A black stain slips into the mind, here comes a thought, a thought that obeys no order A drumming despair and a voice distinct but not separate intrudes into the centre of each emotion. The voice has sipped in my silence Spat it out. Violent. Pathetic. My topography of flimsy flesh is half-captured by the last few drops of evening. there is nothing that is secure everything is mutable Time nibbles gently at my fleshy seems, and my mother is brain-cradled in her despair. I hide beneath a landscape of variegated bed covers, and take tentative dark sips of stale air from my subterranean sanctum of rotten leaves and the corpses of peaches. The doctors materialise once more into the darkness of my self-constructed womb mumbling their grammarless chants. My mind wants to vomit. Their deep-organ tones are rich with inhuman terror.
DAVID HAY’s work has appeared or is forthcoming 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).
MAXIMUS 