in amber

walls of rooms filled w/ dust,
on floors, on hands and knees and blinded

sing w/ your heart

grow scars

this is the place, you see, this house
where the dying man lives, and
there is nothing any of us can do

no blood on the carpet, but a sense
that it could happen at any time

a window

a back yard filled w/ fireflies and twilight

stand there, barefoot, wide-eyed, emotions
carved from dark, sticky wood

speak names softly

breathe in the warmth of
overwhelming joy

stand as still as you can
until all laughter has stopped

fanfare, with trumpets

man in the purple shadows,
crucified, yellow skin, yellow sky,
and the taste of sugar on yr breasts

don’t talk about starvation

don’t worry about the math

lock the church doors and
set the bibles on fire

chop off the hands
and then the feet

let laughter swarm like puke up
out of yr mouth, out of yr nostrils

sing the song you know i love

faultline

my youngest son sick without warning
and so fuck all of your ideas about
benevolence & generosity

accept the fact that
anger is a generous gift

that fear has the texture of
splintered bones soaked in oil

of crows landing on your lover’s pale breasts

we are none of us on this page dead yet,
but listen

god is not the lie that will save you

sunday’s dust cannot be eaten

it’s the age of moths, you see

it’s the pale grey light of a dying sun
that we uselessly flutter around

give me the cure for cancer,
or leave me alone

give me mindless entertainment in 3D

read me the stories of my childhood

i couldn’t be the cripple i
am today without them

BECAUSE I SAID SO, DAMMIT

an interview w/ me at

WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT

helix of compassion

spray paint your small hatred
on dirty walls

substitute anger for belief

blood is the gift
with or without war but
no one really cares about pain if it
isn’t their own

no one really cares about
poverty
if they have money in the bank

it’s simple

the word will always be less
than the thing it represents

the thing itself will always be
more useful if it can be
used as a weapon

what you need to do is
consider poetry a sign of
weakness

consider poets
the enemies of action

kill them like you would
any other coward

in the kingdom of cowards

and then another night
and then another

not loneliness, really,
and not sorrow

desperation, maybe, which eventually
becomes a type of numbness

nails driven into walls over doorways,
and what the hell used to hang
on any of them?

nothing comes to mind

easier to leave them
where they are

easier to let things
fall apart at their own pace

sit in the hall and
watch the children sleep

listen to the wind

all possible endings are
out there somewhere

falling from great heights into vast oceans

strange standing here naked
with a gun to my head,
but this is the new world

wanted to move out to california,
but i was tied to this house, to
this job, to these children

woke up sweating and terrified
from a dream with no meaning

heard water in the basement

tasted rot, tasted decay

not sunlight, you understand,
but this numbing sensation
of suffocation

this false hope of
50 degree afternoons
at the beginning of february

the threat of freezing to death
replaced by the threat
of drowning

the sensation of rust flaking
down from great heights
onto bare skin

and did i mention the gun?

can you picture the hills
all painted a
soft, despairing grey?

we will never be more in
love than we are at this moment

we will never be more alone

choose, but then keep
your choice a secret

malachi (2)

all of these small cancers
and all of these smoldering remains
and all of the bodies

all of the ways that each one
matters more than war

and these words
which do nothing but scratch feebly
at locked doors

these dogs
who are starving slowly

who are chained to the passing days

and this is not a poem but
an explanation
or possibly an apology

it's my mind
refusing to sit still while
the first big storm of the year
approaches

and there is a man who writes to say
that he can't make sense of
any of this

you need punctuation
he says
and you need flow
and you need to stop worrying
pollock's bones

and there is a four year-old boy
on fire
on the other side of town

his mother held back by the neighbors
while the roof collapses

some small tragedy with no meaning
and maybe these are all we
have left in this year of election

streets littered
with the corpses of soldiers or
this man who murders his
pregnant wife

the woman he fucked
two months earlier who says she
just wants to be left alone

who says the walrus was paul

says you have to look for the clues

the open hand or the third eye
or the burning cross

the way america is defined
by its history

the way christ's teeth have been
filed down to dirty yellow points

and do you fall to your knees when
he smiles
or do you turn away in shame?

consider your answer

consider the act of rape being
filmed for the internet

the way names are kept hidden
out of fear
and out of shame

your children growing up with
nothing more than
the wreckage you've left them

one for lisa, stoned

try to help and you
fuck things up even more and
so you stop trying to help

this is the way

these are the starving orphans
of the world and the
battered mothers and the
abused babies

wheels
within wheels

gears clotted with
rust and with blood

this woman next to you
in bed who says show me how
much you love me over and
over but all you do is
hurt each other

all you do is hurt

there is no shame
in turning away

For You

Sun through the blinds onto your body.
Sweat running down your breasts, music
everywhere. Loud, bigger than God, bolder,
and my fingers wet with your taste.

This is something from another room,
from a different town, and I carry it with
me instead of your name. Instead of your
face.

I stand at the window while you lie on
the bed. You touch yourself. You moan.
Things begin to fall apart.

violence

talk about the age
of burning witches as if it’s
a thing of the past

remember
the confidence of youth

hold your ground

the coldest days
are the brightest

squint into the overwhelming
roar of distant massacres

talk about both time and space

these men with their faces
painted white, black smudged
around their eyes, mouths &
teeth smeared with the blood
of other people’s children

the gun is invented,
and then the bomb

killing one martyr at a time
is inconvenient, inefficient

picture the face of god
as an explosion at
ground zero

blinding

overwhelming

you will know it only
once before you die

in the palace of exiles

walk to the far edge of the
field and shoot yourself

would this be considered lost
or would it be considered
found?

believe in christ
as a fever dream

scream at the hills

throw the baby in the river

no one offers you hope
without wanting something
in return

responding to the critics

and sometimes
they write to talk about
discipline
and sometimes to lecture
about the need for
hope

sometimes
i send them pictures
of nuns hanging raped and
murdered from the trees
of central america

we all need to
believe in something

Grace

What it is, after everything, is that his wife
feels cheated, and so she leaves.

There is silence, and then there are
all of the sounds that help define it.

There are the dead and the dying,
and he is one or he is the other.

