Under the Morning Moon (The Devil has Texas 2025) – David Hay

August 15, 2025

For and because of Daniel Johnston

1.

Catch a tear by its stain,
sing a song of sorrow into the flapping eye of a fish.
A rocket flies from the open mouth
of an accordion playing blind child, 
whose bones catch fire.
A Spanish fire is drowned in a Spanish sun.

2.

A clenched fist faced man, unclenches and speaks, 
a tongue transforms from a blue light to a mud-soaked eel,
It flies in an arc
into the open-hearted wound of the sky,
compressing downwards
as the languid moon smiles
Jazz into the last day of autumn.

3.

A light caught a carved rabbit’s eye
below a lightning cleaved sky.
All moments are monuments.
A green silence that slipped a secret from lip to lip.
A departing Christ breathes in the sinking blue
drinking in his shamed sigh of sorrow.
Give death its sweet rest.
A cross tattoos eyes upon a corpse,
singing its lost star into a night,
Fast flowing, chloroformed by infinity.
Sing brother sky, let your black lips
turn a quitter shade of blue.

4.

A crown of burnt feathers sits upon the patriarch’s head,
a worm who knows nothing if not perplexity, 
crawls out of his nose.
He names it as his wife, and much against nature’s order
kisses it where its lips would be if it was a cartoon.
He places it on his shoulder and composes the deepest poetry of his life.
The worm falls off and buries itself in the dirt.
After the man notices his new love’s disappearance, 
he shrugs, bends his forefinger
and gazes lovingly at his fingernail,
he kisses it violently.
A star after its thousand-year vow
not to look upon humanity after the disgust it felt last time,
unfortunately sees both kisses,
makes another thousand
year vow and turns the light off.

5.

In the eyes of a woodlouse,
the sky opens and closes like a human mouth.
A skull full of burning lilacs dislocated jaw
chatters its crooked teeth together
until spiders emerge
from the shadows
of old wooden furniture,
to form their homes
in the skinless prophet’s chamber
of primeval cries.

6.

A scar made of android limbs, squirts
petrol from a fast-fading rainbow.
Tiny Tim doffs his hat and gathers
as much oil as possible.
In the evening the robots 
will be as satisfied as autocrats
nibbling each other’s toes
in suit jackets, t-shirts and jeans.
Above the clouds are tinged with green
sniffed malaise.
On the edge of final slumber,
morning breaks the owl’s heart,
who flies under the moon,
swallowing the silver light
of its eternal song.

7.

Dreams, waking but full of sleep
Embarks upon pathways of the sky couched
palsied side by palsied side,
by the sun and moon,
Stars still unnamed bloom above
the silent coastal town and
under the eaves of a dilapidated home 
a meat and potato faced boy.
Different ages flicker upon his vegetable visage.
Each decade strobe lights across his face
until bones no longer housed in flesh
crumble like oxo-cubes
through the wind’s rough fingers.

8.

A fox made of moss and leaves,
sinks into the long grass,
disintegrates then reforms
at the man’s side.
He nudges his nose into the man’s hands
He cries. My soul he says as his holds the
fox in the in the soft red of mourning.

9.

I carry my dead child in my arms.
its heavy silence is a song of remembrance
that if not consistently exhumed will
lie buried below a sky of minute-hand sorrows.

10.

I cough twice before the demon opens his mouth,
tongues lashing at the opinionated light
cuts apart the ancient promise of dreams
that proposes a union with the land of the dead.

11.

Dark currents of swelling time rise to drown a dog,
arthritic in slow hot beat of its last summer 
licks a volcanic eye
that rages against a ghostly terror.

12.

An old man, conquered by legions of sorrow,
serenades a sparrow; how well it dips its beak
in his worn rosary of kissed blood.

13.

I cannot stand the stain of the last sun-lived winds.
hearts leak sideways out of an already gasping mouth.
A starlit strewn chest embraced by spotlights 
collapses into the long black limbs of cockroaches,
sticking with peculiar tenacity to the top lip mole
of a resurrected Russian monarch.

14.

Cockroaches have a filthy habit of whispering 
infantile advice into the tattooed eyelids of the young.
Some capitalist gibberish bred from poor people’s worms,
drowning below plastic lilacs.
Won’t the sun bend down and a woman’s tender hand
cusp the wriggling dirt, press it against her cheek,
before calling her raven to peck its crinkled pink flesh?

15.

