|||

A scribble, a letter, a thank you

Breath devours breath and silence, the infinity eyed snake of long winters, girdles my throat, raw from so many imagined hangings. A Scarlett web covers the archways of your eyes, open as wolf mouth, howling an ancient loneliness into the chest of men, dreaming on the wrong side of violence. A scowl of a long-ignored father figure, spurting cider from his nostrils as tears or some form of vinegar, cement his skin groaning nonsense, as calcium sucked teeth puncture meat. A shake of the head, an actor’s shiver, an evacuation of the bowls later, I see a spear of light pass slow motion, my pupils so close that I can taste the cutting.

Beauty is truth.

Is this what you call a daytime hallucination, a waking vision of dead prophets singing notes of starvation? My subconscious is parachuting behind enemy lines as rationality, brain-dead mumbling nightmares into the terror tensed air, cowers in a trench, armoured by memories of magnanimous victories.

Truth is beauty.

In work, breathing in the coffee-stench atmosphere, I focus on my hands, hoping my thought adhere to my desire and I won’t inherent the life of one of my many nightmares. A voice whispers some innocuous insult.

Why am I such a twat? I repeat back but I’m so worked up I worry if that was my true voice that speaks only of singular oblivions, or one of the others that intrude into every mundanity no matter how proper or debased. Keats, without incorrectly repeating your poem, I would have only known 17 years but now I know 33, so if life gets worse I’m blaming you for propping me up as my mouth foamed like the edge of the sea. Infantile bed- wetter, I shake your hand and salute you.

How tragic it is to live at all eh? Let’s drink a dram of hemlock and fuck out our brains below innumerable stars, that give the impression they smell like cheese.

David Hay

Twitter: @arched_roadway

Up next Going Underground at the Undercroft [Anything for a Weird Life] Fiction: "Paul, Standing by at Standing Rock" by Matt Gillick
Latest posts “Barricade” by Will Marsh from Saturn Returns by Ashley E Walters Fear Eats the Soul: Reflections on a Masterpiece BRUISER ZINE 004: Saturn Returns by Ashley E Walters Tape World: O.K. Let's Rock with... Nirvana "Deconsecrators" by Terence Hannum "Pottery Fragment, early 21st century" by Jennifer Stark Review: Semibegun's Shitty Music on Tape and I Loved You a Lot "Octopus Facts" by Chris Heavener On the Importance of Infrastructure [Anything for a Weird Life] "The Executive Pool" by Steve Gergley "There is a Flame Called the Endless Night" by Juliette Sandoval "Gigantopedia" by Alexander Gradus Review: Smog Mother by John Wall Barger Spring Break Scene Report [Anything for a Weird Life] Two poems by Rob Kempton "Series in Which My Body is Not My Body" by Arden Stockdell-Giesler "Rows of Jaw Bones and Worn Down Teeth" by C. Morgenrede Two prose poems by Howie Good from "Founders' Day" by Arzhang Zafar Social Media and its Discontents [Anything for a Weird Life] "Jubilee" by Damon Hubbs "Nothing to See Here" by Bernard Reed Three poems by Kimberly Swendson In Praise of Phantomime [Anything for a Weird Life] Two stories by Robert John Miller Review: Greetings from Marquette: Music from Joe Pera Talks With You Season 2 by Skyway Man "Holiday" by Serena Devi Two poems by Jordan James Ranft How to Write a Song [Anything for a Weird Life] BRUISER ZINE 003: Founders' Day by Arzhang Zafar