When The Ugly Fiends Of Hell Sally Forth (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

The Stage Manager nods and points and I’m off from the wings
I count my steps and struggle to breathe and can’t
It takes ages to reach the center of the stage and to step back
When I lift my eyes and squint
There’s but an abysmal space
As meaningless as a moonless and starless sky
I can neither see nor think
The whispers and coughing and restless shifting
And fretting of a disheartened invisible audience
I’m the spectacle and stand alone as a progeny of the human race
I stand alone as an architectonic marvel in skin and nerves
And capillaries and the miniscule ducts
Fold upon fold of membrane and tissue adjusted round the bones
Tucked and stitched and glued and sealed
Rolled up and strapped and knotted and bagged
It is a cumbersome creature advancing onto the stage
I represent to my invisible audience the spectacle
I’m to be the clue and meaning and reason and mirth
Panic assails me and my lungs fill to capacity
And it’s the throat and the voice next
The words?
What are the words?
Who am I becoming?
Who am I to be?
And through sense and sentiment
Rigid and blind with anticipation
Half-singing and half-snorting and all petulance
It’s a tentative and rough and undulating cadence
The actor has inferred and feels suitable for the Thomas Kyd text
The effort is maddening and partly absurd
It interposes itself between him and the chasm of darkness
Widening from the foot of the stage
Towards the back of the theatre
And all other life beyond the front doors and the streets
The actor knows the way and falls back on his tricks
Slurring through the speech
Coating and reinforcing Heronimo’s words
With shrill lilts and a tremor and a sweet sad randomness
The night sad secretary to my moans
With direful visions wake my vexed soul
And with the wounds of my distressful son
Solicit me for notice of his death
The ugly fiends do sally forth of hell
And frame my steps to unfrequented paths
And fear my heart with fierce inflamed thoughts
The cloudy day my discontents records
Early begins to register my dreams
And drive me forth to seek the murderer
Eyes life world heavens hell night and day
See search show send some man some mean that may


2

Like a spider I sense the tension on the thread
And follow it and having taken possession of it
Extract what nourishment I can from it
Sometimes less and sometimes more
And sometimes one waits in vain
For the sky and the sidewalks to change from bright to dark
The street traffic augments and dwindles
And people hasten up and down the avenues
Crossing streets and lingering outside restaurants
Lingering by doorways and subway station entrances
Lingering to chat and harangue and stare and keep silent
Lingering because some have nowhere to go
It’s the stress on the line the stress on the invisible thread
That summons me to the spot and alerts me
It has guided me to this evening and this stage and this play

3

The actor is to be arrested in his changing-room
A car and three men wait for him outside the theatre
And the theatre shall empty as it does after every show
And the unhurried patrons will set out for dinner
In restaurants nearby while others will go home satisfied
That the evening has turned out so splendidly
The night is mild and the sky is gone and moonless
The actor is beaten up and kicked and nothing is explained
He’s dragged out along a passageway
He’s brought out into the alley
Where the black car with the three men wait
The evening has turned out splendidly
And the night is mild and the sky is gone and moonless

4

The assassin belongs to the shadows because he’s a nobody
He’s got no name even when he’s recognized and identified
The assassin serves his masters well and is meticulous
About his business and takes pride in his accomplishments
The assassin is logical and looks upon his jobs
As the long minute arm of his watch shifting positions
At eleven thirty-six Saturday evening he strangles a woman
It’s an actor he’s to garrote Monday morning in a cell
Wednesday he is joining a twenty men team
To dispatch over fifty men and women
They’re to be shot and burnt and buried in a wood
Some of the women will be raped before they’re shot

© J.Noya 2006

Cataloguing Diffidence (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

What is a poem if not a scream in the night?
Way up a dark street there’s man clasping a knife
He drives it again and again into a woman’s belly
He loves and hates fiercely and disproportionately
He cannot abide knowing that she breathes and talks
He cannot abide knowing that she lives
That she has eyes and the rest of her for others

2

A poem is the story of a man beleaguered by misery
Fraught with the redolence of jealousy and fury
A man schemes and plots the end of things
He plots the end and consummation of life and death
He plots the living to be done in the interim
He’s got a bloated heart and swollen eyes and a parched mouth
A poem is a dead man reminiscing and grunting
It’s a dead man disapproving of and rejecting
The manner of his death and the ignominy behind it
When he was stabbed in a doorway holding a ring of keys

3

A poem is a box of photographs locked up in a desk drawer
A poem is a woman in a doorway smoking and waiting
It’s a woman expectant and alarmed and exultant in her desire
She pines for a the stranger who’ll pay to have her in the alley
A poem is an isolated garden where a British general
From the Napoleonic wars was exiled in death
He was buried and forgotten by everyone
But for the poetess who wrote him lugubrious verses in Gaelic
The poem was chiseled on dark marble by a monumental mason
It is a remorseful tribute to loneliness by a lonely woman
The poem sings of the bravery and indignities of war and death
And has retained the patina and queerness of time
The Gaelic poem continues to keep its vigil over the dead soldier
It blooms and writhes in the isolation of the garden
Alive with wisteria and roses and old bent trees
The walls enclosing the garden were once fortifications
With ramparts and gun emplacements
And massive granite turrets where guards kept watch
The former garrison retains the gloom of unknowable episodes
Of despondency and death and of the relentlessness of time
This garden is a poem to oddities and to the tenuous and beautiful
It’s a poem to untenable oaths and to opprobrium and to hatred
The Gaelic poem written two centuries ago
Isn’t all that different from the consuming love
Manifested sometime after eleven thirty last evening
In one killer’s knife and his victim’s bloody perforations


4

This is the poem of weeping and beseeching and mumbling
It’s a poem replete with accusations and provocations
It’s the poem of the priest’s benediction from the altar
It’s is the poem of the lonely man prostrated and weeping
And pleading unseen in a room with his hands clasped
In supplication to his god and minder at an hour of need
It’s the poem of a type of love one can’t show others
Because it’s a love to which words won’t cling
It’s a love there’s no one else to notice
And take comfort in
It’s the saddest and truest poem you’ll learn
The words you’ve given it are your own
And in as much as these words fail to convince you completely
These are the only words you’ve got
And the words you’ve elaborated and constructed your poem with
And to you alone these words ring specific and true
Cumbersome or not you say right and again yes because
For the present you’re done with cataloguing diffidence


© J.Noya 2006