Straws in hand he climbed the trees and drank tears from the eyes of sleeping birds. He ate mushroom beetles and tiger's eggs and prolonged his suffering using the restorative powers of ant's blood. Fortnightly he purified his organs by ingesting a mixture of bark, fine gravel, and shrivelled grapes which he dried on the backs of alligators who hung in sun-drenched stultification between the trees, slung like hammocks. To repair his shoes he clawed at gum trees for sap and cut down wispy vines with his teeth. He strangled snakes with his necktie and trapped badgers in his coat. In times of emotional distress he gorged himself on butterflies. At night and on foggy afternoons he slept on the back of an emaciated bull that wandered the back of a mile-long snake, grazing on nothing but the dew that collected under the serpent's scales. In his dreams he was a snowfall, a piece of broken jade, a cat's strangled warble, a discarded bus ticket; he wandered a muddy, circular path in an ephemeral garden of light. He was a scabbard, a scuff-mark, a tiger's wounded paw, a spanish galleon, a solar system, a tyre in the backyard.
Once he tried to speak but then felt ashamed, as if he had spit in a temple.
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