A Perfect Murder

 Much as I'd like to be a fiction writer, I'm not one. It's much harder to do than it looks and whereas poems benefit from fewer, more concentrated words, prose fiction needs more detail and authenticity than I can summon.

A Perfect Murder was called The Decline of English Fiction. That was always an unsatisfactory title, trying to be self deprecating and literary - by echoing the essay by George Orwell, but now that I've found a suitable minor variation on the title of the poem it was based on, it can be made available as a pdf. And thus is.

I'd send it to a magazine to try to get it into print somewhere if I could find any such magazine but I can't. If any did look likely, their idea of 'short fiction' is shorter than mine.

--

It's harmless enough doing that. What would be deeply harmful, both to my own feelings of self-worth and the very idea of music itself, though, would be me buying a guitar and writing the album of pop songs I still vaguely hanker after. 

It's the same as with anything else. One hears something and thinks I'd love to do that, suspending all awareness of the lack of competence in the necessary areas that would make the project a sure-fire disaster.

Everybody wants to be a pop star. Football managers want to be racehorse owners, cricketers want to be golfers and inside every poet there is a troubadour wanting to get out. I found myself looking at guitars earlier. They are remarkably inexpensive.

I must resist the temptation to prevent the horrors that would ensue. I must look at the poems again and be grateful I'm happy with them.