landscape made hopeless
in the season of rust

John Sweet

and i am
looking for jesus christ
on a saturday afternoon and
finding only objects which
cast shadows

i am stumbling blindly through
an empty house while another man
kisses my wife

while she pulls away and tries to
remember my face

and i have been thinking about
the woman who loves pain
too much lately

i have been
experimenting with self-hatred
while trying not to become my father

and there is always the fear
that my son will find
these poems some day and
try to piece together the
man i was

there is the simple act of
these teenage mothers digging
their own shallow graves out
where the factory parking lots
give way to weeds

and wasn't this what
we always wanted?

From Retort Magazine