THAUMATURGE and seer, agent of miracles and fog-burner — Arcix the housefarm destabilised tracts of ear-churn wasteland bog and planted, miles deep, pungent fiberstalk shims where an otherwise grey brook would run of ease. Charging expulsives and axe-flat crabwalks, he into the cross plank bore his odious mechanism: a trip-sting acid bivalve, manganese and cobalt cowling, its eddying silty wake a grapevine of vortices, a writhing fern-shoot bouquet, nesting motes of limpid eloquence, and germs of preponderant silences. This hood of rocky aether, this cloak of sandstone ghosts, arched over the bluffs of a Cascade scrubtown and held-fast the ants in a rapture.

* * *

FAULT of Fairn and faultless age, he had no way of knowing. Should the man have turned the page against the wind that was blowing? Would the arctic seabirds have deciphered with their positronics every whisper spoken by those cryptic plate tectonics?

Or is it right he left the world to land upon its ear?

Practus Dissectus Ignos

Reductio ad reductum was the motto and the measure. Their boots clattering stiffly onto the steel grates of Cheesebridge, the multitudes of oblate porridge ladles clomp-stomped their vit and vim into the cellars of doom.

Caked-up layers of radio wax and linen dust fortified the crosstalking Dutch mutt's hovel-palace. Resentment engenders retention of aqueous solutions and maybe a mite of perniciousness, but cleavage was telling today, and napping was less a chore than usual, so the loosely-wound bank nit yawned with portent at the dippers' audible approach and released his humour. Ricochets of puns and ballistic limericks Swissed the outlaying curd. Deep in the summits of towering ditches, the cries of "it's not a squirrel!" and "my-oh-my, there's a dime-size whole in the fuselage!" were heard by no one. Had they been, surely the the tumbles would have righted and drowsy-eyed sorrow would have packed right up and moved next-door. But it didn't.

Prior the hullabaloo, the swiftness of woodlice was still a wrench in the locker of blooms, but following the pox-wash of potted intellect, and the practised pit-scritch of sanctity, all bets were paid half-up to the lord and master of shoe-shines; his is a rag that hangs limp from the chair-backs of antiquity. And before the patrons collect their lint purses and roar, let us think of the soaring tree-rat and its perforated pectoral membranes ... and shed tears.

—L.
ACC