He is counting the days.

He is walking backwards.

The sunlight feels good on
his useless hands.

lazarus, reinvented

and you and i in
the brutal light of
empty prayers, and
you and i in the
relentless shadow
of sorrow

thought the words
were what mattered

thought the truth
would be enough

jesus christ,
what a fool i was

borderland

faces painted dark and bright and
all of them hidden at
the edges of february fields

men of power
grown fat on lies

the women they have come to own

piles of skulls left to
mark where one country ends and
another begins

ASH WILDERNESS

I added a link for this collection over in
my BOOKS section. My email is in my
Profile, if yr interested in ordering a copy.

poem for america, ten below zero

and in the end it’s just
a dead man’s country, and
all you can do is sing

throne

small desperation in
pale blue afternoon light

cop on fire, but
too far away to offer
any warmth

do you believe that nothing
can be solved with
violence?

do you believe in anything?

it’s a pointless question
in a house of broken mirrors

all clocks remember the
moment of your birth

they have all seen the
details of your death

count backwards from 1,000,000

scrape the ice from
every december windshield

man stands there in the street

raises his arms in
surrender
and is shot to death

small minds build
flawed houses

i lived there for 20 years
without incident

phone rang every day but
no one ever answered

no one left a message

found her on the
other side of the country
long after i’d stopped looking
with pictures of her child
and pictures of her husband
and we didn’t quite touch

filled the space between us
with too many words
while evening fell

arrived at the truth, finally
but by then it
wasn’t worth shit

THE RETURN OF ASH WILDERNESS

It's back, and who are you to deny it? All relevant info is in the link. E-mail me w/ questions, comments and/or faint praise.

ASH WILDERNESS

starling

somewhere in the dark
cross the line between lover
& apprentice
between angel & whore

cross your heart

believe the prettiest lies

in the morning,
i’m afraid to get out of bed

i need sound, or
at least noise

this desk drawer that
holds all of her letters

this poem that bleeds

that leaves a mess on
the dining room table

no flowers

no mirrors

keep the doors locked and
the phone unplugged

smell of sex still
on my fingers

stand perfectly still

breathe in stale air
and grey light

all despair causes cancer

all starving children
are as good as dead

grab what you
hold most dear and wait

was kissed by ghosts, was weeping

find the ocean just inches
below the desert's surface &
then wait for rain

this is the kingdom of false prophets

these are the bones of old lovers

no one here
wants to be your friend,
but being an enemy has value
too

wars cannot be fought
without cowards

children cannot be raped
without the cold embrace of priests

what matters isn't the truth,
but how pretty the
lies can be made to sound

what matters is power

the shame of being poor is a gift
given freely by the rich

houses built by the hands of
beggars can only fall

you will stand naked in
the ruins of everything you've
never owned and wait like a dog
for the kindness of strangers

ashcroft

lovers w/out faces
or else

towers of metal
connected by thin wires

vast empires

you open your door
and find the ocean

woman in the bed
behind you says stay

choices are like bones
or like promises, but
only because both
can be broken

sky is the color
of sunlit dust

breathe in the
whole of the empire

minotaur

in the end
i say nothing

walk down this empty street instead
into the face of pale broken sunlight with
the lesser bones of priests ground into
fine powder beneath my feet

with the mother of my children
begging god for forgiveness

empty sounds from a bleeding mouth
empty hands cut off at the wrists
because the idea of war cannot be
considered w/out the idea of pain

the forest is where you run
only after all of
the cities have burned

being lost is what comes
after being alive

OTHER AVAILABLE TITLES

the john sweet storefront at lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/bleedinghorse99

MK Chavez/John Sweet, “Next Exit: Nine” (KSE no. 112), now available

The ninth and second-to-last installment in Kendra Steiner Editions' "Next Exit" series of chapbooks—-a series devoted to poems rooted in a strong sense of place—- is now available. MK Chavez (from Berkeley, California) and John Sweet (from New York state) are friends and also admirers of each other's work, so pairing them for a joint chapbook seemed like a natural. MK and John write about beauty and pain in styles that are rich yet understated, jagged yet warm, and ultimately disquieting. The people whose lives they document in their work are human versions of the blades of grass that somehow manage to grow through the cracks in the asphalt. Travel the desert backroads where Gram Parsons spent his last hours; walk through a world of domestic violence and pickup truck gun racks; take a sobering trip to San Quentin; taste the stolen and desperate kisses; harvest the empty garden.

Eleven brand-new poems written specifically for this project from two of the most distinctive American poets—poems that perfectly capture 2008 America.

MK Chavez is the author of Virgin Eyes (Zeitgeist Press) and Visitation (Kendra Steiner Editions) and an active participant in the San Francisco/Bay Area poetry community. She is a poet greatly admired by her colleagues and has been a joy to work with on her two KSE projects.

John Sweet, author of the much-acclaimed Human Cathedrals (Ravenna Press), has been an important voice in the alternative poetry world for at least 15 years. His blog and more recently his myspace page have been offering powerful, expertly crafted new poetry on a regular basis. Recent collections of his work include False Hope, Between Truth and Mercy, and World Without Sound. John is a true artist, and it has been an honor to work with him on this project.
Don't miss this one, folks. These Next Exit chaps generally sell out in 8 weeks or so. $4 US/ $5 elsewhere (postpaid).Ordering information can be found at:

http://kendrasteinereditions.wordpress.com/available-kse-poetry-chapbooks/

keeping score

takes the dog out late at night,
lets it shit in the neighbor’s yard

full moon, middle of october

siren at the firehouse
without warning

river of bones
flowing toward the interstate

oceans of blood,
everywhere

gauze

says to me says jesus rides again like
we both believe there are lions in the holy land
like we both assume that all
children will grow up

september you see and the hazy light of
10:00 a.m. the screams of birds
and i have given up on prayer have stopped
memorizing the names of saints

wish only that the days were warmer

that i had answers for all of the
obvious questions gathering like dust in the
corners of my living room

and so i believe in the roots of trees in
fingers crawling through the dirt to wrap
around forgotten bones and so i come to you
with a handful of heartfelt lies

