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................................................................................................ Photo by Holly Northrop:"Polaroid:#257"



The Poetry Of...
John Sweet.....................................................................

motionless, like an addict

turning away from the world
of things
towards whatever's left

away from these nine bodies
found dead in a filthy room

away from this nine month-old baby
raped and left in the woods

at what point
do you give up on anger
as a weapon?

how many years do you waste
believing in
meaningless acts of atonement?

think about it

this road that i live on
goes nowhere

this town that i've ended up in
is as meaningless as yours

and should we put x's on the doors
of the houses where
children have disappeared?

should we dig for bones in
the empty fields to the north?

listen

i no longer see silence as surrender

i've come too far
into the 21st century to give up
on the idea of money as
salvation

i need shelter

i need food

need a job and then a way to
get there

someone to watch my kids

and it's true that
they never asked to know me and
it's true that i owe them
everything

it's true that the air has
been poisoned

that the cuyahoga has caught fire

and it rains on
a saturday afternoon as i stand
in the driveway replacing
the brake lights on april's car

it rains on a saturday evening as
i put new locks on the back door

as a woman two blocks away
is thrown from
a moving truck by her lover

lives but loses the child

loses the child
but begs for forgiveness

crawls back home with her
frightened tears
and her meaningless blood

promises to try harder





edvard munch, always and everywhere

you tell the story about
the horse dead in the road but
it has no real ending

you talk about
the babies you lost

words to help keep
the sun in the sky and
the children asleep and when i
tell you that my stitches hurt
you bring me my pills

when the car refuses to start
you begin to cry

no other sound around us
but the ticking of
clocks





tracy street poem

yourself with nowhere to go

with rain
and with crooked doors
and with broken windows

the awkward smiles of ghosts

the empty rooms

too long now
since i've felt your touch
and too long since the sun
had any warmth

too many years of television
and too many stories of
bukowski's death

useless noise and
empty screams and
ten million dogs choking on
mouthfuls of shit

your father staring at
the dirty grey walls that
have come to define his life

your mother
who refuses to talk about him

who doesn't want to hear about
the way he smiled as he
backed you into the corner

and i forget which of us
saved the other but
i remember the feeling of drowning

i remember watching the footage
of the bombs going off
in madrid

the bodies torn apart and
the blood staining everything
and the claim that all acts
are acts of god

and the girl was fifteen and
she said she was running away
and then she was sixteen
and pregnant

the ocean was blue but
too cold to swim in

the plane went down and then
the body of a newborn baby
floated to the surface and
i was listening to
something by dylan

tom thumb's blues maybe
and the rain kept falling and
i couldn't get warm

i couldn't remember
your face

you were sitting right there





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