Two Poems by John Sweet

i do not like anything anymore

and everyone here not dead

is dying,

and so what are we

still waiting for?

stick around as

long as you want, but the

future was never going

to be anyone’s

friend

portrait w/ still life, c. 1984

you and i like some frightened

child’s dream of blue skies

no words,

only images

the sleepy deaths of

summer afternoons on

burnt hill road

the inevitability of powerlines

you grow up and then you

move away and then

you stop believing in the idea of home and,

when you drown,

you do it quietly

you do it well

the trick here

is to pay attention

study the art of passive suicide

let the junkies dig their sad little graves,

let the priests be fattened for slaughter

zero is the

only number that matters

all kingdoms fall

never thought about this when

i was kissing you,

when i was undressing you, when the

spaces between us had disappeared

never considered mortality

never breathed in the poison

of government, of religion,

of false morality

was too busy laughing to

believe in those

next 30 years of unrelenting drought

Two Haiku by a.d.

haiku of the sundered childhood

autopodial ex-

hibition— atrocity

of the orphaned self

godmusings

When posed with the question, “What is the holy ghost?”,

her answer came without hesitation:

A state of mind.

a.d.

Four Poems by Mark Young

A line from Quentin Crisp

 

She wondered what it was

like to claw her way up from

being a printed mesh fabri-

cation, designed exclusively

 

in-house & based only on one's

own experience. She brought it

to the table to create distance, to

take the joke on herself as a way

 

to self-soothe. Pink noise is far

deeper than white noise, a sonic

hue that often only comes down

on the side of the outcast. The old

 

movie projector hums in the back-

ground like a dialysis machine

without the beeps. Ambient noise

in the ICU. She closes her eyes.

 

 

Topical nightmares

 

Discover their meanings. There

are twenty-eight listed in the pages

of the OED. What is going on in

the world? To start, don't even

think "How do I find something

now?" Combine different lettering

styles & simple doodles. Decide

which conjunction best completes

the sentence. Reduce uncertainty

by keeping it square through im-

pact. Swap any phrasal verb for

the unknown you're dealing with &

find out if they are actually married!

 

 

sedentary aneurysms

 

I hear the dog shout

blitzkrieg, & every

meerkat within living

memory dives for

shelter. I do the oppo-

site, get up & look

around, fearing there

may be spiders in the

quicksand that surrounds

me, or, even worse, my

sedentary lifestyle has

broken me free of the

crossword I am trying

to do, leaving me lying

on the floor, a victim

of an aneurysmal sub-

arachnoid hemorrhage that

has too many letters to fit

any of the available spaces.

 

 

The / erstwhile tracheotomy / of Jeanne d'Arc

 

She spoke through a tube

in her throat. The passion

that she felt was communi-

cated by the movement of

her hands, her arms. Her

anger was obvious. Finger-

tips glowed like tiger's eyes.

The air rippled. No one could

remember the subject of her

speech; but the gestalt of it

was talked about for years.