Hands broken from blacksmithing the stars, Eltri took a sip of blood falling in perfect tear shaped droplets to stain Gologtha – another god another death he decanted to the young boys’ empty eyes still fascinated by the movement of leaves – he brought no suffering in his time, but his name shall map innumerable atrocities – so deep in sin has man slumped, you can’t even see his arse.
A beggar old, wizened not so much by time but his lifestyle choices – you know being poor, kissed the Messiah’s feet, with each lip touched to his holy dirt he felt his soul anointed by the everlasting spring of heaven.
He went back to his cave and took up a tree branch and in the sand he drew shapes he thought were letters and words until he described with perfection these feelings of sublimation gave him – he sat down with an ox-bladder of wine and drank until his bones were untethered from gravity – when he woke the wind had erased all his all his transcribed wonders, he then proceeded to throw up on the section written concerning prayer, staggered forward, slipped on his own vomit, fell over, cracked his skull head on a rock he’d never noticed and died.
Down the road a priest was writing a book in a language none of the people understood, laying down in convoluted but poetically stabbed psalms, how to use god’s son to make money and molest children. Either one was desirable.
Jesus spoke to the child through the hole in the tree trunk, ‘never trust men who dress in robes and wear funny hats’ – that should be obvious but it somehow isn’t.
*
I sprinkled holy water on my syphilitic wounds that crawled away from the light, I expected Jesus’ hand to reach through the clouds and heal my sores
but nothing happened, oh lord only a fool would think it would end differently.
*
In the night, slowly swallowed by the oak tree, a woman and a man are drunk, shouting slag at one another as they stumble from pavement to road, to pavement again. A hedgehog trapped in the shadows by the light of the moon cries and the boy in his fortress of damp wood cries with it. The couple look at each other, shut up and quietly stagger back to their house that contains three bathrooms but only one sink.
*
You are alone, I am alone and that’s it his mother says while chopping onions. She nicks her thumb and the blood lumps out. This is all your father’s fault she snaps.
*
After much deliberations two teenagers in a friend’s living room drop acid. They look in to each others eyes far too earnestly. He sees himself wearing a wing-suit and jumps out the second floor. As he climbs out, he imagines his body cascading down mountainsides, weightless as light, his nose gently skimming rocks, before flying above a cliff side covered in pines to reveal a small Italian town. He sees another wing-suiter (?) release his parachute to glide him down to the postcard perfect grass. He appears onwards into the town to splat against a rich man’s car – a final fuck you, not to god or the world but to all the dickheads who look like they invest pork directly into their veins. His friend screams his name. The vision and real-life wobble into each other, touching in a sickening way, the kind of touch that brings back that uncle who left his hand too long upon your spine. His foot is at the wrong angle. He stares at it then everything goes black. When he wakes his dad calls him an idiot. If you think you can fly, try taking off from the ground next time.
*
The sky is full of memories, much like clouds choiring with thunder, the past with its muscles and hammy moustache and black coffee breath forces the blue drowning days of youth to tap out and submit.
Welcome to life boy! He screams before seeing mustard all over his tiny shorts that repulse you more than bestiality.
*
David Hay was inspired to write after discovering the Romantics, particularly Keats and Shelley, as well as the works of Woolf and Kerouac. His work has been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader,The Babel Tower Notice Board, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Selcouth Station, GreenInk Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Seventh Quarry and Expat-Press, among others. His debut publication is the Brexit-inspired prose-poem Doctor Lazarus published by Alien Buddha Press 2021.
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