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That young bride, straddled by two beekeepers, putted a birdie into the puttered flotilla, and begged for a memento of the stegosaurus, wild fellow that he was, a staunch supporter of neo-liberalism. His cage was covered in daffoldils, and the memory of the daffodil-covered hillside lapsed after he turned twenty, that year he spent in Hillsdale turning his back on the government handouts, a kind of agenda for the king of adulterers and his dufflebag, somewhere -- he had located it in the ulcer of the sweet spot, a rotting figurine of Dulcinea he consulted from time to time, ususally when he was in diners and went from town to town carrying his yam, the other creature that he consulted and said, "Yum, yum," but he was considerably older than the doldrums that had calcified the week, and his favourite oppossum, a clergyman who waved to him with a friendly smile from the verdant wilds of the television. This winsome memory brought forth more, such as, exactly how wide was his hotel-room, and where did Grand Rapids get its idea of monogamy it had now all but abandoned, and to whom did the dummy pay money because the mummy with the rotting face refused to scrape the limestone that had formed on some delicious turquoise, which was at this very moment being consumed by the American weasel (weevil), and the gamblers, to whom he communicated these shuffling thoughts that could not keep an even keel as he broke over the mists of coral and the missus of karaoke, shot down his French tobacco with some restless islands of ridicule. In his place, the cuckolded marshes hummed a little for their supper, but the full-throated song of the hamsters, Ms. Wiederhausen's fifth-grade pets, was impossible for their voices.

Sometimes, these thin strings on which the voices, the voices and the violins, the violins and the albinos, the albinos and their ruined volition, their ruined volition and a cancerous flute they had rescued from the lair of King Triceratops, fluffed pillows, and sometimes the noise they made, like that of Lenin's theramin, was disturbing, and they picked their noses, and they had all kinds of bad manners until the pail of water marched them up to bed, because the eskimos had forgotten to floss, and one lame mosquito droned on, lonely that its nose flute and jews-harp could not mask the dime from the flecks of ice in the diamond-like air of geckoes. These lizards flicked their cigarettes and they were born in halos; they regretted cephalopods and that they had ever had anything to do with them; they encripted the soft cries of caterpillars and centipedes on a steel chain they had prepared for battle, but a kind of gesso horse weaned them away from its cantelope bridle with muffled cries, and the snowshoe of eggnog was thus buried, an indecent ceremony Christian charity would have rather demanded more of. The eels were behind this lazy summer, where we basked in the sky and you lay out in your aquamarine monokini and the sky of Pink Floyd stretched ahead of us like a parchment monograph we stepped on in the dessert, dissolving into dust like the flaw in a paper jewel (this is characteristic of all flags); we took a swig of Evian because we were felons in that era, and we played peek-a-boo. In the woods where you were naked and where esteemed eagles and the last baboons who had not been murdered spent their honeymoon night smothered by the lichens, the glow of a paricularly harrowing mushroom and the smuggling trophy you received when you were eighteen years old and had just emerged from your coma ruffled your feathers, and you sat like an old bat in a nursing home, your head between your hushed hands, and your thin grey wisps of hair well away from your eggshell-thin breasts and you tried to remember how to pronounce the word "overcoat," the way you had been commanded to do in the Navy, but it all came out like a sort of clock that stole the eggs from other birds and poked around your skirt as if it were drawing a line in mud, one of the favourite occupations of spaniels. Lima beans were for dinner that night, but just for the coquette, and she was otherwise occupied: "Overcoat" -- this was a favourite word of mothers-in-law, and the soufflé had followed them into a space, the sigh between lovers.

It was a regular drama, much like a solo, but it had been scored as a duet by the church picnic, and the dust blew into our lungs, and we remembered "antique," and screwed, and had a coffee-date that was characterised by some indignant screeching, because, playing dumb, the sofas with their old smell so typical of Melbourne, New Hampshire, had paused before the oval lairs to polish a lapsed opal as liana vined bloomed from its face and the foam from latté stained your face, and the fronds that peeked up from the abandoned Volvo were three in number, like grey tendrils in an expanse of grey concrete, and the weewee death of cocoa caused you to assume a grim expression, like in the middle of the symphony.

These were years of the massacre, spent floating in an armadillo shell down the irrigation canals of games of chicken, hoping to avoid the Spanish Armada our childish llama throught was around every corner. We clucked at licence plates, made a particular effort to find a mucous membrane that would hold us together, but it was summering in Angiers, and the smoking codicil soon stemmed the flow of that mousetrap of the old windbag we had even attached a sail to, so he walked down the hall and people laughed at him. It was a small piece of rhinestone etiquette, like assassinating presidents who have large, dark mountains named after them in the prickling rainforest awed by the black-tongued, sassafras songs of bewildered parakeets who are very far from the onus, the structure of any mines and their safekeeping of blistering diamonds, diamonds promising and adorning hands that are too beautiful to look at: I turned my face away and thought about baseball and how sometimes a man has white trousers with thin red stripes and when this occurs the outfield cannot be darker than a particular shade of green and the line around the bases runs through a tan country. Peewee had prevented the opening of the exclave with multiple concussions, but his friends were rather too proud of pronouncing the word "mulatto," and after the wind had shifted and made its oblong escape, the creak of these old bones when confronting the teepee's soliloquy had rather tuckered me out. It was time for a game of "old maid" beneath the willow tree with its comfortable habit of snuffling, the collapsed arches of Guantanamo farther away then than at any time of the father's memory I was relaxing with the coil I borrowed from an old hobbit. I was broccoli-flavoured, and he said, "Why are you in that cocoon? Get down from there?" I bobbed and wove in the collapsing wind, and thought some wine goes with cheese, and the colloquy followed me around like a little lost puppy.

Summaries of echoes remained, stuck to me like a knife in the eye. I resumed the torturous task of scaling the edge of the icecap, but it was not one that particularly interested me any more because I had received a wallop from an especially uninterested cheerleader (this because, my favourite flavour was vanilla). Seconds before the launch, my duncecap was removed, and for the first time I could see that there were many different flavours of algae.