(Fried Nerves:) Sounds.

   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 anymore. 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 eezs becoming shriller,
   turning into a manic whistling kettle.

   I am back in the 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 marketplace, its watery
   pulp landing on my faded shirt,
   as if a painter splashed his canvas red,
   while I, my ears 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 glares in my grandfather eyeballs.

Mario Susko is a witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia. He is the author of eighteen books of poems, the most recent being "Versus Exsul" (Yuganta Press, 1998). Another book of poetry, entitled "The Life After, "forthcoming (Yuganta Press, 2001).