strange that
the anger disappears
without warning

fades like
an autumn sky to be
replaced by confusion
and doubt and when
exactly did it
happen?

day after day wasted
at this window while the
baby grows up

while the fire spreads
to the second floor and all
of the drowned in california
crawl ashore with flowers
clutched to their
hearts

and there is a limit
to how far
love can take you

a limit to how far
self-pity can take you

i have slept in the
houses of suicides and
i have dreamt in the
beds of addicts but
i have yet to stand in
the room i will
die in

i have yet to ask for
something as bitter
as absolution

small portrait of b.n., storm approaching

this woman diagnosed
too late

sent home to die
and she does

a warm january afternoon
with rain shredding
the landscape

not a moment of silence
but the fact
that i have nothing to say

the fact that outrage
is such
a wasted emotion

maybe a pool of
pale sunlight
before february comes
to crush us all

sonnet for the dead and the dying

there is a man found
hanging in the rarified air of
a motel room
four thousand miles away

there is a baby's body thrown
into a garbage can
in a philadelphia apartment

small acts of violence
to help define the season of despair
and i hold each one up to the sun
like something precious

i remember pollock
and the shape of his misery

remember rothko and the weight
of his self-hatred
and i am a believer in the sky
as beautiful poison

i am alone in a room
without mirrors while men i
have no confidence in decide
the outcome of their
latest war

while the baby screams and
the mother
denies the obvious

everything she touches
suddenly guilty with blood

All Poetry by John Sweet