A harmony of destruction 
plucks the cords of winter,
swelling on the horizon,
to kamikaze the last leaves of spring.
I caught love not through violence
but through devoted prayer,
that glorified its simple grace
and gave no tribute to ego,
though that swollen gland
of fatty nothingness, tries
to swallow every tower 
risen in its name.

16.

A sky weaves a sky into a lake.
drink deep and swallow whole.

17.

A choirboy, silent between the empty pews
paints into the ghost of a saint in pure gold light
with his sins.

18.

A widow, long nailed weaves the nightingale 
a nest of her hair.

19.

I wail like a Scooby-Doo ghost,
not out loud of course,
madness must be locked in the heart,
for its truth would bring back the garden of Eden.

20.

Does the heron with punch spoon beak
dream of voiceless eternity? Ponders
a boy tiptoeing over the edge into adulthood.
The heron thinks he’s read
too much Nietzsche too soon
to masturbate without despair.

21.

Give the homeless man a quid,
even if he spends it on booze and drugs or you
suspect he’s faking it.
If he doesn’t need it, that’s on him
but if he does, that’s on you,
says a small prophet to 
the moon reflected puddle.
A phlegm green boat drifts across the surface.
Fake smiles don’t make sorrows disappear.

22.

A god more human than star-spoken,
listens to the river,
its stories are always long-winded and sad.
Why he made rivers talk he doesn’t know.
A regular mortician that river he 
says to a lone bee, drunk on his fifth flower,
who belches something obscene.
A rainbow salmon rises, opens its mouth jibes,
a god of lowly things.
God, shrugs, 
at least the moon understands me.

23.

A rupture in the light casts the forest dim.
I eat the light between the shadows, that
form shapes from my troubled head.
Deep is the longing silence
and brutal is the loneliness
of the wave buttressed boat
before the crystal light of an ancient shore.

24.

To take part in your happiness is a privilege 
a father wishes he told his daughter
as he places her in her tiny coffin.

25.

If God carries the universe in his skull,
he would have had an aneurysm long ago.

26.

I presented my heart to the sun,
it burned at my touch and fled down the horizon.
I kneeled and prayed.
My heartbeat violently between my hands.
From its ventricles, two dandelions sprouted.
An evening breeze blew the seeds along
a roadway of the wind.
Half the craters of the moon formed a mouth,
it opened wide and swallowed the seeds
that had transcended the boundary
between earth and space
as water will one day overcome the mountains.
I can see the shoots of wildflowers
through my charity shop telescope. 

27.

A man swims into the bruised eye of his lover.
He has done this.
There is no turning back.
He broke her and through it,
broke himself.

28.

I, the imperial I of individuality,
lurks at the end of my bed.
Its protruding eyes seem to smile.
Its human teeth dispel
a small section of darkness.
Conformity is the death of the conscience,
But individuality unmoored from community
Sings a silent song to no one.
Sometimes it’s good not to dream.

29.

A car crash involving three hybrid white cars
manufactured in various nations
resembles a spine.
With each passenger pulled from the wreck,
iced coffee in bloodied hands,
each burst into flames
leading to an explosion that makes
Four children cry and one man laugh.
A long-bearded man emerges from the woods
that border the motorway.
He is covered in excrement,
one presumes in posh English, supercilious
arched eyebrow voice,
That it’s his own HAHAHA.
He points at the moon.
its white drifting in blue.
He screams,
the flames retreat into the earth. 
One of the broken women sips
her Frappuccino and whispers freak
down the straw.
He lets three tears slip down his face
before he runs back into the woods.

30.

Silent desires of the snake coiled waves,
let the sick mind,
the troubled soul,
formed from televised suffering
rest.
There is a genocide on every news feed,
there is real pain from foreign
and homemade shores,
tap dancing on the summer wind.
If prayer did anything I would pray
but instead, I listen to football podcasts
so I can ignore it and keep going.
Jesus don’t look at me like that.

31.

A bust of gelatinous meme,
half serial killer, half rotund toddler,
sniffs the air heavy with rocket fumes.
A lizard urinates down the face of the statue.
He looks like he’s crying.
but obviously he can’t.

32.

A cigarette is a remedy for self-annihilation.
Spoken like a true fool
thinks the chick soup brained man
who licks the irises out of his dead wife’s heart,
still thinking his sorrow is more profound than hers.
I was the victim he screams.
A lone man dressed as a mustard bottle
half-heartedly claps.
Sand fills his lungs, the Texan sun sets,
his body rises to the Karman line,
his frozen eyes mirror the moon,
A Russian astronaut uses his head as a golf tee.