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Poetry by David Hay

The Counter-heaven

I watch the lilac’s lips
Suckle upon the sky,
Like a wolf cub,
Freezing into starvation.

I rest my head on the grass,
Tiny thin blades,
Like mother nature’s eyelashes,
Bending beneath 32-year-old bones and fat.

I let my eyes mirror the sky like the sea.

So much of us is lost,
So little remembered,
But is it right to fill the emptiness above
With our sorrows, so sticky and tangled,
So born of dust and dirt?

I stroke the sun light curled upon my lap,
And plot my own myth into
The horizon.

Traveling through the streets of Manchester

There is nothing but violence.
The maelstrom of black rain
Buries the street preacher, with his ink-dried voice and
Words full of pain and burnt-out candles.
A massacre was lodged in the breeze.
I saw homeless men and women
Under the archways and beneath feet;
All was the perfumed emptiness
Of my black coffee morning sigh,
And the causal flick of emotionless change.
Go back to sleep,
Urchin of human conscience,
Covered with the streets’ seasons;
This morning is for the living
And you are the dead.
A car violated the boundaries of silence
And broke the last edge of night;
There was a deepening drumming
As the city rose to dominate the day.
A single pulse was a furnace
And the knife glint of the eye swallowed light.
Here were the voiceless ignored by each decade’s
pitiless song,
Here are their lives,
You can spit on them if you please

A Weekend Effigy

My love, woken into a fresh cream sky, drinks a draught of morning, as tears transcribe notes on her skin. Sirens, stocking fillers of memory — scalped, tired — sling shot the sticky firmament that capes shoulders, sandpapered to bone.

A crow feathered thought of yet another family demise perches on the branches of a tree duly knocking, knocking against the window, stained with clouds.

A bird must know escape will only be found if it can learn to dig.

With my heart snatched from the mutilating frost, i wish to speak to you plain — full to the teeth with memories, and a desire unheeding of change or circumstance.

The essence, if you will, of all I hold in that sun-fried soul, hidden in repetitions, mundane, exhaustive, exasperations — so strangling that tip toe dreams can’t escape,

Is that my heart is too full of you.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel long drank, I write with my open eyes full to my inner sky with the ghost tinctured mirages of your face: sleeping, awake, smiling, crying,

Full of your individual humanity.

I love you as much as this idiot boy of no note, stranded in the no man’s land of masculinity, lonely as a toilet perched atop a skip in a empty early morning street, can.

And just so that paranoia does not take seed and entangle your waking thoughts I will give you the effigy of my heart:

I will love you as long as you let me.

David Hay

Twitter: @arched_roadway

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