i turn away from my mother from my sister
in shame and in blindness

the doors of their houses
stand open against the cold

the mornings here are
nothing like the mornings of my childhood

being afraid of every last
fucking thing should be enough

a subtle disease

drank what you offered but it
tasted like blood and so i asked for more

the joke is obvious
but never clear

the house is made of
dust and hatred

found the room we used to share

found the candles and the rope and
once you grow tired of discussing memory
you can start talking about the truth

once the distance between
faith and hope is halved
the hostages are executed one by one

not every valiant cause needs to
become a reason for war

my future self before a mirror

it was just like you to be
lost in this nation of ambiguous pain,
to be frightened of the obvious

it was almost october

midnight, hot as hell, and the wind
blowing dead leaves &
empty garbage cans down tracy street

sound of someone crying

all of the walls you knocked down,
only to end up
with nowhere to call home

the age of arrogance, endlessly

this point i reach where i
no longer love anything or anyone

these ideas that were supposed to matter

not the house on fire but the man inside

the child asleep and
the mother driving away and
do we really need to have our faces
pressed into the blood
and the filth?

no
but we deserve it

i remember you wearing your
faith like a corpse

i remember your hands and your mouth

a sunlit room on the
edge of town and the sky like it
knew it would outlive us

the certainty that
mistakes had been made

that none of us were beautiful

none of us worth saving

broken glass everywhere

review of HUMAN CATHEDRALS

The flavor of John Sweet's first full length book, Human Cathedrals, mocks the writer's name; there is an utter absence of sugar. Salt is shot—sometimes heaped—in wounds, some gaping and bleeding, some disfigured with scars crisscrossing, and some still waiting infliction.

Behind the understated, slate cover of Human Cathedrals lie frequent references to the color grey and slight variations thereof: purplegrey, bluegrey, yellowgrey, pale grey and every shade of grey in between. At the brightest end of John Sweet’s spectrum, we have a half dozen mentions of blue. From The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary: blue adj. 2: melancholy; also: depressing. One is left to contemplate a conceivable connection between the cover’s complexion and the content beneath it.

Spending an afternoon in Human Cathedrals is like finding a camera at an estate sale with a roll of film still inside. When the film is developed, a slice of someone’s life tears through the skin and into the deepest cellar of belief. Repeat appearances of specific body parts grace these snapshots: thirteen mentions of hands, eight of bones, six of the heart, four of the throat, three of fingers, two of lips, skin, closed eyes, sharp teeth and a skull, one of the ribcage, neck, tongue, wrist, fist and spine.

Behind the black veil of the human cathedral, desperation, anger, failure, guilt, confusion, terror, sorrow and self destruction rumble through the poet’s tug-of-war with faith. From de chirico’s lament: "...and if i give my son only one gift in his small beautiful life it would be the word escape"; from myself a father: "...for this reason alone i place my foot on the throat of god and press...", and in the book’s opener, waiting for the day to begin: "...and it’s not an answer i’m after here but a voice loud enough to drown out my own".

Occasionally we glimpse, always from a distance, an altruistic bond to his wife and son, though within him there seems to exist detachment from the two he most reveres. Sweet presents us with a collection of raw snapshots—a boy lit on fire, the carnage of war, runaway teens, the cremation of his father shortly before his wedding, men leaving their children, abused girlfriends, suicide, alcoholism, starving mothers and ill children—a succinct and graphic exhibit of destruction.

The confessions shared in Human Cathedrals are long on suffering, short in length; it is almost as if Sweet could not endure his desperation for more than a page at a time. Although the poems sting while entering the bloodstream, you will be drawn, again and again, to the candid cathedral of human desolation offered by the shadow of John Sweet. Owning the book is like carrying a mysterious, beautiful stone in your pocket—you are never quite certain whether you’ve been cursed or blessed.

- Shelly Reed

the same story

she is talking
about her thirteenth year

about her mother's lover

the sound of his footsteps
as she lay in bed

the press of his weight
just outside her door

^

it's the same story told
a thousand different ways

it's the boyfriend who
passed her on to his buddies
for beer or pot or a
new set of tires

it's everything
she was forced to do

^

and she is talking
about love

she is saying
she believes

is saying she doesn't
want to be alone

tells me she doesn't
expect meto understand

early afternoon, waiting for dawn

stand at the back door and
call for your children
in the last light of day

find your lover in a
pale blue room and tell her
you don’t love her anymore

tell her the earth is dying

tell her anything

wait for her answer until
the air becomes too
dark to breathe

purified

and then creeley dies and
then thompson,
and then someone decides that
rothko’s bones need to be
dug up and moved

first warm day of spring,
and the woman across the street
is standing topless in an
upstairs window

the hole in my back yard is
six feet deep and
ten across,
and it’s no small challenge
crucifying saviors

kill one
and two more spring up

change the station and
whatever song you find sucks
as much as the one you
left behind

nothing worth dying for,
but the man across the street
stands in his driveway
with a gun

laughs at the children when
they run away

isn’t there when his son jumps
the forty feet from the
bridge into the river, but it
probably wouldn’t have
made much of a difference
even if he was

the truth is easiest
when it costs you nothing

poem from a distance

never told you i loved you and
the days crawled by
without meaning or warmth

never held my father's ashes

never tasted them

forgot his face for my 30th birthday and
remembered instead
the women i'd fucked in the year
before he died

thought about his cup of coffee
growing cold on the kitchen counter
while he lay on the floor

wanted to call you but
you were gone

wanted to touch you
but the moment had passed

stood in the hall while my
sister said good bye

a sort of grace

and he is
tired of empty rooms,
and he is tired of falling
down stairs

he is tired

he is bleeding

one or the other

find him there on his
scarred and dirty floor

offer him your hand

let him feel the
warmth of your breasts

let him die

consider the obvious
burden of compassion

books books books and books

A fine selection of angst, self-pity and post-industrial malaise.

