Home Tags Posts tagged with "john sweet poetry"

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).

prophecy

by john sweet

 

 

woke up naked and blind
and wanted to call you
but didn’t

felt the warmth of
someone next to me

the need for executions

for the deaths of innocent
mothers and children

something to pass the time
until my vision returned

 


The Myth of St. Maria

 

You and I, cowards like Picasso, like
fists on doors in the empty hours
of the night, soldiers acting on orders,
boots through sleeping skulls, and when
victory is declared the words all sound like
screams. The men who speak them have
the heads of birds, with smiles all
blood and gore.

You ask for flight, you receive paper
airplanes. You receive the gift of loss, the
secrecy of houses, the killer running across
the back yard but his lover left behind.

Don’t call it a war.

Don’t ask about the children.

They were raised to believe in Jesus,
and then they were abandoned. Were left at
the edges of highways, at the borders of
anonymous states and unnamed countries,
and when strangers approached, they fled
into the wilderness.

When the helicopters came in low,
the forests exploded in flames.

It was the belief that all truth could be
measured by money. It was the hands of
priests turned into grasping claws, and the
paintings were all slashed and the
curtains ripped down, and what was left at
the end of the day was a nation of
broken windows

The knowledge that we were all
descended from whores.

That Christ was only spoiled meat
left out by an indifferent hand.

That everything is sacred.

 

 

the arrogance of light

 

said this is my gift to you and
gave me a book of blank pages, gave me
a coward’s smile
which mirrored my own

it was the war,
the one just before you were born,
and we stumbled through piles of corpses
with stretchers and whiskey

with pistols, because certain questions
can only ever have one answer

because the pages were blank and
we needed blood
and the girl said she was waiting for
                                    her father

said he’d be there soon, but of course he
was dead, and then so was she

we couldn’t take any chances,
you see

we’d been given gifts

beautiful new poisons which were
no good without victims

bombs,
which the scientists warned us were
                                    only theories,
but god they worked so well

and we were given clean white walls,
and so we burned the shadows of women,
of children, of sleeping babies
into them, and we called it a victory

we asked the doctor to keep the
prisoners alive until they’d
answered all of our questions

we improved upon the crucifixion

took turns raping the girl before
we killed her, and she never
made a sound

was just another statistic by the time we
got to her younger sister, and in
the papers we were being called heroes

in the villages, we were having
the men dig their own shallow graves
and it was just a precaution,
you see

we were just protecting the future

we were making sure the
truths would survive

we had this book,
and we were writing them down

 


explanation

 

all of my poems in
the past tense

all of my reasons

any number of excuses

four days of rain & the
truck wouldn’t start and
there was nothing i could say
to make my son stop
crying

there was nothing i could
do but hold him

both of us very quiet
there in the dark

 


slaying the angel

 

mother says it was easy,
was like falling in love, says
they beat the girl together,
then just beat her to death

says they left her in the shed
for two months,
then dumped her in the bay

says it just happened,
like a poem or a war

was just the inevitability of
small bones breaking
beneath the weight of joy

 

 

BIO

john sweetjohn sweet, b. 1968, still numbered among the living. a believer in writing as catharsis. an optimistic pessimist. opposed to all organized religion and political parties. avoids zealots and social media whenever possible. latest collections include THE CENTURY OF DREAMING MONSTERS (2014 Lummox Press) and A NATION OF ASSHOLES W/ GUNS (2015 Scars Publications).

 

 

 

STAY IN TOUCH