The Cardboard Night by Michael Hayes
To taste your passion—
Savor the slow death of numbing,
The affirmation of existence;
To claw your tongue
And believe that you alone
Are such a captive
Trying to swallow the sky
And expose heaven
With all of its ignorance,
Its gluttons and its God
Lounging In The Execution
Where is the turning—a purpose for which to hang the moon? Boorish attempts at catching my death prolongs the fear of my success. Tumbling through the horror of this inability to breathe stacks me high upon the alone.
I’ve polished the sun and burned my mind. What angst has become the quelling of violet sleep into nightmarish feet scrapping against my conscience—raw beneath shaking chins; beneath open pores and falcon shivers piercing what I thought was a future—a hanging post for the blurring yesterday.
I am lounging in the execution, giving ammunition to the devil’s mouth. Dry and brine against my gums I smile a ballet of thanksgiving for the desert’s phantom hope reaching blue toward my bridle.
Balancing Act
Go away!
Leave the belief to skeptics
Tenuously balancing
Acts of holocaust—
Tattooed in brothels.
Carve life on the backs of whores
Who carry our weight
Of self-doubt
And impotence of love.
Wear my disappearance
Around your waist—
Comb my guilt
From tangled legs
Sweating to the rhyme of Blake
Burning bright
Against sightless temptations.
Run me blind
Through scalding streets
Streaming steam—
Liquid and unaware
Of all who tread
Upon my concrete life.
May I
May I call you
Formed into the failure—
Slightly out of step
With ashes flickering
Flameless toward the floor?
May I hold you
Thirsty into the rest—
Pressing thin boarders
Of trembling touch
And lingering lies
Soothing tired spirits
Flapping wingless
Through my drought?
Highway
The highway is rising higher—
Her pavement against my knees
And my head is hanging low
Like a dirge for the dead—
A mourning mist
Leaves contempt at her feet—
Her broken lines are the beauty
Scraping my face
Across the gravel of another—
I don’t understand
And won’t pretend to care—
These roads are too long
And taking me nowhere.
Morning
Morning comes swiftly
Into a dimmer sun
With fool’s folds
Of gasping lungs
Tired from fighting
For the frame’s fading stares
Covered with a glass hope
And the want to know
Smothering
You are making love to my ghost—
It’s not me—it’s not the truth
That I feel
And it’s not a lie.
Blank blanket kiss smothering me
With disgust.
But I know that I can breathe
And I know that I can believe…
In something.
I believe in your disappearance.
Bouncing
The world is bouncing on my knees
And I can’t forget—
I’ve taken beauty by the ankles
Pulled her apart like a dreadful wish;
Broken every bone in that childish face
With the thicket eyes
Pouring maybe glances
Into my cup of make believe.
I know its playtime again
But I want to smash the world—
Let the stars sink in.
I want to rid myself of her
Whey on my thighs
And me in the fullness
Of this lie.
But it’s hard to move with the world
Hammering my feet steadily
Into beauty’s indifference.
Penance
Overcast, like these sinner’s eyes, I am ready to break the seal on silence and pour blindness on you like a choking priest. You have become what I never can be—atonement trying for the suicide, trying for the big fall, trying for what I don’t believe.
In your dead calm gallows silence, I come mushroom cloud through starving thorns then retreat to the near perfect regret feeding at the bottom of my stockade—paying penance on witching beds.
The Lost Generation
I am of the lost generation—
A celebrant of death
With my hands held flat
Over withered embers;
Convinced that Hell is endurable.
I am the nothing—
The vacant eyes
Of a tired preacher
Propped open with planks of self blessing
Carved from the cross of extinction—
And wisdom can tell me nothing
Without the scars of mistakes
And promises impossible to keep.
It Is Blank
It is blank.
My faith is gone
And I can clearly see
That it is blank.
Blank in the bite
Of an angle’s autumn
That has glazed my eyes
And clotted the blood in my heart.
