his brain is full of bugs.
he just woke up one day
and there they were.
the doctors can't tell him how they got there.
"do you
uh
leave your window open at night?"
yes, he says, sometimes. but how'd they get - he points to his head - in here?
"do you
uh
leave your skull open at night?"
he thinks about it.
I don't know, he says.
"how do you not know?"
in an X-ray of his brain,
they find flies, roaches
wasps, beetles
daddy long legs
and even
a praying mantis or two,
among other things.
one of the nurses
vomits all over her scrubs.
they give him meds for pain,
and he tells them that really it's more like an itch than a pain
but gets a prescription anyway
‘*** the doctors won't sleep that night
if they don’t do something.

when he tells his mother the news she is shocked,
tells him
that his father had bugs in his lips
that stung when they touched hers
and his father's father's fat fingers
were so fat only because
of all the butterflies.
"all the men in our family,
all of ‘em,
but when you hit 22 and I'd never heard
a single chirp of crickets from you
I was hoping."
she gives him a banana before he goes
*** he says he's hungry
from all the blood loss.

he soon gets his first serious girlfriend,
not the kind
he never calls,
not the kind
he tunes out
when she talks,
but the kind that tells him:
"I am so damaged I can barely love,"
and he stays.
he is the kind of boyfriend that,
when his ticks tick her off, and he says:
I cannot think
long enough to fix this,
because of the buzzing
of bees in my brain,
she will leave
without much hesitation,
because
who wants to sleep
next to a man and his mosquitos?