HOUNDING HENRY
(a farcical dreaming)
I was hit as if by a ton of bricks. I lashed
out at something - pushing back as hard
as I could. This wasn't just bread in a freezer
or a brick in free-fall. Everywhere it seemed
there was something tough to take.
The fever, they said, never really subsided -
he died, one night, in a very hot fever, rolling over
twice before just screaming out : 'Palaver!
Fulcrum! Mastery too!' Someone wrote it all
down, but no one could figure it out.
At morning, still in darkness, the commuter buses
drove by - they piled up at the curb like lesions
on a sick person's forehead - and then they stopped.
Someone got out, wearing a black coat. He bowed
down the way wrens do, or maybe penguins -
stiff-legged and in an artificial manner.
I felt it was unseemly to ask any more questions -
the western wind blew sideways, and it took off
someone's hat - which wriggled down the street,
rolled around sideways, and went right down the
sewer : in a form of utter and total silence.
And then it was all over.
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