The Brain
It’s single hub split like a coffee bean
two fists of squid fabric,
a canopy of cauliflower branches
a dense cap of squirming coral.
It’s aroma glows sulphur
like a box of matches doused in sunlight.
Lick it’s gunk and your tongue will hum
as though pressed to a battery.
This bouquet of gristle,
this fungus sprouted from the spine’s root
into the head’s hollow, is your casing.
As wires dream in sparks, so you
are just static bristling in the brain’s crevices,
a chemical paint by numbers
washed over the knuckles of it’s jigsaw,
every grain of you packed like salt
into the ball and socket of the synaptic gap,
all these words, what they mean,
just a network of glands
like railway signals turning on and off
along the wicker-work of skull pulp.
Mark Pajak was born on the Wirral. He is a graduate of LJMU and also the Liverpool Playhouse Young Writer’s Programme. His work has appeared in Askew, Myths of the Near Future, Smoke and Spilt Milk Magazines, among others.