There is a sound in my brain
when I keep my eyes closed, its pitch
getting higher and higher, so I
wake up, wishing I could get it
out like a magician that pulls
a thread out of his grinning mouth
with shining needles strung on neatly.

I used to whistle beautiful songs,
Modugno’s, Endrigo’s, but I cannot
do that any more. Only a hissing sound
comes out, the kind my grandfather
would make when he got back home
from his throat cancer operation.
Sometimes I would almost chuckle
after he tried to tell me something,
those sszzzs and eeezs becoming shriller,
turning into a manic whistling kettle.

I am back in a hotel, in bed, having
scraped six months of dirt, watched
it being sucked by a tub gullet;
I aborted myself, but I cannot
fall asleep, after eighteen hours
of crawling, running, walking, flying,
because there’s no sound of shells,
machine guns, just a distant hum
of electric wires. Silence has become
my torturous clang, my passing bell.

In another world after, where cancer
does not come from stress, fried
nerves as my mother used to say,
or the shortcircuited mind, so I
often thought when young it was
a form of madness, but from the walls,
cigarettes (grandfather never smoked),
chemicals claiming innocence
on food packages, I hear the tone color
of the sun flare, cutting my breath,
making me see my head explode
like a watermelon shot by a sniper
at the market place, its watery
pulp landing on my faded shirt,
as if a painter splashed his canvas red,
while I, my eyes blinded by screams,
tried rabidly to pluck off black pits
suddenly turned frantic shellacked ticks.

Sound waves eating my nerve fibers
in the pons, making my head bob,
that of a rag doll, as I press it against
the pillow, pulling the unending invisible
suture out of my throat, the needles
twinkling, the intermittent cell current
that blares in my grandfather eyeballs.