Robert Verdon, #286, lunacy test

in an Ames Room of my choosing

drinking spiral rainbows of ice-cream soda

cheating on the flextime of history

waking to dawns bathed in nightmare

hating my weakness and chewing my hair

standing paralysed in a dawn of mad babies

rolling colourless cigarettes under the rope of lamps

swinging the lead and chewing the fat and shooting the breeze in dank corners

coughing my lungs up a gum tree

macerating pimply trousers in a gin-mill

docking with alien spacecraft over Gulargambone

remembering a stormwater drain awash with severed cities

hiding cunningly in lightninged rabbit warrens

dismembering bold gold rodents which swank and smirk

ready with rules roaring at ribaldry roughnecked

— the business officer farting the middle manager

medieval in antiquated gethsemanes of guilt —

I pass with slashing plastic bunting like a Sopwith Camel with shredded wings

(caps tossed in the air, never to be found again)

and enter giant-buttocked my very own hung parliament