Death of a Poet

He used to think of himself as a Poet, in the Ancient, Romantic tradition, and he did write poems, dozens of them.  But they were not very good poems, things like: ‘The cat is on the mat, it has a hat. That’s That!’ That sort of thing.

He did attempt to read his poems to people a few times.

Once, he was camped by a billabong, as one does, and found himself not surrounded by local people who had all gone visiting relatives but by City Hippies having a festival.  Invited to sit by a campfire by a group and asked what he did, when he said he was a poet he was adked to recite a poem.  Sadly, just before the end a lot of new people arrived suddenly and un-announced.  My poem was abandoned and forgotten and eventually the billabong dried up, as they do.

Another time he summoned sufficient courage to go to an advertised Public House where an open Poetry reading was occurring.  However, once inside the door, there were two further doors on either side, each with people, and either being the Poetry Reading.  In a desperate act of Free Will, he chose one side, which turned out to be a play, but he was ‘seduced’ into staying and watching the play, which was a good play that creatively used the confined performance space of a front bar.  He never went back.

The last time was after befriending some people who ran a café that had Jazz Music (He wondered later if he had remembered correctly what they called it) and also had Poetry Reading.  He went there with his folder of poems, and sat in the back room and promised he would return.  Some time later the folder had ceased to exist, as things sometimes do.  He wondered if he had left it in that Café.  He always intended to return, till the years turned to decades.

Then in a scenario that is yet to happen, it turns out the poems were found and read and admired and kept, till eventually someone decided to publish them ‘by the hand of an unknown poet’.  And then, as Fate would have it, as it often does, he was collecting up old newspapers to put under himself as he lay in a forgotten corner, and saw by the light of a fleeting moon one of his poems with an account of the fame of this ‘unknown poet'.

That night was particularly cold, and he froze to death, but he died blissfully knowing he had been discovered and was acknowledged as a true poet and was now one of the Immortals.