Record Player
Then into your life
there comes a darkness
—Radiohead
It’s never our finest hour in America but right now,
most things at the ledges of my life are like the sad
shuffling at the edge of an LP. This one time, I forgot
to pick up the tonearm & heard polyvinyl lamentations
until Thursday when I finally realized the sounds were from
my speakers & not one of my own haunted creation.
I would have laughed, but it was war time yet again:
more air strikes crumbling schools, more drone opportunities
& misplaced homilies. You got to be kidding me.
Polished tanks cresting possibility’s hill for another,
unrequited salvo. All the mystifying UFOs & split
infinities in the record’s imaginary are in the past as it
kept playing its static goodbyes: little hiccupping pleas
until somebody, finally, flipped off the infernal machine.
Copyright © 2026 by Adrian Matejka. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Back in March, I spent a Thursday afternoon listening to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool on vinyl. I got so caught up in writing this poem that, at some point, Side A of the record had ended and I’d been scribbling to the static in the lead out. It’s not a surprise that some of those otherworldly soundscapes found their way into these lines along with bits of Radiohead lyrics. That’s why musical ekphrastic writing is so appealing to me: Music simultaneously inspires through the curious heart as well as through the listening ear.”
—Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka is the author of The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), which was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.