Music

Duffle Coat

DUFFLE COAT

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 forest, which grew

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

Life: A Record

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.

The Chord’s Prayer

Our Feargal, which Art in Hanson,

hallowed be thy James;

thy Kinksdom come;

thy will.i.am,

in Garth as it is in Heaven 17.

Give us Green Day our Motörhead.

And forgive us our Travises,

Aswad forgive Them that Travis against us.

And lead us not into The Temptations;

but deliver us from Eno.

For grime is the Kinksdom,

T’Pau, and the Gloria,

For Everly and Everly.

Shamen.