recent posts

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Featuring John Sweet




this nightingale despair


all these days of bitter sunlight,
gets tired of saying i love you while
standing in the doorways of empty rooms

gets tired of the way the windows break and
the bones of ghosts piled up
in the corners

waits for winter like
his father taught him to and
the hills and then the river and then
the bridges that promise
nothing

the promises that lead nowhere

all country is enemy
country in the end




weep and retreat

find god face down in a pool of
holy blood deep behind enemy lines and
it’s good for a
small laugh if nothing else

gotta keep redrawing those maps to
make sure the poor & the
unwanted stay in their place

gotta keep reminding the children that
not all of them will survive

that no one will care

it’s been a long fucking time
since anyone’s death really mattered




the future as a broken mirror in an empty room

and you and i in brilliant
november sunlight,
all effortless grace and fragile hope,
all half-forgotten dreams

a city on fire or a
handful of ashes

someone’s lover found dead in a
stolen car at the river’s edge

i have measured my life in miles
and i have wound up nowhere

i have been the wrong person
for years on end

let the joke fill your heart
like a mouthful of blood

let the gun be aimed and the
trigger pulled with infinite kindness

we are nothing if not
merciful




the contrary

and when you died the first time
no one noticed and so
five years later you did it again

was sleeping when i heard the news,
fucked up and shot through with pure white light and
the children were crying for food

the question was obvious

wanted to apologize for the answer but
my tongue had been cut out

my book of maps had been stolen

93,000,000 miles from the sun and
moving in the wrong direction and when you
died the second time it felt like a weight
had been lifted from my shoulders

felt like my wings
had been nailed to the floor

woke up from a dream of jumping into darkness
only to find i was finally as blind as
everyone else

couldn’t stop laughing at the idea
that you were actually gone




these dreaming monsters

faded blue november sky with
contrails and silence up on burnt hill road and
what if god is nothing more than the
ability to tell the truth and what if truth
is nothing more than the road to beauty?

will you offer your churches to the homeless or
give your wealth to the starving or
will you continue to preach
the gospel of ignorance and hatred?

will you stop raping the children?

there is no end to the ways we can
disguise our lies as luminous truths



John Sweet can be found here: http://bleedinghorse.blogspot.com/


Read my recent review of Sweet’s award winning book The Century of Dreaming Monsters here: http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/book-review-interview-john-sweet.html