NEW NEWNESS

BRAVE RETREAT

the bleeding horse despairs in the face of all that cannot be changed

this wall of heat until you can no

longer clearly remember the darkest days
                                                of february

the laughter of children and

the hum of air conditioners

trickle of sweat

between your lover’s breasts

and what hope can you have for the future

when your religion is based on blood
and violence, and why would you kiss the
feet of a savior who wears a halo of ashes?

why would kiss the

feet of anyone at all?

listen
 

i am tired of the burning house

i am tired of the weeds

that devour the garden
 

once you move past the idea of

immortality, you begin to see clearly
 

once the last dollar has been spent, you

begin to see the attraction of despair
 

and do you understand why

bukowski’s death doesn’t matter?

do you understand he would have had

nothing but contempt for you?

and this is true of dali also, of course,

and of reagan, and once the villagers have
all been locked inside the church
the priests light the torches

they line up the bulldozers and they

explain that all true gods take sides

they turn politely away

while the women are raped

it’s a sad fucking world when the

only thing we can
think to beg for is forgiveness

gossamer cathedral

girl has a mother

but the mother is dead,
                  girl is dead,
carpet heavy with blood and,
outside,
the suffocating weight
of august sunlight

buzz of cicadas

poets with nothing better

to write about than
their own sad little lives

waiting for rain

and all afternoon the slow grinding

roar of factories pumping out
blood and despair and
all afternoon the stench of gasoline and
burning cars carried in on a steady
wind from the south

all afternoon the

sky a luminous silver, a delicate
shade of purple and the hills all
smudged & blurred against it

the sun at uncertain intervals

the tentative shadows of bare trees

across well-manicured lawns

when did you become so

fucking afraid of everything?

widow poem 1

silver sun in a

bone-white sky, which makes it
easy to confuse living
with being alive

helps the pills go down easier,

but the hands are still cold

the suicides refuse

to give up their beliefs

won’t laugh, won’t cry,
won’t give me any reasons
for what they’ve done

just stand their bleeding

onto all of my poems

TENETS OF DEMOCRACY

1.

no one you elect
gives a shit whether you
live or die as long as there is
profit to be made at
your expense



2.

no one you elect
gives a shit whether you
live or die as long as there is
profit to be made at
your expense



3.

no one you elect
gives a shit whether you
live or die as long as there is
profit to be made at
your expense

the fade out

nothing to say really
but no one trusts a quiet man

no one trusts a television that
isn’t turned on

need fucking NOISE need the
rush of caffeine and sugar, the
lies of politicians and the empty
platitudes of priests as they
rape your sons

need the color red and the
steady buzz of neon tubes

need a gun in each hand

so much killing to be done in
the space of
just one lifetime

NEW COLLECTION

PAGAN DAYS

NEW REVIEW

HERE

ASH WILDERNESS REVISITED

click on the magic link - - - - - - - - -> ASH WILDERNESS

ebook orgy

THE BLISS

(cover by rebecca etter)

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bliss-john-sweet/1105699177?ean=9781257680030&itm=1&usri=9781257680030

ENDLESS NOOKIE

World Without Sound.

(cover by rebecca etter)

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-without-sound-john-sweet/1105801942?ean=9781257423811&itm=1&usri=9781257423811

MORE NOOKIE

FALSE HOPE

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/false-hope-john-sweet/1105806124?ean=9781257689644&itm=1&usri=9781257689644

available on the nook

GIVE A POOR MAN GOD AND WATCH HIM STARVE

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/give-a-poor-man-god-and-watch-him-starve-john-sweet/1105691988?ean=9781105008795&itm=1&usri=9781105008795

required listening vol. 4

(the december sound - the silver album)

required listening vol. 3

yves

required listening vol. 2

required listening vol. 1

holes through me

or the horse in yr
heart swimming through
oceans of pain
or the clocks that tell
only lies

this is you in dali’s room,
the end of the war,
corpses caught in frozen mud

you want them to sing
but the song has no words

you want them to apologize
but the words have no meaning

the mouths are
filled with gravel

with bloodsoaked truths

take the ones you need and
call them yr own

rape the priests who
would do you harm

let their despair be
all you need

victor safonkin, eurosurrealism

vladimir kush, russian surrealist

the classics

HUMAN CATHEDRALS

and who can forget.....

