Another Legend Without A Red Convertible In It

There was something like snow I think the sky spit
out it could have been postage stamps steamed off envelopes
it could have been candy kiss wrappers
too bad it wasn't Though someone says
Alcoholics Anonymous it's No Exit's sentences reflected in a gin
gimlet's remains make Victor's head swim like that
but it could have been
frosted artificial fingernails Nuncle Artie'
d like to gnaw he feels toxic caustic metastatic
as if he were lost in deep space nebulae above
Las Vegas As for the sky
it could have been diet pills it could have been the fizz
's 1000 fisheyes as if this were just another evening
Dixie spent drifting through the bathtub speedread-
ing Schopenhauer & the Personals & bubbles that could
        have been
snowdomes if they weren't soapsuds if they weren't thought
balloons there was something inside them if it wasn't plastic
roses it was homunculi chirping snatches of
Blue Velvet & asinine Schubert lieder
& Judy Garland's mouth was there someplace a taste of
eucalyptus coughdrops & butibarbitol melting under her
tongue don't ask me why she does that those bubbles
        exploded off
the Rum & Coke Dixie sipped washing them down there
        were 250
miles left to travel through the known world including
all the horrors and hoo-rahs of Utah the
Great Salt Desert's white skin's a car crash waiting
for Jayne Mansfield to happen it had that same sense of tragic
preposterous happenstance as The National Enquirer & was
as flat Let's go mumbled Victor like the reincarnated
Jean-Paul Belmando he felt like just then & in general
as hooked on Lucky Strikes too Back to the sky
it could have been nickels the one-armed bandit
coughed up the sun at the vanishing point of Winnemucca's
main drag seemed no more no less blonde rising that
        morning than
Miranda her hair could have passed for Pernod merging with smoke
or some equally poetic vapor she was someone Nuncle Artie
        wanted desperately to
drink there were never any other tomorrows he could walk in on
there were checkered tablecloths & horoscopes
& copulating ice cubes whatever that
meant She tells him Get a life
that moment she felt she could understand Elsa Lanchester's
dilemma everything's alive including herself
everything began with an F
as in Felix Culpa who's staggered clear from
the innards of a Holiday Inn sign in Needles the one
Victor & Dixie'd eaten Coconut
Cream Pie scribbled exquisite cadavers on napkins drunk Coc-
a Cola smoked dope in the parking lot at They were looking for
junk supposedly stashed in the bronze
Impala's glove compartment turgid as Bangkok & looked for
spaceships zooming westward like postcards through the
pink cellophane sunset stretched above the Kingman MacDonald's
Dixie chewing Bazooka
Joe Bubblegum read aloud The Poetics of Space & Dear Abby
        looking
for answers no one knew the questions
to the news-
print's Baskerville typeface was something else the sky spit
out another tragedy on the rose-pink
horizon another mov-
ie Nuncle Artie's masticating phone numbers during like
popcorn actually he's choking on raw
stockings this is the way the world ends he quotes he didn't
        look
anymore like TS Eliot sporting a Stetson than
any other compulsive masturbator he keeps his false
teeth his ballerinas his fugitive numerals in the water-
spotted glass on the dresser steeping in Polident his hands
are Raggedy Ann dolls his body's a doubleknit
suit hung-up undrycleaned in the Oldsmobile's
backseat window viewed in passing like a late night TV
        commercial
the sort the frolicking goddesses of banana splits
whisper true love throughout he doesn'
t think Hegelian suicide in so many words it's
a fact of life like scads of pink paper parasols scattered
across the polyurethane bar that thinks it's a mirror
of course there's not much hope for
Nuncle Artie in any purple kimono sky good-bye
I can't say I knew him that well everybody'
s alone in this world & so forth Victor for instance whose
        favorite
words are laughing bones fedora dope & void he does-
n't look like Robert Frost he feels like him sometimes
        meantime
the lounge's Bride of Frankenstein Motorola's blue
capillaries rippled the picture
tube's screen it was someone's face Dixie
couldn't place though she wants to kiss it if it wasn't
Proust it could have been any drag queen crooning
Over the Rainbow which gives her the strength to live
the next five minutes She feels like a Vivaldi violin
concerto about as labile
like a string of bubble lights
love's everywhere then for a millisecond it
reminds her she once saw Carmen Miranda's
plastic grapes plastic apples plastic
apricots spilling hopeful though bruised through Lodi's clear
        blue sky
the taste of amyl nitrate
urgent she thought on her palate that was last August
so many temblors ago
hello it's Felix Culpa reduced after
25 hours of doubling down at the Blackjack
table to Patsy Cline's bolo tie a seashell a tarnished angel
hood ornament the sheet music to Roy Orbison's
It's Over & a state map placemat He'll never plant
a wet one on Miranda like a
fallen star floating on top of a cocktail
& as for the sky it could have been
snow swirling out from one of any number of luminous
TV's descending incandescent just then through spheres
of fire above Nevada Victor thinks
you can look for love in all the wrong places for instance the
lobby amongst the smoldering carnations ditched in the sand
ashtray Miranda's
exasperated with this poem already she tells me point-blank
she expected No Exit except in a
Motel 6 in Tucumcari one of those Hope-Crosby Road
extravaganzas gone wrong
like everything else she's been put together
Tyrone Power's soul in a zaftig Clara
Bow body the Katzenjammer
Kids on the loose in her head that's where they vanished
to from the contemporary desolation of the Sun-
day comics page the sky spits
out in the midst of a jazz
radio station's confusion having taken a wrong turn off I-
80 west of Provo in this snow-
storm Some people are rushing east as if their veins ran
crystal meth & memories of the good old days when Albrecht
        Dürer
painted himself as Christ ev-
erybody's Christ
nowadays this is a problem while
the sky spits out Jean-Paul Sartre's spectacles Miranda's
vodka & orange juice manifesto Felix Culpa's genuine Navaho
barbed wire necktie & bad luck a ticket parts
unknown the sky for instance Victor & Dixie wish
they could move there like all the other test tube radioactive
effervescent infants hooked on
Tosca & all-purpose cleaners what
do I care I'm a celestial road map no one folded they've got
miles to go before they sleep & miles to go before they sleep


Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010

La Giaconda and The Shadow

1

Rag wings stitched with an F flat stolen from Ma Rainey's throat:
        in her throat it'd gotten by on desire, it'd lived
        a poppy's meet me at the Casbah life;

but in the time before time was they were happier maybe, a
        black tux, an ivory satin gown (that sort of smile
        that's an unrelenting lunule glaring amongst the
        crystal candlesticks, that sort of rigorous mouth like a
        black tie, Mary Egypt remembers these things
        inhabiting movies) until a diamond stylus inured to
        tunes wounding the body sewed their tatters to the
        scapular muscles;

but once patched together they were disreputable as that
        poppy, as problematically smoky, & when they
        shuddered it was because they remembered fezzes
        congesting the speakeasies, Stutz Bearcats,
        Humphrey Bogart, someone whispering huskily take
        a message to Garcia, & minarets there in the menstrual
        twilight announcing God's absence through the
        palms;

& this photograph seemed as fraught with inside dope as the
        orange Ford taxi cab that just now sloughs toward
        Mary Egypt who's loitering dissonantly on the corner
        blowing soap bubbles;

for lack of kisses she blows them between the needle-like
        bodies of fish that purl past threading & knotting
        through her wings C sharps, typewriter ribbons,
        attenuated spit like strings of pinprick white lights
        snarled in the cycadeoids;

(Johnny had observed the phenomenon often enough in that
        Jurassic edifice where he slumped in the most
        visceral red chair while he thought about gulping
        lagers amongst humongous fern fronds;

(& they called that joint the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it
        hadn't stopped raining there for over 10,000 years—
        however they never lacked for insects there, the
        insects showing traits of gigantism & a taste for
        Stravinsky's most violent strains, they were violins
        pitched sharp as if whipped); then

the fish they get euphoric on her & Mary Egypt can't take it
        any more, these mouths gulping hunger, spewing
        bubbles, & the bubbles actually molten charm
        bracelets the fish disgorged— because it is almost
        that time;

& the taxi floats past taking on water & churns past water
        snakes where they thread through the scuttled
        dressmaker's dummy's wire pelvis & past these
        hirsute lilypads while it honks dahlias, Storyville
        Blues, & a sewing machine in ecstasy;

but mostly it sounds like the mynah bird cracking wise at the
        Greek's deli: above the bouzouki's vibrato it cracks
        aphorisms regarding the beautiful & the eternity of
        love, it sounds like the old guy cracking beer bottles
        with a pop & a rasp;

it's several weeks after midnight, in other words, almost
        that time, & Johnny lounges in the blue Tiparillo
        smoke— as if everyone's lips were evaporating— &
        he's dissolved a priori, he's gray eyes afloat between
        the brim of a brown fedora & the collar of a
        trenchcoat;

& the trenchcoat slumps frazzled & wrinkled & without
        ethics, without honor, without a thought for the wide
        world's spasmodic splendor;

the world wasn't wide but deep;

& here comes the taxi to take Mary Egypt out...

