the serinette and the lightning-rod

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