The Elixir of Life
Anna Gretton
Oil is magical
Long-lost animals and trees from epochs ago
Become a piece of soft velvet
Being stroked one way and the other
Calming and entrancing the senses
Or becomes a rainbow shimmer
Colour sweating out onto cold tarmac
Distilled life, contained in a drop
A metamorphosis –
From dirty treacle to rock-hard plastic
Mould it how you like and it will power our lives
But what it truly is cannot change
Fragments of the dead
Whose spirits writhe in the toxic fumes
Angered to be pulled from the bottom of the sea
They are taking us down with them
We suffocate and asphyxiate
As we frantically bop to the latest pop
Through tinny plastic speakers