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ok, this is probably bad, because I don't really have her permission and she's unpublished and I only sent a message or two to this woman, but what the **** I'll post it anyway. one of the mods can take it down if she comes across it and objects.
This is by a very good poet (I think anyway) called Rachel Lindley
The Freak Show Speaks Of Her Unbalanced Head
It's my eyes that keep the crowd here, make their breath
stutter and spines lean forward in their seats.
When the light catches the first surface of my skull,
the audience isn't shocked. After all, it's truth
in advertising: they find the vast expanse
of brow, the brace propped upon my shoulders
to stop this bony fruit from snapping off its stalk.
That's part of the thrill: whether my head
will kill me. Cheap parlour tricks don't earn wages
or respect. You can stop in any rat-bit town and find
some freak hidden in a cellar or filling gas,
extra fingers, missing eyes, even another head
melded to its brother and towing two dicks around.
That's it: they think it's a trick, and me some grifter
who wears a pumpkin on my neck for kicks.
Then my eyes will shift. I'll fix my stare and focus
until they wet themselves. They learn I'm here
inside, a mind so massive it spans the world and fills
their own. They know that when my pupils constrict,
I can see their puny heads wallowing in the laps
of their lovers, the son whose battered skin they use
to beat away frustration, how they left their mother
almost dead and begging in the hands of strangers, the way
they watched their waitress as she bent down her head
and breasts to pour coffee before they stalked and pinned her
like a leg-pulled bug, their broken ribs and spirit gripped
in their husbands' arms, the afternoon they surrendered
and shoved their eager hands down Bobby's pants
in the playground. They stay because I save them
from themselves, keep their horrors in this sibyl skull,
and still let them look away from me and go.
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