Month: July 2014

A series of poems inspired by vinyl singles…..I started years ago and only done two so far so here they are…maybe I get inspired to do more 🙂

This about my Nan Butler’s front room.. a broken piano, boxes and boxes of ‘damaged Smith’s Crisps’
(My Gramp delivered most of them rest ended up there)…and my Uncle Brian’s sixties and seventies vinyl…

Chairman of the Board: Working on a Building of Love 1972

45s piled in a dusty box

centres pulled out for stateside jukeboxes cheap resales

for years I could not play them at all

just played with them like toys on my Nan’s front room floor

an old broken upright piano

worn red Axminster carpet

a radiogram that no longer worked

I put the record down the spindle anyway

listened to the faint noise as I span it against the worn needle

the wah and flutter as speed changed

nylon nets breathing in and out each summer

from the drafty windows

a year later managed to plug it in and shocked myself on bare wires

too scared to tell anybody

as they’d have banned me from playing in there

but I did take the Chairman of the Board singles

the Invictus label….from Detroit post riots..

forgot about the shock until now…like love. Bittersweet.