Sponge Boy

He dreams whole continents of tires aflame, the velvet yes yes
of gas fumes when his mother finds him sniffing
the Suburban's tank like it's a dog in heat.   Only he can hear

the medicine cabinet, a piñata jangling Vicodin and Restoril,
decibels of cough syrup.  Fifteen years old & this need
marrowed in.  From choked pipes, the plumber roots out

empty amber bottles.  The second sister breaks
down, slips the full tattle, like a hotel bill, under her parents' door.
No use denying the vamperic fog, the eye drops and Tic-Tacs

wrapped in oddly scented sheets.   Outside, the family's hedges
grimace in the neighbors' headlights while the sneak
thieves mesmerized streets.   Next morning: everyone's lost

cab fare, and seven decapitated frog heads, like little Stalins,
line the driveways.   The devil's commandeered
that boy's gyroscope for sure.   If only he weren't

so jacked up, bent, so chemical.   Box him, send him away
to some brick margin.  Couldn't the prospect of a death
tour do anything or the rat-tat-tat of a shrink's excursion

in his sog brain?   O limbic skull, his mother prays,
O scatter cast.   Strain the savage from his cortex.   Let
the twisted thing drip clean from him, feral & steaming,

as from the slit throats of slaughtered calves.  

First Published in Poetry March 2005