Lessons Learned From the Album Covers of the Seventies

In addition to the seven poems I posted at that other place today, I'm offering some poetry up right here on Blueprint Blue:

From the summer of 2002:

Lessons Learned From the Album Covers of the Seventies

The first thing to remember is that Englishmen with beards
Get the best white ladies
This has been clear to me from the start
This may change but for now, heed this advice
You can see it in the lines in the ladies’ faces
And the way they look away because they have to not because the photographer says so
You can tell from the contours of the ladies’ bodies, their natural beauty
Not an artificial thing about it, it’s all too beautiful
And we know the men are English from the liner notes and their accents

Now, the thing with the hippies and the blue suits, I can’t explain
But they’re everywhere
You see a hippie in a suit and the suit is always blue
You see a blue suit and there’s a hippie inside it
They always look right at the camera in their blue suit
Like with a blue suit they’re not afraid of you anymore
Hippies are foreground and the rest of the mad slack world is background, man.

And you’re well aware that birds are significant
Often they portend flight
Or freedom
Cats suggest danger, in the same way as a man selling pretzels in a park
Empty rooms evoke loss, especially if the paint is peeling
A lead singer sitting in a chair means he’s fat and sad from drugs
Montages are creepy

They often fill the background with random strangers
This suggests mystery, a weight, an angle
They do this to distract you so you don’t stop listening
This is why the best critics never look at the covers
They only look at the labels
So they can write down the titles and count the stars they’ll give