THE BLISS

which is apparently now an ibook over at itunes.

how ifucking odd.

(excellent cover art by rebecca etter!)

latest collection

with a cover that came out pretty nice, by accident.

in the kingdom of oblivion

keeping score

small hope like sunlight on
shimmering treetops, like a sky the color
of luminous dust

take the silence you’ve been given

hold it close to your heart

the children are tired of despair, are tired
of starvation, of revolution,
and so what are you going to do?

how far are you willing to crawl in a
desert of your own creation?

if i were a liar, i would tell you
there can be no wrong answers

if i were honest, i would turn away

do you remember the
life you had before?

do you remember the ocean?

i am a believer in easy escapes,
in walking away from pain and sorrow

i take comfort
in the gentle haze of distance

i find despair
around every corner

open your eyes, for christ’s sake

icarus, motherfucker

http://www.members.littleepisodes.org/profiles/blogs/icarus-motherfucker

ceremony of beasts

http://www.members.littleepisodes.org/profiles/blogs/ceremony-of-beasts-1

the angel uriel, lost and forsaken in the desert of upstate new york

http://api.ning.com/files/B6D9G2PAI7QVZr7u22hwJm6zhpDvNW3sYdvtP0On3pWaGNu5wSvDEl9kPQfGtPryaESwktmQkZikHoMFERZq-jBI-LlcMWIb/uriel.pdf

4th of july

90 degrees by ten in the morning, dirty
silver sky and you were telling me i
was nothing and i was watching you bleed

i was a believer in
time and in distance

in failure

house smelled of decay, of brutal heat and
damp corners and we were waiting for the
parade with our flags in tatters

we were writing letters to the dead and
dreaming of answers that would never arrive

dog was chained to a
tree and starving to death

child playing at the edge of the road and
i was crawling across the bedroom floor

was looking in the other direction
when i heard someone call my name

looked back and the child was gone

NEW YEAR, NEW BOOK, SAME OLD DOWNWARD SPIRAL

CONTINUUM

more work at mortal corkscrew

http://melanie-mortalcorkscrew.blogspot.com/2010/11/john-sweet-more-words-in-short-choppy.html

tentative notes from the village of dust

not sleeping and not
breathing and instead she is found
in a suitcase at the bottom
of a lake

the rules of war are spelled out
in blood and in shit across
the bedroom walls of
all your lovers

it’s okay, you see

you can laugh
in the face of atrocity

you can eat the
ashes of witches

cut holes in the
body of the christ child

bask in the glory of whatever
dim light shines through

new work at melanie's kickass blog

MORTAL CORKSCREW

slow drift into exile

RECENT COLLECTION, AVAILABLE HERE

rusted awkward movements

some older stuff

high

december, january, and all of
the ordinary horrors

sixteen year-old girl drowns her
newborn baby in the toilet

box full of maps

room full of nothing

tried to sustain my anger,
but i couldn’t

there were bills that
needed to be paid

small dogs crawling on their
bellies through shit & filth

potholed roads

you want to drive to the ocean
but can’t get past the hills

it’s a joke told by a man whose
eyes have been gouged out

you laugh with him
or you laugh at him

you find the body in a landfill

flowers push up through
the bones of forgotten saints

all of our darkest dreams
make perfect sense in the
bitter grey light of day

shroud

ONE OF THE BESTEST ZINES AROUND...

