A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 8/1

8/1

A dish of red beans & rice congeals on top of
a mahogany armoire while yellow light slants thru
venetian blinds like a baby grand’s
lid trembling imperceptibly during some

Revolutionary Étude climax while a sack of
Popeye’s 3-piece spicy white meat chicken
oozes grease on an embroidered ottoman while
Charlotte paints her toenails C# black while

a passel of mayflies is giving it up in
the mentholated smoke New England evening
air like a swarm of slot machines simultaneously coming up

cherries while a rose bouquet leaves Marlowe with
premonitions of 1 thousand Maoist blossoms debating
the musical questions of a personal life

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 7/23

7/23

A doorknob sprouts in a VA tomato patch under a
steaming tapioca bare-assed sun—
but it’s not a miracle Ma Chère it’s got no
door to look forward to— in a VA

tomato patch where Marlowe’s making a
new start as a garter snake creeping thru the
evil 4-leaf clovers & a croquet match occasionally
interrupted by sonic booms that are actually

latex enamel electric blue peacocks whooping
Siamese orgasms— in a VA creeper miracle
Ma Chère where there’s no new start to

look forward to Marlowe sheds his skin 1 more time
like a drenched black trenchcoat mumbling
Sayonara to all that

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 7/18

7/18

A prop job with the tsetse fly shakes like a
ukulele strumming My Little Grass Hut like a
kaleidoscope undergoing the shudders shattering then
coalescing as a map but it’s alright darling

Marlowe just thinks he’s a desert island with a
fountain pen & 1 solitary Royal Palm
He’s actually an Easter Island fetish dressed in a
tux aloft in a shuddering lawn swing surveying a

distant landscape that hasn’t got many
mouths or ears or eyes tho
the wind’s got an armload of black & white photos

swirling like so many undead shadows The
prop job hunts for any chimney it can descend into
in lieu of a dead volcano

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 7/16

7/16

A streetlight with scoliosis a
confirmed old bachelor too the night’s
prismatic night sweats are a problem too a con-
firmed old bachelor with a bunch of re-

collections it just can’t shake with a
wheeze like a fire extinguisher wheezing mica a
confirmed old bachelor a trace jaundiced at that the
night’s incontinence is a problem too there

isn’t much sunlight to say the least there
isn’t a Holiday Inn swimming pool glinting blonde to
say the least the fog on Divisadero 12 any-

thing a m thick with soap bubbles in search of a
mouth & Marlowe feels more like a spectroscope
with an astigmatism no less

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 7/11

7/11

India ink spruce trees up on the hill it
could be anywhere watching the sunset’s
locomotive crash into the swamp with its
refrigerators & rowboats & slightly effeminate

ferns & a black wool blanket overrun with
beetles & ladybugs & a snapshot of Jane with
a peach pie & a thermos It could be
anywhere anytime September 2 1988 Albemarle

County VA like a porcelain full moon that looks like
a magnolia blossom sprouting from a caboose that’s
rattling & hooting through heaven like a

tugboat chugging through water lilies &
Marlowe’s just now dropping a line to the past stating
If you miss the train I’m on you will etc

Jack Hayes
© 2010

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

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/20

6/20

The sunset just looks like radioactive chicken soup
iridescent & pissed-off & splashing across the flat-top
Victorians lurking Dear Diary like water glasses
in a diner whose whole herd of stainless butterknives

will slice fluorescent light into butter & harmonicas &
Marlowe’s jukebox breakfast on another tomorrow with its
        odor of
sex & Ivory soap floating across the Pacific amongst
almighty Holsteins chewing & lolling like trawlers

It all looked like a vinyl tablecloth spreading a classical
picnic in the ruins of the Parthenon where Maggie’s
sipping her 5th milky espresso & the moon by then

spilling its milk across the table
spilling its milk across Marlowe who’s feeling about
        as bucolic
as a hospital bed sleeping it off in Dolores Park

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/13

6/13

A black umbrella wobbling above blue yellow &
purple gingerbread houses thru sheets of
rain with its maple sap half-life & an avenue meantime menaced by
black rotary phones & princess phones & the stained

glass doors guarded by dachshunds with
bobbing heads & the only fish that swim past Marlowe sport
big black dewlaps like Jerry Lewis bow ties tho
Marlowe feels like a kite doing the deadman’s float tho

