keeps thinking about the desert finds the slight depression at the far no songs but the the smell of lilies, of remembers watching the bus pull out of and so he’s stoned at the far edge of he’s 25 and then he’s 43, a father and an he doesn’t support the war and he walls are walls, of course, and the dogs are always hungrier when the but he’s thinking about the desert, he’s thinking about this child he about a poem he should but won’t write he’s lost, yes, but only because only because he never knew where he John Sweet, b 1968, still numbered among the living. A believer in writing as catharsis. Opposed to all organized religion and political parties. His latest collections include APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press) and the limited edition chapbooks HEATHEN TONGUE (2018 Kendra Steiner Editions) and A BASTARD CHILD IN THE KINGDOM OF NIL (2018 Analog Submission Press). All pertinent facts about his life are buried somewhere in his writing.
dive
about getting high
about the girls he’s fucked in any number of
shithole apartments
edge of the field where the horse was buried
songs of bees
dogwood and roses, clouds like mounds of
faceless corpses circling overhead and he
thinks he had a son
the parking lot but has no
memory of it ever coming back
summer, 85 miles an hour down the interstate,
hills in every direction, shredded tires from
eighteen-wheelers, crows at the roadkill,
all of these pointless metaphors for
a wasted life
emotional cripple, sunburnt, unshaven,
no use for anyone’s god
doesn’t support the soldiers and he
doesn’t support the government
every window is a target
corpses are bulldozed into pits and burned
you see,
or he’s thinking about a woman he still loves,
and the two have become interchangeable
in his mind
may or may not have
his eyes are closed
was going in the first placeAbout the Author