2

& o yes it takes her out because the wings don't work;

& just then the town seemed more than ever like a Mesozoic
        morass, its restaurants all reeking catfish, & decaying
        Da Vinci landscapes loomed— it was frightening
        how they loomed! you could hear the cabbie remark
        on the rocks, how they looked like ears & there Mary
        Egypt sits timeless amongst the rocks & looking for a
        kiss;

& Johnny feels like an aficionado gulping espresso from a
        dirty cup— as if he actually had a face, not
        something ersatz sutured;

how many stitches had he taken? how many chances had he
        missed? how many windows had his fist shattered
        allowing the shadows to rush in, back then when
        movies first created night— & he liked to hiss these
        scars on my back are Trilobites okay they needed
        someplace to sleep it off;

he didn't mean much by it, just ossification & night terrors
        like this 3-D screen distending, its wings thrashing
        faces watery, wings like an extinct bird's— which is
        mostly what he feels like paying the tab with a fin—
        & like venetian blinds creaking exhausted from
        witnessing sheer lust that often amongst the ashtrays
        inside the reptilian buildings— until his whole
        existence reeked gingkoes— then he arrives;

how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul
        with all its maladies has passed? the cabbie asks, though not
        in those words exactly, he actually says So do you like
        baseball or Stormy Weather, the latter phrased in a
        different key & as a question, the way it'd sound
        through a pawnshop trumpet;

& Mary Egypt thinks I've got the answer: I am rag wings (the
        fabric was 60% a piano's black keys melted down, it
        was 40% a movie poster for Casablanca scissored into
        a collage;

& they called that jazz;

& Mary Egypt arrives;

3

& this moviehouse half-sunk in the swamp: it was a castle a
        tractor hauled in from the late show's Carpathian
        tor— it looked that much like a pyorrhetic mouth, it
        looked that much like a face turned to stone from
        staring at sleep's face— which Johnny knows
        something about, as he knows something about what
        evil lurks in the hearts of men;

where there is water everywhere usually, or bruised black
        motor oil, & a lightbulb dripping hopeless water
        which somehow reminds Johnny of a cock getting
        wrung-out semi-tumescent in an Exxon station's john
        in the absence of beautiful gorgons' mouths;

they were such embittered tidal pools! what did they care
        about the Jersey Turnpike's stupendous
        petrochemical tanks on stilts or the fishscales
        showering everywhere, & Mary walking in asked
        Who turned out the lights?

because it seemed more or less insubstantial to her, this
        darkness complicated with pupae & recluse spiders
        & the echoes of a Django Reinhardt improvisation
        trembling near the soda fountain;

not to mention the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
        mysticism of the middle ages with its spiritual
        ambition & imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan
        world & so forth;

not to mention Johnny envisioning silver light & silhouettes
        trying to break free of it— he knows how they feel,
        one supposes, because he knows more about
        vanishing & suffering & suffering & vanishing &
        crawling amongst the bivalves & starfish & salt water
        taffy wrappers, crawling through water which seems
        strangely dead as well as infiltrated with shadows &
        flashes;

it went something like that;

because the movie screen looked like it had a lot on its almost
        inert mind besides inertia, besides this mayfly hatch
        the projector aimed at, it was a bus mired past the
        hubcaps in quicksand & who knew if anything could
        ever move again?

The Shadow knows...

4

Nothingness;

& Johnny thought I've got it made— as if the Spanish moss
        dangling like so many shrunken heads could give a
        damn &

the theater yacked bacteria & electrodes & appendages with a
        life of their own: for example thighs, for example ring
        fingers— meanwhile

Mary Egypt rose so strangely beside the waters—

as if this were the instant she reached inside herself;

as if this were the instant the movie started to roll out the
        silence without any cigarettes, without any
        matchbooks;

which isn't silence at all but a phone off the hook spewing
        insects;

actually it was pterodactyls & a scream shorn from the body:
        for all the world it sounded like Fay Wray's except it
        shimmered with tarantellas & luna moths

