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a small dog, bleeding

John Sweet

it happens this way sometimes,
where the children die from the poison that
seeps up from underground

you vote for one person or the other,
and the children die, and it's not war but
business, and both words are actually just
different ways of saying profit

listen

new computers will be given to
the schools as gifts

the sharpened teeth of priests will snap
the bones of young boys in two

what you need to believe in are
rabid dogs
speaking w/ the voices of humans

what we do is use the word political
to describe what we don't want to
talk about and then, of course,
the children die

the war becomes nothing more than
one more mundane fact of life,
and the men who make money off of
the corpses of every dead soldier,
and that there are others out there
filming your daughters fucking
faceless strangers

that the poem is just a message
handed down from the
throne of god

you will ignore it like all of
the lies you've been forced to swallow
in the past, and then it will come
to define you

John Sweet was born in 1968. His recent collections include "ash wilderness" and "human cathedrals". www.bleedinghorse.blogspot.com
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