A Poem by John Sweet

letter to ernst

not quite warm and the
sky a perfect, blinding blue

gravity, or the absence of it

what you hold onto
always fighting to get away

in the end, i grow sick of poems,
grow sick of regret, but haven't
found anything to replace them with

in the end, i am naked at the
edge of someone else's forest

i am afraid

i am happy to be alive

have finally begun to see
that they are the same



cover yr ears & shade yr eyes

sunlit hills straight down to
the edge of the parking lot and the
parking lot empty

weeds pushing up through
cracks in the pavement

belief is what's brought you
this far, and then what?

insurance will pay for the abortion

the coup will fail

twenty thousand dead in the
blinding summer heat and all of
the survivors starving, but no one likes
a crybaby so just shut your mouth
and write your fucking poems

learn to levitate

consider what any government has
ever achieved by
killing the artists and the children

all theories bleed themselves
dry in the here and now


penitence

calls to tell you
she's high again

to tell you she thinks she'll
crawl to california and
she she says she never stopped
loving you but she needs
more sky

needs bigger clouds
for god to hide behind

an endless ocean,
even though nothing can
ever be washed clean

John Sweet sends greeting from the rural wastelands of upstate New York.  He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, in painting as ascension and in the need to continuously search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth.  His latest poetry collections are APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press) and BASTARD FAITH (2017 Scars Publications).