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Within These Walls of Sorrow

john sweet

    Early afternoon in January and the sky the color of luminous dust. The faded shadows of trees down these chalkwhite streets, and have you grown tired of waiting for Christ? Were you ever promised happiness?

    Listen.

    The children on the bed aren’t sleeping, they’re dead. The mother isn’t God, and neither are you, and neither am I. The days are numbered. Are always being counted backwards to zero, and if all you have is faith then you’re fucked.

    And what if the story was never even about you? What if every border is a lie? You think this way, but then the first plane hits the North Tower, and all of history needs to be rewritten. The person in bed next to you isn’t anyone you love, doesn’t even have to be anyone you know. Your children breathe in manmade poison, and it tastes like money dipped in blood.

    And can you tell a politician from a whore? Not if both will fuck you for your money.

    And when the phone rings, it’s the wife of a man I’ve never met, and she says she won’t be over today. Says her husband is on his way home, but she wants to finger herself while I talk dirty. Wants to cum through fifteen miles of wire, and what I think is that I may have finally discovered religion.

    What I wait for is the roof to collapse. For the crows to find the body of the dog at the end of the street.

    Listen.

    In one hundred years I’ll be dead, but what if this house is still standing? I should leave a message somewhere, should carve some holy inscription into a basement wall. I should remind someone that I was alive, but I probably won’t.

    And I remember one of the last conversations I had with my father. I remember he was defending the war, and I was laughing. I asked So why is this douche bag any worse than all of the other dictators?

    I asked Why aren’t we trying to free any of these women being held in Bosnian rape camps? and he answered What the fuck are you talking about?

    Said he’d never heard of the fucking things, and so I explained what I’d read, what I’d seen on the news, and I told him about a series of paintings I was working on, and he snorted into his drink. He stubbed out his cigarette, lit a fresh one and said Listen Ð suffering is what actually happens in this world. Art is for assholes.

    He called out into the kitchen, asked my mother if dinner was almost ready, and three weeks later he was dead on the dining room floor.

    Missed my marriage, missed my divorce, missed the end of the war, and now here we are bogged down in the next one. Here I am at the computer, reading about different rape camps in other countries, writing sometimes but not painting. Still not doing anything to make the world a better place.

    Still waiting for the children on their beds of blood and oil and flame to open their eyes.

    To laugh with the voices of angels.



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