Tryst Feature Poet John Sweet

to starve in a house we call home

and in these
thin shadows cast by
the darker half of the sun
even this cross looks
holy

simple lengths of wood
held together by pain
and there are those among us
who would let a man be
dragged to his death

there is the song you sing
quietly at midnight
when my hands find your heat
and what we never let
fall between us is
the word love

is the taste of your
best friend when she
knocks on my door at three
in the morning
or that the man downstairs
has been thinking too much
of the gun in the back
of his closet

calls his ex-wife
in the small hours
just before dawn and cries
and all it does is make
her boyfriend angry

all it does is wake
the baby up
and then at daybreak
it begins to rain

cold and hard and with
the shadows washed away
all that remains are the bones
of forgotten martyrs laid bare
down these broken glass
alleys

we will not be the first
to starve in
a house we call home

 

© 2002 John Sweet


Featured Poetry
a footnote to the season of rust
poem as a noose
stealing the title to atwood's notes towards a poem that
can never be written

the body dissected and the cancer laid bare, (later)
building something darker in the ruins of the human cathedral
a cold spring afternoon in the world of darker truths
the poet runs out of words
number 29, 1950, second attempt
the collapse of the human cathedral: a premonition

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