david hay – 3 poems

Father

I’m sorry they broke me, and there are no flowers for your grave. But I brought some toothpaste and a toothbrush and my large madman’s grin– doesn’t that make you proud? No? Dirt inhabits my nails but I’m not the same as the oak, or even a small shrub. I cannot sense my prey from a distance. Yes father, I have entered the parted legs of a woman but my children are as useless and landless as me.

Your bones are now artefacts– they are calcium-covered history. However, how can you be dead when I hold your memories like a child? I brought you your favourite whisky. Here is a swig– the worms will be drunk; they may be kind and spare your eyes.

Oh father I’m bored of being a man. There is nothing to a man anymore– only a mirage without a desert, a plane without the womb of a horizon. You gave your years to the earth and so you return. But I– I don’t even have dreams– of a cabin and a gas stove – a woman of iron and clouds and a seat by the lake with an evening of stars: the flowers in dark-webbed forest of night. Nothing makes sense anymore, and I will never escape these turnstile blues.

I read a poem today (big shock). You would be proud or you’d at least smile. It was beautiful. The world revealed its hidden patterns to me, but it made no difference. I don’t have your eyes father, I have mother’s.

I feel done father and I’m afraid, afraid of the amount of life that still awaits me, and I visit you each Sunday and I don’t know why; to escape life without dying perhaps? To tread on the precipice of those swollen shores containing people older than the terraced houses built after the bombs fell and Hitler lost his moustache? Fuck it; I’m a coward just like you. Eat your worms father, they are good for you.


Spiegel im Spiegel

The night whispers with breath as sour as grief,
If the mind has been broken once, it can be broken again.

A sadness almost physical,
Reigns in the quiet hours before your return
With your box cutter and your blue uniform
Discarded the moment you arrive,
To stand as naked as an unwritten poem.

After hours lost, scanning items, stocking shelves,
Your only desire is to embrace, to hold firm my body,
Without reservations and make each
Touch a deepening root,
But I recede as time, forgotten momentarily,
Reveals itself like a grotesque striptease,
And I am transfixed, 

these are my hands, my heart, the eyes my mother loved
the face without make-up that even the mirror despises,
please tell me you see, see the eyes my mother loved,
the silence that means I’m afraid. Talk, talk and
distract me.

The chance of connection is lost,
It is a fault of timing, 
And my simple failings suffocate the hours.

The white-throated cry of winter rises,
And with promises earnest but never fulfilled
The heart loses its hold on the centre
And the woman bandaged together by love
Disintegrates as touch reveals her illusion.


Bird of Spring

Flies through the traffic-light madness
Swallowing grief like air.

You are a visionary winged emissary
As genderless as dew;
Your black cries choke the church bells
That mark the hours,
Falling into your unblinking stare
That birthed the colour of tears.

Your memories are as 
Pregnant as shadows,
They are as deep as the 
Synthetic ocean of noise
Perforating eardrums, spines,
And my friend’s cancerous hump,
Slowly ballooning him to heaven.

You navigate our town of rugby league,
Above nightclubs of ash-filled laughs,
Above grey waves of stationary steel,
As we drive below in our
Rusting car of held light
Circling the many hearts of our home,
Silent as atoms. 

You are carried by wind, 
By strangers breath,
By bureaucratic sighs,
As babies and the homeless,
Vomit their cinders of sadness
Across the empty blue blanket of spring.

The distance between us
Is momentarily softened by 
Your green song,
Fleshly bitten
Smelling of damp peaches.
I inhale it,
Take a deep long drag
And hold your song
Of decomposing leaves, of waves
Of the gutter’s sludge,
In the base of my throat
Until I break
And I can no longer breathe;
For you will soon be gone
And I have no words to match your music.	 


DAVID HAY's debut publication is the narrative poem Doctor Lazarus. His first poetry collection is forthcoming from Rare Swan Press. He has a collaborative work Amor Novus/A Spontaneous Prayer with Soyos Books, a pamphlet due in November from Back Room Poetry and has a novel How High the Moon coming out from Anxiety Press later this year. He has been published in Acumen, Abridged, Cape, Expat, ,Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader,The Stone of Madness Press, The Fortnightly Review, The Lake Dodging the Rain, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Apocalypse Confidential.


HOME