In the silence that prolongs the span
Rawly of music when the record ends,
The red-haired boy who drove a van
In weekday overalls but, like his friends,
Wore cycle boots and jacket here
To suit the Sunday hangout he was in,
Heard, as he stretched back from his beer,
Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.
A record lifted. He bent back,
Tired by the show of energy that defeats
The brokenness of towns, and black
Flashing coherent in the crowded streets
To sport its owner’s lack of rest;
For the stiff feel and heavy sound confined
To the heroic, and oppressed
As a delaying habit of the mind.
And on the others leant together,
Concocting selves for their impervious kit,
He saw it as no more than leather
Which, taut across the shoulders grown to it,
Sent through the dimness of a bar
As sudden and anonymous hints of light
As those that shipping give, that are
Now flickers on the Bay, now lost in night.
If it was only loss he wore,
He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,
Complicity and nothing more.
He recollected his initiation,
And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had laid tattoos:
The group’s name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born To Lose.
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