MANNEQUIN ENVY

SHOOTS AND VINES

SHOOTS AND VINES


SHOOTS AND VINES


SHOOTS AND VINES

was kissed by ghosts, was weeping

find the ocean just inches
below the desert's surface &
then wait for rain

this is the kingdom of false prophets

these are the bones of old lovers

no one here
wants to be your friend,
but being an enemy has value
too

wars cannot be fought
without cowards

children cannot be raped
without the cold embrace of priests

what matters isn't the truth,
but how pretty the
lies can be made to sound

what matters is power

the shame of being poor is a gift
given freely by the rich

houses built by the hands of
beggars can only fall

you will stand naked in
the ruins of everything you've
never owned and wait like a dog
for the kindness of strangers

sun & the moon

like death she said or
like dreaming,
and then she tore off the
baby’s wings

then she laughed
about what she’d done

SUNPOISON

new collection, an assortment of poems from 2004 - 2008. $15, can be ordered directly from me. 160 pp, no rhymes, profanity w/in acceptable parameters, soundtrack not yet available.

NEW WORK

POETRY FRIENDS

one for the man wrapped in barbed wire

or the sudden and undeniable knowledge
that all you are is an asshole

the broken wings of birds

the bones of all the
children you’ve watched starve to death

such a huge fucking feast of misery
laid out for you to grow fat on

holy days: an attempt at chiaroscuro

strange to end up lost in this
house i’ve called home for
fifteen years, and strange to
spend so much time considering
suicide on these bright
blue mornings

if you were here with me,
you would be beautiful and stoned

if we had children, they would
learn to live with disappointment

they would understand the
inevitability of being born in
a building on fire

NEW AESTHETIC, NEW WORK

READ HERE

servitude

It’s the age, yes, and it’s the war.
The naming of the enemy, the gift of
destruction, and this man I know, his
son, a soldier, a child, burned alive
inside his metal fortress, and so we
speak of revenge, we speak of God, of
victory, of the need to win this thing
that cannot be won, and the mother
cries in the boy’s room. The women
in the villages are raped and then
murdered. Are gutted, then left for
the dogs. What their flesh tastes like,
i’m told, is freedom.

AS GRUMPY AS I WANNA BE

Interview w/ me at THICK WITH CONVICTION.

Could I be more entertaining?

miro, dreaming

with thousands of birds
singing or screaming

fields of mud and snow

10,000,000 miles of road
between susan and maria and
one of them to love and one
of them to fuck

are you anywhere
that can be mapped?

have you been mouthing these
same words for too long now?

look

the plane goes down in flames

accusations are made
and victories declared

the churches
are set on fire

what this accomplishes
isn’t immediately clear

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

a new e-chap, SMALL CHILDREN BLEEDING POOLS OF SUNLIGHT, will be available for one day on May 1st at Poetry Superhighway. get the skinny HERE

prophetstown, before and after

everything turned
suddenly to desert

the women raped and
the children missing

tenskwatawa
pulled from the fire

brings a vision
back with him

not the death of
everyone and everything
he loves, but this is
what happens anyway

this is the
birth of america

newwwwwwwwwww work

THE WHISTLING FIRE

2:23 a.m.

and you write about death,
of course,
because it’s what you fear, and you
write about despair because
it’s what you know

the truth isn’t always a fist,
but it’s best to be prepared

america, big and small

a box filled with smaller worlds
in a room heavy with dust

old man in a chair at the window

city buried in
its own mindless filth

freedom was never a gift
intended
for the poor or the weak

subtle ascension

wake up to rain on the
morning after the massacre,
and to the knowledge that
it will all happen again

stand naked on the sidewalk
among the dying flowers,
the burnt-out candles,
the prayers that have all
washed away

this is not your home

these children with their
tear-stained faces will
never love you

you have always
been a coward

5 new poems at Lit Up

LIT UP MAGAZINE

a shroud

but don’t be america

don’t be the old man sitting
next to his filthy window

the trigger is pulled
and the hero has no name

all wounds are greater
than they appear

hold the child above your head
and view the sky through
the hole in its chest

remember the kingdom of god

remember the island of skulls

stand in the spot where
opposites meet and feel the
wings start to grow from
your shoulder blades

this is beyond magic and the
dull grimy walls of religion

we are worth more than
the prices
placed on oil and on fear

it’s easy to forget this
with a foot pressed
hard against your throat

the ocean, at night

it was the year picasso began
painting monsters

it was the year he died

small objects in silent rooms,
always moving, smell of dust,
taste of rain against
dirty windows

