A Poison Garden
A
poison garden lined with snake plants, littered with brazil nuts, I would
rather not continue…
Perhaps
you cannot bring a horticulture but violence can be wrapped in language
elegantly folded in a nucleus,
folded
in a yolk,
by
sweet ancient women with soft wrinkles on their translucent hands.
Bus Station Aubade
Like
this.
On
hard fiberglass seats. Wanting to touch.
Always
like this.
Ancestors
roamed naked with wolves and bears loving each hair and hemorrhoid
indiscriminately. But I stay.
Deficit
is not a lack but a new whole.
Negative
space completes composition.
Goats
lapping other goats. Never more than this.
What
else like this?
What
else…
Never
an answer. Only lack of questions.
Conspiracies
Do
not assume.
There
are conspiracies. You half smile. A stained
tooth.
Maybe not you but there are conspiracies just
at
my fingertips.
Get
out of the street.
Linger
like a pigeon on a weathered ledge. Don’t fall
like
an old woman crossing the street.
Kittens
under the canopy of Egypt’s double crown.
Our
lord married his sister. Built the heavens in
sandstone.
Don’t
make me stop.
Running
exhausts me. The tear at my side. The wound
of
the manticore. Don’t make me stop and drink sweet
water.
There
are conspiracies. The joy of my ex-boss. The
success
of others. An actor in Daley Plaza
surrounded
by kids in Karate uniforms, kids in
tie-dye,
police officers.
I
am ignored even by anaemic tourists newer than
me
to this city.
Put
a paper mask in front of your face.
There are conspiracies.
Nicholas
Alexander Hayes is the author of Amorphous Organics (SurVision
Books), Ante-Animots: Idioms and Tales (BlazeVOX), NIV:
39 & 27 (BlazeVOX), and ThirdSexPot (Beard
of Bees). His work has been featured in the anthologies Lovejets: Queer
Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman and Madder Love: Queer
Men and the Precincts of Surrealism.
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