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The day tasted purple when I woke up this morning, so I wasn’t at all surprised to discover I was three feet too tall when I got up. I ducked through the door to make my tea, and after a cup and a difficult shower was back to normal height before I left the house. It seemed the morning for it, half the bus was three quarters the size, and the bus itself was a single decker by the time it wended its way to Wheatley. Wheatley was wet, winding weird, whirling winds warped water wrapped ways, withdrawing, waning, wasted. I got out into a tracked field of maize, a tall and twisted labyrinth, a field of maze. At the centre was a minotaur reading part of a poem:

The queen she said “I’ll have that bull”
and called an engineer.
The engineer arrived and said
“I have this cow suit here”

The copulation went as planned
The queen counted success
and wither engineer and king
is anybody’s guess.

The minotaur accepted string, and gave me a way out. I passed through corn by direct route, a nearby roundabout. I caught a bus returning home, as I had intended, but realised only nearly there the poem hadn’t ended.

To travel in a poem is never recommended, Odysseus will relay at length how his trip was extended. Already I was on the bus, I couldn’t get off soon, and with the weather earlier was at risk of typhoon. I thought up some classical tricks for poems to unhinge, liking breaking the meter entirely for no good reason, or ending rhymes with orange.

Success! And not a moment too soon. The bus pulled up to my stop, and I got out. It wasn’t my most successful day ever, but sometimes getting home was enough.

It’s Lewis Carroll’s birthday today.

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