for poetry

July 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

what you want is
nothing less
than everything

this is not uncommon

the history books are
filled with murdered tyrants
the ground with forgotten
suicides

i sit at this desk
too often
obsessing over unpaid bills

i lose sleep
i yell at the baby
i watch my right hand
chop off the left

there is the day job
and the night job
and my pocket full of change
for the pay phone

i am the voice my wife
hates to hear through
fifteen miles of wire

the man my friends
speak badly of

i have no use for poets
for poetry
or for the bones dug up by
beaten dogs

anger is a fuel
and self-pity a drug
but this you already knew

if there is money
to be made in selling
your fear
i will do it

nothing is so dirty it
can never be spent

further west

July 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

this is
further west

away from the drowning girl’s
blackened bones

away from my son’s
beautiful smile

a motel room in
a pointless town

afternoon sunlight through
half-open drapes
and a partial view of
the interstate

in the bathroom a young mother
twenty-two or -three
naked in the tub and with
her wrists cut
wide open

the postcards in
the nightstand drawer left
blank

the bible stolen or
possibly
never there at all

every poem a man might
ever hope to write
hung unspoken and
just out of reach in
the shimmering
air

we

July 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

we are safe in
this cheap motel room

we are
approaching drunk
and we are mostly silent
mostly in love

i am still
in the early stages of being
a failed writer

your sister’s miscarriage
is still
four years away

with any luck
we will find other ways
to measure these weightless
spans of time

uncertain prophecy for the missing and the missed

July 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

pick a day
where none of the wars
involve you

describe the sky
and the taste of the wind

do the hills spin slowly around
this piece of land you
call home?

are you in love?

there is a point
where these questions intersect

a place where your shadow is
as tall
as the man you actually are
and somewhere in the back of your mind
is a list of all the runaway girls
you knew in the summer
of butchered nuns

a list of all the reasons they gave
and now it’s ten years later
and still
no one has stopped running

it happens

anger is only another needle
waiting to be worshipped

the patron saint
of raped cheerleaders
is a myth

and these are not new rumors
and no one’s pain
is unique

no one’s future
is written

and still
it’s not that hard to guess
how badly the stories
of the disappeared
will end

psalm

July 2001 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry

you are not
in the kitchen
with jesus christ
and he is not
bleeding

you are not curled up on
the cold linoleum with
your husband kicking you
in the back

your children are
not dead

tell yourself this

your children are not
dead

weep bright red
tears of joy