Seagull
With his father’s hunting knife
a boy removes the eye of a seagull
and replaces it with his own.
It flies away to live his new parents
in a flat, made of misfortune
and an insufficient amount of love.
The boy grows wings
heads to the ocean,
eats discarded chips,
dives after fish and cuddles
his new feathered wife.
All is well, all is free.
The seagull sits in its bedroom
and sheds its first human tears.
The Captain
I see the Captain with his Whitman beard and Hebrew tongue watch with ardent eyes his cargo of carrion– their bones twitching arthritis, grumbling with mouths full of toast crumbs, waiting to embark on his half-drowned cathedral of mossy time. His is a pilgrimage through jetsam: fecal matter, condoms and Sertraline screams. Only the Captain with his barnacle crusted nails, whose tongue transcribes the weight of sorrow knows the featureless landscape of the other horizon; only his eyeless sockets know the symmetry of stars. Your choir of ornate girls, fleshless as seaweed, their voices wrapped in gin, grieve in their dungarees on the bow, matching their words to the rhythm of the waves, the girls are frozen in the rain, the girls are frozen in their rain.
What does the face of god look like? The old and young wonder as night pierces their once golden eyes blind. Give them details, facts, the sound of eternity, something divine, something only you would know, but your anorexic lips as thin as pennies remain sealed.
The young averting your apertures throw garlands at your unwashed feet with one hand and in the other, hold a hanger keeping straight the untinctured skin like suits, kept creaseless, covered for the big day– when it will pay to look your best. The old, the middle-aged, those too long in time, too broken to give way to such painful tom foolery sit with their half-filled in crosswords and cry about their children, about things they never would have done, about the simple clues they only now have figured out.
A few drunk bastards with their ideals like fallen leaves in their hands quote Neruda with topaz tongues and with wide-eyed grins carry daisies like sabers before scarring the sky with their green signatures. But poetry has no weight here. The Romantics, out of time, out of fashion are slap-jawed, Gestapo broken and return drooling; a warning to the twitchers; the lonely hearted cowards who slept with their grey despairs and did nothing– who look to the horizon waiting for a line of distinction between sky and sea and think what if?
Captain of the painted waves, they are broken in the receding tide– carry them to their mother’s grave, on the other side of those dark waters. Let them cease below the mountain with no name. Carry them with the tender arms of night. Give them carnations of red. Speak to them with words not molested by time. Let them know the feeling of fresh sheets– the warmth of a partner grasped for after bad dream, and found. Carry them safe and clean. Please, show something; give some inkling, if only one. For one day I will stand on your carcass of the deep, to be transported to this new land and I will fear not your name but the journey, the slow capitulation under hours made heavy by the limits of hope. So, I ask for a smile, a human look from your lifeless mask, for fears crawl into my waking thoughts as a spider crawls into the sleeping mouth.
-- Doctor Lazarus, a narrative poem, was David Hay’s first published piece. Since then, his work has appeared in numerous online journals. He has a collaborative piece, Amor Novus / A Spontaneous Prayer published with Soyos Books, Saxon Suites by Back Room Poetry. His novel How High the Moon is available via Anxiety Press and his debut poetry collection is out now with Ballerini Book Press.