Poetry

Saturday, 20 August 2022

Concrete dreams

Come on raise this building

Like a Moses foundation

Pillars of Salt

And pillars of rock


The three little pigs in a housing shock

Negative equity of Goldilocks

Rising inflation forced onto bears


Some of them built Shepton Mallet

The town

Sheep rustlers, shearers, 

Property of the crown


Strode was there with flowing hair

Looking down

Upon the poor who flocked to her door

Including the Ugly duckling


Black swan, white swan not seen anymore

Only on the pub signs swinging above the door


Periwinkle, weasel, wren and Robin

In the twisting clematis hob-gobble

Hoblin, goblin, shaven head

What dreams we have, when we are dead


Dying, trying to be new

Shepton Mallet, pallet crew

Shifting cider

Shifting saw

Bed pan, dustpan, bread pan more

Whistle down the truckers road

Hard granite town

Prince from a toad


Someone dreamt of a cinema

Another of a theatre

Built an enormous house

That turned into a monster

Some say its hideous, oh what an eye-sore

What do we need a fairy tale

We have Ugly post modernism to abhor


I'm not sure

It is a ball and chain

Tying the town down

It is almost a shame, almost a game

A mirror of the Church somehow


Except a warped being bent and contorted

Not given full form

Like a nineteen eighties computer game

Grasping at perfection

In replication, Ironic in it's supplication to

perfection, acknowledging limitation

Yet that was cool back then

Now it is a record of a time before


It is like a tetras castle fallen out of the sky

Landed like a giant parcel, some knowledge of 

an American Apple pie

But incoherent and intransigent,

And in, in , in itself  out of place

In congruent


But let's not worry ourselves

It was somebody else's concrete dream

And we no longer see the seams

It has been sewn into the fabric of life

Now it is a gym, it has turned into

It's own image of itself at last

A modern church - a temple to the body

The material wealth

Of protein and carbohydrate

Packed inside, prayed to 

Heated up baked in the crucible

Of exercise and self-belief

The Great I, the great I am

As we climb mount Ego

On the steps

As we let off steam

As we lose sweat by the buckets

On the exercise bike

Perhaps we lose our selves

We forget the boredom of days

That put on the fat

We negate with positive prayer, the mantra, I will get there

One step at a time

Like a stair way to heaven

Built of tetras bricks

That have fallen down for our sake

To climb, to work out

Rearrange angles, remake


So perhaps this ex theatre really is our modern church

as close as we can make it

Though I am yet to see John the Baptist

Lift a Bar bell in there

Although you never can tell of course






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