Mad laughing. The rope. 
Stumble and write down the glare, 
backwards, like butchers do. Is he 
French? Down the page again. God, 
patiently listening in the Quandary Room. 
Those things his eyes, his oysters 
parked beside him on the floor, asleep, 
and him hunched over the bloodied pieces. 
Those animals, they seem crazy and erratic, 
is it the coloured food? That old 
soothsayer fetish, you know sorcerers 
dote on the house pets. Brad's father's 
father, he was psychic, they carried him 
under the forest canopy to join the bears. 
Carolyn and Brad, they said - hmmm, I'm 
lost for a moment behind her blue jokes, 
where she took to young blokes. 
Poor Auntie Ellen, stuck on the train, 
a two-hundred-mile booze-up; she'd rather be 
among the cooled, the watery shoppers. 



The glass bells float above the insurance jingle chiming like that angel's
melody the blacks were crooning, and the breeze there banging the platinum tubes
plays a rhapsody. Around the thunderheads the rare gases flashed and ignited, as
the blight bit and the signs of business activity failed - now the clouds get
demolished, softly, and worse, his parents, their high-tech track on the radio
fizzing, then Mum was onto decorative lamps: one bigot's face at each window,
lit up. I can tell Brad's too fond of liquor. For a minute he smelled just like
a chicken - pungent - but he was a real man, the horror movie buff, and nothing
worried him; he had the dimwit dimple, he had deodorant with the "family scent".