the poet takes his place in the actual world

fuck this idea of
poetry reaching back to
embrace the past

i will not worship
the martyred or the immortal

it's enough to be stuck in
this town of defeated old men
as they shuffle aimlessly
up and down anonymous streets

it's enough to watch the
factories burn

and i have driven in every direction
and i have seen nothing but
more of the same
and i am only waiting for the news
that reagan is dead

i am only waiting to hear
from a friend
who hasn't written in a decade
that all is forgiven

and i have a job that will never be
anything worth describing
and i have a son who will someday
want nothing more than to
escape his father

what i give you hear is a
pale blue november sky bleached
to white at the edges

the drone of a plane and the
sound of wind through bare trees
and there is a house of
delicate bones in this picture
that i call my home

there is a river that holds
the body of
a fifteen year-old boy

it doesn't bother me that i've
outlived him
but maybe it should

the hollow heart

and i wanted to be
beautiful

i wanted to dream

not pollock but picasso

not christ but pilate

childrens' hands cut off
by soldiers and left
in the streets

leaves falling
from a pale blue sky

words like food

like drugs and
every poem a needle

every priest hung

your god washed clean and
your crosses pulled apart
and the crows as they
picked at the bones

the bones as they
grew up from the soil

your flesh like religion in
those last perfect days

with apologies to juri arrak

these men with the heads of crows,
beaks filled with rusted teeth,
this windowless room, this table
piled with bones

can you show me the difference
between religion and prison?

can you promise my children
they will never be fucked
by the messengers of god?

it’s a life spent without regret
just waiting for a reason to kill

"the disturbing muses" reinvented as a one-act play for two voices

why do you write?
he asks
and i answer i don't know and
even here
two thousand miles away
i can hear him take an
involuntary step
backwards

passion is the word he
needs to hear

burning maybe
or maybe consuming

descriptions of war and disease
turned inside out
but listen

i walked away once
for almost two years and
i don't remember missing it

i have no explanations

is it enough that i'm back?

that i bleed?

the trick is in asking the
right god
the right questions

avoid mountaintops
and open wells

lie
if necessary

this is the true power
of language

new poems

3 new ones at WORDS ON THE WEB

autobiographical sketch from the last days of the age of miracles

and you sat next to me in the car
and said
give me the sun in december
and i said nothing

and the hills spun
silently around us and
the clocks all moved forward
and the bombs were silent from
this distance

the dead held
their mangled hands up to god

a small act of faith
and then the moment was gone

2 new poems

in the latest issue of Perigee

the bleeding horse, denied

the bleeding horse, denied

open 24/7 for your convenience

waiting for rain, for paradise

i came hear having heard about
the streets of gold

was born 1968 in the
dying light of autumn

grew up in vacant lots and
behind fences

in the rooms of strangers and
with the salt of their skin
on my lips

with their names peeling away
like old wallpaper

dogs in front yards or at
the throats of young boys

woman dead on the kitchen floor

no notes and then her
husband doesn't come home
anyway

she's found by her son
and i am not him

i am finally grown up

will only cry when the
last holy note has faded

scenario

the cold brilliance of
sunlight in the trees

a blue sky with clouds

the shadows of houses
pooled on sidewalks and
do you see why van gogh
pulled the trigger?

there can only be everything or nothing

whatever needs to be said
is lost in the translation

do you know the name of this baby
found in a plastic bag on a street corner?

do you know for a fact that
your lover
isn't fucking someone else?

and what about the fools
who tell you that jesus christ and
violence are polar opposites?

what about the young boys
devoured by priests?

and we drive with the radio off
and the children asleep in
the back seat

we pass through the town where
the burning girl's body was found

we stop at the edge of the field where
i first dug up the bones of the
bleeding horse and it's here that
you ask me why i write

it's here that you ask
if i still love you

all i can offer is the truth

sleeping gas

in the distance in the pale grey
sunlight
dust on your hands
in your mouth and
the highways where the cities end
the spaces between them all
broken glass and brown grass
all emptiness and pain moving
towards the hills
dreaming of franco of pollock
of picasso and the small
moments he invented
the women he buried
and there is no turning away
here in the first bitter days of
februray
there is no cause for joy
no forest that is not on fire
and in the distance there are
horses
there are riders
there are fighter planes
coming in low
casting shadows over
everything we have yet to build

empire

the soldiers drunk in the
first purple light of morning
and driving their boots into the
skulls of sleeping babies

cutting the breasts off the mothers
and laughing at the simplicity of it

and what you can do is plant
a painted wooden cross
by the side of every interstate and
wait to see what grows

an all-night truck stop
or a walmart
or a porn site where teenage daughters
are fucked in rest stop bathroom stalls

what you can do is follow
the hawk's shadow
until it meets the rabbit's neck

build an in-ground pool in
the middle of the desert and wait
for the hookers to arrive

wait for gold to be discovered
or oil
or the body of an eight year-old girl
raped and murdered by her
next door neighbor

and what we've done is send
the soldiers to another land and
what they do there is
shoot the fathers and fuck the
daughters

what they do is film each other
torturing the prisoners

what our reasons are for the
atrocities we commit is
never quite clear

the child, cut in two

not the dying man
but his reasons

his hands
which are grabbing

which are empty and so
what would you
fill them with?

the bones of his children
is an obvious answer
so look past it

reinvent the circle
if you have to

build a better bomb

we have been in this desert
too long now and eating
nothing but the dreams
of the starving

we have been bleeding
for as long as we can
remember but
listen

every day brings us
closer to a darker age

every war is the one
that cannot be lost

this is what we tell the
widows as
we undress them



* originally published in christ the destroyer

first and last

or i will be a man who
says nothing,
or i will be a man
who says less

it's not really the truth
that matters

the room is what
you'd imagine it to be

myself at a table,
this woman on the other side,
and all she wants is
a confession

all she wants is a
betrayal

an admission that power
will always defeat love

that money makes a sound
like hammers on nails

like nails driven through
flesh, into wood,
and so i say nothing

i sing a song filled with
the blood of ghosts

i consider what it means
to have an enemy

fuselage

This man with his hands on fire,
with his chest cut open,
peeled back,
heart illuminated like the eyes of Christ,
the musicians warming up,
the planes coming in too low

Woman spreads her legs here,
gives birth to a war

Feeds it the bones of her children

Steps out of the car and she’s
already seven months pregnant again,
and the bomb is strapped across
her swollen stomach

The killing is in the name of God

He only hates you
because you’re human

o brothers, o sisters

We are not nothing, we are
something more.