Nantucket is pretty far off still &
Maggie’s flickering there like a lovely black haired candle a
smattering of black-eyed Susans blooming across her

black scuffed combat boots tho as usual she’s a
concertina exuding Nino Rota
tho the wedding got rained out in the 2nd inning

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/9

6/9

The blue cars sighing a little like zippers
unzipped in a breathless studio apt in the midst of
this miserable sonofabitch effluvial moonlight that’s
sweating like a bottle of Mexican Coca Cola in the

Sacramento bus station May 1988 It felt like
a country radio station sobbing sucrose &
Dear John letters & Pictures from Life’s Other Side across a
Formica counter in the midst of Marlowe’s nervous

collapse like a red dwarf star’s collapse like the
red tip of Alice’s Marlboro collapsing into an ashtray amidst a
fistful of ocotillos when it was too late after all & Marlowe

feels like Ambrose Bierce in the midst of
Mexico D.F. in the midst of life & so forth & after all darling
the blue cars come to a stop at the stop sign

Jack Hayes
© 2010

A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets - 6/8

6/8

Marlowe at 1-something a m on a worknight’s
like a typewriter with a case of yellow fever
a ‘56 Chevy Bel Air rusting in
a humongous ice rink

like a cigarette butt with hepatitis B a
rheumatic 2-slice toaster clogged with
poached eggs & who crammed the
poached eggs into the slot

In the dream Marlowe’d rather have for breakfast
he tells Charlotte all the relevant stuff
like a wedding band made of lips

like a peach crate come down with textbook melancholia
& Spring is springing like nothing off a trampoline
in a wood-paneled rec room


Jack Hayes
© 2010

Heaven #3

Hushed as a fishtank amongst the cock-eyed stars

* * *

The stars aren’t flowing downstream they’re static

* * *

Eating tortellini with pesto & just the proper shower of black pepper &
slices of Granny Smith apple

* * *

I suppose the desert’s just another big sky-blue American car you can sleep in

* * *

The gray sky kind of cracking at 5:00 a.m.

* * *

A humungous iceskating palace crammed to the rafters w/rusted
        Chevies
The windows don’t open & it’s raining

* * *

The stars hung to dry over Mission Dolores, probably
sad themselves; we were having a perfectly sober chat about
                                                                                        domestic life

* * *

Feeling categorically empty at the bottom of the well
surrounded by tarnished pennies

* * *

The mailman was extremely, one might say perilously, late that day

* * *

Somewhere it’s midnight in an peach orchard where Max is
strumming a mandolin in lieu of gathering fruit

* * *

Cat’s-eye shades that yearn to be butterflies. A yen for gothic literature.

* * *

A teacup filled w/evil conundrums & blue eye shadow. A cigarette holder that doubles as a letter opener. The mailman delivers.

* * *

A mirage, a gasoline stain smearing rainbows across the pavement
until it shimmers into a dim glimmery swimming pool.

* * *

Dilapidated hurachi sandals slapping anapests

* * *

Fire trucks

* * *

There was such a profusion of golf balls orbiting the earth at that precise latitude. You could see them day or night, marking perfect parabolas, with a yen to become true satellites.

* * *

A peasoupgreen trolley car an easter bonnet an elmtree

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010

Sonnets for Lily Yukon - 6. Lost Highway

I wanted to write you a beautiful poem recalling the dozens of
sand dollars dying in the sand as the white unhealthy fog
        covered us—it
wasn't my fault Lily—it wasn’t a beach this
road inundated in two feet of snow two silhouettes walk down, &

one tries to steal a kiss;
So there were 2 people on that road’s shoulder & neither one of
        them wore my tweed coat—
which just about then seemed like a whole lot of mirrors woven
        together; &
I could hear you, Lily, saying, So this is outer space...

a theorem explaining the intersection of parallel lines; the
sputtering candle, a metal bookcase filled with regrets; & I
think I remember you from another Saturday, a
boat cut adrift, now sailing past the concrete
shore where my memories washed up
lonesome as shoes without a stove to thaw them

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010

Sonnets for Lily Yukon - 5. The Great Northern

This is your final notice the stars announced Clear out!
it's astounding what a desolation of phone poles &
        clotheslines—the
shirts & trousers hanging there frozen—lurched into the wind's
        mouth but
it wasn't wind, it was the Great White Whale itself plunging
        like the

