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…

boardlove

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.