The Fire-clay Tail is a poetic narrative intended to describe Onspunuz the Unkempt, originating in The Practical Atrocity. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is an extremely long series of quatrains. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines sometimes have reversed word orders. The fourth line of each quatrain contrasts the underlying meaning of the first line.