Family Scent
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 a train,
a two-hundred-mile booze-up; she’d rather be
among the cooled, the watery shoppers.
The glass bells, floating above the insurance jingle like an 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’.
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