You're

You’re the most British person I know

Your hair wafts back like a sparrows nest

It looks like a thatched roof

Atop a croft that’s blest

You’re the most British person I know

You’re the most Greek person I ever knew

Your hair is so dark

Like Methuselah’s hue

Your skin like an olive grove

So dark green imbued

With the frankness of foresight for the

Tragedy new

You’re so Hungarian with your forthright airs

With your blood that boils

At room temperature

And your Saturnist cares

You’re so dying

In the now that you don’t care

You’re so hard Italian like

The stone of an olive

Cannot crush its essence

Get to the kernel

You’re so filtered coffee with

The heroics of Hercules

Its sad when your abandon

Leaves you roaming the open seas

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

The Wall

I thought about the meaning of it all

How when I go

There will be nothing but the wall

Which I have either climbed

Or let fall

Keeping it up high

Trying to stop it fall

And there is nothing but these barriers

That separate you from me

That keep us all apart

There is nothing but the Wall

Which we build inside our hearts

What are we trying to protect?

Some little piece of paradise

No one can reject

Our little square of green

We’d like to keep in the sun

But after all is said and done

Its just a Wall

Its just we all

Must love someone

From the dockyards of Bombay

To the sand hills of Egypt

We are trying to fill our cargo bays

With some thing they can’t reject

Something like a phenomenon

Of pride that writes the Edicts

Scribbled on the wall

That’s falling to pieces

Come climb my wall

I’ll try to pull yours down

The Queen dances in the hall

The king has lost his crown

He sees love and tastes

The bitter leaves of regret

Come help him pull down

These bricks and mortar

Of the Wall he tries to forget

Cambridge Analytica

They're Cambridge Analytica
All their words so Politica
So insightful, oh so true
Who ever thought they'd be spying on you?
Oh we trust them, yes we do
With their names in iron
Etched like lions on our national consciousness
Like Lords and Ladies walking through
We know they have the privilege
But what do they know about you?

Such as these were whispering
Beneath the stockade
When they crucified Jesus, King of the Jews
They were the ones who got paid
Such as these have testified
Against youth and against old age
And if you don't measure up
To their examination box
Be sure they'll try to push you off stage

Oh they're Cambridge Analytica
Full of the fascism of Hitler
Held in place by their prestige
But take off their face and you'll see their greed
Their tongues lie, their voices are grey
Their blood is Luke-warm, like that of a snake
But not cold blooded, they would never make that mistake
They are too precise to fool -every correction they make

They're Cambridge Analytica,
Cambridge Analytica
Robots of the system never sympathetica
Machines who do no wrong
But their hair is always grey
Mind they don't catch you too
In their Spider web way
Cambridge Analytica

Jail House Blues

The jail birds of a rotten rock
Jangle their chains
In the stocks
The balls of iron round their ankles haul
Across the rain soaked
Jail house yard
And from a distant tent of blue
They spy the hill top climb
They knew
Before this incarceration time
Came like bonds to bind
Them in their prime

Then others of that certain hue
Came by them under skies of blue
Blue like their jail clothes
Blue like seas where the sailor rows
Blue as eyes you look into
Where forever dies on tomorrow's knees

A dog

And a dog followed me back
He gave chase like
A twister in the field
Between the nettles
And the Elderberry
Around the Spinney he happily played

And a dog he followed me back
And this hound he ran around
And this mutt he moved his butt
He wagged his tail
And shook his head
And a dog he followed me back

A Springer Spaniel
Louis the 16th century style
Curly locks and floppy ears
Bounding about
To my cheers
Go back home said I to him
Too far have you roamed
You'll be lost at sea

He listened not to my pleas
So I returned with him
To his Farm stead lea

And a dog, he followed me back
Across the field
Under skies of blue black
He was free

Because you said that thing to me

Because you said that thing to me
Because you did and meant it
The words that left the orbits spin
Flew off and I got dented

You see I've been off in space somewhere
Exploring darkness
Isolation, despair
And I was hit by
Your space debris
Which reminded me
Life is so fragmented

Pieces hit and bounce around
We all spit
But not all hits the ground
And Some spaceship
Ends up in lost and found
Because you said those words to me

Just little things
That make the world go around
Little words
Little sounds
But they turn great cogs underground
And water wheels
Flood with oceans pound
And enough of mud and blood
Its drowned
Out by the echoes
Of your words to me