the poem is a mouthful of ashes the poem is the god's eye the dream is where the shadow of one white house spills across the wall of another or october like a slowly unclenching fist the trees on fire the sunlight offering one last fading glimpse of warmth and even here i find myself numbered among the silently screaming do you understand what i need to say? the poem is the deepest part of the ocean and we are falling from the edge of the sky and if not this then what? the poem is a mouthful of ashes the poet a frightened gutshot animal it reaches that point occasionally after the fire, all of the missing found early morning beneath magritte's sky and cold smoke still rising from the ruins of the burning house there is a point where the dead have to stop being mythologized where the streets all come to an end and the starving keep walking into the wilderness beyond there is a fragile skin of ashes blanketing everything i own my son in another room calling out my name and then falling back asleep and if his tiny voice is the only beautiful thing i will be given today then i take it gladly i am not so big a fool that i would pass up simple joy all of the raped and battered women and all of their children and five years after his death i am still writing about my father in the present tense am still trying to find the wall that separates love and hate and i think that maybe there is none i have seen you naked and on your knees in a pale blue room with a stranger's hand at your throat i have tasted your tears am sorry for your pain but will not be the one to ease it and how many times have i said this and to how many people? all of the raped and battered women and all of their children and i have closed every one of those doors behind me have slept in my narrow bed while the flames reached for the curtains have woken up with the taste of gasoline filling my mouth and the phone ringing my mother's voice saying "your father is dead" the sky nowhere to be seen the history of inevitability:  an elegy if i give you a cross you want another if i give you fifteen you declare the ground they're planted in sacred you call the children martyrs which is only another way of saying dead the years all end just as bitterly as they begin what gets us through them isn't faith but fear my father taught me this and then all of the lovers i ever had and i remember each day thick with the taste of oil and road salt i remember dreaming of august then waking up to bare trees and the news of another teenage daughter lost and what does it matter how young i am if all i have to offer are words written on bare flesh? i have survived the loss of things i can no longer name but that at some point were more vital than blood i have walked lost down the streets of a hundred different towns filled with the knowledge that saviors are only dogs still waiting for their first taste of flesh with an addiction to rage pounding through my veins my life spent avoiding god only to end up discovering religion this poem is already written says god is on the highway says god is in her empty hand two hours outside of buffalo and the rain begins to freeze she's stopped bleeding she's stopped burying her dead this is how far we've come two hundred miles and still the same indifferent sky almost there and she says she wants to go back home says she misses whiskey hill road shows me her wrists and this poem is already written there in faded black ink obvious magic but i have to smile (c) John Sweet 2002

John Sweet, at 33, lives in continuing obscurity with his wife and son in a 60 year-old house in a dying factory town in upstate new york.  his hope is to make every poem the absolute truth for the period of time in which it is written.  upcoming chapbooks in 2002 include Approaching Lost from Via Dolorosa Press and Human Cathedrals from Ravenna Press.