Charity shop crawl
I start in Scope, find my first Kiss T-shirt from the Lick it Up tour, the old black now charcoal grey, a seven inch tongue lost to too much Persil. In Shelter, I find my leather jacket, purchased from an alternative clothing shop that used to be down a side street near Leeds Market. I knew It was mine. It still had the AC/DC guitar on the left lapel. I bought the badge in The Merrion Centre, circa 1984. In Mind, looking for something to read via the magic of serendipity, I find my old copy of The Whitsun Weddings, a storm of little Faber fs in a green frame that framed a picture of a train which journeyed through the opening poem, Here. In Oxfam, I find The black pixie boots I bought before my band’s first gig at The Astoria, when I was dwarfed by an 8 foot image of myself on the video screen behind me. I nearly bought them back but it’s been 30 years and I could never pull them off, or on. In The Sally Anne, I am forced to take a seat to calm my breathing when I find my mum’s brass Buddha with the outstretched arms we used to rest spliffs on so we always had the next one ready. It had graced our cluttered mantelpiece. I boxed it up back in 2008 with its assorted friends and took it to St Martin’s House. I buy the Buddha back.
Mark Connors is a poet and novelist from Leeds, UK. His debut poetry pamphlet, Life is a Long Song was published by OWF Press in 2015. His first collection, Nothing is Meant to be Broken was published by Stairwell Books in 2017. His second collection, Optics, was published by YAFFLE in 2019. For further information, visit www.markconnors.co.uk.