‘Tall cappuccino to go,’ I say.
He picks up a cup and a pen.
‘What name is it?’ he asks,
and I reply, ‘Eratosthenes.’
He looks at me blankly.
‘E, R, A, T, O, S, T, H, E, N, E, S.’
Dutifully he writes down the letters,
requiring only two repetitions.
When he’s done, I say,
‘On second thoughts,
could you make that an espresso?’
Joe Williams is a former starving musician who transformed into a starving poet in 2015, entirely by mistake. He appears regularly at events in Yorkshire and beyond, and has been published in numerous anthologies and in magazines online and in print. His debut pamphlet, Killing the Piano, was published by Half Moon Books in 2017. www.joewilliams.co.uk
Wanton Fuckery Poetry 