you were asked to believe
in god

you were told

stood by the window waiting
for yr husband to come home,
but he never did,
and the children were crying
and then they were grown

maps were drawn,
plans of attack diagrammed

we would kill the killers
before they were even born

we would burn their fathers’
eyes with holy light, would
turn their mothers into
shadows of contorted pain

we would win the war by
refusing to fight it

we would
bomb only civilians, only
mud hut villages, only straw
and bamboo churches, and
it was the year my
sister was born

it was the year i kissed you
for the first time

made all of those promises
that sounded just like lies

BLAH BLAH BLAH

words, new and old

cage of thorns

yellow flowers pasted onto
pale blue construction paper and
all of these complicated ideas
about love & suicide

lying to myself is easy

lying to others is necessary

wake up too early to the
ringing of my phone, to the voice
of my youngest son

snow at the end of march,
then it fades to rain

this will be the
day i drink the faucets dry

this will be the moment
of my ascension

streets lined with houses,
but no people

endless fields of dead grass
and splintered bones

stand there next to my oldest boy
and he says he’s not sorry for
any of the pain he’s caused
and his voice sounds
like my own

his presence might or
might not be imagined

all acts of grace
are torn apart so easily

in amber

walls of rooms filled w/ dust,
on floors, on hands and knees and blinded

sing w/ your heart

grow scars

this is the place, you see, this house
where the dying man lives, and
there is nothing any of us can do

no blood on the carpet, but a sense
that it could happen at any time

a window

a back yard filled w/ fireflies and twilight

stand there, barefoot, wide-eyed, emotions
carved from dark, sticky wood

speak names softly

breathe in the warmth of
overwhelming joy

stand as still as you can
until all laughter has stopped

fanfare, with trumpets

man in the purple shadows,
crucified, yellow skin, yellow sky,
and the taste of sugar on yr breasts

don’t talk about starvation

don’t worry about the math

lock the church doors and
set the bibles on fire

chop off the hands
and then the feet

let laughter swarm like puke up
out of yr mouth, out of yr nostrils

sing the song you know i love

faultline

my youngest son sick without warning
and so fuck all of your ideas about
benevolence & generosity

accept the fact that
anger is a generous gift

that fear has the texture of
splintered bones soaked in oil

of crows landing on your lover’s pale breasts

we are none of us on this page dead yet,
but listen

god is not the lie that will save you

sunday’s dust cannot be eaten

it’s the age of moths, you see

it’s the pale grey light of a dying sun
that we uselessly flutter around

give me the cure for cancer,
or leave me alone

give me mindless entertainment in 3D

read me the stories of my childhood

i couldn’t be the cripple i
am today without them

BECAUSE I SAID SO, DAMMIT

an interview w/ me at

WHAT TO WEAR DURING AN ORANGE ALERT

helix of compassion

spray paint your small hatred
on dirty walls

substitute anger for belief

blood is the gift
with or without war but
no one really cares about pain if it
isn’t their own

no one really cares about
poverty
if they have money in the bank

it’s simple

the word will always be less
than the thing it represents

the thing itself will always be
more useful if it can be
used as a weapon

what you need to do is
consider poetry a sign of
weakness

consider poets
the enemies of action

kill them like you would
any other coward

in the kingdom of cowards

and then another night
and then another

not loneliness, really,
and not sorrow

desperation, maybe, which eventually
becomes a type of numbness

nails driven into walls over doorways,
and what the hell used to hang
on any of them?

nothing comes to mind

easier to leave them
where they are

easier to let things
fall apart at their own pace

sit in the hall and
watch the children sleep

listen to the wind

all possible endings are
out there somewhere

falling from great heights into vast oceans

strange standing here naked
with a gun to my head,
but this is the new world

wanted to move out to california,
but i was tied to this house, to
this job, to these children

woke up sweating and terrified
from a dream with no meaning

heard water in the basement

tasted rot, tasted decay

not sunlight, you understand,
but this numbing sensation
of suffocation

this false hope of
50 degree afternoons
at the beginning of february

the threat of freezing to death
replaced by the threat
of drowning

the sensation of rust flaking
down from great heights
onto bare skin

and did i mention the gun?