& they called that jazz

which was the silence Johnny heard like a saxophone's
        exhaust pipe— it sounded like hearts convulsing in
        surgically-opened chests— meanwhile

he slumped amongst the theater's emphysemic lungs— they
        gurgled: hours hours hours ensemble like an
        aquarium— it only sounded like horror of horrors;

they had their vestigial gills now they wanted wings— their
        talons were cooked lobster claws grappling with
        whatever floated past belly-up;

because they lived off hearts & not much else except off
        various Jack Teagarden riffs & off unmentionables;

& what could you do with these old fuckers? the next thing
        you know they're waterbugs the hotel's sink spit up
        as it gasped: loss loss loss— it only sounded
        sometimes like Eros;

& whatever else Mary Egypt couldn't get off her mind from
        the wax museum— for instance, dolls' knuckles
        glued to the backs of their hands as if they gnawed
        blue veins— & all she can think is one last kiss

5

because a kiss is just a kiss, despite the fact someone's mouth
        bursts into Japanese Beetles, bowties, & carbonation
        broadcasting My Funny Valentine through yellow
        candlelight amongst the tuxes & gowns, & the
        candles are after all poppies with immemorial
        recollections;

once upon a time, before time was, they were perhaps
        happier, but there's no guarantee of that amongst the
        melting blues platters & the belemnites squirting ink
        until the entire theater's blotto;

so they step outside into this effusion of music like Green
        Dolphin Street down which taxis drift through a
        detritus of photographs, crumpled cigarette packs
        like someone's notion of crushed gardenias & a
        detective novel dredged from the swamp dripping
        volvox, oscillatoria, chlorella, & hyacinths, & the
        flukes & leeches are inching between the pages;


which summarizes the movie's plot— so who can blame her
        if her eyelids are a little weary? because all this has
        been to her but as the sound of lyres & flutes & an
        entire bandstand jammed with sewing machines
        whining mechanical yens & a theater full of caged
        mynah birds cawing beauty wrought out from within
        upon the flesh;

but Mary Egypt remains unflappable;

but she is thinking about veils, how they spread out across all
        space for instance like cobwebs or the negative image
        of a jazz platter bodiless hands push under the Singer
        Stitch-o-matic's needle & all they wanted to be were
        wings composed from memories of Ingrid Bergman
        beside a piano;

though the platters were in fact melting, black vinyl melting
        into shadows which were not her wings, were
        distended dismembered bodies like Johnny's which
        is everywhere & nowhere— along the walls, across
        the sidewalk, some residue seeping along the
        theater's floor until you can't help but think about
        lips dribbling musical notes which are really black
        dahlias he wants to stitch into his trenchcoat— as if
        that could help;

as if that could change the fact that the insects are crawling
        for the most part in a dark room amongst the sounds
        of plumbing & gulping & the screams of an
        archaeopteryx ripping up the curtains— there where
        he marks time while itching for some Duke Ellington
        cross-hands passenger train solo to shanghai him out
        of this lagoon—

where the one is becoming the many &

his face, like something he's known for far too long— for
        instance, fossil Paleozoic dragonflies with 30-inch
        wingspans enmeshed in fossil cobwebs— when this
        unravels;

So what if his face is a spider web thought Mary Egypt, & her
        hand crept off by itself to look for big bloody lips
        which were not his;

(a diamond stylus hemming the grooves

(retrograde into Ma Rainey's throat

at which point she's flying.


