Head

The head, I keep
in a pearwood coffin;
a little box with brass
handles, the size
of a builder's lunch-tin.

I open the door
during quiet
lulls at dinner parties,
prodding the oystery eyeballs
with a dirty fingernail,
and sometimes, when I am abroad
and I run out of money,
I stand on street corners,
pinching and peeling back
the top and lower lips,
exposing purple gums
and the brown caves
of rotten molars.

Some nights, it screams;
mostly when there is rain
or the wind is blowing from the east.
Words twist from a riptide of anguished bellows:
'Sorry,' and once, 'Help me.'
The box rattles with pique,
pounds with muffled imprecations.

Sometimes, I think it is screaming
for its fingers. They writhe like hooked ragworms
on a row of ten nails.