Sound of My Head, The

On my birthday I advance in from hiding

in the cool sand under the house

where I've been talking to my friends, the lizards.

Pale sand caked upon switch-welts is my new put of ribs.

She says now I'm four, stop crying.

I taste somebody's piss like pennies

on my lemon-colored birthday cake

and I counterfeit not to know I'm their animal.

They weigh each feather in my head again,

set a certain quantity of alight, some adrift.

I want to make an outcry with a fish-hawk's voice

that's the same unmutilated as the sky tearing.

If I'm quiet as a cricket in a brush fire

they'll laugh at their little birthday joke

Or she'll break my face for talking crazy.

Maybe I was born crazy, gone fizzy in the head

like a melon left too drawn out in the sun.

That's what they say, doing those things that hurt

I think of the little toenails upon my dried rabbit's foot

and decide to cover up it in the morning.

When I try to vomit on my mother's deep-throat kiss

she says the brown bitter matter in my ears

is the turd of scorpions that nest in my head while I sleep

They sting my brain to make mad dreams

and if I wake them at night I'll die.

She shrieks I'm more stupid every day,

asks can I have feeling my brain shrinking?

Sometimes I stand not upon to one side,

shake my head, scared to hear a rattle.

SCOTT VERNER is the reviews editor for verse London.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2003

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