Otis in cloaven stilleto,
Drags his feet, 'cross the asphalt,
Fissures the street.
A cheesewire incision,
Reaching deep into molten black chambers,
He tumbles and snaps his leash, father cries 'No!'.

Below throned on calciferous mount,
Within cowel and crevatte,
The underworld janitor watching him fall,
Puts his claw to his craw,
Clears his throat with a thuderclap,
From the igneous gulf he he extends a 'hello'

Otis tiara'd in amnesiac starlings stands,
Dusts his knees, rubs his eyes,
Ruffles his razor-wire hair, takes a sneeze,
Takes in a lung of the putridest, foulest and stagnantest air,
And his guts start to throw.

Gazing back, glued to his throne
Like an airfix gone bad,
The Bone Harvester, kelp-clad and dignified
Smiles at the boy through black-pudding lips,
Points at his skinny white hips,
Hollers 'Dance for me or I'll never let you go.'

Under ragged saber sky,
Lightning cracks like a blade
On the roof of the cavern,
Seals shut the whole hole he made,
Darkness descends like an elevator
Severed from its wire, Otis lurches
All baffled anxiety, fast stubs his toe.

The Harvester hacks out a bellicose roar,
'Only losers get bruises, you're no good to me
Black and blue'. A circle of candles three-foot
In diameter encloses the boy. 'Now dance!'
Shrieks the janitor. 'Go!".

'Now listen' says Otis 'I don't mean to patronise,
To dance without music is ludicrous and unwise',
Rather like pulling your underpants over your pantalons,
Or doing a decathlon under any circumstances. NO.'

The Harvester wrigglin on sternum-backed chair,
Wears perturbed on his brow runs a hand through hijiki hair,
'Noone's requested this prior to you, I'm all vexed, all my 78's
Are warped to fuck, I wish you luck finding song in this squalor,
Not even a heartbeat to follow, no wind you can harmonise to,
Just the arrhythmic clatter of bones and the hissing of molten stew,
One day soon that could be you.

Otis blinks his huge lashes, his eyes like molasses,
He keens in his resonant tenor an E, quaked the cave
Like Wagnerian Valkyries once shattered glasses,
The bone-strewn floor shudders in synch to
The oscillating tremors of terrible echo, and sweet sustain
Shimmers like jewels in the ether, The janitor weeps,
At his purgatory beneath a world governed by music.
As Otis sings over the echo a chord stakes out light
In the grisly grim portent of night, and angels are birthed in the beam,
Streaming forth a dawn chorus in argentum filigree,
Bathing the Janitor in sound, bones are bleached and the ground
Thins to ochre, the song's a real choker, a ballad of the virtue of song,
In the time-honoured style of that Orphean one.

The cavern collapses and Otis set free, climbs the beam of lightsound,
To the surface, whose ground still hums luminous with song
From the subterranean goings-on of that afternoon,
As he tilts his head skyward, he glimpses the moon
Through passing black cloud, in whose shroud he sees wrapped,
A warm, calcified smile, hears a laugh through a thunderclap,
The janitor is loose, cushioned safe in the airbag of heaven.
A truce between silence and sound has occured, between stasis and motion,
The land and the ocean duet, a sound Otis will never forget.