On the road to Taunton

On the road to Taunton

Just down Pedwell hill

I remember the fields

Where we used to roam

As teenagers on the common bill

On the road again, the smell of manure

The stone houses are the same

The bus ticket price has changed

But it all seems familiar

There’s a layer of dirt in my mind

A layer of dust I can’t reach above

Feed back from my body perhaps

Clear thinking doesn’t happen

When you’re down on the levels

You need hills or seas for that

This probably is why farmers are manipulated

By politicians’ wicked games

It’s the plains people, the beautiful plains

But they are like animals unthinking

White cows graze in the morning sun

Frisians in another one

As black and white as politics seems to some

The rows of Ash and Oak

The clouds like streams of white smoke

The close-cropped hair cut of tree-lined hills

Sticking up above Sedgemoor

A road sign reads Little England

I think that’s about right

Then the bus stops outside the London Inn

Builders’ white vans, the Westcot Close

The grey dull council houses of Margaret Thatcher’s ghost

On the bus are admin clerks

A gypsy looking man

A grumpy frumpy woman who keeps sighing

We pass Burrowbridge hill

Where King Alfred burnt the cakes

What would he have made of our mistakes?

Cornfields growing, farmers still have a stake

People must still eat, it's just the slice of bread is that of cake

East Lying, but so is the West

The dams of the reservoir, where six

Years ago this was a flood plain

A sea because of poor maintenance

Because we’ve taken the trees from off the hills

North Curry, Stoke St Gregory

The Thankyou for driving carefully

Signs – the yellow light upon hedges

The Outwood Newton, the pasty-faced man burping

in a sickly way with ginger hair

The large red brick houses of childhood memory

And the dark green hardwood groves that fill

The valleys where we drove

Like time is running out for us

And this like a fat snotty man with head phones on

We are oblivious to nature

We just make our internal machinations public

In a most crude way

A frumpy but respectable lady gets on

Outside a respectable well/trimmed beach hedge

And everything becomes more well/trimmed and neat

Worthy lane, North End, so must the South but perhaps not yet

House 66, Hamlea, DV Direct vehicles on Tarmac drives

Caravans on them and paddock close

The England flag waves above garden gnomes

Humps for 350 yards – I think that doesn’t sound enough

Try 10 years

Weak bridge -bound to be,

Let’s build a Euro-bridge

But we have Euro tunnel-vision

Hyde lane, Vicarage way

Around the Mulberry House and bush we go

Irish back stop is illegal

Just like a super state of two eagles

Can’t figure it out, like a boy scout

We’re lost but we will survive and make do

And the bus fills up with college types

As we pass the Baptist Church

Taunton 3 miles, Illminster 9

Cross barred gates, sunlit fields

Herb Robert dancing in the breeze

The woman I thought looked fed up and was sighing

Turned out to be deaf and she was signing

Just using her hands more than normal, than I would expect

Like some of us on the white cliffs of Dover semaphoring

Across the English Channel our SOS

But it just shows how long I am in the neck

Polka-dot black spot on white blouse walks on

Elder in the hedgerows singing a swan song

Gold rings in her ears and purple lips

As if death might have kissed her

Held her hips

Then the brutal masculine reality of progress

The Earth work road team digging up paradise

Diggers and cranes and pile drivers knocking

On shingle, gravel and uncovered red brown soil

Here we are in Taunton the place the journey ends

Londis, silk mills, inflatable theme parks

No left turn, no U-turn for Brexit into the Service Road of self-respect

The Holly bushes and the Ivy thorns and the hair dressing apprentices

All on the roundabouts over the black brook

The parks, the broad roads, bus depots and crofts

Here is the place that the journey stops