A Body Surfaces: Eighth Battle Stations

 

 

 

The Folly

Battle Stations

 

 

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A Body Surfaces

 

Adamson discovers that a lifetime of choler

Well-trodden ways from whiffs of cheek and bother

To the full-blown stack of outrage

Sackings, threats of action

Can’t well prepare one for enormity akin

To a magazine’s explosion

‘No one at home! No one at home!

How can you mean it?’

Mrs. Combles follows, grumbling

Try doing a good turn…

Of course she doesn’t mean it, if the facts of the case

Are to be laid at her blameless door

What use to say they’ve scarpered, Lem and Nell

That done, the only lodger done the same

As always sitting days in her front parlour

She sees things

She no longer has a mind to tell

 

Adamson climbs the stairs, and the smell

Of neglected duty churns his stomach less

Unknown to him, or in all the world unsuspected…

Best way of putting it, is Lem’s by ladder

Prying of the window up and fixing it, wide

Near crossing his eyes to keep from seeing in

Krug, where for these weeks he’s been, lies airing

Another moment though, when amazed it should be so

Adamson turns the knob, finding the room unlocked

A blackened face with matter in its sockets

Seems to convey (in dream or echo)

that least expected

Thank you

 

 

 

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A Body Surfaces

Newtons

And the Other

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2020, Stephanie Foster)