december poem, in february

no shallow end,

no lifeline

this is not an explanation,

you see,
this is my grandfather’s suicide

this is a letter to the fucker who

tried to get me fired twenty
years ago because i was sleeping
                           with his girlfriend

we grow up

and then we grow old

the wars don’t matter as long as

we can still afford to get drunk

this is a truth i

never see printed in the papers

this is blood in the

bathroom sink at 2:00 a.m.

i think about who i might

call, then end up just
going back to bed

in the morning,

the basement has flooded

a joan mitchell sunday afternoon

 

 

 

 

the pure light of lost afternoons

not black & white but

shades of grey,
smudges of dull green

amnesia

solitude

use the poems as bricks

and build yr own prison

stand in the empty field  out

past the railroad tracks
and wait to cast a shadow

wait for winter to end

refuse to die in yr

own small way

holiday favorites

 

 

my lulu collection of traditional and electronic books,

all marked to move.......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

always almost somewhere

click below

 

 

 

dorothea, max

 

 

 

dominion

sunlight like the fist of god
and then all of the days
i've wasted with my eyes closed

this quiet house on this
dead-end street in this
dying town

will you stand beside it
while it burns?

will you stand outside the
room of hanged men
and count backwards from twenty?

and what if it's here that i
finally tell you i love you?

i believe in words
no matter how often they fail me

i believe in july and in august
and that all of my promises
will be broken

look at my hands

both of them open and
both of them empty and
waiting for the moment to pass

waiting for their mistakes
to be forgiven

whatever you say in the silence
that surrounds us
never the poem that i
wanted to hear

 

 

 

the way it happens

this man on the bridge
falling or jumping
or holding a rock with both hands

dropping it
and the windshield of the car below
parting like violent water

the woman's face split in two
and your sister on the phone
saying she's pregnant

blood pooling on the floor where
you've left the idea of a mother
murdering her son with a butcher knife

the sky where it
pours itself over the landscape

the rock as it falls and the woman
as she turns to her husband and smiles

the pair of hands attached to a
person that no one knows

these fifteen crosses planted in
the ground in colorado
and the fact that nothing grows

your sister on the phone
saying she lost the baby

saying the blood
won't come off her hands
and the fact that nothing falls
out of the sky

the way she describes
the fetus to you

the idea that
none of these wars can ever
really be won

the man on the bridge jumping
and then falling
and then breaking through the ice

his apartment
and all of the places
a note was never left

all of the people it was
never addressed to

the body not found until spring

in the kingdom of reviews

 

 

link is inside the gerhard richter painting....

 

 

and we will make such beautiful ghosts

HERE

available in both book and ebook forms

 

SUNPOISON

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the door locked, the house burned down

this pointless action,

this screaming, this putting your
fist through a window or
pulling a trigger

what a fucking bore

knowing suicides
knowing addicts

what a fucking hassle

these tiny crippled fingers always
grabbing at your throat

what a goddamned joke when

all days are the same

from THE SUM OF BROKEN PARTS

10.

i am the only child of

the one true god
and i am in hiding

i am silver and i am

gold in the age of famine

motherless and broken

stoned

no ladder to the sky no

more precious metals to
dig up from the earth
and so we die in the
world we’ve created

we are reborn into the

world we destroyed

a circle carved into

your lover’s flesh

a new day

wake up slowly and

without regret

crawl down the stairs

and out the back door

smile blindly into the

unforgiving sky
while our sons and
daughters burst into
                     flames

static

the sea of static

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mary's house

yellow light into grey,

       end of november,

             almost warm,

          almost hopeful,

and when you’re tired of being an artist or

      when you’re tired of bleeding for minimum wage,

      when you’re tired of sorrow,

                           tired of breathing,

there’s always suicide and

it’s not like i’m telling you something new here

it’s not like i’m saying

anything at all

BRAVE   RETREAT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the lost and the missing

half-seen

ALL SIGNS POINT TO SORROW

HERE IS THE DOOR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

psalm with the weight of nails through flesh

pale yellow sunlight on

the bleeding horse
and the shadows he casts swallowed by
the shadow of something larger

