Let's Go to the Hop

In those days it was thrilling,
after a beer or two,
as we turned the corner,
like grown men,
to hear the band playing Buddy Holly.
For it sounded raw
in the young evening air,
but we, too, were raw,
raw all-boys-school boys,
mere monosyllabic boys,
like our names,
Bill, Bri, Mel, Jed and Fred.
And we stuck out
like one word headlines
on the tabloid walls of the pounding hall.

Girls were frighteningly pretty
and mysteriously multisyllabic,
clustering in paragraphs
of incomprehensible complex sentences
in the editorial of the dance floor.
Hard boys,
with safe distance boldness,
we eyed up and shared out
the ones we fancied,
from where we dithered.

But you flushed and quivered
with spot-conscious bashfulness
if you were invited to dance,
and then
what if you couldn’t jive
and your mates were jeering at the side,
and what if you didn’t know
what to do when the dance finished,
and what were you to do
if she saved the last dance for you?

.

Reviews

[Gee]

What a great step back in time, scenes that have been played out over and over for many a decade.
Reading your about methinks there was little or no luck in you being published. The nearest I've ever come to that was punished :))

[Gerald Parker]

Thanks for commenting. Getting published in books is incredibly hit and miss. You have to know someone, to have won a few poetry competitions, and it helps to have gone to the right school, etc., etc.