All the woodland deer

Through the alleyways of despair
The troubled town of crimson wares
The blood curtains speak of passionate crimes
All the dead beings are out walking tonight

Following on from the thread of the past
Humans in the looking glass
Take on a different hue
Turning from their Rusty Rouge
To an indigo shade of blue

Mauve is the shadowy sky
Ladles of burgundy
As God's wine cellar spilled
Cross bow heart
Takes aim
At the creature in the forest
Going down, down, down
In flames

The size the weight
The body blow
The bolt from the blue
Which touches its brow
Like a charismatic healer
Bring her low
Falling in flame
Falling down in flames

Chasing off the chasms of scheme
Laying low in the undergrowth
The final aching biting scream
And fighting for her last breath
Turning in the psychedelic dream
Of a graveyard of birth and death

Poem for Marguerite

All the places I travel to
Time is free at no cost
Ashton - from ashes to ashes
To the poet's wood (Audenshaw)
Where Auden talked with Bernard Shaw
Even the weavers wove their web
In Droylsden where waters ebb
Then flow into the miller's dough
of Milnrow
Thrashing at the fresh hay of Newhey
A deer stalker passed by the way of Derker
And a freeman took his land in Freehold
Who knows why you'd risk your success in Failsworth?
Newton Heath and Moston are the best towns to get lost in
In Monsall, they sell moon rock on a Sunday morning
In Crumpsall they can buy it back again out of season

Of course you can get your arrows fletched
And your bowstring stretched
in Bowker vale
And some pom-pom girls will make you bouquets
In Pomona
If you feel the need to rest a while
Drop anchor in Anchorage
Its a strong foothold for a gentleman suitor
On his way to Ladywell
Where the finest dames are known by name
To wash their hair
And chambermaids collect their buckets of water

Be careful of the Vikings who invaded long ago
We paid their levees like their toll
When we travelled on the Dane Road
And the wives of Stretford are hoiking up their britches
As they cross the waters
Tip-toeing to Timperley

The summer birds are nesting in the eves of Martinscroft
Because the green leaves grow in the withies of Wythenshaw

And everybody knows a rolling stone
Gathers no moss
It only feels its loss
When it stops
In the shade of shadow moss

Fires

Fires in the heart
Fires burning by the road of despair
Fires on the hill
Blowing through the bracken of care
Fires on the holy ground
Where sacred rivers flow
Fires in Heaven's sound
As straight as the crow

I've got a burning to do tonight
I've got a burning work
Burning through the pages
Of a script I wrote
About the love of two people
In the towns of the red night

Fires where the dead are riding
On a flickering flame
Fires where farmers are crying
Out her name
Fires like a circus of animals gathered round
Wild and uncertain of each new soul sound

See the dancing animation upon the church wall
Candles of a salvation wax works of a fall
Every icon melting in the powerful sun
Liquid mass of a Helium gas
When I miss someone

All the balloons are blowing
Their jets are rising high
Into a sky that's a glowing
With Chinese lanterns flying by

Even the dragon is growing redder
With each puff of air
Breathing the fire of a holy desire
As flowing lock of golden hair

Some business men are burning
Down the street of a city tonight
Writing on the wall
The worth of all by torch light
And in the darkness the horses call
Across the chasm of their oblivion
Where their riders fall
Down to the fiery pit of derision

Morning Blues

Woke up this morning

Feeling this bruise

It rose like a hill

I suffered its ruse

I woke like a fire

Set on a log

With the howling desire

Of a graveyard dog

I’ve got the blues

Got the blues for you

I needed a bank job

To put me straight

But they put me in a jacket

And told me to wait

I said I’m not used

To standing in queues

They said they’d put me in irons

If I refuse

I got the blues, got the blues for you

There are six dogs waiting

Waiting at your gate

They say I must choose

Between love and hate

Six bullets waiting

In the barrel of a gun

Waiting in the bed chamber

Of the Lady Someone

But I still got the blues

Got the blues for you

I tried to stay silent

Not put pen to paper

But its like the man said

She is an escaper

Always trying to break loose

Of the chains and her noose

But who could blame her?

Who could try to name her?

She’s every woman, and someone

I’ve got the blues, got the blues for you

Enough

The Northern diatribe of some folk

Is enough to make North tribe vs South tribe seem a joke

Its really important the North invented Industrial Production

And the South gave us Vacuum cleaning power suction

But the big question is do you push or pull your Henry Hoover

There’s an investigation in Shepherd’s Bush into the who pulled the wool

Over the carpet stain remover

Who cares?! I’ve had enough

I don’t mind if the North provided England with a power house

Made us super rich for a time

All of that is Post Modern now

It only influences our aesthetic taste for ruined industry art

For Nostalgia as if Britain wasn’t nostalgic enough

Why do we need reminding we used to have this stuff?

But screwed it up?

The fact is we were puritan’s who stood for something once

We had roots but now most of it is lost

Then you say we instilled the work ethic into the labour force

Well yes and no, though few people really starve now

Few people really grow, there is not such ambition in the working class

And the ruling elite are still hankering after the myths of the past   

They’re now too weird to be jealous of

The rich / poor divide is too great

They might as well be the Royal Family

And share their fate

But revolution is not on the cards – we have too many rules

And most of us through education have been turned into robots

So all we know how to do is conform

We are grey, we are a lifeless nation moving into oblivion

Ruled in part by people with no imagination

Who are too serious to fool

And that is one big problem of unquestioned authority

When students don’t question the teachers

The teachers don’t question their institutional rules

And the citizen cannot question the politicians

There is no accountability at all

But neither is there any room for failure or mistakes

Which is where the best inventions come from

We have gone in on ourselves in the best English tradition

When the world has gone crazy around us

We have retreated into the castles of our souls

And it will take a lot to unlock the door

To bring down the drawbridge

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