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JOHN SWEET
footnote to bleeding horse sonnet no. 1 the shadows of ordinary objects at the end of august the weight of houses and of hills and the subtle threat of empty factories the idea of blood pooling at the edges of barren fields and abandoned parking lots of a president who hates you who would have the poor eat the shit of an idiot god who would have the dissidents shot dead and their bodies burned in public squares and who is i that poisoned the ground you stand on and how much money have they made from the bodies of these teenage girls dying of cancer? why would i want my sons sent off to fight a war waged in the name of greed and petty vengeance? the list of people i'd like to see dead is already long enough wilderness rain at six a.m. on the edge of a dying city rust on the machines and the tired hands of lovers and the dogs gone wild a woman attacked in her front yard the starving without names a baby left behind and a vulture at its face and the angels caught in wires the neon light of god shot out by a junkie with a gun the shallow graves dug at the edge of the highway a shovel and a roll of duct tape a son and a daughter and you pray with a mouth full of ashes you sing with a rope around your neck and your feet not quite touching the ground and faith is a desert and desire a pool of tar the house has been on fire since the day you were born none of this anything more than the truth judas you crawling lost in a blind room or this you blind in a sunfilled room in a room where the windows explode blinded naked when the door is opened smiling or asleep when the hand is placed over your mouth or the gun to your head someone you know and he says beg and you do gladly at first and then not and the way your sister's boyfriend says he'll kill you if you tell anyone puts the tip of his cigarette against your breast and says cry and you do and i have nothing as useless as answers to offer i understand the twin gods of money and power the one who lets his friends have you for a price the way he tells you he loves you tells you to smile and you do one of you the sun and the other one blind one of you locked in a room and the other one laughing like the shadow of god both of you naked and betrayed both of you stoned and desperate all of us willing to lie to get whatever it is we want faith or your door kicked in at four in the morning and the way he tells you he loves you as he slams your head against the wall the way he screams it this constant need to be believed a poem on leaving a building burning at the ocean's edge a woman you don't know naked in a chalkwhite room waits with her hands nailed to the walls believes in violence but calls it love the same sad fucking song you've finally learned to call home laughter what you are is dead in someone else's war and who you are is god's child and does it help knowing this? fuck no a corpse is a corpse and a poem is just a poem until it begins to choke on its own useless anger until it begins to sound like a sharp blade hacking through the base of the skull and what i mean when i say religion is retaliation what happens is that the killers cannot be identified and so everyone needs to be slaughtered and every corpse defiled every church burned to the ground the future reduced to ashes before we even arrive 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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