by Christopher Mulrooney
I had flown in on a dare
to his own house I went
a cub reporter
that’s what I own like 6 T-shirts
and a bag of milk chocolates
but no-one else could
we got along just fine
he served the soup out of my tureen
I mean the one we had grown up with
all the time
his favorite saying was
I’ll be peckered
his favorite thing was an antique
serinette
he had rigged up with
electricity from a lightning-rod
he spoke about conductivity
lots of materials he said
just can’t stand up to my action
I started in the business he said
twenty years ago I had
lots of people working for me
you couldn’t imagine what it was like
a sterile litigious environment
all day long the claims were coming in
I had to stamp each one
with purple ink
anyway you had to
had to get up the stairs
and go to the roof to put the thing up
and run the connectors right the way down
to the bottom
it was a similitude of something
yeah
now though when there’s a storm
I have bird music
the house had varying instruments
and pictures
we had soup for about an hour
and then he listened to his serinette
warble in the lightning
I was glad I wasn’t going to fly
again until tomorrow
