Stephen J. Williams

Category: New writing

  • People like us

    The numbers are important: it has been twenty years,
    more than twenty years. Still, he is always home at six, exactly.
    I have prepared the table, and the vegetables. Something
    has been cooking all afternoon that we will finish together

    later, but before that he throws his arms around my shoulders
    and kisses me on the neck. We have a drink and talk.
    Like all companions we have a secret language, and a world
    within the outward world where characters, known only there

    sub-plots, imaginings, laughter, have private lives and meaning.
    Then, when it is time to eat, we go to the kitchen and agree
    on how to serve. Did you know that in the Bible it says
    be subject to each other? It means, I think, he is first, always.

    It means, he thinks, I am always first. We assess the wine.
    He is better at this than I am. At this, and many other things.
    I am better at the jokes, I think, but we share a taste for the absurd.
    Everything and everyone is discussed. No one has the final word.

    Then there is a handful of hauntingly beautiful scenes, a girl
    in a red coat, a crumbling beach house, the installation
    of the finished bell, to be recounted later in a dream, music
    and poetry piling up in a great heap of life.

    For us there is nothing ever new under the sun.
    In the place beyond the city where we escape
    debates and news—where it is useless to mention
    politics because there are no roads or pathways

    and there is no right or wrong—people like us, lie down
    in the grass, and for a minute there we lose ourselves
    the sky too quiet to talk about, and we can be nothing
    actually nothing, nothing at all, if not together, not as one.

  • ABCs

    After bitter conservatives decry
    every fact gratuitously
    —How in juridical knots
    lazy minds neverendingly opine!—prolix
    questions raise suspicions, then,
    unflaggingly vociferous wranglings,
    xenogamous yawns, zeteticism.

  • [There lies Peter Clutterbuck now]

    There lies Peter Clutterbuck now
    still fourteen, on Phillip Island
    where he was sent, and where he died
    in 1935 parentless and poor
    to the Newhaven Homes for Problem Boys.
    His sister could not move him from this grave
    since with him is another child
    named Victor Hardy, still eleven.

    The Argus 29 August 1935 page 8
    The Argus 29 August 1935, page 8.

    The grave of P Clutterbuck and V Hardy is in Cowes Cemetery, Phillip Island.

  • [Years ago, when I was reading]

    Years ago, when I was reading the philosophical works of Schopenhauer
    I heard a sudden eruption of laughter on the street.
    I looked up to see what the cause of this laughter was.
    Across the road, an old man
    extraordinarily obese, was heaving his immense body
    along the footpath. He used a cane to help balance himself as he walked
    and to relieve the strain on his back
    caused by the great bag of fat hanging from his stomach.
    It required considerable effort for him to walk only a short distance.
    I felt revulsion at the sight of this man.
    There were feelings of pity, too.
    I knew immediately
    there are no counter-motives to humiliation.
    We live by climbing over each other
    struggle to keep our heads
    above despair
    and try not to think of harm that’s done.
    I lowered the book and listened to the sounds of birds
    a howling dog, a small child in the street
    asking something of her parents —
    every voice repeating the inner nature of the world
    and I knew what trouble and pain was
    still to come.

    Published in Pink Cover Zine, No. 3, November 2018.

  • Sr Pessoa

    Of course, in times of crisis I do not write
    poetry—a consequence of having escaped
    pretenses about pain and metaphysics.

    Last night, though, my head was full
    of dreams—most particularly
    that my friend (a euphemism)

    had decided it was time to leave—
    bringing us to the long struggle (an embrace,
    perhaps, but it may have been a death-clutch).

    And when I woke
    everything in my world was ruined
    and in fog.

    So, it has been impossible to speak
    a word that makes sense
    and there is no pleasure in a pun.

    After all the excitement
    I am just another child sleeping
    face-down at the edge of the abyss.

    Come over some day—
    I can offer refuge
    in tired abstractions.

    I will put on my red dress,
    make tea, and then
    ignoring Life, we will walk or write.

  • The tourists

    Who are these people for whom we invent excuses,
    Put on a brave front, and beautify our slums?  Signs

    In twenty languages clear their path through our confusion,
    While we, in our own town, don’t know which way is up.

    How could they know us by looking down through dark glass
    From their high buses; after cropping out the dirt and poor

    From careful snap-shots of our churches and galleries of art?
    We give them whiskey duty-free, and fluffy toys, for consolation,

    Rooms with views and service, air-conditioned day trips,
    And large portions of deference, so that they will not have to see

    What they have come here not to see.  (—Are paying not to see.)
    And if one should ask, “Where am I?  What does all this mean?”

    I have no doubt we would be kind and give correct directions,
    Or give as best we could.  They are just like children:

    They do not know what is ahead of them.  —And we don’t demur
    Because of that. The meaning of travel is to endure.

    Originally published in Walking the Dogs: the Pariah Press Anthology, 1993

  • [cathedrals in their middle age]

    cathedrals in their middle age
          sourly contemplate

the platitudes of worship
          (what longing made

the history of their long struggle
          and what prayers like smoke

stain the minds and hands
          of old men

): their structure is a torsion—
          pleasure and silence

twisted
          at invisible altitudes—

below, the dark
          icon of betrayal

above, a whispered light
          revealing nothing.

without ceremony
          no voice to read

a lesson
          or to preach

and no believers (especially
          if there are no believers)

at the end of worship
          silence is their business.

if I was such a man
          —my eyes removed

for safe-keeping
          through the wars

my memory buried
          in a field—

how could I then say
          what my body meant to say?
    Originally published in Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, Puncher & Wattmann Poetry, 2009