How many times does the opportunity arise
in which you can visit the ghosts
and smile with relief as a tear gently rolls down your cheek?
A bedroom door hides many a secret from the world,
the stolen, lengthy, beautiful snog with a girlfriend, heavy petting banned
in the local swimming pool, but a delight worth risking
when she cycles
over to see you from Wendlebury one summer’s day
in ‘85 and music from a band worth loving plays, crackles, skips
like my heart as she leans in again,
on the stereo in the corner in my room.
The vision of an appendix blown, decayed and throwing up
the collection of teenage dirty well-used cups
that collect dust on top of the stone cold murky penicillin filled tea,
at a pure white wall
soon to be discoloured until the parents redecorate,
on which on the other side, your father groans in disbelief
at the noise at four in the morning.
The woman who now owns the house invited me to take
a minute’s reprise, a few precious seconds
in which my mind remembered everything
that went on in that room, girls kissed with a breaking heart,
music blasted at a volume
in which two neighbours would complain with passion
but others would
stop silently and congratulate me on my odd but sublime
taste for a teenager.
The pictures that were haphazardly blu-tacked to a wall, changing from
Johan Cruyff, Paul Power, Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish to
a giant poster of Linda Lusardi, (placed on the wall reverentially,
whilst listening to Pictures of Lily), the obscene creature
that emanated out from the sound of a guitar and the Old English
written hero destroying the mossy death but giving me life
to further find more books in the same vein.
An Invisible Touch next to the Page Three glamour model,
and Elvis’ wife hiding serenely on the inside of the wardrobe door.
I drummed mind concealed drums
in time to many an album by my holy trinity.
With albums scattered around me, I mimed in the darkness,
not wishing to shatter the illusion of being able to sing. I gave up very easily
playing the obscured unfulfilled non-existent guitar and the very real tattered
violin that ended up under my glue pined and screwless
bed in the summer of ‘86.
I look around, memory, memory after memory,
some bitter, some deserved, some happy, some perfect…
all taking place here with the back drop to hundreds of albums
bought from Chalkie’s and taped from other people’s collections.
Did I ever leave a note, other than the ones that came from the 7 inch
singles?
The record of wanting to be a Market Square Hero,
of knowing the desperation behind The Brazillian.
Did I leave any broken record of my existence in that bedroom in Bicester
that I would find scratched into a lower part of the wall
that the new owner had not found
or was this all that was left, a manifested memory, the ghost
of my impressionable ghost, all that I was lingering in the darkness of another time?
The dreams of an adolescent boy, music, beer and girls, football…
Sobbing when Man City got relegated…twice
Fancying many a girl from school and from Cooper,
the nursing of an eye badly damaged by a thrusted angry, fucked up elbow
for daring to go out with a girl from the opposing school
and having my first kiss at eleven in the buildings
on the other side of the road, newly built, cold and no body living in them.
Venturing back is like a dream, but it has to be handled with care.
Too many ghosts, the spectre of a half remembered past will
not let you play too long before wanting something in return.
I leave, I shake the hand of the woman who now owns my bedroom
but I disappear unnoticed carrying more than a trace in my head than when
I entered.
Ian D. Hall 2014.