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Tinnitus

The Bardic Minstrel

Sunday, April 8th, 2001

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Imagine the slow air-rush of an endless bicycle puncture,
The sound of infinite silence when lost in infinite space,
The crew of the entire Imperial Fleet
Whistling on-board the entire royal family,
And then all its antecedents,
Stretching back in a long straight line to William the Conqueror,
And then whistling them off,
And then,
On, again,
For ever.
Imagine blunt chalk and then blunt finger nails
Scratching down a blackboard,
And Quasimodo in his belfry,
On speed,
And bottomless deep-depth bends,
And high sky pressure change;
Imagine a perpetual rush of wind,
A never ending screech of brakes,
Interminable car alarms,
The cat-call cry of an English football crowd,
Destroying Phillip Neville
Or foreign national anthems;
Imagine the inexhaustible interference on an off-station radio,
The whistle of a television after the programmes finish,
A steam train screaming through a never ending tunnel,
The whine of numberless Dyson vacuum cleaners,
The canned laughter of everlasting sitcoms,
And Pinky and Perky, perpetually, on acid;
Then mix all those cacophonous ingredients together,
And that’s almost as bad as losing at home;
You get used to Tinnitus.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/tinnitus/