We were lovers at least,
until the lies we believed in were
exposed.

We were static.

Were faint sounds down
empty hallways
and then the wrong door was opened.

The hanging man was found.

Eyes wide open and smiling
like he thought we’d
never leave.

Pollock, w/ anchor

and Lee in the corner,
and neither of them smiling,
and none of it real.

None of it more or less worth noting
than the dropping of an atomic bomb or the
names of all the corpses floating in the Congo because,
bottom line,
you're here aren't you?

Alive and well and possibly loved and,
if there was more,
wouldn't you have found out by now?

Wouldn't the hand of God have come down
from the sky and taken you by the throat?

It only seems fair.

the bread of forgetting

she says you're loved
but not in this house

she says all you are is
broken bones
in the age of starving dogs

takes the children and leaves
and the emptiness is
overwhelming

the floors are filthy and the
walls cracked and
i'm trying to remember if this
ever really happened

i'm trying to remember why
we ever felt our
pain was worth sharing

at some point
there is nothing more
honest than silence

the smaller kingdom of obvious lies

if and when there
is no god

is only the house of the
dying man and the
tears of his children and if the
songs cannot wash away
the pain

if the woman you lie next to
tastes like failure

when she tells you
she no longer loves you

no longer believes in
your fists

lets you kiss her scars
but only because
she's already gone

poem for the patron saint of children trapped in burning churches

you want to take the
crown and destroy it

you want to pray without the hope
of ever being answered

is this all?

what it amounts to is
something less than faith

where you are is the same
dead end street you've
wasted the last ten years of
your life stumbling down

you can either be pilate
or you can be christ

you can forget the names of
the girls who've told you
they loved you

these are the last days
and no one is sorry

no one is forgiven

we are all strangers
standing naked
in the room of mirrors

we all believe in
some form of rape

it's not an apology
that i'm trying to offer
here

The Cyclops, Blinded

And if you see Creeley, remind him
that he's dead. Tell him that none of it
mattered in the end, not the words, not
the silences, not the endless fucking
theories.

It was February, and then it was
August, and then we finally reached
November. Age of nothing, land of less,
and what should be obvious is that
Cobain's suicide meant more than the
deaths of a million geriatric presidents.

Do you remember the song you were
singing when you heard the news
about Reagan?

The name of the woman you were with?

It was almost enough just to lie on
the bed and laugh.

the bleeding horse sings

the bodies of the dead tied
to the backs of boats
and pulled ashore

the sound of flies descending

a noise like prayer

a silence like being fucked
at the edge of a desert

someone's son found
nailed to a fence

returned to god
or left for the crows

only obvious truths

the woman on the floor
who says the baby isn't hers

the baby wrapped in
bloody rags and shoved
beneath the kitchen sink

nameless and without hope
and a storm moving in
from the west

the president's daughter
naked in a windowless room

tied to a bed and laughing
while the camera rolls

our definitions of freedom
always without any
real meaning

betrayal: before and after

the day will break,
or the body, or the spirit

know this

you don’t need to be beaten
to be scarred

you don’t need to speak,
but you will

small words, and whispered,
and i will breathe them in
like prayer

listen

i was raised to believe that
truth exists in books

that witches exist only to
be burned and
what i’m trying to say here
is that i love you

what i want to remember
is this feeling

the taste of your salt
when the moment finally
arrived

The march

Upriver slowly and in black & white.
The sound of helicopters, distant but
approaching. The silence of the
Indians hiding along the shore, unaware
of the annihilation that comes with
democracy, and then April, and then
July. A sound like we had never
invented God, like all of these young
girls sleeping, dreaming of becoming
Internet whores. Sunlight in the moments
before the bomb hits, and then this man
who comes home on Christmas to find
his family gone, and all he knows how
to do is hang himself. All he knows
how to do is die.

whip hand blues

early morning sunlight like
rust crawling up the factory walls/
across the windows/
and we were nothing less then
than what we are now

i was hanging
and you were waiting to be hung

3000 miles of humming wire

the distance
between love and fucking

between god and religion
and what if all we had back then
to fill the empty spaces with
was apologies

what if all we can
give each other now are
refusals?

it’s never been enough
just knowing how to
make you cry

shroud of days, age of fear

and four years later
you ask the drowning boy what
he dreams about
but he doesn't answer

you watch the helicopters circle
the missing girl's body

there is a need here for some
song of hope
but my hands have begun
to crack and bleed

there is a need for dali
who understood the importance of
visions

who understood our fear of both
the known and the unknown
and who knew that america was
destined to devour itself

and for three years
i lived next door to a man who
refused to believe in the holocaust

for twenty-seven
i had a father who breathed only
the rarefied air of martyrs

who choked to death on it
two months before my wedding

who was vague history by
the time my son was born and
his ashes only a faint bitter taste
in the back of my throat

and the idea of saviors had
given way to the rotting wood
of mortgaged houses

the phone continued to ring
but i had stopped answering it

i was reading about a boy lost
while playing by the river

it would end up being the only
story from his life that
i ever knew

crows, screaming

in the sunlight, in the trees,
and my mouth filled w/ frost,
and the sound of helicopters in the distance

the stretches of highway that go to the ocean,
that go to the hills,
that go nowhere

the need for weapons,
which is born from fear

the love of enemies

you and i, for example

the bones of the evening

to be inside the machine

to be in your lover's bed

the scream of sunlight
or the laughter of children

the broken words of politicians

you eat them like glass and
dream of living forever until the
day you die

you carry a handful of
your father's ashes
for luck

have tasted them on the day
your oldest son was born
and again three years later and
what you remember is the fear

what you remember is
reading a poem for your wife
in a dark room and then the
tears she cried

the way you mistook
their taste for salvation

nothing ever this pure again

the bleeding horse, running blind

a man you don't know found
behind the wheel of someone else's car
and he's come a long way to
tell you his story

he has nothing to say

poems maybe
written in blood or in piss on
a bus station wall or maybe spelled out
with the bones of indians along
the edge of the interstate

someone else's city
seen from a distance

almost beautiful

the sound of sunlight
off of chrome and dirty glass

the weight of your heat or
the absence of it

all of that time we wasted at the top
of burnt hill road

this man and the letters i sent him
and then the fact of his death

the news of his silence

what it means
never quite clear

The explosion, in reverse

In the pale light of God, in the
slow burning of November, our
hands heavy with prayers, our
tongues thick with hollow truths,
and in the camps the women
are dead.

