Growing Up Unhappy in Sweet Home

We began like this picture in the album
smiling blankly into possibilities:
green hills and a mist beyond,
the plausible world.

One by one, rivers dried in the mind
our ears sprouted dried grass
shoulders slumped forward like 
mountains giving in to a wind.

Still we smiled in the pictures
but no one believed us.
Inured to compressed landscapes,
they could see the dry grass

They could see the sky in our skull
neatly contained like a hanky in a drawer.
The world pressed and put away

Grass giving way to nettles
only enough room, only enough room now
for the rodent, the little rodent who gnaws
in the heart.