The House With The Room With The Hi-Fi

After Creative Writing classes, I swore I would never write another poem. This is it.

I was reminded of this piece by meeting a fellow writer who actually owns a Bang & Olufsen. Sigh....

In sixth-form there was a lad called Tony Ormerod
Quiet, curly hair, glasses.
Looked a bit like Buddy Holly
but no-one bullied, abused, threatened or touched him
For he was armed with the most venomous grolly

Could spit, split a reed at thirty feet
If it was an inch.
Knock a wayward schoolmaster off his bike
At a pinch

Didn’t really know him.
Was a friend of friends
but already I knew better than to cross him,
Then try to make amends

for vile sputum, rotten, rancid and mephitic
would have winged my way, asteroid-like
There was some irony to hear A-levels
Were his passport into medical school
to learn the art of physic.

Fermented his own wine,
Supercharged alcoholic
He drank as if in training
for his bedside manner
As, for days after, he was sick.

In Assembly the headmaster read
religious bromides from behind a lectern
while Tony loaded his mouth like a breach
and practised yokking from the balcony
during lunchtimes to see if one day
his range might reach the teach,
mid-preach.

One evening my friends of Tony
were invited to his house down
the posh end of town.
Well-heeled hardly came into it

The house was massive and plush
But, what took my breath away
Was a room that had one purpose only.
It was furnished solely with a hi-fi (and a sofa)

Oh what a hi-fi, mounted on a simple table
Speakers like wardrobes and a single Paschal light
Phonograph, plinth, elliptic diamond stylus
and the amp! A temple and its altar in its church
The house with the room with the hi-fi.
How I prayed. How I craved.

From that day on the thing I wanted most of all
(Apart from, with hormones coming to a head,
a girlfriend) was a house with a room
with a hi-fi, to listen to Ummagumma
And see Pink Floyd’s instruments where they lay
In the dark – See Emily Play
In the house with the room with the hi-fi.

I was at an impressionable age.
At 16, like putty used to duplicate keys
to unlock other people’s pleasures.
Now, in this age and of age, with CDs, DVDs MP3s,
music’s
in reach with ease.
And I no longer wish for
A house with a room with a hi-fi

but I wouldn’t mind having the girlfriend.