In the evenings, the songs take
on deeper meanings. The
silences are expected.

Listen.

Things will expand, or they
will contract. Wars, nations, the
bloated bellies of corpses, and
what you fear more than anything
is loss. Your house. Your job.
The way everything you hold
dear is tied together. Pull a part
of your life out, the rest will
crumble.

Live in fear, but pretend you
don’t. Hold your wife, or hold
someone else’s. Close your eyes
and see if you can tell the
difference.

in the age of forgiving

you are someone living on a
hilltop or you are
someone crawlhig towards sunlight

i am there beside you

am the hand of god
but with no clear meaning

i have held you down

have slid up between your thighs on
cold december afternoons and
when you screamed out my name
i was only a man turning
away from the future

i was only the shadow of hope
laid gently across
a bed of broken glass

everything else was a gift

violence

sudden rain in the
last light of day

my father dead
which i think i've mentioned

his bones heavier than
i remember

my illusions more precious

not the person i am
but the one i'm afraid of becoming
and maybe even this is
a lie

maybe all i can do is
love my children and hope for
the same

wait for cortez to return
or the ghost
of every murdered slave

and what i remember is steinbeck
driven out of california for
what he wrote

pound dragged through
the streets in a cage for what
he believed

the smell of burning witches
as i sat in the back seat of the car
with a book in my lap

with the sun in my eyes

almost home and
already afraid of everything
i would find there

New Faith

Or the first lie you tell your child,
or the ways I would love to
watch you die. The idea of mercy,
which I will prove to be meaningless.
How sweet your cancer would taste.

bastard

told her i wasn't the bleeding horse,
said this isn 't the burning house
even as the windows began to explode outward

the end of june and hot

the face of america touched
by the hand of god

not beautiful, not filled with wisdom,
and i turned to the man on my left and
told him i was sorry for the truth,
and he confused this with the truth

he leaned across the table to a woman i had
once loved
and told her she was a whore

offered it like an apology

held out his hand
but only after she'd slipped beneath
the surface

The Cyclops, Blinded

And if you see Creeley, remind him
that he's dead. Tell him that none of it
mattered in the end, not the words, not
the silences, not the endless fucking
theories.

It was February, and then it was
August, and then we finally reached
November. Age of nothing, land of less,
and what should be obvious is that
Cobain's suicide meant more than the
deaths of a million geriatric presidents.

Do you remember the song you were
singing when you heard the news
about Reagan?

The name of the woman you were with?

It was almost enough just to lie on
the bed and laugh.

we fall

The women hanging, spinning beneath
a ground glass sky,
all refracted light and cubist emotion,
all subtle joy and grey sunshine,
and this boy at the water’s edge,
but on the wrong side, face down and
nameless and then discovered
and named.

He is yours, or he is someone you know,
or he is no one. It happens.

Look at the picture.

Your lover, smiling on a beach,
her husband just outside the frame but
always there.

The rope, which can be bought at
any Wal-Mart.

The hallways, which smell of
hurried sex and desperation.

Whatever house you call home
just waiting to burn.

dreamt you were gone

or maybe there's a morning where
i wake up and
can do nothing but hate

maybe the rest of my life
comes to be
defined by the actions of others

things offered freely and
things taken away and all of
the promises that sounded so good
in darkened rooms

all of the women who believed them
and that i've forgotten their faces
but not their bodies

that i've reached this day with
nothing but my name and
my children

with whatever small light
we can hold between us

the burning hand

this will be the year that
all words are shown to be
meaningless

these will be my hands
balled into useless fists

the sun blinding and without heat

the distance between us
no more than it's ever been
but now i'm older

have buried lennon and
cobain and bukowski

have ended up with a
life i never wanted

with a house full of empty rooms
and a notebook bleeding
bitter poems and what i
still believe is that christ never
wanted to be your savior

what i still refuse to accept
is the idea
of a benevolent god

no one lets children be
butchered in the name of love

26 saints

and it's just a number
even if all of them are bleeding

she's only an old woman
on her knees

reads her bible with her eyes closed
as then trigger is pulled
and then she's just one more
murdered nun

she's just one more child
of god

bury her and nothing grows

book of saints, age of despair

man rapes a
nine month-old baby and
leaves it for dead and
all i want is for this thought to
stay with you forever

all i want is for you to know
that the baby lives

all i ask is that you
teach your god to crawl

once you get past words, you arrive at meaning

looking closer at
the blood in your smile

digging deeper for
the missing child

finding nothing
which is how these stories
always end

finding the bones of slaves
the ghosts of indians
my father

his coffee cup
his left hand with the
cigarette grown cold in it
his anger wrapped neatly in
black rags of self-pity

these highways which take us nowhere

which end up in cities or towns
no more or less desperate
than the ones we've left behind

these sidewalks with their
crosses of colored chalk

these houses with lit candles
at every window

with the mother tied up and
beaten to death on the living room floor

the son tied up and beaten to death
on the living room floor and the
fact that i have moved past the point
where anyone mentions me
as a friend

the fact that i
yell at my children too often or that
they love me without reservation

my wife asleep on the couch in the
middle of a perfect july afternoon

my eyes closed

everything i fear just waiting
for me to open them

sanctuary: an improvisation

here in the house of truths in the
silence of cold sunlight at the
edge of the western world
i am only a broken fist

here with the shadows of birds like
frightened thoughts over fields of ruin

with the factories bleeding poison
into the rivers and the
children on fire and with their
bones reduced to dust

with their names forgotten and the
two of us alone in some
stranger's room and our hands and
our lips and our obvious scars

you on top and eyes closed and
the ease with which the moment is lost

picasso's horse staggering blind
down all of the streets I grew up on

soft music from further down an
empty hall and a phone
ringing in on the day my father dies
and it's always this ending that i
keep coming back to

a poem without words for a
world without beauty

all of these bare floors where your
daughters and sisters are raped
and the pure white light that
fills their minds

the lies that spill from their mouths

so much complicated anger and
nothing to do with it but build

homecoming

man drives towards
the dying town he grew up in
late in the evening in
early spring

grey sky over grey hills and
he turns to his wife and
says i love you
and she says nothing

the children sleep in the back seat

he pauses

considers repeating himself
but doesn't

thinks about the ghosts
he's left behind

about the scars he keeps hidden
and the ones
he displays openly

thinks about the money
he owes and
all of the poems that will
never be written

all of the ones that amount
to nothing more than
fading ink on dirty paper

understands finally
what a mistake this was

For Efrim, Patron Saint of Useless Words

Cold rain in June and the baby sick.

