head and
I’d been depressed for six or seven years by this point
Hated myself in some vague abstract way and I
remember walking back home later that
same day with Colleen’s number
written on my wrist
No hope and no chance for redemption
Middle-aged without warning and
none of us any smarter for it
The mutilated hands of St Sebastian nailed to
a billboard out on the interstate
Woman I love telling me why she’s unhappy
Grey snow and dirty rain and the
idea of dogs so easily
confused with the idea of wolves
The poem I meant to write lost somewhere
between my fingertips and the page and
I spent a lot of time back then
wandering blind through fields of ghosts
Spent a lot of time dead and
just waiting to be something else
Watched my heart pumping blood out into
the frozen sunlit air and she wakes up alone
in a stranger’s bed on her 24th birthday,
mouth thick with vodka and blow jobs
Walks home and lies down
on the bathroom floor
All of those fading dreams about enemies
and tyrants, and every motherfucker she fears
is always the one she should fear the most.
***
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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