I step leisurely toward surprises. I limit work to custom jobs inside a doll. I shake in my shoes when a cocktail develops. I’ve got to act tiny, with a network for dabbing at contracts to get rid of germs. My eyeball squeaks like a balloon.

Sleep, with its room key dangling from a yawn, arrives at my face with a writ for nonpayment of working features while persistent night opens to swallow a philter. I tweak loose the threshold. There’s ample space for a negative image but it’s quiet and uptight, like when a self-made reclining nude said fuck you to Picasso.

The best money catches nice immediate drugs. A bent cop draws back a leafy smell. I should see if my corkscrew has a biological use. Why was Mozart covered in thick fur? Does smoke have children? Which armpit toy is mostly glass? I smash through the picturesque, where the cows go sha-boom, to suck on a hatchet. Might go looking for the fish slice.

It’s what happens when a gunman creates a lipstick, it feels great in your hand then you lose it. Kurosawa’s a shrub, Hammett a rinsing glass. I film my teeth.

In Sweden once this guy jiggled shrimps in yoghurt, contracted leprosy and became a nun. His father had a silly name for welding struts to a can. Ice cubes in paraffin. The dishwasher crossbow. The bullet with increased leisure. I seem first to shoot and then exploit a photogenic smear.

I wake to a tiny church bell, bring it to my lips and say a blanket word. An orderly hoses a jigsaw. I bake a sponge. I take down a glossary of forms. I go mad before nature and am withdrawn at lunch. I teach death, using my own end to point to the mechanism while my keeper straddles the butt-piece. I plait thongs until they give a vague impression of belt. I sing the body leather.

Actual contact would make any scientist dirty up there, fidget with a bar of soap, turn a few cartwheels, borrow a vacuum cleaner, fetch some ether, make the dead speak, then get lost, return to invented childhood, become a dreamer, walk into Torquay, miss the gig, hear the grass grow, feel out of it, hide behind a lettuce, know all things, go back inside, climb the social ladder, dick an actor, cancel the milk, ring Charlie Korngold, mistake a lipless jug for a quasi-theatre, bleach a pair of jeans, help a jockey quit by using the last of the Vaseline, ask if ‘wabe’ is stone, hold a piece of it the wrong way less than six inches from a natural bowl with a stage. The plastic world won’t keep, desserts turn into stiff waves. A monster decorates the labyrinth. Two deck chairs full of rock plants beguile a small deer. A bit of flex spills out of a bra. I paint it, pink.

Down in the ping-pong room I rotate my hands, as if screwing a moth into jogging pants. I get my tools to step out while my privacy guards the flashlight. A bead constrains the sweat on my face. The moth fits the brief. It sits back while I explain what prose is, activating the plot in the process. I incubate a musical phrase in my mouth, separating the white from the notes. The song expands priapically, a ball sometimes resting on it. A workman patches the leak-back from a mental checkmark, an ark on dribble.
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