Milly
Magazine
Chapple.
Six poems By Hayden Hyams
‘Interviewing is choosing which words to save.’
‘Save from what?’
‘The void.’
‘Which is what?’
‘A necessary place.’
‘It sounds dramatic.’
‘It can be.’
‘How do you know which words to save?’
My memory fails.
Te Araroa.
The Balrog reached the bridge.
The shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.
​
Pinpoints of ink,
Letters,
Words,
And phrases,
Were sucked into the belly-less dark.
​
Geoff Chapple stopped,
‘You cannot pass’, he said.
The orcs stood still and a silence fell.
‘I am a servant of the secret fire...
You cannot pass.’
Chappie.
Chappie, one of the police robots, is stolen by criminals who treat it like their own child. Withnew programming, it becomes the first robot with the ability to feel and think for itself.
​
The Void Is now a park,
Beautifully capped.
​
Just beautiful, what a job.
They did a really good job.
​
You need to see it,
All the beautiful people.
​
‘Behind every person, now alive, stands 30 ghosts.
That is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.’
True Blood. Toot Toot
Did you know most vampires do not learn the piano or another language, as you imagine they
might.
They watch every film ever made.
​
Did you know,
Despite popular belief, werewolves are not pack animals.
They are anxious,
And tend to run the other way.
History.
‘History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing
fields.’
-Yuval Noah Harari
I don’t usually acknowledge my lifts,
But that’s the whole poem.
E pluribus unum.
The Sun is hurtling at 14000 km per second around the centre of a galaxy that contains one
hundred billion bodies, plus luggage,
A lot of luggage.
Walking home today we passed a group of people chanting,
‘I will not be masked, tested, tracked or traced!’
The earth is hurtling at 30 kilometres per second through space,
Around a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with an internal convective motion that generates
a magnetic field via a dynamo process.
Covid.
Certificate of vaccination id.
Hayden Hyams is from Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, currently living in London. His poetry can be found in The Poetry Zealand Yearbook, Takahe, London Grip, The Friday Poem, Fast Fibres and Milly Magazine. He is working on his first collection of poetry.