John Sweet

a murder/suicide in southern California

by John Sweet

or that the man you love

is a rapist

that the mother walks away

from the burning trailer

from the sleeping child

every starving dog with

a gun and a justification for

why they shoot it

every room in the

house of truths silent and

thick with the smell

of blood

and i am

not a good person but

i love my sons

i am not a killer but

i believe in

the simplicity of it

i have my list of people

who deserve to die

it does nothing but grow

just north of town, out past the cemetery

John Sweet

the sound of cold metal grinding

against cold metal in the frozen air

the desert you were born in

the gasoline you got drunk on

fucking father was blind and crippled

and just because he left you his

shoes doesn’t mean you

have to wear them

just because he had a sense of humor

doesn’t mean you have to laugh

just because it was too late to

stop the bleeding doesn’t

mean you couldn’t have at least

held his hand

like fire

by John Sweet

thought maybe the

blood would begin to

run backwards once the

war was over but

it didn’t

thought surrender would

earn us mercy

but no

the children were lined up and

shot beneath tattered white flags,

their bodies dumped in the river,

their mothers raped and then

butchered, and do you

remember the year?

was it before you were born?

after we died?

do you remember the priests

and their magic wands,

their answers that answered

nothing at all?

found you naked behind the trailer

with your wide open eyes

and quicksilver wrists

and I told you there that the

baby would never have my name

told you that the dogs would

say whatever they had to

to get in between your legs

let you find out for yourself

that being weak in the

civilized world would

never buy you any mercy

the silence of betrayal

by John Sweet

these shadows like

the shadows of ghosts

this hand the one that caresses you

anointed with salt and blessed by

nameless lovers and then the

crosses where they spring up from

the frozen ground

the wars

after no believes in them anymore

go ahead

explain to me how

god takes sides

show me the shacks made of

corrugated siding and plywood

the bodies buried where the

fields come up hard against the cities

there is no difference between

the past and the future

no need to distinguish between the

dead and the hopeless

i was there when he jumped

from the bridge

but i was just passing by

was on my home from the

post office and the river was on fire

and there was a woman i had

married

there were our children

two of them and beautiful and

the man on the radio was saying

that dylan had lost it

was saying that

cobain had been shot

had been found crucified at the

edge of the desert

but when i open the door

you’re gone

when i open my mouth

the words all taste like shadows

we’re not growing fat out here

we’re dying

pyrrh

by John Sweet

in the temples as they crumbled,

in the year of burning children,

where hands were windows,

where eyes are open,

saw shadows like scars,

felt the warmth of yr mouth,

kissed the salt from yr breasts

stood in the doorway

after the rain had passed

stood between yr husband

and his lover

called it the year of broken wings

because none of us could leave,

because we could only fly in

circles,

could only repeat our mistakes

again and again,

and when you turned to me i

saw shadows like scars,

kissed the salt from yr lips,

felt the heat of yr lies

stood in the doorway after

the house we never shared had

burned to the ground

Dive

by John Sweet

keeps thinking about the desert

about getting high

about the girls he’s fucked in any number of

shithole apartments

finds the slight depression at the far

edge of the field where the horse was buried

no songs but the

songs of bees

the smell of lilies, of

dogwood and roses, clouds like mounds of

faceless corpses circling overhead and he

thinks he had a son

remembers watching the bus pull out of

the parking lot but has no

memory of it ever coming back

and so he’s stoned at the far edge of

summer, 85 miles an hour down the interstate,

hills in every direction, shredded tires from

eighteen-wheelers, crows at the roadkill,

all of these pointless metaphors for

a wasted life

he’s 25 and then he’s 43, a father and an

emotional cripple, sunburnt, unshaven,

no use for anyone’s god

he doesn’t support the war and he

doesn’t support the soldiers and he

doesn’t support the government

walls are walls, of course, and

every window is a target

the dogs are always hungrier when the

corpses are bulldozed into pits and burned

but he’s thinking about the desert,

you see,

or he’s thinking about a woman he still loves,

and the two have become interchangeable

in his mind

he’s thinking about this child he

may or may not have

about a poem he should but won’t write

he’s lost, yes, but only because

his eyes are closed

only because he never knew where he

was going in the first place

the poem as a bouquet of broken glass

by John Sweet

hangs himself on an

ordinary sunlit afternoon for

reasons you don’t need to understand

never heard of frankie b

has no use for jackson

a genocide of one, right?

guaranteed no survivors

color and form, yes, but too much of

one and not enough of the other and so

all stories become stories of the

failures that have shaped

your own life

and all lives end in death,

obviously,

but some of us can’t wait

some of us have other places to be,

have more immediate points to make

and she opens the door to the shed

while thinking about none of this

and there he is and

there he stays

the end of a sentence, sure,

and the end of a life,

but the punch line will always be the future

those of us who survive will

always have the final say

who you were never matters as

much as who we are

willing to let you become

why i stopped being me

by John Sweet

asks do you remember the

bleeding horse? and i laugh, tell her

that shit is dead & buried

this is the age of absolute zero

we are the bastard children

of crippled dreamers

this fucker crawling around in

the middle of main street, for example

10 o’clock at night and too

high to know he’s history

wants to talk about blake,

wants to scream out forgotten verses

by rimbaud, or maybe he just

lies there choking on

his own puke

maybe coughs up

a lungful of blood

a lifetime of small

unimportant deaths leading up to

this moment, and so maybe

we just let him go

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).