A grammar school education

didn’t spare me British Leyland;

post-continental drift saw me slip

into the rut of Birmingham

on to the track my path

should’ve been turning from.

Days and nights were plaited,

moulding metal into traffic,

everything was automatic –

you only had to punch yourself

in and out each shift.

 

I was the relief man, the filler-in.

Whenever you were desperate

for a crap or a fag,

or if your nervous breakdown was nigh,

I’d play your part for 5 or 10 minutes

and maybe the rest of your life,

while mini-avatars descended

for the trim and spit and polish

as our bodies draped in homage

upon interior and bonnet.

 

Legend has it that we struck for higher wages,

to further aspirations, promote a revolution.

No, it was just self-preservation:

the fear of three stops up, the barmy house

that locked and bolted nuts;

when we stumbled from the pubs

with our fingers off the button

we were dodging from oblivion.

 

Dominoes at dinnertimes

with young Rastas and old Jamaicans;

I and I in Brummie accents,

talking duppies, Zion, mashin’, smashing

down the spots as if we dared

the machine to reawaken.

 

When my new missus started cooking

pizzas and quiches for me to fill the night shifts

their eyes would roll with disbelief in,

they’d slap me on the shoulder

and say, man, it soon be over,

soon be just cheese roll with no pickle in.

 

The day I told them I was quitting

to start Psychiatric Nursing

I could see the buzz zigzagging

all around the paint shop,

the assembly line clatter stopped in its tracks.

We’ll catch you later, they roared,

catch you later three stops up.

 

I don’t come past the place that often,

the broken down asylum

and the ruins of The Austin,

the pubs turned into sheltered housing

for the aged, the forgetting.

It’s getting harder to remember

which was first for falling.