Poetry
John Sweet
Photo Credit: smilla4/Flickr (CC-by-nc)
bluest sky
snow on the first day of spring and
then the next and
how fat will you get eating
nothing but dirt and sorrow?
or maybe it’s the space between love
and broken bones I’m talking about here
colleen laughing as she’s
pushed down the stairs or maybe this is
just the way she wanted it to be
do you remember her telling you that
everything was fine?
do you remember the cuts on one arm
and the bruises up the other?
regret is a tiring thing
stand there with your hands on fire,
the children in tears,
and consider all the reasons a man
might have for drinking himself to death
consider the absolute failure of
pollock’s last paintings
believe in the age of famine
lesser gods crawling through
the filth of lesser minds
side streets and abandoned factories and
the futility of building palaces
on graveyards
DONE is DONE
christ has no use for your suffering
phone rings and it’s your father saying
so long motherfucker just the
way it happens in your dreams and
hatred is easy so why not embrace it?
look at all the politicians
all the holy men
who want you to understand that killing
the enemy is your only option
look at all the enemies they offer
it’s only inevitable to find yourself on
someone else’s list because
no matter who you are
you’re the wrong person
you grow fat on apathy and fear
because they taste so goddamn good
nineteen-year-old kid with a gun
kills a mother of four
and what we need now is a tv movie
what we need are arguments from
both sides that accomplish nothing
that sound good in campaign speeches
and spilling from the assholes of
media personalities and
then on the second day of spring i
wake up to bitter sunlight and
children’s toys stuck in the frozen mud
i wake up to dried blood and
empty apologies
every day of my life wasted thinking
the next one will be better
caelum
not a fear of death, not yet, or
at least not while awake but
desperate times call for stronger drugs, and
all the burned girls standing laughing
out in the rain
all the reasons the heart has
to betray the body
the o.d. and the car crash
a sleight of hand where everything you
love is no longer anything that matters so
grab a shovel
dig a tunnel
down to christ’s back yard
watch cobain turn blue at the
foot of the bed
spent your whole life believing in
magic but
there is no magic here
an eye
all poems starve in
the desert
of your mind
all wars begin with
the idea of god or the
concept of greed
this need to kill
the enemy
which
leads to the need to
create enemies
to become one
some stranger in a
windowless room
smiling in antici-
pation of the
day i die
on arthur ave
man says he’ll feed the
starving children dust
says he’ll burn
hollywood to the ground
will teach the priests about pain
and in the background a
television plays too loud
and a stereo
and the portrait of christ above the
sofa has been done in
luminous paint
still sings even after the
lights have all gone out
still bleeds
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A Flag on Fire is a Song of Hope (2019 Scars Publications) and A Dead Man, Either Way (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press). Email: bleedinghorse99[at]yahoo.com