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John Sweet Poetry

a homesick poem

by John Sweet

sunlight and crows

a sacrifice

a clenched fist
dripping blood

these are not options,
this is the
proper sequence

we are believers in
the wisdom of ghosts

of fairy tales

we are believers in
a void of
our own making

wealth and
self-righteousness

power from the
end of a barrel

who are you to
criticize
until you’ve taken
your first life?



between defeat and despair


first week of april all brown lawns and
grey sky, threat of snow that
never quite arrives and
what i miss are
leonora’s pale breasts in the mexican sunlight

do you remember 1937?

are we still killing for the
same reasons we were then?

seems like it was all pretty funny until
we realized that everyone
who’d died was someone we’d known



let all sounds be the sound of freedom


these houses and
the spaces between them

these streets all heavy with silence
in the early afternoon

trees and the shadows of trees
and the ghost of de chirico

a kingdom of dust
for the lucky few

can’t be god these days unless you’re
willing to bleed and
maybe that’s how it always was

not every cripple is a prophet

not every prophet understands
the necessity of hope

picture yourself as the desert
and your life
finally starts to make sense



upstate; a surrender


in a fog of numbed-out pain and
                              creeping cold

in a collapsing city in
a dying kingdom

a future built on ruins,
and what is there to say about it?

you’ve wasted your whole life here

taste of guilt mixed with
the texture of ashes, right?

the dead among the living and
                          all of us blind

all of us halfway down the
road to being forgotten

anonymous houses & abandoned factories and
each day shaped by dull light without color

each moment meaningless on its own
and then when added to all the others,
                                     and so breathe

                                       don’t breathe

gotta make a choice
either way

gotta stand up and be counted or
lie down in whatever
shallow grave you’ve dug for yourself

there will always be a despair
greater than your own



this kingdom of rain, these corpses on fire


crows outside the suicide factory,
first light of a dull grey morning

screams and whispers

echoes

there is no future in being holy,
you understand

there is no future at all

the present is always with us, the
past never remembered clearly and when i
tell you i love you it
sounds like an admission of defeat

when i get out of my car, the parking lot
is littered with the bones of angels

the machinery has just begun
to grind into motion

each day starts at zero, and then they
all move backwards from there



everyone i hate, and the reasons why


man with the gun says
there need to be changes,
but he’s just as dead the rest of us

he’s high on the fumes
of burning children

he’s trapped in the shadows
of his father’s fists

a slave and a whore,
but fuck it

no one comes to this town to
live up to their fullest potential

no one talks about better days
until there’s no hope of
them ever arriving

you learn this early, and then
it just seems like something
you’ve always known



st. nicole, lost in the labyrinth


the suicide season again,
and all your fucked up lovers say
it’s the sunlight that ties this noose so tight

they say it’s the fading warmth of
a half-remembered past
that blurs the future to a dirty grey, and
what can you do but agree?

your father never liked you, sure

left nothing but the gift of self-hatred
when he walked away from the burning house

and how many years did you wait
before you went looking for him?

how easy do you think it was
for him to forget your name?

opened the door to his shithole apartment
with shaking hands, with a blank stare,
and told you he’d never had any kids

told you his wife disappeared
back before the war

made you start to doubt you’d
                                     ever been born




BIO

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 DEAD MAN EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery) and No ONE STARVES IN A NATION OF CORPSES (2020 Analog Submission Press).

The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

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