Arthur Butler

He's back. Or rather, never left. That broad smile waiting for me as I came into the bookshop. Years since leaving those little scraps of paper around town saying "Arthur, your poems are ready." It was the internet that brought him back (to the store, anyway.) Someone had told Arthur that he had his poems published in Poems-For-All. And he had. Two of them; great big little poems. Published and packaged into a special little box, which has been sitting in the same space on the "hold" shelf, waiting, waiting. Years. Until now. I had always assumed Arthur had moved out of the city. It was the best explanation for never seeing him; hearing no word from others of sightings. It only took a slight variation in his orbit, he explained, a shift of a few blocks, away from his past haunts and hides, to make him invisible.