can you picture the hills
all painted a
soft, despairing grey?

we will never be more in
love than we are at this moment

we will never be more alone

choose, but then keep
your choice a secret

malachi (2)

all of these small cancers
and all of these smoldering remains
and all of the bodies

all of the ways that each one
matters more than war

and these words
which do nothing but scratch feebly
at locked doors

these dogs
who are starving slowly

who are chained to the passing days

and this is not a poem but
an explanation
or possibly an apology

it's my mind
refusing to sit still while
the first big storm of the year
approaches

and there is a man who writes to say
that he can't make sense of
any of this

you need punctuation
he says
and you need flow
and you need to stop worrying
pollock's bones

and there is a four year-old boy
on fire
on the other side of town

his mother held back by the neighbors
while the roof collapses

some small tragedy with no meaning
and maybe these are all we
have left in this year of election

streets littered
with the corpses of soldiers or
this man who murders his
pregnant wife

the woman he fucked
two months earlier who says she
just wants to be left alone

who says the walrus was paul

says you have to look for the clues

the open hand or the third eye
or the burning cross

the way america is defined
by its history

the way christ's teeth have been
filed down to dirty yellow points

and do you fall to your knees when
he smiles
or do you turn away in shame?

consider your answer

consider the act of rape being
filmed for the internet

the way names are kept hidden
out of fear
and out of shame

your children growing up with
nothing more than
the wreckage you've left them

one for lisa, stoned

try to help and you
fuck things up even more and
so you stop trying to help

this is the way

these are the starving orphans
of the world and the
battered mothers and the
abused babies

wheels
within wheels

gears clotted with
rust and with blood

this woman next to you
in bed who says show me how
much you love me over and
over but all you do is
hurt each other

all you do is hurt

there is no shame
in turning away

For You

Sun through the blinds onto your body.
Sweat running down your breasts, music
everywhere. Loud, bigger than God, bolder,
and my fingers wet with your taste.

This is something from another room,
from a different town, and I carry it with
me instead of your name. Instead of your
face.

I stand at the window while you lie on
the bed. You touch yourself. You moan.
Things begin to fall apart.

violence

talk about the age
of burning witches as if it’s
a thing of the past

remember
the confidence of youth

hold your ground

the coldest days
are the brightest

squint into the overwhelming
roar of distant massacres

talk about both time and space

these men with their faces
painted white, black smudged
around their eyes, mouths &
teeth smeared with the blood
of other people’s children

the gun is invented,
and then the bomb

killing one martyr at a time
is inconvenient, inefficient

picture the face of god
as an explosion at
ground zero

blinding

overwhelming

you will know it only
once before you die

in the palace of exiles

walk to the far edge of the
field and shoot yourself

would this be considered lost
or would it be considered
found?

believe in christ
as a fever dream

scream at the hills

throw the baby in the river

no one offers you hope
without wanting something
in return

responding to the critics

and sometimes
they write to talk about
discipline
and sometimes to lecture
about the need for
hope

sometimes
i send them pictures
of nuns hanging raped and
murdered from the trees
of central america

we all need to
believe in something

Grace

What it is, after everything, is that his wife
feels cheated, and so she leaves.

There is silence, and then there are
all of the sounds that help define it.

There are the dead and the dying,
and he is one or he is the other.

He is counting the days.

He is walking backwards.

The sunlight feels good on
his useless hands.

lazarus, reinvented

and you and i in
the brutal light of
empty prayers, and
you and i in the
relentless shadow
of sorrow

thought the words
were what mattered

thought the truth
would be enough

jesus christ,
what a fool i was

borderland

faces painted dark and bright and
all of them hidden at
the edges of february fields

men of power
grown fat on lies

the women they have come to own

piles of skulls left to
mark where one country ends and
another begins

ASH WILDERNESS

I added a link for this collection over in
my BOOKS section. My email is in my
Profile, if yr interested in ordering a copy.

