Poetry: John Sweet

 the ideal

everything burned and

                    everyone,

              beyond hope,

     beyond recognition

                            sorry

the truth has no shape,

refuses to fit into any

pre-ordained space

the war is won, but no one 

can remember why it began

which specific lie was

deemed necessary to rationalize

              the first shot,

              the first corpse,

              the first baby run through

                               with a bayonet

                                          oh well

cities can be rebuilt

and names forgotten

strangers can write me letters,

tell me i’m an asshole,

                   a pessimist,

                   a nihilist,

but what have i done here

besides replay history

without emotion?

who among us didn’t believe

that the future of democracy

hung by the thinnest

of threads?

what we finally deserve,

i think,

are the deaths we so

eagerly heap upon others

***

dorothea’s birthday

a moment of sunlight,

                of blue sky

wakes up smiling at

three in the afternoon from a

dream with no meaning at all

a raft of forgotten gods 

adrift in an ocean of blood

the phone ringing

and money owed

frost still crawling through the

shadows but fading heat 

where the scars refuse to heal

pale scars where the

past joins the future

they will only hurt for as 

long as we 

keep drawing breath

***

the garden of severed hands, without end

what i never did was 

invent the machine gun

this should count for something

we should be brave in 

the face of hopelessness

should be in love but

christ

the days are like hammers

my thoughts are either 

bitter truths or obvious lies

do you see?

this town is dying and the money is all gone

we're caught

we're f**ked

6,000,000 dead and all we can 

think to call it is history

all we can do is spend our 

paychecks at walmart

listen

america doesn't need you and 

it doesn't need me

there will be no revolution 

there will be no equality

picture christ on the cross 

and understand that he saw it coming

believe in the strip malls and the

topless bars and the anonymous women

screwing nameless men on the internet

because they will come to

define us

they will be the dogs that

devour our children

these cities can only fall beneath

the weight of so many corpses

***

gutting the pig: a rhapsody for false kings

he is a man of burning houses,

of petty, dying kingdoms

he is a believer in halos made of

precious metals, 

a believer in crosses and in

anything that can be crucified, and

when you ask him what he thinks about the future,

his mouth is always filled w/

                          blood & shit

when you ask him what he’s learned from the past,

he will undress you while explaining

the necessity of rape

he will laugh at 

the pain of victims

you are already

one of them

***

poem written on the graph of imaginary colors

or christ pinned

down by enemy fire or brian

jones nailed to a cross of pills and

                                      self-doubt

a good year for junkies everywhere

you teach the children to live with the

pain or you teach them to bow out gracefully

maybe find a lover

who will call you honey

maybe build a god from

whatever spoiled meat you can find

and it’s one thing to be afraid of

dying young and it’s another thing altogether

to be afraid of growing old but

you’ve got to choose

you’ve got to scrawl

 yr message

across these suburban bedroom walls in 

the blood of yr victims

this seems like knowledge you

should’ve been born with

***

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).

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Setu, April 2021