Three Poems by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

 

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.