poem for america, ten below zero

and in the end it’s just
a dead man’s country, and
all you can do is sing

throne

small desperation in
pale blue afternoon light

cop on fire, but
too far away to offer
any warmth

do you believe that nothing
can be solved with
violence?

do you believe in anything?

it’s a pointless question
in a house of broken mirrors

all clocks remember the
moment of your birth

they have all seen the
details of your death

count backwards from 1,000,000

scrape the ice from
every december windshield

man stands there in the street

raises his arms in
surrender
and is shot to death

small minds build
flawed houses

i lived there for 20 years
without incident

phone rang every day but
no one ever answered

no one left a message

found her on the
other side of the country
long after i’d stopped looking
with pictures of her child
and pictures of her husband
and we didn’t quite touch

filled the space between us
with too many words
while evening fell

arrived at the truth, finally
but by then it
wasn’t worth shit

THE RETURN OF ASH WILDERNESS

It's back, and who are you to deny it? All relevant info is in the link. E-mail me w/ questions, comments and/or faint praise.

ASH WILDERNESS

starling

somewhere in the dark
cross the line between lover
& apprentice
between angel & whore

cross your heart

believe the prettiest lies

in the morning,
i’m afraid to get out of bed

i need sound, or
at least noise

this desk drawer that
holds all of her letters

this poem that bleeds

that leaves a mess on
the dining room table

no flowers

no mirrors

keep the doors locked and
the phone unplugged

smell of sex still
on my fingers

stand perfectly still

breathe in stale air
and grey light

all despair causes cancer

all starving children
are as good as dead

grab what you
hold most dear and wait

was kissed by ghosts, was weeping

find the ocean just inches
below the desert's surface &
then wait for rain

this is the kingdom of false prophets

these are the bones of old lovers

no one here
wants to be your friend,
but being an enemy has value
too

wars cannot be fought
without cowards

children cannot be raped
without the cold embrace of priests

what matters isn't the truth,
but how pretty the
lies can be made to sound

what matters is power

the shame of being poor is a gift
given freely by the rich

houses built by the hands of
beggars can only fall

you will stand naked in
the ruins of everything you've
never owned and wait like a dog
for the kindness of strangers

ashcroft

lovers w/out faces
or else

towers of metal
connected by thin wires

vast empires

you open your door
and find the ocean

woman in the bed
behind you says stay

choices are like bones
or like promises, but
only because both
can be broken

sky is the color
of sunlit dust

breathe in the
whole of the empire

minotaur

in the end
i say nothing

walk down this empty street instead
into the face of pale broken sunlight with
the lesser bones of priests ground into
fine powder beneath my feet

with the mother of my children
begging god for forgiveness

empty sounds from a bleeding mouth
empty hands cut off at the wrists
because the idea of war cannot be
considered w/out the idea of pain

the forest is where you run
only after all of
the cities have burned

being lost is what comes
after being alive

OTHER AVAILABLE TITLES

the john sweet storefront at lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/bleedinghorse99

MK Chavez/John Sweet, “Next Exit: Nine” (KSE no. 112), now available

The ninth and second-to-last installment in Kendra Steiner Editions' "Next Exit" series of chapbooks—-a series devoted to poems rooted in a strong sense of place—- is now available. MK Chavez (from Berkeley, California) and John Sweet (from New York state) are friends and also admirers of each other's work, so pairing them for a joint chapbook seemed like a natural. MK and John write about beauty and pain in styles that are rich yet understated, jagged yet warm, and ultimately disquieting. The people whose lives they document in their work are human versions of the blades of grass that somehow manage to grow through the cracks in the asphalt. Travel the desert backroads where Gram Parsons spent his last hours; walk through a world of domestic violence and pickup truck gun racks; take a sobering trip to San Quentin; taste the stolen and desperate kisses; harvest the empty garden.

Eleven brand-new poems written specifically for this project from two of the most distinctive American poets—poems that perfectly capture 2008 America.

MK Chavez is the author of Virgin Eyes (Zeitgeist Press) and Visitation (Kendra Steiner Editions) and an active participant in the San Francisco/Bay Area poetry community. She is a poet greatly admired by her colleagues and has been a joy to work with on her two KSE projects.

