Three Fabulous Poems by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

Unfortunate Lad

 

Dust has covered the trail. And tiger lilies muffle ash as it falls.

 

Cut down and indecisive. 

 

Cut down and sitting in the parking lot 

on the cement barricade 

watching a few stars penetrate light leaking from the sign

buzzing in alien rhythm. 

 

Pain radiates in medieval rose petals on my pectoral. 

Our hearts become venereal and preserved. 

Milky discomfort sours my stomach.

 

I find my footing on uneven ground — 

a tatter of white fabric as my claim to someone else’s land 

or the world held in common.

 

I know I may shoot my neighbor’s sheep 

or tame the coyote in my spleen. I stand 

not to quake in the river bed as I draw water for cattle. 

 

Their skulls lining the paddock

after having gone to their home.

 

Parasitic Aphrodisiac

 

God has a plan for the dead without faith.

Little death seeps from pleasure’s lack of faith.

 

A novitiate confides her desire.

Her hospice duties, an act of faith. 

 

Voluptuous ivory Venus 

pornography or object of faith.

 

Julian dying in the desert acknowledged defeat

by the Galilean, but he did not refute his true faith.

 

End of the World

 

sprawled legs. blue shoes turned out.

near ear arc.

to ween, wax wan,

pass ruin, turn tour.

clod hoppers. gamer glamour, sprawled legs. thigh bones turned out.

lame clamour over pallid glow.

flannel flame, rotate through other, through heat death.

clod hoppers. rolling deck.

near, between, back and through.

rolling deck, delicious leap,

roll over pole roller. 

 

towards entropy.

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.