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| John Sweet |
and he wasn’t dead but
she was laughing still
1974, i think, or maybe 1992
blood on the sheets in a
late august bedroom
kissed the hollow of his heart
while he thought about
getting dressed
told him she loved him but
she couldn’t remember his name
and he’d never known hers
he’d never seen any reason to
believe in god or to
miss his father
took the right exit but in
the wrong state
pulled up to where his sister’s
house had been just before noon
but it was 1986
the fire had made the local paper
and then been forgotten
ragweed pushed up through the
ribcages of the
sleeping and the homeless
a faded plastic cross at the
highway’s edge
and a stranger’s name
blue sky and sunshine and she
sat beside him with her
hands in her lap
said she wanted to go home now
said it was best if they didn’t
see each other again
***
jul29 (2)
your wasted time your
empty years and then the
baby is born dying
and i get sick of my own
self-pity but not
enough to give it up
i believe in the
weightlessness of fear
the house
failing apart
by silent degrees
got this bastard faith in
trust and love that
cannot be shaken but
what if i’m wrong?
what if each day matters
even less than the
minutes and hours that
make it up?
the truth means nothing
if all it ever does is
cause us pain
***
poem in deepening blue light
and no shadows because
everything is shadow
do you see?
a tentative world of
maybes and suicides
five below zero
the fact that i love you
which i use as a shield
like walls
without doors
and in this room at this
exact cracked and bleeding moment
i can look out this window and
see it reflected in a window
fifteen feet away
i can see the space i would
occupy in a better world
the blind horse and the
crippled rider
and i can hear the laughter
we are all freaks but
only some of
us recognize this
we are all learning to die one
awkward day at a time
ends up being a life and
all we’re left with are
stories about how
easy it was to waste
***
song of the sinking man
all these hottest days of late spring spent
obsessing over the grey despair of
february, and why not?
there is only hope and hopelessness,
endlessly circling one another
this woman framed in the pale light of a
bedroom window and when you ask if
she’ll be the one who betrays you,
she laughs
says it’s not that simple, but
doesn’t this feel like a lie?
weren’t the teeth of christ filed down to
jagged points for a reason?
listen
you were told the same shit about
inheriting the earth as the rest of us,
so why would you ever think
you’re special?
why would you bow down to
anyone demanding fealty?
learn the faces of your enemies
and then learn their weaknesses
***
the brittle heart
imagine the truth as a variable
the sky as empty of
everything but the sun
let enough time crawl by and
nothing in your past
can be remembered exactly
fill in the empty spaces with
sepia-toned might-have-beens,
with hopeful possibilities,
because you can’t be
god without getting clean
can’t f**k all those fallen saints
if you’re afraid to feel their pain
look
spent a lot of time driving through
dying towns searching for
things that were no longer there
wrote a lot of suicide notes
disguised as poems
stayed up late waiting for
all those wounds to heal
then woke up every morning
wrapped in bloodstained sheets
do you see the punchline here?
are you tired of late autumn,
of winter,
of children massacred for the
blurry concept of freedom?
what about all that time wasted
kissing the frost from your
lover’s eyes?
it has to be obvious by now
the room will be cold no
matter how many books you burn
the house will fall no matter
how many spikes you
drive through christ
we cannot hope to be anything
but footnotes in the history
of neverending despair
***
heretic
collision isn’t fatal but
the blood offers possibilities
tv on the wrong channel and
the president speaks of raping babies
shouts about the importance of wealth,
the need for vengeance,
the illusion of victory and
everything spoken through a
mouthful of sawdust and dogshit and
then the man with the gun laughs
says there’s no such thing
as something new
says this, and then he takes
his own life and, in a world without
safety, there can only be promises
kept or promises broken
can only be darker shades of
grey and red
the two of us alone in a
stranger’s room and
waiting for the first light of day
***
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 FLAG ON FIRE IS A SONG OF HOPE (2019 Scars Publications) and A DEAD MAN, EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).