There is no garden
Beneath my perch
And my fate is the fate of all—
To be bludgeoned
In a battle I did not fight;
To be silenced
By the voice I did not hear.
A Psalm
Lord, is it always to be so bitter—
Is it always to seem so hopeless?
Where are the dances of David
Upon the enemy’s sword?
The demons of damnation
Have encamped around my soul
And in the mortal mist of regret,
I fail miserably against the judgment.
Do you not know my weakness of being;—
My longing in the bitter sting
Of your sinking hand dropping me
Into the mouth of Satan?
Do you laugh as he nervously
Chews my mind?—
His beautiful fangs of temptation
Scraped white on my bones.
Christ, stone me with words I have spoken
And leave me to the salvation of dogs!
In My Head
With the resurrection skyline broken
And the cloud of the world
Asleep in the rain,
I am trying to drink these voices
Out of my mind.
They are telling me that I am nowhere—
That I never have been…
And all these razors in my head
Are simply razors.
A Few More
A few more days
In the cauldron’s sling
Is all I would ask of you,—
A few more nights to forget
That I’m alone; to forget
That I am weak with fear
And the feeling that I’ve
Made a terrible mistake.
I cannot see past the blue you wore
When trapping me within this circle;
And I’ve learned that a circle is not
The symbol for God—
The beginning and the ending
Grind against each other
With the hell of desperation
Past The Falling
Past the falling down drunk—
Past the sidewalk staggering shadows;
I balance my eyes
With mumbling thoughts.
When the gathering has departed—
When human voices are silent
Beneath my touch;
I kiss the depth of longing.
It is simple to note that I am
Alone;
Cock-broken;
Bitter to the taste.
I’m Saying Good-Bye
I’m saying good-bye to the hope of youthful perfection and its complete honesty;—Good-bye to the marriage and fondling of myths to real to believe.—This is the hardest mistake I’ve ever had to make.—I’m left on roads I did not take, in places I have not been—With chances I did not recognize.
Lay Us Down
We crowd this room with desperation—
Beg the walls to bear our sin.
I gather the past
Into a pile of regret—
Lay us down gently upon the stench.
Your uneven smile
Comforts the stammering
Of my clumsy voice.
My undecided hands
Rake acceptance from your poison flesh.
And what of you?—
Lying on your back to crush my soul.
Into The Hiding
Against the slopped pebble ground
Into the hiding
I dream absurd—
A watchman from the distance
Holding the most obscure glances
As games of delight
As doors of acceptance—
Chances not available
To weak-minded poets
Of bedpost arenas—
When this night has ended
I will graze on their conquered lines
And take comfort in knowing
That they shall never see me
Under the harshness of light
To This Clown
To this clown,
Robed in the fading echoes
Of children’s laughter,
Give words to describe rain,
Give love to inscribe pain—
A beating down of lonely hearts,
A pummeled view of heaven,
A hollow face with sunken eyes,
A smile beneath.
Suffer This Longing
Wrap the tyrants of faith
Around my throat.
My dream was of liberation
But my voice is dead
In the face of silence.
I hurt with the days I haven’t lived—
The days that blind.
Goddamn the moon
That will not surface
In the face of my inability
To suffer this longing
For justification.
These Eyes Have Dimmed
These eyes have dimmed.
They refuse me color,
The pale song of life.
Caterpillar hands caressing me
And I do not see.
Where are the mollusk
Showers shining red?
Where is the salvation?
This life has been misplaced.
I am lost—
I have been forever.
On The Morning Of My Demise
On the morning
Of my demise
I pushed against darkness
I gasped its name
When my hands broke through
And I tumbled into black
Suffocating fear fell
Fever
Stoking my intestines
Clenching my heart
Beat
Dirge
Stumble
Lost
Bumping into trivial
Breaking on despair
I peeled my eyes
Pried my pupils
As shadows slid
Unimpeded
By this state of blind
And I heard
The click of feet
The clack of street
Life washing
Washing
Washing
River rushing to sea
What a fool I am
It was darkness
Had pushed
Into me
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