A SCREEN OF WHITE NOISE

Another poem that was sparked by a memory. The title is the year the events took place in and yes, back in those days, people did rent video machines.

1979

for this birthday she rented him a VHS video recorder

then had to set it up because

he was rubbish at that sort of thing

we all marvelled at the squat black rectangle

it was timed to record Casablanca

while we went to the pub

on our return we began to watch the film

we’d all seen it many times before

but felt free agents now

adrift from the tyranny of the tv schedule

abruptly

it stopped as they sang La Marseillaise

a screen of white noise

we’d turned it on before the end of the transmission

I moved to Plymouth

didn’t see them for a year

when I did

they were no longer a couple

he was drinking with a seriousness I had never seen before

she’d met someone else and was having a baby

she told me their life together

could have been summed up by that afternoon

a series of optimistic starts

that abruptly stopped

I'm not sure why this particular memory decided to float to the surface but as I wrote the first draft it seemed like it had legs. 

Here is Billy Bragg with Natalie Merchant and Michael Stipe singing Hello In There.

Until next time.