It makes me look back
The track record of vinyl Birmingham
The lessons from school and skipped songs
Veritable fashions in rationed book cupboards
I don’t know what to see
All that music is about me
The times I listened the times I tried
Some of it even reminded me of when I cried.
TDK cassettes and a hairy CD Walkman
Items for the rarity shelf today if ever there was one
Unicorns of delight and sea nymphs of error
All sorts of enjoyment when the music was high school terror.

AI Summary

It’s a poem about looking back at your Birmingham childhood through the music and objects that shaped you — vinyl, cassettes, Walkmans, school corridors, and the emotional charge of songs that felt bigger than you were. The speaker recognises how sound became memory’s first language, the place where identity formed in private before the world had words for it. It becomes a gentle, aching portrait of adolescence as both refuge and reckoning.