Welcome to the 'heritage-listed foyer'--they've ordered you a workstation, and your induction starts now.

In Harry Reid's LEAVE ME ALONE, we enter a nondescript door down a laneway and casuallyapply the secret knock. This is not the door to the reception, or to the main office; it's the door to the sly-grog palace of language inside our minds. You can get a straight-up glass of viscous word-gin that you could stand a spoon up in. No ice. Here, all of the office's materials--its customs, its dialects, its equipment, the roles of its people--are flipped and made to appear in their full uncanniness.

Poetry.