#1 - Do You Want Some Company?

The vicar sidled up to me with teeth
like toffees pressed into a new wound.

'I could help you decide what to cook your
beloved for tea,' he simpered, 'we

could do a jigsaw together,' and I heard
the shuck as he produced a 500-piece

fractured painting from beneath his cassock. 'One side
is Constable's "The Hay Wain", the other is beans.'

I imagined hundreds of man-sized baked beans
bottlenecking at church exits in a panicked stampede

trying to flee one of his interminable sermons,
his arms flailing as if he were a traffic policeman

his pulpit a blur of flame and bad static.