ll tongues were grafted in places
where they could learn to deceive:
"Voices," he told the jury. "They made
me do it." And they believed him, sent
him to the asylum that was supposed
to end his corruption of flesh. But no
secrets could hide underneath the skin;
the backbone could not be battered forever.

Snow existed only in his imagination,
but it chilled just the same. The orderly
complained about the draft in his room;
nobody could find its source. Two days
later, he ate the heart of another patient,
because there was nothing left which he
could bleed to dry. On the walls, he smeared
his self-portrait done by bloody fingertips.

He called his room a bone garden--where
a compass point dangled to his will. "You should
have killed me earlier," he smiled, "while you
still could." The shackles held him for a while;
his cell was empty the next morning, the lock intact.
Every Sunday, he brought an offering to the mental
hospital's director, put it under the brass plaque:
a handful of seeds, fingers, grass, eyes, love.