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geography john sweet this age of rain and of wasted time this flat expanse of land between the mountain and the river the piles of garbage and the burned-out gas stations and these teenage girls in trailer parks the babies their boyfriends leave them with the sad little deaths that should matter more than they do all of these names that we spend our lives forgetting absolute zero john sweet each poem sacred in the age of starving dogs and every dog drowning in a pool of filth this logic that doesn’t need to make sense this house at 1:30 in the morning the weight of silence the bones of christ or of gorky of lennon none of us saved and none of us loved and whatever room we sit in cold whatever child we hold onto crying all of our days laid down before us without meaning small song from the age of miracles john sweet or something simple and obvious like good sex on a grey sunday morning none of the bills paid and no money in the bank my car which only starts on warm afternoons the rest of my life a fever dream, sunday john sweet bluegrey light in a motel room and nothing else a faded parking lot through a dirty window and then weeds small blue flowers moving silently in the wind and pieces of trash pressed into the hardening mud this idea of emotion dictated by scenery the fact that this place will never be my home these simple broken thoughts and nothing else lakota #1 john sweet the city is the machine and the machine is god god is what you create with bleeding hands look at these roads laid down over the bones of indians look at what pollock was trying to show you what comes after the age of the ghost dance is the age of advancement the bullets pierce the white shirts and the children are slaughtered the song is an old one the machine can only be destroyed from within this world forever john sweet or consider the words that you write read out loud in an empty room not meaningless but pointless or the sound 300 sioux make in the space between the massacre and the burial the pale september sunlight that spills through their ghosts the idea of shooting a five year-old girl in the back as she runs for her mother of doing it in the name of god and america the fact that neither has any meaning

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