Saturday, June the 18th, 2005

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Hoon Hing Boom Bang a Bang

Tap tap tap. Clunk. Tippety tippety tap tap tap. Clunk. Oh. Hoon Hing Boom Bang A Bang. A pudding-basin haircut on the Choctaw man. A goat in distress in a faraway place. Pins and needles and rigorous thought. Hoon Hing Boom Bang A Bang.

When you fall from a tree you've been climbing, and your headache is thumping thump thump, and a pig has a snout and a tail, and there's leakage and victims and loss, how are you going to decide the right time to set fire to everything that has to be set fire to? Food and shelter and clothing, thousands of seaside resorts, Celine Dion's autograph, Lake Winnipeg, and that pudding-basin haircut on the Choctaw Man, his father's gaze and his mother's tongue, his brother's axe and his sister's stick, his daughter's bell and his other daughter's bell as well, both the bells, chiming away. Oh. Hoon Hing. Tap tap tap. Hoon Hing. Clunk. Tap tap tap. Clunk. Clunk. Hoon Hing Boom Bang A Bang.

I went to Oswestry and I went to Dawlish. I took my library books back. Gigantic screeching vultures scraped across the sky, and the sky was blue, and the library sat on a hill near a lake, that legendary drained lake, where they found the big white bones of something that they did not know had ever lived. They drew around the bones with chalk and then they took the bones away. They were big and white and boxed in crates and tap tap tap, tippety tap, clunk. Clunk.

Hey there, lantern-jawed rag-wrapped florist. Have you seen these strands of floss? The Choctaw Man had some for supper, and now he's writhing in that ditch. He used to be a narcoleptic, then he joined the river police. Now he's writhing in a ditch because he ate those strands of floss. Hoon Hing. Hoon Hing.

Dark and cumbersome. Love in a mist. An orphan's shattered view of a hedge. The necessity for each of the crew to bale when asked. Here's your bucket, here's your pail. With U Thant In Kamchatka, an anthology by Several Hands. All those widows lurking in doorways slicing up cabbage and shelling peas. I was in the snow with a horse and a pillow, and I lavished attention on things unseen. Tap. Clunk.

Disco jam bag hellpit frock coat. Breakfast jar pot bandage king. That was me in all my glory. Tap. Clunk. Hoon Hing Boom Bang A Bang.