FOUR POEMS
BY JONATHAN HAYES










At the Henry Darger Exhibit

Across the street from Lincoln Center
in the American Folk Art Museum

we gaze at his gigantic paper scrolls
of little butterfly girls with penises

– battalions of these awesome creatures.

Colorfully mixing violence and sex,
and never showing his work to anyone.

Some things we keep to ourselves.

+ + + + +

Circuit

Time

is black –

an hour

when all

is visible,

like a poem.

+ + + + +

The Distinguished Visiting Professor

dons himself in deep and dark black threads,

having left one school for sexual harassment, now

coming into the classroom with a poor boy sandwich

– an intellectual gangster in the hallway,

with weapons of mass destruction
in the spring of his

step.

+ + + + +

After several wet salmon seasons in Alaska while working in a cannery, and hoboing along the Columbia River of Washington, until joining fruit tramps and migrant workers in the red delicious apple orchard, and then driving a John Deere tractor before sunrise on slippery-dewed grass of agrarian reform, the factotum ceased. Now a barnacle-covered hermit crab scurrying from class to sea lettuce in the tide pool of San Francisco State University, by the not-always peaceful Pacific littoral.


Author bio:

Jonathan Hayes lives in San Francisco, California. He has taught poetry at 826 Valencia – a writing center for children – located in the Mission District of the City.