the houses ending suddenly where

these barren fields begin

wind and the smell of gasoline

and the sound of the interstate

the idea of somewhere better

which is probably a lie

there is no escaping disease

there is no escaping addiction

look at these men

who have died for god
and then look at the catholic church

look at the diseased fingers

of priests
picking through the bones of
the past

count the number
of children raped in the name of
salvation
 

there is

so much left to destroy

support KSE

from Bill Shute -


"Good to have John Sweet back at KSE for another poetry chapbook. Mr. Sweet, working out of south-central New York state, has been a kind of quiet warrior in the contemporary poetry world, eschewing the usual self-delusional self-promotion and the laughable “outlaw” posing of so many who use attitude to compensate for lack of talent. Sweet’s work speaks well for itself—no hype or backstory is needed to prop it up.

Simply put, John Sweet’s poems are terse, finely sculpted, razor-sharp pieces that capture the violence and illness under the surface of contemporary life. On the level of the intimate relationship, the family, the community, the nation, the world—Sweet presents closely observed episodes, full of tension at the level of the phrase and the line and the stanza, and sets them up like spring-loaded traps. This new collection of eight poems, BRAVE RETREAT, examines many subjects: families who talk but don’t communicates, the burning secrets inside those closest to us that never come out until too late, the bleakness of Rust Belt America, the futility of overseas military adventures as we surrender to forces we don’t understand on the home front, the burning need to create and to change and the ways those with that need are snuffed out by society or simply suffocated by marginalization. And it’s all presented in the form of specifics and precise details with not a wasted or flaccid word—the precision of a Cid Corman, the caustic understatement of a Samuel Beckett, but in a natural contemporary American voice. Though I don’t believe Mr. Sweet is a poet who does many readings, there is an exciting sense of drama and pacing captured on the page that makes it seem as if the poems are being read to you dramatically by an actor with great subtlety but capable of great menace—think Willem Dafoe or the early Christopher Walken. This is the America of 2012, and it’s the melodrama of life in any period. No one captures the pain, the stepped-on and discarded dreams, the way John Sweet does.

The new poetry chapbook from JOHN SWEET, “Brave Retreat” (KSE #216)…scalding shards of verse from this master craftsman, pieces found broken and abandoned on the internal battlefields of contemporary America…from the author of Human Cathedrals, Continuum, and This Moment Reflected In Ice…proud to have him back for another KSE chapbook…fads come and go, but John Sweet remains a constant, the real thing in a world of posers and dilettantes…."

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 feeling 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

talking about famine

FAMINE

 

 

 

carcinogens

CLICK HERE FOR POISON

and we thought that when the war was over the blood would all flow backwards, and we were wrong

or living like a wounded animal, which

isn’t really the same thing as living,
but there you are in your collapsing hole
with your open wounds and your blood trail

here we are after 25 years of winter

½ a lifetime spent digging at the same

small patch of frozen ground with bare hands

low tide

faulty compass

and what i find out too late is

that anger isn’t enough

is that silence isn’t an alternative to

suicide, but a slower version of it and so
                                            we scream
 

we make ourselves such easy targets

open the door and all of that pale, blinding

sunlight just blows holes straight through you

w/ wings of clay

small gestures at the end of

summer, these anonymous lawns,
weed-choked flower beds, these
spider webs spun between branches
and the corners of windshields in
the first damp light of day, and
i would tell you here that i
love you but my voice would be
a whisper and you would be
3000 miles away

i would give this poem your

name as it’s own, but
futility gets old quickly

the children are hungry and

the ceiling cracked

the age of plague

nearly upon us
 
i will keep repeating this
until it becomes the truth

christ the saviour

another day of no sun of no

money no drugs and
in the silences between breaths
there is only waiting

in the fields that move from

the edges of town to the collapsing
hills there are only weeds
                           and mud
 

the ragged coughs of feral dogs

who have learned to walk on
their hind legs

have learned to fuck for pleasure

and to torture for even more and
will you remember where you were when
you heard about cobain’s suicide?

will you let your children keep the

skulls they find along the
freeway’s edge?

it’s a brave idea to not believe in

killing, but it won’t
help you at all down in juarez
because your tears will have nowhere
to go when the ditches are all
filled with corpses

those in power will wash themselves

clean in the blood of the weak

this is the only real truth

that history has to offer

ON FIRE

BURNING WORD

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