Jack Hayes
© 1990-2010

Sam Peckinpaugh Mexican Xmas

It was 1 one of those border joints gets you feeling you must be a
        1 car collision accordioned
smack at the intersection of an upright
piano a taxidermized swordfish & a rack of pool balls exploding
like a basket of rotten fruit
1 of those joints that’s crawling with axolotls &
lobotomized sombreros
& a dozen Hummels in need of a lithium script
Rita looked irrationally lovely too
like a pair of cat’s eye sunglasses worn lopsided
by a bruised columbine sprouting in a junkyard
I don’t doubt she had her troubles existence
determinism & eyelids held open with
needles in the orange a.m. It’d get here
someday she looked sad as a
napkin pink lipstick’s smeared across & under that anti-freeze
        green
& conjunctivitis pink bird-of-paradise piñata strung up on a
        rope
I had a few things on my mind
& they all had names
Gasoline Alley & Rosie & Rosie’s dejected
sunglasses burning chemical
blue in Gasoline Alley xmas eve about
39 hundred miles past
you can’t forget Rosie that 5 foot 9 redheaded mourning dove
she said time to time she felt like a Minnie Mouse watch with
        both hands
reaching toward the sky Christ
what a honeymoon that provocative & especially toxic rendition
        of Bach’s Toccata &
Fugue in D Minor giving the Greyhound
bus the shakes Christ it was really a washed-up conchshell
in the midst of West Texas & just about now
Jimmy was stumbling drunk & he looked just like
a dimestore knickknack burro with human
risus sardonicus teeth a brutal paintbrush slapped
onto its kisser He tells me I’m better off Christ
it was 1 one of those joints makes you feel you’ve got to be lost
inside a Bosch triptych the joint was swarming with
refugees from the Personals’
Wild Side section
Decked-out xmas trees’ chasing lights that were shuddering
        hypodermics
loose in a fit of El Niño shakes no amount of
nembutal or gift-wrapped
baby dolls was going to
fix amphibious leather jackets with big amphetamine ideas
& a taste for Monarch butterflies impaled on a hatpin &
a few stragglers from Twilight Zone
        reruns whose hearts were parrot
hearts who sported Panama hats & had this nasty habit of
        chewing cuticles at the frenzied climax of
reveries about Plan 9 From Outer Space
Made me wonder what’s more lonesome
a campfire in Death Valley
or Warren Oates’ ghost which is mostly hungry sunglasses & teeth
or Rosie’s gasoline-burning blue eyes burning irrelevant
love letters up like so much neon
alphabet soup Christ I was packing an imperial quart of Colt 45
        in my once festive guts where it waltzed with
smoke from 17 Nuestra Señora novena candles that reeked like
        stale
Chesterfields inhaled in the drizzle It was
1 of those past life experiences
Rosie singing Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire in the key of
Nothing flat That’s when I’d known it was just about done for
All I was seeing were mangled brown
monterey pines still trimmed with
candy canes somebody’s false choppers embedded between the
swirls & them ditched on the curb on xmas 11-something pm & I
        wasn’t singing
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire I was
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire
Did I tell you Rita looked inappropriately lovely
like a phonebooth sporting a broken heart tattoo Christ
she was no help
I felt like a 1-way ticket to Oaxaca
only took me far as Juárez & there wasn’t much in my suitcase
        anyway
a Three Musketeer’s bar some garbled memories of mariachi
        ballads all the
dark matter strewn thru the cosmos between here &
Oklahoma & of course the rearranged faces of all Rosie’s
ex & future lovers & Jimmy was drunk as a fold-out scenic
        postcard as an
eyeless fish as Ernest’s Borgnine’s
teeth when he guffaws about Nearer My God To Thee violence in
an Old Mexico that doesn’t exist there was going to be a sunrise
        but who could say when there weren’t any
angels at least not sober 1s There was Santa Claus though blind
        drunk & baring
pharmaceutical dexedrine teeth snickering
pink & green feathers & Tammy Wynette crooning
D-I-V-O-R-C-E on a country station transmitting
radio waves bounced off the Diá De Los Muertos
sugar skull that passed for a moon in those parts but
there was no Rosie except transformed to a freight train hooting
I’ll Be Home For Xmas as its highballed a zoo of exotic birds north
        up the coast Christ
She’ll reach the North Pole someday &
I felt like an upright piano with ornery lungs & 1
dud G that stuck coughing up
Stranger in Paradise in the key of Fuck Off Minor Christ
stuff lay broken all over
falling stars like so many incisors & molars a left
uppercut knocked helter skelter & Rita’s
unbearably lovely flat affect It could be a face on a matchbook
smoldering in a black plastic ashtray
that’s cracked leaking black black millipedes with a
more than 1 beer thirst for toxic
polyurethane smoke
It’s a shame they got squashed like that afterwards Jimmy’s
        knuckles cracked
like an upright piano with a decrepit ticker stuttering
Blue Xmas the first few bars burning blue streaks every half
        note drenched in
gasohol touched off with stubbed Camel straights the butts
snapped at the blue print
& Santa’s smudged Foster Grants
cracked too reflected con-
cupiscently needless to say pretty faces pretty much like
Rosie’s foundering down in the bottom of his cracked beer glass
        Christ like so many
hearts like a broken-hearted bird-of-
paradise piñata a 34-oz Louisville Slugger swung level & eye
        on the
pill by Warren Oates’ ghost shattered nearly lyrically &
the way most things break apart in slo-motion

Jack Hayes © 1995-2009
This poem appeared previously in Chump