Lost for words, they're burning the books

Salisbury plain in the rain

And the foreign hoards

The hair dresser in a Salon

One of Seventeen

They were different there

They told her she talked too fast

She needed to slow down

I asked her if she knew any blacksmiths

No

There weren't so many horses in Salisbury I concluded

The conversation 

Began to feel awkward

Though perhaps that was started when I tried to pay

With a fire damaged book

I mean barren down

That's where I found it

And I didn't want to go

in there empty handed

She was sweeping up human hair

and I was dropping charred words

And paper on her floor

From Collins 500 word search puzzles

I like the idea that the word search survived the fire

So that when we are lost for words

At all the devastation in life

We can keep searching for them

And eventually we might solve the puzzle

I hobbled back into the rain on my crutches

and got the twelve pounds out the bank

To pay the nice hair dresser lady

She told me the bull dog statue was for the Bath and West

The fire, I didn't see it

Only the black singed earth

The smouldering and then the smell of sulphur

Addictive somehow

Barren Down

A Barrow

The dead may now be cremated as well as buried

And you can see the Glastonbury Tor

It is torn from Autumn brown

They're burning books in Shepton Mallet

The fosse way

They are turning the pages

of history black

They're making a stink

Painting it pink

And the Goblins are wanting it back

The green fingers 

Of book worms

The witches are running in turns

Hailing the flax

Railing the haystacks

Smoking like chimneys in packs

They are burning the books

In Shepton Mallet

But don't tell them

They can't read them

Their libraries closed

And the Filo fax

Is out of order in poets corner

And I'm having one of my attacks

Roman Roads 

All along the spine of hills

Open and close like chapters

Read in geological time

Strata of line and verse of rock

The meter and rhyme

of ticking geo clocks

But the stage coaches rolled on it

Reading between the lines

The wrong side of the tracks

Came from the Frome side

All roads lead there perhaps

And maybe they paid in kind

In book bind, double blind

On the summit of knowledge

When you know it all

You find out you know nothing

So Burn your books by the pallet

Burn them in Shepton Mallet

Burn them tooth and nail

I'll go over with a fine tooth comb

To find these lost words

In the ashes of Canard's Grave