POEM: Eighties Music

Eighties Music

I’m singing along with Phil Collins
at the very top of my vocal range,
listening to Three Sides Live
as if nobody lived downstairs.
How many times did I drive
our old Ford Escort (the car
I always tried to borrow
because of the tape deck)
blasting this album or Signals
or Bring On The Night or
Songs From The Big Chair?
I would sooner have left the house
without my pants on than leave
without music to listen to.
And then the trick was to get
the tape to the exact right spot
so when my girlfriend got in
there’d be a good song playing.
I doubt she ever even noticed.
We didn’t really have the same
taste in music. Other than maybe
Paul Simon. And now, decades later,
Talking Heads. But I didn’t know
them then, other than to know that
her older brothers liked them.
Earlier this year a British friend
and I drove through the Tennessee
countryside listening to OMD’s
Pacific Age as it was beamed from
a satellite to my phone and then via
Bluetooth into the rental car’s stereo.
In a way, we live in the future,
but we also have immediate access
to every piece of the past,
assuming someone set it to music.

13 November 2013
Oak Street