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the bigger world
strummer dead and
all of the tortured in el salvador
and the way that nothing is beautiful
in the first grey light
of morning
the parking lots ending raggedly
and the streets going nowhere and
this young boy lost in the
back seat of his mother’s car
the way we say
the scream of metal
or the way we turn away from
whatever remains
the world defined by
the edges of shadows and
the smell of gasoline and this taste
of ashes that i can never
drink away
this ice forming along the
banks of the river
the garbage that gets
trapped in it and the man
found three months later in a
town he’d never been to
the note he left
that didn’t say anything and
what i’m getting at here
is that i miss you
what i’m trying to do
is explain who i am
all i ask is that
you believe it matters
anvil
and it was the joke you
told on the day before your suicide
and it was your 15 year old daughter in
the back seat of some stranger’s car
it was the year my
youngest son was born
it was summer and
then it was too late
all those love letters to christ
finally set on fire once we
realized we’d never get an answer
regret
says walk on your hands
says burn the child
little things to
help win the war
says if this were california
we would still be lovers
smiles in the wrong lane,
eighty miles an hour
and the glare of the sun
says you never
hold me anymore
says for god’s sake
blood pouring from her
open mouth while
i consider my answer
grey sky toreador
man tells you
the future is prisons
tells you drowning will
always be an option
but this is nothing new and
do you remember how easy it was
to kill the last ambassador?
how long it took to
find his daughter’s body?
we are not a nation
without resources
we are 500,000 ghost towns
waiting for the fall of empire or
we are the ones who close our eyes while
the sky falls down and
the truth is that i never cared
enough about christ to deny him
the truth is internet porn
gov’t-sanctioned rape
you fuck up who you can and you
steal from the weak and
you touch the pale hand of god
you cut it off and sell it
to the highest bidder
in the kingdom of oblivion
we will all be made holy
sister’s house
saw the storm moving down the
valley, heard blood in the spaces
between each word, saw
the face of god
no time to breathe
no air that hadn’t been poisoned
could feel the black heat of
medicine pushing through my veins
and i couldn’t stop shivering
couldn’t figure out when exactly
the moment had passed
wasted the next twenty years of
my life trying to dig my way
back up towards the sun
diagnosis
he is tired of waiting to die
he is tired of causing pain
is smaller in the sunlight and so
he stands on the shadowed side of the house
with his fear of bleeding and his
powers of invisibility
he sinks the shovel into
tender soil
but turns up nothing sacred
thinks he knows more than he used to,
knows he cares about less,
and it makes him feel safer
makes each day less absolute
maybe pushes the mistakes of the past
far enough away so they
stop cutting like rusted blades
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A Flag on Fire is a Song of Hope (2019 Scars Publications) and A Dead Man, Either Way (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).