Five Poems by John Sweet

 

in the morning

 

your saviour

embracing his own crucifixion

 

walls, but no windows,

                 no doors,

                 no roof

 

a forest of doubt

and then the kingdom within

 

the future, of course,

and the immediate past

 

tell the children they’re fucked,

and all they do is laugh

 

 

the minotaur in defeat

 

simple and holy in the first

bright light of day,

the wolves asleep the children

devoured and will you put on

your blood-red dress?

 

will you comb the feathers

from my hair?

 

listen

 

we’ll fall and we’ll fuck and

we’ll split the difference

between trust & love

 

we’ll bury the past and

we’ll burn the future

 

maybe build something more

hopeful from the soft grey

ashes of our hearts

 

 

that summer on tracy street

 

or else you wake up in a foreign country where

everyone speaks your language

but no one knows what you mean

 

you wake up in a bed filled with blood

 

in a cold blue room on the

shadowed side of the house and this

junkie’s corpse next to you

 

this shard of glass

caught in the baby’s throat

 

keeps trying to talk but all that comes out

is the invisible sound of blind despair

 

 

diode

 

speeding past moments that have no meaning,

past hours and days with my nose running & hands shaking,

thoughts cut off jaggedly at either end like tiny

failed revolutions, and i am cold and i am sweating

 

i am too old to be cut this easily

 

am thinking it was david byrne who said

HEAVEN IS A PLACE, and from the top of

burnt hill road you can see everything

 

from the top of burnt hill road you can

see that there’s nothing to see

 

can feel the afternoon pressing

down against you like polished glass

 

so much air to breathe, but all you can do is smother

and we will sing until our throats explode

and we will tell ourselves we’re happy

 

black waves rolling through an open window, and i am

guilty like pilate was guilty, and i am drowning like st. maria

 

i am an open fist hitting a concrete wall

 

i am a blue sky bleeding sunlight

 

there is room for neither faith nor doubt in

this new world i propose

 

there is no need to look beyond

one’s own mirror for the enemy

 

fear will be your weakness and your weapon both,

just like it’s become mine,

and your words will be written in rust

 

your children will be raped by soldiers

 

this much cannot be changed

 

 

preliminary sketch for the human condition

 

needle hits bone and

you just keep pushing just

keep laughing at the idea of

justice at the idea of

equality and the ones locked

away in camps eating their

own shit or the ones

run down on the highway

by some redneck vigilante

and then a cold glass of

orange juice on the

morning of the

execution

 

a letter to your wife

telling her not to worry and

another to your girlfriend

telling her she will always

be the only one

 

her response

which arrives too late

 

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).