Nails chewed down to stale blood.

to fresh pain

Noon,
grey light through every window,
and then six thirty, seven thirty,
the house filled with the smell of age,
the smell of softly rotting wood,
and when the roof begins to leak there's
nothing left to do but run.

picture it

A stretch of road up in the hills just
outside of town, and you were both fifteen,
just standing there holding each other,
making out, the smell of her hairspray,
the taste of her gum, feel of her
breasts with your hands up
underneath her jacket.

October, grey, and what you didn't
know is that you'd be 37 someday, and
divorced from a woman you hadn't
even met yet.

What you didn't know is
how many jobs you'd lose.

How many friends would die of
cancer, would die in car crashes, would
just disappear.

Would wake up to
an overdue mortgage, a mother with
Alzheimer's, a leaking room and
just run.

Just drown in the
pure fucking beauty of escape.

the scream

you see it on the film
how the bullet hits the skull

how the skull explodes
and the flowers scream

the future
suddenly without shape

the baby born without arms

and will you
sing it a lullaby?

will you help dig in the scrubland
beyond the interstate?

the bodies could be anywhere
and the father isn't talking

the soil is poisoned and
the mother's body washes ashore

and it has no head and
the fetus is gone
and then the doctor says she'd
like to run some tests

says cancer is something
she dreams about

vultures digging at the
eyes of starving children

a television left on in an empty room

not my father
but my father's ghost

not his anger
but his sense of despair

the two of us sitting in a bar at
nine o'clock on
a sunday morning

an assassination on the television
or the sound of angry silence

the fact that we have
nothing left to give each other

that i'm tired of choking on ashes

am tired of answering phones
in dark rooms

of driving to hospitals and
walking down sterile hallways
and when she asks what i've brought
i hold out my empty hands and
it's never enough

when we fall from the couch
to the floor
i can almost forget my anger

can almost see myself
pulling the trigger

my hands on fire and
dreaming only of your flesh

pound

this idea of poets dragged
in cages through the streets

this town at six a.m.

heavy grey and almost silent
and filled with meaningless words

each one spelled out in
faded plastic or dead neon or
spray paint

each one a promise or a threat
and you in bed with the
bones of all your old lovers
and me in love with you
and the sidewalks where they end

the factories where they rise
without apology from the
blood of indians and slaves

the absence of shadows

this certainty that
none of us will ever be forgiven

cathedral of bones

what the dogs taste
is the meat of jesus christ
and they spit it out

what the junkies do is beg

but there is no room for symbolism
down these empty streets
in the first purple light of five a.m.

children are dying everywhere
and the thought i hang onto
is that my son isn't one of them

i have taught myself
the politics of fatherhood
after fifteen years spent trying
to escape the idea of
the boy i was

i have built a cathedral
of human bones

of meaningless words and angry voices
and there is nothing left to put in it

there is nothing to see
from the windows
but the flat white smudge of the sun
spilling across november fields

beyond the fields are
the factories
where nothing is made

where the dogs grow hungry
in the glow of the neon cross

and home is
where you find yourself
when there's no place else
to run

poetry as architecture

and how long does it take
before you realize
that words will not save your marriage?

how old is your son
the first time he tells you he
hates you?

and dali is somewhere laughing
of course
and a man 10,000 miles from home
is stepping off a chair and waiting for
the rope to break his fall

a woman i have never met writes
from the edge of someone else's ocean
to tell me that i've captured her life on paper
and i throw the letter away

none of this was ever about salvation

i am not a believer in
absolution or in fate and
on this day there is nothing as pure
as the feel of sunlight through
a clean sheet of glass

there are any number of reasons
for writing
but i keep them to myself

children are starving for god
and for politics

they are found in the woods or they
are never seen again and
i'm asked if i pray

i'm asked if i vote
or if i deserve what i get

and there are women forced to live in
rape camps i'm told
and there are the bones of nuns
dug up on the outskirts of
central american villages

i have been shown the pictures

have been asked what i plan to do
to stop the atrocities
but what i was speaking about here
was the word

what i was trying to remember
were the last ones
my father spoke to me

there's the possibility that
forgiveness had been mentioned

Speed

It was the needle, yes, it
was the need, but also the
dream of hands filled with
pure sunlight reaching out to
hold you, reaching out for
the weight of your breasts,
just another simple act of
drowning, and it was only once,
was only twice, was only June,
July, August, September, the
days suddenly cold, my eyes
filled with ground glass,
heart pounding, phone ringing
for days on end with no one
answering it, and i remember
you were seventeen, then
eighteen, remember you were
laughing and then gone.

Below

2:30 and the threat of rain.

Yellow skies and unspoken words and
the clock running backwards in this room
where we no longer touch.

The starving hung with barbed wire.

Wait.

I know this song.

Have sung it to my children even as
politicians were placing tarnished coins
over the blind eyes of other men's daughters.

A beautiful sound in the back of my
throat that exists only to be devoured by crows.

The hand of God reaching down from an
empty sky in the form of a bomb.

The only true power we have
which is the power to take away.

In the moment of truth

I will say yes to
anything you ask, will
close my eyes in crowded rooms
just to see your face.

Just to hear your voice.

Words low and beautiful,
and the way you taste where my
tongue licks bare flesh.

The weight of our silence when
we no longer need words.

