“No Way Out” © John Engstrom
[all we knew and all we witnessed]
and it’s okay if all of your
poems are lies, and
it’s okay to hate the people who love you
we’ll all be dead soon enough,
right, and what’s the point of
turning mortality into a religion?
what’s the point of art beyond
being a way to make someone rich?
listen
everything kills everything else,
period, and the stones
were always better than the beatles
accept it
your ex-lovers are all waiting to drink to
your memory and then piss on your grave
your children haven’t started
contemplating a world without you
yet, but they will
they’ll wake up one morning and
see you for the relic you’ve become
they’ll laugh politely at your jokes
and make notes about what will
need to be done to your house
before it can be sold
about what should be saved and
what can be thrown away,
and you’ll stand in the background and
nod, and you’ll know that
everything they say is right
you’ll mention that you want
to be cremated, and one of them will
smile while the other pops
open his trunk to
show you the can of gasoline
and you will never feel
this grateful again
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in compassionate nihilism which, as luck would have it, is the genre that has all the best bands. He was once denounced as a no-talent hack (in the letters to the editor column of an honest-to-goodness print zine!) by the woman who exchanged vows in a Celtic handfasting ceremony with Jim Morrison, because he had the sheer unmitigated gall to mention Jimbo in a poem. The nerve.
John Engstrom is a Boston-based artist-author-poet. A retired journalist-museum worker, he serves as Arts critic for the Fenway News. His collages and poems appear on Facebook and Divergents Magazine.