A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 7/1

7/1

The sky’s big blue eye isn’t a blue eye after all
sure looks like 1 tho & sincere too the rose
petals pressed between the pages turning black the
newspaper clippings turning piss yellow the

Polaroids taped against the infinite the clouds’ whitish
teeth chew them up spit them out just like
Wrigley’s Spearmint Well the sky just can’t quit
smoking So why’re you so nervous Mr Marlowe

There’re awnings everywhere on the margins of
existence & they’re all undergoing acupuncture It’s
taking place on Haight & Masonic for instance

where Rosie’s strolling like a dog-eared paperback
novel as dirty blonde & voluble & in which
Marlowe can’t find his place

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/30

6/30

A coffee cup squats in a singular mood of
lust & vapor & resignation like a shooting
gallery duck that keeps coming back for more &
maybe the night’s kind of syrupy not sweet tho

there’s not 1 toothache in the violet fog not 1
sugar packet not 1 pair of panties drying on a
clothesline under a gawking monocled blue
blue moon’s decapitated noggin that can’t stop

thinking Who wears monocles nowadays but
the sky’s riddled with unstable stars that can’t stop
coming unsnapped like safety pins that can’t stop

falling gigantic as ironing boards flattening
hopes & fears & so forth unnoticed by most as
Marlowe’s head floats off like a chipped coffee cup

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/23

6/23

A blue coughdrop lost in the depths of Marlowe’s
sport coat pocket like a spelunker run out of
luck amongst vampire bats & subterranean
phone numbers no one answers gives up the ghost

gasping We are such stuff as dreams are etc. &
sinks like a mollusk that’s lost it’s shell into the
godforsaken depths of a lachrymose pre-socratic
tidal pool tastes like a stale Carling Black Label

& it wasn’t so long ago either Jekyl Island GA
June 1988 Jane did the australian crawl in a
lukewarm ocean of interminable love or at least

sex with loads of good will behind it like
a waterbed on castors with a burnt clutch lurching
like the subway Marlowe now stumbles into


Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/21

6/21

A deuce of hearts misplaced in the arms of a
VT forsythia bush the other blossoms of course a
sort of raincoat yellow & the heart inside the coat’s
sort of sputtering like a buckwheat pancake on a

griddle in a Mojave truck stop in the middle of 100 miles of
yucca & borax & bleak fortune cookie sticking their
paper tongues out like so many 5¢ Chinatown
postcards Marlowe’s penning return address un-

known tho it could be the North Pole for that matter
someplace he couldn’t escape from like a snapshot mis-
placed long ago in a bungalow run aground long after the

Mendelssohn wedding recessional shed white yellow
blue pink scads of umbilical blossoms scattering ev-
eryplace as tho the mailbox had blown up at last

Jack Hayes
© 2010