DAD’S RECORDS
( for all the beautiful record shops now then an forever )
Flip, flip, pause, wait, flip, hold
With each flick of plastic
I transcend time
Find myself
Transported to Martin Luther’s
Blackwood high Street circa 1981
He was the king of vinyl
Where,
Just to walk through town
With a plastic bag with the shop’s logo
Was a badge of coolness
An insignia of hipdom
Even
If it did contain
Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry like the wolf’!
Flip, flip, pause, wait, flip, hold
My arthritic fingers
Suddenly nimble as I
Flip through the albums
As Sepia memories flicker
Time travelling in close grooves
I taste the titles
Finger the little squares of heaven
Like a naïve archaeologist I carefully dig
Discard the surrounding soil
To unearth the turntabled treasure
Black Sabbath ‘Live at Last’
In the bargain bin!
who needs the Dead Sea Scrolls
when you find this?
I like the order of the records
A-F Heavy Metal
Prog, Punk, Indie Ska
Layered lives
The neatness of band names
Half man half biscuit
The Slits
The The
Even splodgenessabounds ( though they should be stored in comedy not punk)
The immediacy of then
Comforting the now
Compartmentalized moments
Held to the light
Smiles in amber
Flip, flip, pause, wait, flip, hold
A road map to solace
When all else fails
It is that one song
We remember
Sending echoes through neural pathways
Lighting lost roads
With that soaring chord sequence
Framing that tragic love story
As Spandau listened to Marvin
The weeping
The being
Anthems of a blue,marooned ( not 5)
Generation
Suddenly finding their way home
In the museum of the misplaced
As
Tiny black grooves
Spark
Epic rainbowed veins
Arteries to resonance
Paths to glory
Highways to hell
Like a
Ragged 10 commandments
You create yours
To walk the line
Begin your day with the friendly voice
See kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
Fallen leaves in the night
I had no way of knowing
fallen leaves in the night
Isolation desolation incantation
I will still follow
it’s just a spring clean of the may queen
Even if there’s no future in england’s dreaming
So stuff your fucking army
Killing isn’t my idea of fun
We shall overcome
In the tunnel of love
With our bullshit detectors
and stay in our garage all night
Flip, flip, pause, wait, flip, hold
Hold
Hold,