Poem for All the Old Guys that Still Have Elvis Haircuts

I saw one of them getting off the number 3
outside Brixton Town Hall this morning.
He must’ve been in the last five years of his working life,
but he still had a full head of hair
and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

Same cut he must’ve had since way back
when his best mate slid hot black vinyl from a crisp white sleeve,
snarling You ain’t heard nothing yet!
with a newfound curl to his lip.
Then there would be the hard blip
of the needle hitting the groove,
and what happened next was enough
to send our boy home to plunge his fingers
into a tub of Brylcreem and baptise himself.

He’d keep on doing it
through strike and recession,
flower power and moon landings,
even as hair sprouted from his ears
and his abdomen echoed the Vegas years,
he kept on doing it because nothing else
had hit him so hard, searing his soul
and leaving him all shook up uh-huh-huh.

Look out for them, they’re everywhere,
standing out from all the other fickle generations
like a well pronounced ring in an oak tree’s trunk
signifying that in that particular year
conditions were suddenly extreme and unpredictable.