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John Sweet |
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fucking the holy ghost: a chant thinking on a sunday afternoon about the need for religion about the taste of sex and the ways that one becomes confused with the other and i am thinking in this land of lands in the flat-out heat of august about the shrouded face of god about the emptiness of the bone-white sky and the redemption offered by spread legs and blasphemy it seems is about as close as i can come to prayer and in the end i am always sorry for your brother beaten as a child by your father and for your sister raped by your mother's boyfriend on her thirteenth birthday and it's in the bright blue glow of your bedroom that i find the ability to forgive i taste salt and the word i need to hear is crucifixion the one you give is blood and it flows and you call me christ and you call me christ and you call me and you believe in love like i believe in war and i am thinking always about the weight of futility i am thinking about the things in my life that i consider to be holy what matters in the end is whether or not i would kill to keep them a poem like weight for the drowning this relentless white sky for two weeks now your grandmother calling every afternoon to tell you she's dying to tell you not to worry her voice small and bitter through the wires as a woman less than five miles from this sheet of paper holds her lighter to the loose threads on her five year-old son's pants as the boy cries and begs and says he's sorry for everything and how can this not be enough? |