by David Hay
My voices are torn in two, no matter how hard I plead I am never alone.
Golden sands stick between my toes. Seagulls one flight off death perch upon my shoulders, even they whisper, ‘can phantoms of memory no longer hear the dead man’s screams?’ Tendrils of living light grasp the goddess’s alabaster throat. Blood stems down her lonely tongue. Angels of death cover their eyes, as fruit flies feast.
Amidst a cabal of misdeeds, lawyers savouring each centimetre of flesh, praise their dull race to lofty climbs of barrack like shadows that haunt the cathedral doors, as amphetamine eyed bureaucrats laugh with their ageless faces turned always away from God.
Masked schemers with long puppet noses profane the dying moon, too tired to sing.
The landscape of bone grabs me by the shoulders, shakes me until I fall – the lilac sky and azure earth form a bridge through the hole in my head – bits of black cloud leak out. On the shoreline of a snake, I buried my head in its body and tasted eternity in each scale as it slithered languageless across the line of the horizon, swallowing what little light was left.
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David Hay has had work published in numerous journals. His books include two novels, How High the Moon (Anxiety Press, 2025) and No Birds Sing (Atomic Bohemian Press, 2026), a forthcoming poetry collection The Devil Has Texas (House of Vlad) as well as a previous poetry collection, On the Edge of the Asylum (Ballerini Books, 2024).