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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN SWEET
the sun is god's face bleeding down six a.m. in the age of rain and the streets of someone else's city flooded and filled with corpses and this is what it takes to make us forget the war this is a woman shot dead by her brother someone's mother raped in a room filled with broken glass and what i'm waiting for is to either be forgiven or forgotten i have spent too many years dragging the people i love through the filth of priests and politicians i have turned away from my children have slammed doors in their beautiful faces but wait christ was never meant to be a weapon the truth is only a less direct form of lying without a an obvious enemy we have only each other to hate cage some minor ghost in another room some forgotten act of violence a fifteen year old boy in the woods his girlfriend who he's just beaten to death with a length of rusty pipe and what the earth looks like from where i sit is flat what my wife cries herself to sleep about at night is my blindness and listen jesus christ was the original navajo the idea of slavery can never be separated from the idea of america or what about my son? four years old and beautiful and already well-versed in the concept of hatred or what about phil ochs? found at the end of a rope in his sister's house and the fact that there was nowhere for any of us to go from there the fact that the government believes in nothing beyond itself ask ronald reagan if he lost any sleep over those first few thousand aids victims ask all of the dead orphans in all of the ruined churches if it felt good to burn say what you want until some fucker with a gun decides it's time for you to die manifest destiny: a literal translation or this man who kills a priest the priest who rapes young boys and we were never promised beauty and were only offered hope by liars we built our houses on the bones of the slaughtered called it democracy waited for the first walmart to open john sweet, 35 and counting, angry, bitter, etc etc, hiding in a pissant town in upstate new york, a believer in very little. a follower of the writings of j. pollock and of the words of h. frayne. too much education, and still a shit job. recent publications include the chapbook Enemy (www.pinkanarchkittypress.com), the full length collection Human Cathedrals (www.ravennapress.com) and the electronic chapbook Silence in the House of Truths (www.tmpoetry.com). |
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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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