Poetry By John Sweet

       Jerry Huddleston CC



​
[we could just fall to pieces]


or this is your oldest kid’s suicide or
it’s the blackmail that
pushed him into that particular room, and
what exactly are we believers in here?

god?

a brighter future?

fuck all of you vampires, all of you
whores, all of you cancers

the kingdom of nil is never
where you expect it to be,
but there it is

do you get it?

picture the drowning man
with nothing left to hold onto

picture the parachute as
it fails to open

and we all have to breathe

we all have to dream

and how many mornings have i
woken up in the wrong room, in the
wrong house, with the wrong person?

how many different ways
have i envisioned oblivion?

and this kid, and the one before him, the
one that will come after, and 
you know it’s not going to end, right?

you know money is what matters

power

the idea of hope, but only as a
way of moving more product

only as a slogan
you can dance to

just gotta keep moving those
feet until they’ve
been shot out from under you




​
fanfare


and everything’s a shame and
all the quiet lovers die but
                    don’t apologize

every direction at once, like sunlight,
and i thought about you all summer long

i dug a hole for ginsberg and
another for kerouac

predicted the war that would take your
father’s life, but it never came

pulled the blinds and licked the
sweat from between your breasts and
we laughed at the ghosts who
wanted to die

at the ones who wanted to 
live forever and we said we knew 
the truth was a dead-end street 
in a nowhere town

said we were going to fuck god
until he begged for mercy

until he got sick of listening to 
all our tired bullshit and just 
finally admitted he’d never really cared
                                                                     at all

​


​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).