Robert Verdon, #137, memories of the golden age, an epitaph

crumbed zoos of encoded possibilities stretching ahead blown-out tyres of parties and bottle shops that wasted them Bacardi and coke endless cigarette butts like shrapnel P.B. Shelley and ‛psychedelic’ shirts having a job you hated hierarchies of fireworks arranged by price Holden cars sitars Glad^® wrap japcrap being in air & potato guns crystal sets Indochina hair dye and curling wands reds crumbling mail order clothes lists of nouns and verbs that might come in handy plastic sailing dinghies and stamp collections coffee spoons that melted the pines are pissing Maxie the Music Teacher dreary empty freeways Labour Day my love’s an arbutus and endless trees immor(t)ality liquidambar at the nursery a hill of unburned telescopes tripping through Lorraine in my wooden shoon Mervyn Peake Phillip Susan Paul Nick Carol Gordon Michelle never fitting in anywhere a pocket full of lost opportunities Joyce wetting the bed in Portrait of the Artist zither wind henny penny 1910 sixpence Strawberry Fields Forever catalogued and a lake of bread and dripping black and white tv clouds building with each heartbeat across the wild world Golden Rain the never hearing a word I think I read in a Vassar Miller poem Gough then the end of the golden age