Great Northern Freight Train pitched into infinity, like a house
        that can't stop moving;
& it wasn't a house, it was an abyss inside my pocket with my
        cigarettes; or else it was a frozen waste the train moans a
        formidable zero while traversing; but listen, there's no
hopelessness much emptier than this here boxcar;

The engineer doesn't know much anymore,
for instance whether his home's still underwater or which station
        comes next:
Tungsten, Old Crow, Antarus—some star that's the clue from 500
        crosswords I never
remember one Sunday to the next, which between horizons is
        10,000
miles; it's true you said:
if you miss the train I'm on you will know that I am gone

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010

Sonnets for Lily Yukon - 4. Landscape in Snowdome

A pair of tamaracks plus their naked, rawfingered shadows—
painfully configured hands & black snow generally, blacker snow
locally where the tamaracks' hands reach out at obtuse angles
        untouching—
all these black gloves abandoned gesturing from the drifts,
        all these

spectacles & their bent black rims—
& not much else can be seen for a month of Sundays inside this
        snowdome except the confetti
which looks like a lingerie catalog shredded then reincarnated as
        black snowflakes about the
size of eyelets;

the trees had their own ideas of anguish;
you knew how they felt about such things, Lily: you
felt like them watching a glove floating under the bridge &
        through the canal's fingers which are black ice; your body,
        standing over the bathtub
feeling absurd dripping icicles like a tamarack's needles; & I'm
        somewhere else,
the way the glove's wrung-out when the cops fish it out

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009

Sonnets for Lily Yukon - 3. Star Light, Star Bright

The stars you thought you could count on as
recently as Friday 11/21/91, Lily... well those stars have
        drowned like spooned
sugar dissolved in steamed milk:
another headache, & what are you left with but cold sweats &
        symptoms of

night blindness; & what's left to eat anyway?
Ice & snow, a few decimal points left over from Mr Infinity's
        breakfast, a
31st birthday cake crumbling with frostbite—its sugary roses,
        they're teeth breaking off biting down on an ice cube;

No one says it doesn't hurt like a mouthful of ice caps,
this grind; & what's left in the fridge?
2 beers, a map of the Northern Hemisphere's night sky in
        winter, a
paperback Leibniz wrapped in foil for freezing—not to mention
a motorized voice
(& it's echoing oddly staccato & to the tune of The Queen of
        Night's Aria), bellowing
Happy Birthday & Last Call

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009

Sonnets For Lily Yukon - 2. Last Chance Saloon

Say— nothing's sacred anymore in the world's northernmost
        saloon,
but there's a hypothermic bathtub & plenty of people drowning,
they're treeless islands in the wake of a heavenly cataclysm,
a paperback Moby Dick splatted against the wall;

& it might amaze you Lily to hear the meteorites splash breaking
        hearts across
unearthly breakers tossing around nude boats;
Oh the stars in these parts they have bad attitudes, the old man
        confides,
Mostly they grind their resentful magnetic teeth

& there are a few other things you don't know:
for instance, I wanted you so badly when I got tossed ashore from
        that liquid oxygen heaven
I puked ocean snow & called it stellules;
& tonight's reek is retch & piss & a men's room white & for-
saken linoleum floor—an ice rink where I'm lying cold-cocked,
        a smoked Sockeye on ice, & only
my fingertips are still smoking

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009

Sonnets For Lily Yukon - 1. True North

The arctic tundra's microcosmic diorama in this ashtray,
this heap of ossification & flakes piled glacial in snowbanks &
        drifts: the
caribou antlers, the ptarmigan shit, the walrus tusks, spent
        Winstons—
which aren't unidentifiable marrow bones the carrion birds
        picked clean, Lily—

Go ahead & look out the window:
Polaris is up there reflecting a tangle of wire & uncombed hair
        & irreconcilable fractions:
the square root of dead silence—
which is negative one & this indoor blizzard: a snowdome aswirl
        with ashes

& I suppose before it's over you might ask how I managed to
        evolve as this
polar region that looks macrocosmically so much like a
        prospector's barroom—
a buffalo's savagely bovine eyes staring from the head hulking
        stuffed on
the wall remembering the ice age.
Just cut open my chest before you say goodnight that final
        Wednesday
before you step out into the infinite,
& you'll find this chunk of ice,
the pumps & springs it froze around.

Jack Hayes
© 1990-2009