Fait Accompli

‘I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The weather was magnificent. I found that I could not think. No idea presented itself to my imagination, which had been so lively a moment before. A melancholy, which was not without charm, captivated me entirely… Tears ran down my cheeks, which had no cause in my thoughts and which no amount of reasoning could halt. Finally, seven o’ clock came and the drum woke me from this strange ecstasy. I walked home.’

I don’t know what the novel is about, though.

Once a month I run a hot bath, rise out of it a pink, pectoral-fin-flailing seahorse, towel myself speedily, and finger my balls in search of incipient tumours.

Maysie sent me a link about the London Word Festival’s ‘fib’ competition (a fib is a poem based on the Fibonacci Sequence), suggesting I enter. So I wrote this:

‘Entente Cordiale’

I
hide
behind
platitudes,
safe in the knowledge
that we’re speaking the same language.