15. parsnip in her narrow beak

All by instinct ruled










Somebody wanted to kill him during his sleep

He had parried the blow with the hot brick

He had said to his wife

–One in your family tried last night to blow me with a whack out of the map

By instinct alone I grabbed the hot brick and smashed him

First before he fled.



Or she fled – she said.



–Anyway he must be sporting a nasty bruise

By now on the head

Or the face or the shoulder you know

Please be so kind as to in a discreet manner

Ascertain then who might it be.



–You are too friendly with the woman folk of the household

Commenting too favorably on the color of their dresses

And insinuating how healthy and appetizing their bodies look

The man folk don’t see it with such leniency as you’d hope for

And then there are the jealous hags

They feel spurned and affronted if the praise coming their way

Is deemed to be somewhat of less import than the one their rivals get

Or there are those that reckon that you are coming on too strong

Too aggressively...



–Me? On the contrary no way

Unfailingly too gentle

For instance can never approach the heteroclite spread

Or the blackening pile

Of any suddenly offered bargain

Never dare or care to push away the eager strangers

Vying to get a piece of the shitty loot

Truth is their touch alone repels me excruciatingly...



Soon the abode was in turmoil

His clothes were always wet

His cushions and his bed always wet

His pillows teemed with untamed oblique quirks

Burned films of horrors past

Soot swerved about from new prickly tiny craters

On ceilings and walls

Enigmatic sounds of fetters heavily drawn

Along narrow passages he surely heard

Filtered through the partitions that grew like mushrooms overnight

Lewd anchorites burgeoned from erst homely nooks

They frowned defiance upon the foreigner

He was heckled as any defective too ugly neophyte would...



He screwed up his courage and readied his suitcases

And started his journey at a break-neck pace

Endless vaults and new alleys appeared in the building

New crannies new stands new shops...



A vertigo was his that blatantly unsettled his wits

His reign he was relinquishing bit by bit

He was a pharaoh doomed

He had embarked in that druid business and now he was alone

His acolytes flagging

His vestals and nymphs swooning hither and thither

The unholy mirth of the enemy closing in...



He scratched and growled

Rent were the slimy curtains

Scruffily sighed the imps

Whoever dares impinge into our realm

They whistled

Anyone who crosses the jinxed causeway in deadly earnest

The lost soul that strode over the unquelled worms of our corpses...



And so on.


He was worn off

In the throes of despair when he found the door

To heavenly outside.



He fell agroof over the flagstones.



Flabby scared on his soiled duff

No longer personable and smooth

He had been just zapped

By the clammy law.



The residual chaos of himself bemoans

Almost instinctively the unfairness of his luck.



His wife

Still alive

Peers from a garret orifice

She seems to hold a parsnip in her bill.