Your band
was a one song wonder.
Don’t know whether
you made another.
Got made
NME single of the week.
It put the bubble
in my squeak
and the snap
and crackle in my pop.
Twelve weeks solid
I did not stop
playing it.
The jingle-jangles
softened
the awkward angles
of what it’s like
to be fifteen.
I kept the sleeve
pristine,
wore a duffle coat
all that summer.
I hear you became
a plumber.
A hall.
I saw gig.
Was ill.
A-ha.
If I were called in
to construct
a soundtrack for my life,
I should make use
of muzak.
Each song indistinct,
immemorable,
and entirely
without consequence,
as it fills out the silence
between floors
until
the door
opens
for me.
He would stride
through a subway
and barely falter
but, for some reason,
a bridge over-troubled Walter.
a trail of parsnips along the floor
was all it took to lure
the sons out of their caravan door
where mumford was, i wasn’t sure
bundling the sons out of my van,
i planted them in tubs of manure,
watered them daily,
played them the banjo
and ukulele,
and watched them grow
in the golden glow
of a late summer afternoon
gazed upon the long limbs
lazing up to an incipient moon,
the entangled bramble of beards immune
to the unforgiving snip
of the shears that prune
mighty sons of mumford,
fifty feet high,
stretching up into the pale night sky
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.
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.
it was quite by accident
that i discovered Paul Young
in the garden that morning,
living under a hat.
he appeared to have
made himself quite at home
there although he admitted to
periods of abject loneliness.
i would visit him daily,
feeding him turnips,
the ends of which he
would store in his turn-ups.
upon arriving, he would beg
me to stay for good this time
but, having other things
to attend to, i never did.
however i did enjoy the feeling
of him next to me and so
every time i went away,
i would take a piece of him with me.
then one day, to my dismay,
i lifted up his hat, and found
there was no more of him left,
not even an ankle or an earlobe.
in a rage, i tore his playhouse down
before going inside to stroke
my cyndi lauper.
