John Hartley Williams

(Art’s story)

When I was young, I coveted the money and the woman, kept coaxing busy blood drops from my reluctant thumb, grumbled out the spell-cracked poems of a sorcerer’s apprentice.

No rich. No fetch the ladies, either. Then I saw an ad: ‘Join La Table Ronde,’ it said, ‘accrue the benefits of debt.’ I wrote for details. A pile of bumf arrived, a...

(i)

A penguin, a donkey, a piano. Their tinkle-plonky grief.

A station trolley rumbling over pavement slabs carries the deceased.

Black hearse, black iceberg in a warm dissolving ocean, it sails toward the gulf that it will occupy.

The flag is folded small, the folding of a child. Smoothed from the national laundry is a crease.

The penguin. Its raised beak. Its self-important air. An advice...

amor vincit omnia

Venus lies ahead – ball of mists and disenchanted fruitfulness, too hot for charity, too steamy for reproach, my mission crystalline as snow: to conquer what has always conquered us. Airlock doors slide open. They reveal the Mekon, president of Love Unexpurgated, a peagreen Humpty Dumpty on a flying plate, vestigial legs suggesting toxic misadventures at the antenatal...