Poet
I recall that Monday morning when you said I was a bore,
That you didn’t find me sexy didn’t love me any more,
All day I couldn’t take it in that we were on the rocks,
But when I returned from work that night I found you’d changed the locks.
You wouldn’t let me take my clothes you wouldn’t let me in,
And when I phoned next morning you said they’re in the bin.
You said I’d had a cheque returned for just a small amount,
Then sniggered when you told me you’d cleared our joint account.
I was gutted when the judge declared that you could keep the car,
‘Cos you had to take the kids to school and wouldn’t walk that far.
And then it dawned on me that you were on a winning streak,
When your maintenance was set at three hundred pounds a week.
The judge said you could keep the house ‘till the kids got their degrees,
And I would have to pay for all their education fees.
My life was now in ruins all I could do was sob,
I couldn’t take the pressure so they sacked me from my job.
The kids don’t want to see me now ‘cos you’ve told them I’m the baddy,
And now you’ve moved your lover in they call the bastard Daddy.
They tell me that you’re happy now they say you’re on a roll,
While I’m dossing in a hostel and living on the dole.
A crumpled lotto ticket relieved my dark despair,
And overnight I became a multi-millionaire.
When you heard you came to see me with a low cut sexy dress on,
And told me you were sorry now and said you’d learned your lesson.
It seems your lover left you an affair you now regret,
But it seems he also left you fifty grand in dept.
They say revenge is sweet but a dish best eaten cold,
She’s living in a council flat now the house is sold.
I sent the kids to boarding school to teach the some respect,
Then flew to the Bahamas for a few months to reflect.
Now all you loyal married men with selfish wives and kids,
Don’t expect any sympathy when you’re on the skids.
About Malcolm Whyman
From a young age, writing was an attempt to resolve the mysteries of life. Reading other people’s work was an important part of that.
Boredom could a problem, which in my case, was offset by the library and the cinema. Leading one to contemplate that marriage was perhaps the default position in life. And so it was that, as a young man, it was through wedded bliss that I sought my salvation. I was mightily disappointed! Not least because my sexual expectations were far from fulfilled.
Two years and two attempts at a meaningful career later, my marriage was at an end. I found myself driving a crane in a London scrapyard and suffering from a debilitating depression.
Back in Nottingham and among friends, I eventually recovered and ever the optimist embarked on marriage once again, with much the same results as the first time. Only this time I was overwhelmed by a surfit of sex.
All this domestic chaos resulted in the outline of my book, ‘The Onion Peeler’. Throwing caution to the wind, I hitched down to Cornwall and a new career as a craft jeweller. But it also gave me the opportunity to complete the first draft of my Novel.
The end of the tourist season saw me broke and looking for work. An offer of a couple of weeks work at a scenery firm in Nottingham found me back home again and taken on for a couple of seasons by the scenery firm.
A contretemps with the management of the scenery firm saw me back on the cobbles again and contemplating fifteen years of work with nothing to show for it.
I barely owned the clothes I stood up in, little knowing at the time, that things were about to change for the better. Via a short stint in a junk shop, I was about to embark on a career in the antique shipping trade
Money was still tight in the seventies, mortgages were difficult, to get and bank loans even harder. Getting a wedge to start up a business was almost impossible.
Meeting Tony in the junk shop was nothing short of a miracle.
Tony had money, contacts and a car. It was said at the time, that all a buccaneering spirit needed to get into the antique shipping business, was a car, a roof rack and a tank full of petrol.
Tony had all those things and more, he was probably at that time, one of the smartest seventeen year olds in the country. From almost a standing start, within two years we were rich. Big house, fancy cars, continental holidays and expensive dinners, the usual indulgences of those with more money than sense. So It would have continued had Tony not got the creative bug.
Our nemesis was the first commercial pottery in Nottingham. Its capacity to consume money was prodigious and despite a huge injection of cash, from a legacy left to Tony by his father, it was to no avail and we went bankrupt.
We were rescued by a phenomenal rise in the price of gold and silver. So for nearly two years we became bullion dealers and made enough money to set up a shipping business in America.
The nature of our business was such that it allowed me to spend time on music and writing. Unitil now, in semi-retirement, I can concentrate on those things full time.
Feature Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash