JOHN SWEET - POEMS

john sweet, b 1968, still numbered among the living.  A believer in writing as catharsis. His latest collections include APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press) and the limited edition HEATHEN TONGUE (2018 Kendra Steiner Editions).  All pertinent facts about his life are buried somewhere in his writing.

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the glimmer
​

​or consider your father’s suicide from
the safety of 25 years away
 
set your own failures against his
 
sleep through december
         through january and february
 
take whatever pills you can find
burn whatever you need to keep warm and
then wake up lost on the morning the
flood finally creeps into your house
 
look for your youngest son
but his room is empty
 
answer the phone with the
proper amount of fear in your voice
 
always these goddamned ghosts on the
other end of the line
laughing at the bloodsoaked mess
your life has become
 
 

the frightened sparrow
​

​flat expanse of houses beneath
pale october sunlight,
powerlines and telephone poles and gas stations,
distance to the river,
sister hanging out beneath the bridge and
we are not no one and this is not
nowhere but the possibility exists
 
the desert is within
 
grow up and then start to grow old
 
marry and then divorce
 
everywhere
the smell of decay and of burning
 
bones buried in back yards
 
this woman i know who refuses to
believe that the freeway is a lie
 
thinks she’ll escape even though she’s
tied to her daughter, to her granddaughter
 
i give her a shovel and
show her where to dig and
what she finds is herself but
her eyes are closed
 
says there’s nothing to see
 
asks why i don’t love her anymore
 
 

black chalk
​

or when the sunlight
tastes like gasoline or where the
clouds gather into fists
above the hills
 
this woman i know who
says she loves me but
that she won’t leave her husband
 
won’t walk to the edge of the field
where the child has been bound
and shot and
if there’s a truth i would have you know
it’s that the war cannot be stopped
 
these men who have written their
names in blood on the courthouse wall
are the biggest kinds of assholes
 
are as useless as poets and
if i were in california
i would be kneeling at the feet of
saint maria
 
i would have
no more use for words
 
would forget the feel of salt rubbed
into cracked and peeling skin
the sound of metal grinding against
metal on ten-below afternoons
and i would learn to forget
my children’s names
 
i will learn to build
the holiest of towers from their
tiny bones
 
we are nothing without
this vast empty space between
joy and pain
 
 

​or honesty, which i would only ever offer to the queen of open wounds​

 
 
river choked with ice in the dark and
all of the stars left nameless
 
venus low over the hills, brilliant and sinking and
it’s true that nothing you or i say will ever matter and
it’s true that nothing you or i do will ever
change the world
 
it’s the taste of blood as we whisper in
curtained rooms, and it’s the futility of defiance as we
scream ourselves hoarse against frozen windows
 
it’s the end of january in the last year we will
be together, and we stand naked at the water’s edge
 
hold tight to each other like the future depends on it
and it does of course but
whatever future there is will arrive with or without us
 
whatever past we had will be remembered by no one
 
after all the lies i’ve told you, here we are
suddenly at the truth
 
 
 

the image but not the idea
​

​moving east through six a.m.
tunnels of rain, november, december,
age of desperate ghosts, this woman w/
the pale scars keeps slipping pills
between yr lips, keeps speaking in a
language he doesn’t quite understand
 
only 10,000 miles to the coast
 
only the ghost of frida kahlo
to light the way
 
sister asleep in the back seat and he
misses the exit and then the
one after that, and these faded plastic
wreaths w/ their tilted wooden crosses
on the side of the highway
 
this first grey light of day
 
thinks let me keep my name
 
thinks let the suicides all
take someone else’s
 
starts with love and then
burns his way down to the
ghostwhite bones