There was a place called nice before the bells

Rosy pink limbs contorted at grotesque angles
the hound of bells lopes in circling arabesques
narrowing the confines of a dark heavy prison.
The arms and legs are leaden, the air trapped:

A pot-bellied man with one crossed eye under a trilby
smokes, self-satisfied, a foul and cheap cigar, smugly
confident that his disfigured wife will always obey-
a melted duck ornament fell from the festive stove
and burned her neck and shoulder. Childless she remains.
He walks the blue streets alone, out of place and grand.

The hound of the bells brooks no dissent in pink
limbed contortions, their wet snarling corrals all
the heavy inmates into a tiny inner hellish grove
where blinded the baying echoes from the blank fog.

Those Locrian chords bellow distant. Thin man.