My head is beaten like a sunflower,
bowed and haggard, brown petals hanging
like loose, carnivorous teeth, my face
a pale mosaic of shell-ends.

It wasn't the sun that did this, I tell myself,
whose radiation feeds each mouth, root, and field,
whose random electromagnetic signals
form a proper background noise
as in a waterfall
and contain no pointed data.

It must be satellites and cell phones
that leave these trails in my cloud chamber.
Does anything stop neutrinos?
At some basal level, relying upon
the sodium-potassium pump,
isn't my brain affected?

Schizophrenics have always believed
monolithic transmitters
spoke to receivers in their heads,
but I never gave their stories credence.
Yet I feel bombarded, beaten down
like the sagging sunflower by the sun,
awaiting the arrival of birds
to pick my cortex clean.

The brain floats in water
like the great turtle upon which the world was built,
but water and bone casing are not enough
to shield me from the swarm of artificial signals.
Who can prove to me that I am not, in part,
a pawn of hieroglyphics carved upon
my tiniest neuron like a microchip?