John Sweet, author of the much-acclaimed Human Cathedrals (Ravenna Press), has been an important voice in the alternative poetry world for at least 15 years. His blog and more recently his myspace page have been offering powerful, expertly crafted new poetry on a regular basis. Recent collections of his work include False Hope, Between Truth and Mercy, and World Without Sound. John is a true artist, and it has been an honor to work with him on this project.
Don't miss this one, folks. These Next Exit chaps generally sell out in 8 weeks or so. $4 US/ $5 elsewhere (postpaid).Ordering information can be found at:

http://kendrasteinereditions.wordpress.com/available-kse-poetry-chapbooks/

keeping score

takes the dog out late at night,
lets it shit in the neighbor’s yard

full moon, middle of october

siren at the firehouse
without warning

river of bones
flowing toward the interstate

oceans of blood,
everywhere

gauze

says to me says jesus rides again like
we both believe there are lions in the holy land
like we both assume that all
children will grow up

september you see and the hazy light of
10:00 a.m. the screams of birds
and i have given up on prayer have stopped
memorizing the names of saints

wish only that the days were warmer

that i had answers for all of the
obvious questions gathering like dust in the
corners of my living room

and so i believe in the roots of trees in
fingers crawling through the dirt to wrap
around forgotten bones and so i come to you
with a handful of heartfelt lies

i turn away from my mother from my sister
in shame and in blindness

the doors of their houses
stand open against the cold

the mornings here are
nothing like the mornings of my childhood

being afraid of every last
fucking thing should be enough

a subtle disease

drank what you offered but it
tasted like blood and so i asked for more

the joke is obvious
but never clear

the house is made of
dust and hatred

found the room we used to share

found the candles and the rope and
once you grow tired of discussing memory
you can start talking about the truth

once the distance between
faith and hope is halved
the hostages are executed one by one

not every valiant cause needs to
become a reason for war

my future self before a mirror

it was just like you to be
lost in this nation of ambiguous pain,
to be frightened of the obvious

it was almost october

midnight, hot as hell, and the wind
blowing dead leaves &
empty garbage cans down tracy street

sound of someone crying

all of the walls you knocked down,
only to end up
with nowhere to call home

the age of arrogance, endlessly

this point i reach where i
no longer love anything or anyone

these ideas that were supposed to matter

not the house on fire but the man inside

the child asleep and
the mother driving away and
do we really need to have our faces
pressed into the blood
and the filth?

no
but we deserve it

i remember you wearing your
faith like a corpse

i remember your hands and your mouth

a sunlit room on the
edge of town and the sky like it
knew it would outlive us

the certainty that
mistakes had been made

that none of us were beautiful

none of us worth saving

broken glass everywhere

review of HUMAN CATHEDRALS

The flavor of John Sweet's first full length book, Human Cathedrals, mocks the writer's name; there is an utter absence of sugar. Salt is shot—sometimes heaped—in wounds, some gaping and bleeding, some disfigured with scars crisscrossing, and some still waiting infliction.

Behind the understated, slate cover of Human Cathedrals lie frequent references to the color grey and slight variations thereof: purplegrey, bluegrey, yellowgrey, pale grey and every shade of grey in between. At the brightest end of John Sweet’s spectrum, we have a half dozen mentions of blue. From The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary: blue adj. 2: melancholy; also: depressing. One is left to contemplate a conceivable connection between the cover’s complexion and the content beneath it.

Spending an afternoon in Human Cathedrals is like finding a camera at an estate sale with a roll of film still inside. When the film is developed, a slice of someone’s life tears through the skin and into the deepest cellar of belief. Repeat appearances of specific body parts grace these snapshots: thirteen mentions of hands, eight of bones, six of the heart, four of the throat, three of fingers, two of lips, skin, closed eyes, sharp teeth and a skull, one of the ribcage, neck, tongue, wrist, fist and spine.

