I cannot
And I do not
And so there is a sense
Of the waste of it all
I care not
And I shall not
And so there is a label
For the flakiness of it all
I am here
While the rose red trees
Refreshed by wind and rain
Are in my neighbour’s garden
Their bearers cannot
And shall not
Be with us today
Lifetime’s toll has taken them both
Though I do remember that innocence
And joy
As we talked of poets
Sat in their floral armchairs
They are but memories
Though memories of a youth
Spent searching for passion
Copulation sometimes mistaken for love
From thirteen to twenty
A seventh of life thus far
Heartbreak and heartache
One night and then the next
From youth club to dancehall
From football to bar
Friendships and egos
As batteries for life
The Albion
With Led Zeppelin on the jukebox
Where I walked in barefoot
On return from the Isle of Wight festival
The West Riding
Where local football stars, internationals too
Turned up on Saturday teatimes
Straight after the match
The Burns Tavern
One of our technical college lunchtime venues
Where Syd Brown would eat
Three rounds of pie and peas
The Mandarin Restaurant
Three-course lunch
For seven shillings and sixpence
Served to the more refined students such as I
The Starlight
A dancehall of renown
A place for meeting girls
In the lottery of the lights-out, contra-rotation circles
Lord Jim’s Discotheque
Where Steve from tech (mostly absent from tech)
Was a DJ, he also was said
To deal a few uppers and downers on the side
The Amsterdam Bar
Save the best for last, where the gay proprietors
Would don their Shirley Bassey costumes
All those old places
We all have them don’t we
Yet to be reminded
Is such a wonder-filled journey
Studio 58
Where the good folk congregated
To show themselves off
Also to be in with the in-crowd
And the downstairs bar
Where only young people would go
I forget its name
But it will have changed anyway
Slimline suits you said
Sold in the ready-to-wear shop
At the bottom of the arcade
Oh yes, with a very pushy salesman
Lights flicker in the mall
Taking time out to write
Thinking back
To when I studied the technicalities
And completed calculations
For lighting and illumination
I do know my sodium
From my argon mercury vapour
Also you too will remember
The neon lights in the discotheque
Where our white bits were made to glow
By the simplest
Of the light inventors trickery
Light emitting diodes
Now known as the ubiquitous LED
Were in their infancy
Tungsten, back then
Was the first choice
When the cost of energy was low
Quite a lot then has changed
For a little while
I mixed coloured paint
With oil on glass plates
Which I projected
To create
My own kaleidoscopic
Lava lamp effect