poem below freezing
afternoon in the
house of dead mouths and
everyone sleeps
there have been
rumors of war for as long
as i can remember
there has been sunlight
and the lack of sunlight and
any number of people willing to
confess to me their small
ugly sins
it reaches this point
occasionally
the blind
and the crippled
and all of the believers
raped by priests
all of the teenage mothers
abandoned
by their lovers
the age of victims
which tastes like kerosene
and broken glass and
all of the ones forced to
swallow
a girl no one knows
on her hands and knees in
a windowless room
a body found at
the edge of a desert
the stories it has
to tell
------------------------------
the poet refusing to be anything more
it takes no effort
he says from 3000 miles away
it's too easy
and what he wants of course
is blood
which no one ever gets tired of
what he wants is
something more than words on paper
but i have bills to pay
i have a wife and two young sons
and fourteen inches of snow in the driveway
that needs to be shoveled
listen
i was glad when
the killer was put to death
i understand the ideas behind
revolutions
but have no faith in man or god
i have nothing to offer
the descendents of slaves and nowhere
to put the bones of indians
remember that
the past is a weight
that the future is a
bottomless pool of black water
understand that
both can be changed but
never without sacrifice
ABOUT JOHN SWEET:
"have been writing for 20+ years now, appearing in the small press for 15. live in rural upstate new york w/ one wife, two sons, three cats in a heavily mortgaged, slowly collapsing house.
recent work has appeared in ShoeString Poetry, Verse Libre, Arsenic Lobster and Small Spiral Notebook, and my first full-length collection, Human Cathedrals, was just published by Ravenna Press."