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
