Polyvinyl chloride disc
with modulated spiral groove,
you’re up to scratch,
you’re prone to snap,
your pop’s crackle makes me move.
You turn the tables,
you’re fragile, an uncalculated risk.
I love you thirty-three and a third more times
than any compact disc
(and forty-five times more
than a download
from an online store).
Digital is clinical,
cuts the air like a surgeon’s knife,
but vinyl has the touch, the feel,
and surface noise of life.
For two hours she sat,
clutching the ticket
from the machine.
But then,
she’d been waiting
all of her life
to be seen.
Every song on the radio reminds me of you,
I hear Anarchy in the UK and think about the time
you established an anarcho-syndicalist commune and led
a bloody, but ultimately unsuccessful, uprising in Merthyr Tydfil.
Bohemian Rhapsody comes on and I remember
the episodic, integrated, free-flowing work you composed
whilst holidaying in the Czech Republic.
Like A Virgin reminds me of the day
you got your new Virgin Media TiVo box installed
and you touched it for the very first time.
I listen to I Am the Walrus and recall those stupid
bloody Tuesdays when you would sit on a cornflake
in your corporation t-shirt and wait for the van to come.
An Oasis song plays and I think about that wall
you used to have, which was not like any other wall,
the one that used to fill me with wonder and still does today.
Other memories fly to me across the radio waves.
Your strange and wide-ranging CV: a waitress in a cocktail bar,
private dancer, boxer, taxman, joker, thief, lineman for the county.
There was that time you laid your hat and declared it “home”,
and that party we went to with a special atmosphere,
the one when you kissed a girl and then let the dogs out.
It’s no wonder I still think about you;
you and your beautiful, bright, sexy, gypsy,
Betty Davis, brown, green, baby blue eyes.
Brian Bilston 