john sweet John Sweet is a poet from the extreme eastern portion of deep cleveland, also known as upstate new york, depending on your map. His work has been published at Burning Word, Locust Magazine, and Thunder Sandwich. Several chapbooks are available at Kitty Litter Press and Via Dolorosa Press. bleedinghorse99@aol.com untitled meditation think of sunlight the lack of it a windowless room with a locked door the fact that only young girls are chosen to die the fact that only young girls are chosen to die the fact that only young girls are chosen to die   the woman who loves pain gets married but stops by first and says she wants to fuck me one last time says she remembers the seven secret names of god then asks me to kiss her scars asks me how her first child will die and when believes that knowledge is the same as salvation   remembering the age of disease old sunlight and cold shadows and all of the places i go where the word love is never mentioned all of the colorless rooms i wake up in hungover or lost or forgotten a dirty window with a view of a parking lot a radio muttering static and what i'm thinking of here are the faceless whores of reagan's dreams the pigs who grew fat on the corpses of the butchered in central america a woman puking in the bathroom an orphan maybe or the daughter of a priest and the air heavy with cigarette smoke and meaningless conversation someone's sister run away or shot to death by a lover an old story played out again and again and when i hear the shower turn on i get dressed leave the keys on the dresser and a handful of words scrawled on the walls nothing soft nothing warm nothing less than twenty five years of useless anger looking for a way to cause pain   on being human or what about the reasons cages are built? what about the reasons children are butchered and women raped? could you give the orders yourself? don't say no just yet   poem for poets everywhere imagine your death and all of the poems that will come after all of the ways you'll be forgotten the beauty of a world that will never care   all of the dead philosophers, all of their empty thoughts six a.m. monday morning and the motor grinds but refuses to turn over the taste of scorched metal is everywhere even when nothing burns the taste of despair the grey light of indifference and it happens sometimes that the choices are narrowed down to either writing or breathing it happens that men kill out of boredom or ignorance it stands to reason that christ was a builder of crosses and occasionally the poetry of our actions is both brutal and mesmerizing secrets fall from our hands like the panicked dreams of killers and the child is no longer safe the window is open and the room empty and the car anonymous ten miles away and then a hundred a thousand this sudden atrocity too huge to be measured by something as irrelevant as distance   philosophy for the drowning this terrible thing done well this baby shaken to death while morning crawls relentlessly towards the suffocating weight of afternoon the stars invisible but named every house a black hole and in each one any number of objects gathering dust any number of windows looking out over empty fields or dead-end streets or dahmer's bones any number of possibilities a wife vanished or a father in a motel room with someone's sixteen year-old daughter or maybe his own small children dragging their crosses from martyr to martyr actions defining outcomes a country devoured from within think of cancer or of men beaten and tied to fences think of faith not as a cure but an addiction no matter how much you have you will always want more

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