why nothing else matters

by John Sweet

in the slow truth of broken afternoons,

waiting for warmth,

waiting for sunlight or at least for the names of

my children to be returned to me

and are you a believer?

have you learned to embrace

the politics of ignorance?

picture this

a sunday afternoon somewhere in the

first few weeks of autumn

a dying factory town

further upstate

and no one here

speaks of de chirico, but his

ghost is everywhere

no one speaks of cobain, but we all wear

the $5 t-shirts we bought at walmart

we turn 30 then 40 then 50 and

some of us fade but

none of us ever quite disappear

some of us stand down by the river

waiting for the bones of

slaughtered indians to wash ashore, and

do you understand why all pain is funny?

look

it’s okay to hate your government

it’s okay to hate your parents

odds are, they were never that crazy

about you, either, and no, you’ve got this

house you can’t afford and this

job you can’t stand

you had friends at some point,

but those days are gone, and by noon the

whole landscape has been painted

over in shades of grey

powerlines and cell phone towers and

all those potholed roads that do

nothing but turn back on

themselves

you arrive again

even as you leave

you are more or less human

it’s normal to feel a                                                   

little bit sick when you learn this