Revolver

Revolver

 

He’s older now and only grabs you by the air

when he knows your hand used to be there,

drags you down Truro cobbles by tractor beam.

You forget to engage inertial dampers, it seems,

and with a shock sling shot around the sun

you find yourself down past, something undone

minus money for a choice pair of trainers.

Would you have paid that? You just wouldn’t.

Once there were cassettes, C30, C60, C90, Go!

You’ll find them in this ancient world, you know,

but later you surrounded yourself with discs,

they’d scratch - but overall, definitely less risk,

fed up with the old twisted tape and pencil

routine, and I remember how you purged them,

in one of those troughs that follow every peak:

you were down, despondent, couldn’t speak

but held Lynsey DePaul back for a rainy day;

sold all the others except tapes you’d mixed.

They’d once held hearts that came unfixed

and mean nothing to us now. Each disc a door

opening onto another past and another reason

why, at the end of the year, this midwinter season

you find yourself here, naked like Schwarzenegger.

The lightning flashes. In the past, looking forwards

at times passed, coming from dark moving towards

light, or not. Smarter than your average bear.

All that ADHD might put hairs on your chest,

but leaves you down and out, wanting breath,

and you can't ever reach discs from high shelves

that Harry Moss has yet to stamp and press.

No way of knowing a stylus would lead you here

but, by the same logic, any spiral scratch

would inevitably bring the door, lift the latch,

spring the trap and down you’d inexorably tumble.

So, those choices you made were always chosen -

times to be happy, times to be numb and frozen,

those lovers you left, the ones yet to come.

Women who'd traced the grooves of your face,

and friends who'd vanished, leaving no trace

or anyway to reach them, talk of old times

about adventures gone and committed crimes

you repent of now, wished you could forget

even those sins that have not happened yet.

He’s older now, you’re somewhere back along

spinning old discs, walking old tracks. Old songs

that I suppose, one day, you’ll leave him with.

So there’s only two ways this could really close,

tails you win, heads you lose - you choose.