The Madman’s Skull
They cut off the head of some unlucky madman
who, in a somnambulist’s tone, used to recite his monologues,
and they threw it in the garden where, in the sweltering hour,
he would speak to roses and red carnations,
before, in the asylum, from some unknown disease, he’d died,
then that mass of cells and phosphorus, transformed itself.
Shed the hair, and the muscle of his face,
birds pecked out his eyes,
and the sun made the skull into an oven, cooking
the head, from whence gruesome, fateful worms
emerged and from whence a thousand gold-leafed butterflies also.
Later, when the asylum’s gardener,
holding it between his calloused fingers, shook the skull,
strange sparks shone in hollow sockets
and the jaw bones rattled as if laughing.