When everything is finally
spoken with
fingertips and desire.

the vast empty spaces of dying afternoons

you sit across the table from
a woman who
at some point in the past
has beaten your youngest child and
you listen

she talks about nothing as
a plane flies overhead

bitches about her life as you
watch the sunfilled front yard and
you answer and wish for a cigarette
and close your eyes against
whatever it is she says next

you wait
but not for anything in
particular

you breathe

eating the heart of christ: an exercise in diminishing

the body found
unexpectedly

washed ashore
3000 miles away from this
small pool of clean light and
then given a name

and do you believe in beauty?

look out this window

at these houses built by men dead
before i was ever born

at these children with their
vacant stares and clutching hands
and do you think about
hinckley anymore?

about all of the poems you write
that no one will ever read?

and what about the unborn child?

what about the husband
or the blood in his smile?

and wherever you go you'll
find these sixteen year-old girls
and their babies

tiny kitchens and hands
held to burners

apologies screamed

words raining down like
filth

On The Day You Die

And the humor is always there,
but you can’t tell the suicide that.
You can’t tell the suicide’s family,
wife or husband, children, parents, but
you can laugh from a safe distance
away. You can stand in the shitty
apartment your father was found in,
can think about the heart attack that
nailed him to the floor, the lack of
history in these two tiny rooms, the
absence of yourself, your sister, your
mother, and you can flip through the
stack of mail on the wobbly table. Bills
and junk mail and nothing else, nothing
personal, not from you, not from
anyone, and you can smile. You can
laugh. It’s one way of passing
judgement.

of faith and devotion

In the here, now, the silence of
this room, this street at two in the
morning, the need not for Jesus
but for something stronger,
something tangible.

Here in the
unrelenting heat of July.

Here, in this unforgiving new
century, with the delicate hands of
mothers cut off by other women's
sons, and in the name of freedom,
in the name of power, because a
pile of dead hands can never
really be an enemy.

A child with its tongue cut out
can never really beg for mercy.

And I believe in the future,
but only because the past is gone
forever.

I believe in the hammer, the
obvious border, the nail driven
through soft flesh, but I'm no
longer certain about right and
wrong.

I have no use for politics, or for
the whores who would make me
swear allegiance to something
as irrelevant as a flag.

There will never be an end to the
line of smiling shitstained dogs
who want only to force you
to your knees.

ships, sleeping

you open the door and
find the hanging man

what you've been chosen for here
isn't clear but listen

he has a wife and he
has a child

a room full of
books without words

a cigarette grown cold in
an ashtray

and what happened is that he
woke up and
the house was on fire

the last great war
hadn't begun yet but the
streets were full of starving children

do you remember
the stench of corpses?

do you believe that
god and the devil are the same?

this is the question you
need to ask your lover when she
kneels before you

ignore her words when she answers
but watch her hands

listen to the passing traffic

and is this a room where
every mirror has been turned to
the wall?

it matters

your smile can only hold
so much broken glass

the clocks will only run backwards
until they reach zero

think about
all of the lies your father ever
told you

walk to the end of the hall
and open the door

the possibilities are never as
endless as you'd like to believe

sunflowers in autumn

An ambulance in the sunlight.

An arm, a leg, something missing
from the picture, but the
picture has no sound.

The dog has been shot twice,
but refuses to die. Cut its head off
and it grows back, and so
you drive.

End of the road to the edge of town
and then 3000 miles to where
the continent falls into the ocean.

I am looking for you here,
among the weeds and the discarded
bones.

I have questions,
have gifts,
have dreams that need interpreting.

I was told that this would
be my century.

I was led to believe that
what I had to say
mattered.

Some of this must sound familiar.

in the room of mirrors

tired of yr sickness, yes,
and tired of my own,
and strange that i can place my
hand on yr sorrow and
turn it to rage

strange that i can close my eyes
and pretend you never
existed

funny,
but not like christ
asking one of us to drive the
last nail home

Every step, towards or away

I have never killed the enemy,
have never stood close enough to
touch the face of God.

I was raised to understand that
the glass is half-empty.
Was taught by my father
how to pour more,

and on the morning of his cremation
I was hiding in another town, with
another man's wife, and I hold no
illusions about forgiveness.

I believe that our lies will get us
through these days as well as
anyone's truth.

I have yet to be proven wrong.

ghost

the dead heat of july
and the weight of loss and the
way none of it can be separated

the way that what i write is never
the same as what i'm trying to say

do you see?

let's call the sky tarnished silver

let's have it press down against
the hills without compassion

and we'll say the girl was only
eleven
when she vanished more than
a decade ago

would you consider her
an adult now
or do you just assume she died
terrified and alone?

would you walk into her room
if you knew that nothing
had been touched since the
day she disappeared?

listen

it's not your pain to give
but you can still receive it like
some inverted blessing

you can still bleed like
the rest of your life
depends on it

everyone does at some point

places where the bodies of murdered children have been found

places where the bodies of murdered children have been found: an incomplete guide to america


1.

at the water's edge


2.

in a shallow ditch
alongside
a desert highway


3.

hung from a tree in the
hills of southern california


4.

in a summer field in
rural pennsylvania


5.

in a dumpster


6.

two of them
in a clearing in the woods
of upstate new york and
both of them hacked
to pieces


7.

two more beneath a
freshly poured concrete slab
in the back yard of a
man from just down the street


8.

stuffed beneath
the kitchen sink while
the mother lies wrapped in
bloody sheets saying
it's not hers


9.

laid out neatly on
their parents' bed


10.

floating face-down in the tub


11.

floating face-up in the tub


12.

in a plastic bag


13.

in the locked closet of
a burned house


14.

in a suitcase


15.

IN A FUCKING SUITCASE


16.

would you
waste your breath on
a word as
pointless as mercy?

dakota

or the first time i taste her
or the first time i
make her cry

the days in between
spent waiting

spent listening to the ghost
of black coyote

to the sound of rifle fire
ripping through small children
and newborn babies

the sound of america
taking shape bone by bone

medals pinned to the
bloodstained uniforms of
drunken soldiers

the book of days rewritten to
make the killers
seem like monsters

to make them
seem more like you