Behind the black veil of the human cathedral, desperation, anger, failure, guilt, confusion, terror, sorrow and self destruction rumble through the poet’s tug-of-war with faith. From de chirico’s lament: "...and if i give my son only one gift in his small beautiful life it would be the word escape"; from myself a father: "...for this reason alone i place my foot on the throat of god and press...", and in the book’s opener, waiting for the day to begin: "...and it’s not an answer i’m after here but a voice loud enough to drown out my own".

Occasionally we glimpse, always from a distance, an altruistic bond to his wife and son, though within him there seems to exist detachment from the two he most reveres. Sweet presents us with a collection of raw snapshots—a boy lit on fire, the carnage of war, runaway teens, the cremation of his father shortly before his wedding, men leaving their children, abused girlfriends, suicide, alcoholism, starving mothers and ill children—a succinct and graphic exhibit of destruction.

The confessions shared in Human Cathedrals are long on suffering, short in length; it is almost as if Sweet could not endure his desperation for more than a page at a time. Although the poems sting while entering the bloodstream, you will be drawn, again and again, to the candid cathedral of human desolation offered by the shadow of John Sweet. Owning the book is like carrying a mysterious, beautiful stone in your pocket—you are never quite certain whether you’ve been cursed or blessed.

- Shelly Reed

the same story

she is talking
about her thirteenth year

about her mother's lover

the sound of his footsteps
as she lay in bed

the press of his weight
just outside her door

^

it's the same story told
a thousand different ways

it's the boyfriend who
passed her on to his buddies
for beer or pot or a
new set of tires

it's everything
she was forced to do

^

and she is talking
about love

she is saying
she believes

is saying she doesn't
want to be alone

tells me she doesn't
expect meto understand

early afternoon, waiting for dawn

stand at the back door and
call for your children
in the last light of day

find your lover in a
pale blue room and tell her
you don’t love her anymore

tell her the earth is dying

tell her anything

wait for her answer until
the air becomes too
dark to breathe

purified

and then creeley dies and
then thompson,
and then someone decides that
rothko’s bones need to be
dug up and moved

first warm day of spring,
and the woman across the street
is standing topless in an
upstairs window

the hole in my back yard is
six feet deep and
ten across,
and it’s no small challenge
crucifying saviors

kill one
and two more spring up

change the station and
whatever song you find sucks
as much as the one you
left behind

nothing worth dying for,
but the man across the street
stands in his driveway
with a gun

laughs at the children when
they run away

isn’t there when his son jumps
the forty feet from the
bridge into the river, but it
probably wouldn’t have
made much of a difference
even if he was

the truth is easiest
when it costs you nothing

poem from a distance

never told you i loved you and
the days crawled by
without meaning or warmth

never held my father's ashes

never tasted them

forgot his face for my 30th birthday and
remembered instead
the women i'd fucked in the year
before he died

thought about his cup of coffee
growing cold on the kitchen counter
while he lay on the floor

wanted to call you but
you were gone

wanted to touch you
but the moment had passed

stood in the hall while my
sister said good bye

a sort of grace

and he is
tired of empty rooms,
and he is tired of falling
down stairs

he is tired

he is bleeding

one or the other

find him there on his
scarred and dirty floor

offer him your hand

let him feel the
warmth of your breasts

let him die

consider the obvious
burden of compassion

books books books and books

A fine selection of angst, self-pity and post-industrial malaise.

the poet takes his place in the actual world

fuck this idea of
poetry reaching back to
embrace the past

i will not worship
the martyred or the immortal

it's enough to be stuck in
this town of defeated old men
as they shuffle aimlessly
up and down anonymous streets

it's enough to watch the
factories burn

and i have driven in every direction
and i have seen nothing but
more of the same
and i am only waiting for the news
that reagan is dead

i am only waiting to hear
from a friend
who hasn't written in a decade
that all is forgiven

and i have a job that will never be
anything worth describing
and i have a son who will someday
want nothing more than to
escape his father

what i give you hear is a
pale blue november sky bleached
to white at the edges

the drone of a plane and the
sound of wind through bare trees
and there is a house of
delicate bones in this picture
that i call my home

there is a river that holds
the body of
a fifteen year-old boy

it doesn't bother me that i've
outlived him
but maybe it should