love poem in the kingdom of blind dogs
by John Sweet

and i thought we trusted
each other, or i thought we
believed each other

i thought the knife
would go in cleanly

that the pain
would be tolerable

six years spent driving down the
same goddamn roads every day
but you’d disappeared

left me stoned at the edge of some
ocean i’d never seen before

lost behind anonymous doors in
faceless neighborhoods and i
woke up dead on
the morning of the funeral

maybe a couple of drinks

maybe a handful of pills and
strange that the sky
could be so blue

strange that i remembered you
                               as sunlight

                               as oxygen

and you in the hallway, laughing,
saying now isn’t the time to
fall in love and then
twenty years later,
then thirty five


my life as a cage and my
country as a wasteland and
you and i invisible against
the slowly fading landscape

you and i
without end


---

John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A Flag on Fire is a Sign of Hope (2019 Scars Publications) and A Dead Man, Either Way (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).