Brambles and roses clog the door and vacant niche intended for the statue of the Governor. Chinks in the shale are round with rain. The old men visit once again the church at the end of Donkeyshit Lane. But squeeze under the portcullis of white roses that spill from eyeholes in the grass-snakes' and cornflowers' habitat, and skip the stinging nettles and the illusive niche between mirror staircases receding to a horizon in the pineal eye, scratch on slate. Where the blackboards have all fallen through the rotten floor nouns in the ossuary-chapel, verbs trapped in plane leaves.
Priests mutter, the cantor chatters.
They will all rise as mad as hatters. Mr Socrates Achillopoulos, the Benefactor, parsed into landscape circa 1909, finds himself compounding syntactical trunk-murders down every damp trail, the topology police hot after his flow. Nonsense, cheap tricks of perspective and inversion, words that can't be faced unless they're vases or fishtanks or frescoes - and after all they're so easy. It's only nerves. Earthenware, splotched with fake primaries or strewn with twilight differentials of green on green, walls, it doesn't matter.