All Stories, General Fiction

The Ex-Poet by Michael Bloor

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By and large, old age doesn’t suit poets. I’m not saying that, once they pick up their pensions, all of them start to regret that they didn’t crash and burn in their twenties, like Keats, Shelley & Co. Or that they start experimenting with monkey gland injections, like poor old Yeats. Nor that there aren’t quite a number of poets, like Seamas Heaney, who could keep the pot stirring through all the transitions of age (indeed, I know a couple of pensioner poets myself).

But Andy Brailsford wasn’t one of those functioning pensioner poets. Though fortunate in other ways, he hadn’t written more than the odd birthday card in thirty years. As a kid at school in the early 1970s, he’d written a lot of mawkish stuff about sunsets and dreary stuff about post-nuclear winters. There was no family job waiting for him when he left university, his dad being a van driver for the Co-op in Burton-on-Trent. So, he did what a lot of fellow English Literature graduates did: he joined an Advertising Agency.

Instead of writing poetry in the evenings in a London garret, as previously envisaged, he found himself in London pubs in the evenings listening to a lot of slightly older Eng Lit graduates earnestly discussing whether Wilkinson Sword, a safety razor manufacturer, could out-sell Gillette, another safety razor manufacturer. He smelled the future and it stank. So he dropped out and joined a commune in the Black Mountains of South Wales.

Andy then wrote a lot at Pen-yr-heol. He wrote about holy springs, about green mistletoe bushes high among bare oak branches in bleak mid-winter, about ruined churches, about young lovers and home-brewed beer. He published a few things in little magazines; some of them paid a few quid and some of them didn’t.

He learned a lot too. He learned that milking a goat is completely different from milking a cow (you mustn’t pull on the teat, instead pinch the top of the teat with your thumb and forefinger, and then squeeze the teat with the rest of your fist). He learned that to get a crop you must feed potatoes but starve carrots. Sadly, he also learned that if you keep open house, then you’re inviting visits from the constabulary. So he once again did what a lot of fellow Eng Lit graduates did: he got a ‘TEFL’ job abroad – teaching English as a foreign language.        

He was dead lucky: he landed in Siena, among the Tuscan hills. The Sienese Republic, alternately a democracy and an oligarchy, lasted four hundred years; the wealthiest city in medieval Europe with its bankers to the Popes and its traders travelling to Persia and beyond. Eventually, in the fourteenth century, the Black Death swept through it and left behind a ruined economy and a perfect living medieval monument. So perfect that, for Andy, just living there was enough. Nearly always.

Andy had kept copies of his old poems and very occasionally he’d take ’em out and look at ’em, noticing that the paper they were typed on was turning brown and slightly brittle. More frequently, he’d take a wander over to the Palazzo Pubblico, the parliament building of the old republic, and gaze there at the great Ambroglio Lorenzetti fresco of the city with its celebratory dancers in the streets, artisans in their open workshops, crops in the fields outside the city walls, and – in the middle distance – laden packhorses heading towards the gates of Siena the Magnificent.

On a May morning, soon after his retirement and following yet another visit to the fresco, Andy came out of the Palazzo Pubblico, sniffed the spring breeze and headed over to a small park with a view of the new-green Tuscan hills. He passed a little group of picnicking tourists on the grass. One of them, playing a guitar, began a quiet song. Andy stopped, stunned: the girl was singing one of his poems, set to music.

Michael Bloor

Image: Pixabay.com – Pair of hands writing on white paper with a pen.

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Published by literallystories2014

17 thoughts on “The Ex-Poet by Michael Bloor”

  1. Michael

    Such a terrific little piece, full of with resignation of things , for things are as they must be, then a wonderful little surprise that says “No, things do not always have to be the way you think.”
    Leila

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  4. Hi Mick,
    This is so beautifully written, just as we have come to expect from you!
    It is a cracking piece of character writing – We do get a feel for the guy with very little said.

    Brilliant!

    Just as an aside :

    I wrote a lot of poetry – Over 200 I think. I have around thirty published, mainly in anthologies in the USA. Ahh, anthologies!! Make you feel published but make you poorer as you make no money and end up buying the book. Beautiful books I might add – Fucking dear though. I don’t think I got one under thirty quid!!

    It is a pleasure to see you around, a delight to read your comments and a pure treat to experience your stories!!

    Hope all is well with you and yours my fine friend.

    Hugh

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    1. Hugh – I empathize. My biggest expenses against something like $200 lifetime earnings are Duotrope subscription, buying the anthologies and books I’m in, and happy hour when I’m accepted and again when I’m published. Still it’s much cheaper than old age (too late for middle age) crisis leading to buying a Jaguar and having an affair.

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    2. Thanks for your enthusiasm, Hugh! It means a lot.
      I smiled at your ‘anthologies’ aside. I had a flash fiction published in an online mag that then produced a ‘best of year’ printed anthology. I was in there, so I felt I should support it, and shelled out for a copy. There were more than sixty pieces in there. The online mag then folded. Hey ho.

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  6. Yesterday or a couple of days ago, I had a couple of similar moments. I thanked people for favorable comments on stories. They keep us going don’t they? Why yes, I do go back and look for them on old stories – LS is a gold mine – to keep me going.

    The story made me think of going to Italy, but maybe we waited too long. Southern Europe and much of the world is burning up. Got as close as Switzerland on the grand tour 1988.

    Unanswered question – was Andy happy or content?

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    1. Thanks Doug! You’re quite right about the lasting warm to be had from past favourable comments. Re: Andy, I’m guessing he was momentarily happy and subsequently content.

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  7. A little hope there, that something Andy contributed was valued. I like the description of Siena and in fact, that is perhaps one likely place where an English tourist girl would be playing his olde song, perhaps about young lovers and holy springs.

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