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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