(Fried Nerves:) Sounds.

• Author: Susko, Mario
• Position: Poem

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...