| Thunder Sandwich #17
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 dweeb by jeff filipski |
| writing blind in the age of butchers i will be a failed poet at 33 or a failed husband or a father no better than my own i will move beyond myself and the pain i have caused others let's say we've reached the last desperate days of another grim year the phone is silent and the house is cold and the war almost won we have started calling the dead martyrs have begun wrapping the corpses of children in flags we will make their unnecessary deaths into something bigger and i am still left sitting in this room of growing shadows waiting for the possibility of warmth waiting maybe for a human voice to put the size of these random thoughts into perspective to explain why anything that can be built can be destroyed think of what you hold most dear thinking, more or less, of bukowski and how many years now since bukowski died? i've lost count and it doesn't seem to matter anyway words are blind spiders in dark rooms are burned flesh and charred bone and they are all we have understand this i will not apologize for the despair i've caused i will not stop causing it does this story sound too much like your own? i know i'm not the only one to have slept with the queen of open wounds then walked away i have seen the nuns hung naked and raped from south american trees in the name of freedom have seen the sky painted a luminous grey on certain afternoons where the only sound is from this pen crawling desperately across a blank sheet of paper and i am afraid of what goes left unsaid i am terrified of losing myself in the blinding white glare of someone else's pain nothing pure in this vast ruined landscape is ever given away my sister's story it's my sister's story really and i borrow it too often my father in his last year diminished somehow a smaller man than i knew growing up and he gives up drinking as some secret penance wakes up one grey afternoon lost without warning and deep inside enemy territory a stranger to himself or worse a naked body pinned in the brutal glare of self-realization and then eight months later he's dead and this becomes my mother's story but she refuses to tell it and it looks so much smaller than i remember painted across this simple sheet of paper |
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| ISSN: 1534-4037 |
Edited by Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny
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