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

the hollow heart

and i wanted to be
beautiful

i wanted to dream

not pollock but picasso

not christ but pilate

childrens' hands cut off
by soldiers and left
in the streets

leaves falling
from a pale blue sky

words like food

like drugs and
every poem a needle

every priest hung

your god washed clean and
your crosses pulled apart
and the crows as they
picked at the bones

the bones as they
grew up from the soil

your flesh like religion in
those last perfect days

with apologies to juri arrak

these men with the heads of crows,
beaks filled with rusted teeth,
this windowless room, this table
piled with bones

can you show me the difference
between religion and prison?

can you promise my children
they will never be fucked
by the messengers of god?

it’s a life spent without regret
just waiting for a reason to kill

"the disturbing muses" reinvented as a one-act play for two voices

why do you write?
he asks
and i answer i don't know and
even here
two thousand miles away
i can hear him take an
involuntary step
backwards

passion is the word he
needs to hear

burning maybe
or maybe consuming

descriptions of war and disease
turned inside out
but listen

i walked away once
for almost two years and
i don't remember missing it

i have no explanations

is it enough that i'm back?

that i bleed?

the trick is in asking the
right god
the right questions

avoid mountaintops
and open wells

lie
if necessary

this is the true power
of language

new poems

3 new ones at WORDS ON THE WEB

autobiographical sketch from the last days of the age of miracles

and you sat next to me in the car
and said
give me the sun in december
and i said nothing

and the hills spun
silently around us and
the clocks all moved forward
and the bombs were silent from
this distance

the dead held
their mangled hands up to god

a small act of faith
and then the moment was gone

2 new poems

in the latest issue of Perigee

the bleeding horse, denied

the bleeding horse, denied

open 24/7 for your convenience

waiting for rain, for paradise

i came hear having heard about
the streets of gold

was born 1968 in the
dying light of autumn

grew up in vacant lots and
behind fences

in the rooms of strangers and
with the salt of their skin
on my lips

with their names peeling away
like old wallpaper

dogs in front yards or at
the throats of young boys

woman dead on the kitchen floor

no notes and then her
husband doesn't come home
anyway

she's found by her son
and i am not him

i am finally grown up

will only cry when the
last holy note has faded

scenario

the cold brilliance of
sunlight in the trees

a blue sky with clouds

the shadows of houses
pooled on sidewalks and
do you see why van gogh
pulled the trigger?

there can only be everything or nothing

whatever needs to be said
is lost in the translation

do you know the name of this baby
found in a plastic bag on a street corner?

do you know for a fact that
your lover
isn't fucking someone else?

and what about the fools
who tell you that jesus christ and
violence are polar opposites?

what about the young boys
devoured by priests?

and we drive with the radio off
and the children asleep in
the back seat

we pass through the town where
the burning girl's body was found

we stop at the edge of the field where
i first dug up the bones of the
bleeding horse and it's here that
you ask me why i write

it's here that you ask
if i still love you

all i can offer is the truth

sleeping gas

in the distance in the pale grey
sunlight
dust on your hands
in your mouth and
the highways where the cities end
the spaces between them all
broken glass and brown grass
all emptiness and pain moving
towards the hills
dreaming of franco of pollock
of picasso and the small
moments he invented
the women he buried
and there is no turning away
here in the first bitter days of
februray
there is no cause for joy
no forest that is not on fire
and in the distance there are
horses
there are riders
there are fighter planes
coming in low
casting shadows over
everything we have yet to build