Metal man lamp post


You ugly bugger of concrete
Banged in the seventies
They lined up and peed on you
More than ever before
And urine yellow
Looks vile on concrete
And galvanised inspection chambers
What wires in your bowels?
Oh sodium one!
May you flare tonight,
May you replace metal lamplight
The parish man was proud

Not even a close aesthetic
Frankenstein dreamt you up
In the council office
Cast iron the man
Killed the lamplight
Where kids played
And concrete sticks
With lollipop licks of sodium
In 1976 we clicked our bubble gum flick cards
At your based buzzed the curious hum
Electric bubble gum we spat it
Stuck on your knobbled skin
Your pebbledash grin, we found fossils
We scratched smiley faces
Curious kids pried the galvanised door
What on earth could be inside?

We pushed you
You never moved an inch
no iron bars to climb
Just cold, a clinical
Cynical we felt sorry
For we believed you had no soul
unlike the steel lamp, he swayed
When we played
tag
He moved malleable, engaged with us
We prefered him
But summer 76 brought the rattling
the back,
Of the council truck.
He had been plucked.
They are going to melt him down

What an intersting poem - I didn't know I shared my birth year with lamp posts - we had one knocked into our house by a car came right through my brothers window.

Funnily enough he developed an obsession with having yellow lamps in his bedroom from then on and used to go out and nick the little square ones that workmen used to show holes up in the night.lol