In Gear Poem by Marc Mannheimer

In Gear



On a weekday morning,
with free time on my hands,
I stopped in the record shop
at Tower City, downtown Cleveland,
en route to my volunteer job

I wasn’t there to buy
or to look,
but to listen –
to samples from CD’s
on the computerized listening stations,
30 seconds of each song from each CD,
a taste,
a revealing tease
of what was to come if you bought the pricey things
(in general, I don’t buy CD’s,
I take them out of the library for free)

The Arctic Monkeys,
Neko Case, and
TV on the Radio
generated hip tapestries
of caustic rock, alternative-folk and electronic funk, respectively

“Watching the skirts
you start to flirt
Now you’re in gear”

– “Good Morning, Good Morning”, Lennon-McCartney

I walked out of the store,
coffee cup in hand
Yeah, I was in gear
but it wasn’t the skirts,
the women in suits beginning to sashay through the building
It was the coffee,
and, of course, it was
the infusion of fresh sounds
from troubadours of the modern Zeitgeist,
and their do-it-yourself, spill-it-all-out, forge-your-own-genre
methodology

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