October Poems – David Hay
October 30, 2023
October 15th
A sky swims forward
into the glen of a singing eye,
sinking inward
down deep silence,
where frothing darkness
washes mountain peaks,
birthing through waves
twisting like spines
across black rocks,
as a three-year spiked scream
brings cursed light to a still sky.
OCTOBER 23RD
I caught the lamplight in a drowning pink fist, held it to a still visible star, causing concussions in a sky
cut red.
I retreat to my sleeping home.
Something dead should not continue to grow but ghosts sing, cry, howl, age, as the years cause deepening stretches of milk-fed skin –
sagging into history.
I hold my struggling silence and witness. What is a writer if not a witness?
A song, stitched with blue and embroidered with the deep sea green of cities swept into the sea, rises skyward. An echo will drift Irrefutably into my dying dream. A pink fist slowly sinking bleeds a once dead bird into the sky.
In a Morning There Is Too Much Life
The grey canopy, smothering the trees
so lost in their greenness that death tastes the same
as leaf membrane and branch breaks fail to punctuate
the lightest slumber,
pops with the last thunder of summer.
A loving kiss of a couple signifying not goodbye but a return,
cuts deep, when loneliness corrupts a morning
two breaths away from joy.
I search the streets for tyrants, slinking between
corporate shadows, composting pornographic
body parts in hearts collapsing inwards like spent out stars.
I calm myself, think of goodness bound into a physical form,
of a million acts too boring to be broadcast.
A prostitute gets out of a generic black car,
she stumbles then rights herself. The car speeds off.
She walks carefully down the road. By her shaking frame,
it obvious she is crying.
I consider if any word or action I have at my disposal
will alleviate the kind of sadness that strangles,
she turns the corner and is gone.
The tram door opens. Job junkies take up every seat.
I stick in my headphones, look out the window,
get my copy of the collected poems of Sidney Keyes,
open a random page,
let punk playlist number 5 give me a final push,
stick my feelings in the spaces between the words
allowing each syllable and note to
paint subterranean pictures
of the 20-year-old who died in 1943
and the young woman,
struggling down a street to a fate
unknown but probably tragic.
At my stop, just before departing,
I focus on my girlfriend’s voice,
pressing my ear upon
the hard, cold hours when she last whispered,
I love you.
Edge of Night
Teeth touch deep, slide
into growing swells.
Panic drags clouds down sides of flesh-weaved sky.
A homeless man goes down a slide and smiles,
in an empty park, as the sun tiptoeing to set
shanks orange lines that trace rusted metal,
sad as a cabbage in a baby’s toothless grimace.
A ghost, holding one of its legs like a rifle
pretends to shoot the man, glitching down the slide.
A man in a barely furnished apartment watches;
he is stained in every sense.
A woman in a local insane asylum is screaming,
she sounds like a train,
squealing around the London underground.
A back door slams shut,
a dark wind crouches in my heart,
it is two sentences away from springing.