A Poem by David Hay

In the north, a man judges his time by how much he gets fucked up

Seagulls flee the cage of my throat
into a sky hung so low with tears and rain
I could be mistaken, but –

I’ve lost my body,
meat-coated house where memories
on a clustered stage
shadow-born, parade back and forth
where no object can be distinguished.

If this is hell, it is hell.
All is perception.
The annoying philosopher in his mustard-stained
Suit
Declares.
Sometimes, we have debates,
My ego, small and cylindrical as an iris
bursts orgasmically across naked winter’s frame.
Painfully, as forks scrape across plates,
he screams, this is poetic masturbation.

Wash your suit, you maggot-tamer
before you lecture me!

I shout inaudible.
These voices are mine,
trapped in here with me
and I, with them,
will not be conducted by my tongue.
They gang up on me,
mock me,
deride me,
until the desire to take a hammer,
and blacksmith my skull,
until spectres of anxiety
squirt out and I am free
to form them into
something useful.

But now I am weightless, drunk, high
on some mundane Tuesday evening epiphany,
trying to elongate time.

I sink into a sky-mirrored sea,
surfacing for air on my unmade bed
frightened of the mass of time ahead.

Glitch Vispo Image -- a clay lion on a mercurial table -- black and white and grey scale. by Robert Frede Kenter (c) @2023.

David Hay was inspired to write after discovering the Romantics, particularly Keats and Shelley, as well as the works of Woolf and Kerouac. He has currently been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader,The Babel Tower Notice Board Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Selcouth Station, GreenInk Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Seventh Quarry and Expat-Press among others. His debut publication is the Brexit-inspired prose-poem Doctor Lazarus published by Alien Buddha Press 2021. Twitter: @Arched_Roadway.

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