Mother’s explosive shouts, 

Wicked bomb-bursts, play

On loop from my loudspeakers. 

Fuming anger erupts, flaming 

Forests and scorching greenfinches

Like sixties Vietnamese hellfire.

Dark ash billows upward, 

Greys skies. Black-hearted

Rhetoric’s spat like gunfire. 

She taught, I learned

To make poetry of cruelty, 

Sing cunning tunes, shake homes 

With enraged, volcanic rumbles, leave halls

Reverberating with furious echoes,

Ancestral echoes. I tremble at my father’s fears,

Detour from foreboding routes on the same side-streets, 

Unhinge my mind in the dark and feel anxious tremors 

Rising at the same giant thoughts. Dread-wallowing,

Prayer-whispering, I look to our lineal god. My sister’s 

Cries haunt, ghosts, shame-apparitions 

Slipping out of my mind’s dark, 

Deep crevices, each’s ghastly wails 

Echoes of her sobs, guilt sirens, inherited sirens.

A cranial PA system’s resounding shouting aches

A wad of brain matter, its cortical folds throbbing

Until fuses stay unlit, detonators untouched--

Until greenfinches fly unscorched

Over mouths of ancestral magma pits

And soar freely over a flameless,

Deciduous sea of lush-leaved tree crowns;

Until giant thoughts topple

Over, Goliath-esque, and wailing sirens

Fade into love's oblivion.