x
Cracks have appeared in the concrete and some tough, urbanised grasses
Have sprung up. You can’t get onto its forecourt with wheels any more:
Some circular blocks have been dropped across entrance and exit
While metal roller blinds have been pulled down in front of its shop.
x
Its pumps are hooded, and its car-wash has been dismantled. Gone
Are the twin perpendicular brushes that used to spin as they closed in
On your bonnet. Fragments of grimed and mildewed glass
Litter their rusted track. The lavatories are padlocked round the back.
x
However somebody has taken a crow-bar to the Ladies, wrenching
The door off its hinges, and within the sink is intact although
You can’t get even a dribble of rusted water out of its single tap,
And both the toilets are seat-less, and one of the bowls has a gap in it.
x
And on the bank to the rear of the site, where there used to be that plastic
Goblin tree with the slide in it and the tented rigging for climbing up,
There’s nothing: the tree has moved on, the rigging has been taken down.
Ragwort and thistles encroach now on the grass that once was mown.
x
A newly built by-pass accounts for the drop in volume affecting this stretch,
Which is less than congested, these days, restored to its rural veneer;
And safe-ish for cyclists, but clearly from the perspective of any petroleum
Vendor far from worthwhile, and so there’s no longer a filling-station here.
x
What remains is for sale, I guess, but who could possibly want it?
Derelict monument to the age of oil, already being superseded by sugar-beet
Fuel, wind-power, tidal generators, and doubtless by far more inventive
Methods of transport in the future, teleportation, for instance, beaming…
x
Years down the line, the Council will call in the bull-dozers, order the JCBs
To break up the forecourt, knock down the shop, rip up the battered pumps
And send them off to the scrap-heap, along with that rusted compressor
Lying on one bent and eroded support like some defunct grass-hopper
x
By the debris of the air machine. Then nettles and vetch will assemble
And thorn-trees, and maybe the wild plum and certainly thickets of bramble
Where thrushes will nest, and small creatures running on smaller ones,
While bugs and gastropods will come to inhabit an overgrown copse
x
Here obstructing a view from the road of sink estates and staple crops.
x
From Shorter Poems – available here
anthonyhowelljournal 