Vintage Concert T

Another night in the coffee house
among hordes of worshipful
classic rock T-shirts burnt thin
from pre-sale washings
in foreign laundries…

I bet no one here understands
how it worked back then:
we either wore the shirts to threads because
we loved them to death, or hated to see
the silkscreen chip away and stored them
when they started to look like this
until we could get to the next stadium show
and get the next one.

It wasn’t style. It wasn’t fashion.
It was a medal for love
and death by tinnitus
or misadventuring among the rows, tongue twisting
under the seats with the new friend
and the new shirt tied over the old
and hoping no one found the stuff in the cigarette pack.
It was the way out blazoned on a 60-40 blend.
We’d compare them
at school next day
and envy each other swearing
we’d never miss another tour,

until a day came
when we looked in the rear view mirror,
kissed off all the expensive devotion,
and proceeded straight on to mortgages
and beer guts unconcealable by any shirt.

I’ve found T. Rex on the radio tonight and
can see Bolan’s big platforms and rainbow swirl
on black across my chest, big ass chunky music
gonging in my head for two days and the shirt
telling everyone I’d gone to see The Man.
I saw that same shirt earlier tonight on a kid
as skinny as I used to be except
it was grey as a post and scraped evenly clean
in all the right places.

I don’t know what he saw in it:
how you buy damaged goods
and call it fair trade
without putting your own time
into the wear,
I’ll never know.