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

More trees please

 The trees, the trees

Send them in

The ides of March are wearing thin

The pine and larch and ever green

Where are they now that I have seen?

The roads are bare, we cry take heed!

They can't bear our load

Or meet our need

No shadows now are drawing long

Only the night's blessings to keep us strong

Each day a furnace of solar fire

Baking the roads where cars are for hire

And more and more roads we lay down

In Roman fare of overcrowded town

And what of the so called wasteland?

These are not nothings we hold in our hand

Even a glebe or a bramble strewn field

Can be turned into a woodland of cooling heal

We think we can live just as we did before

But this is just folly of standing on threshold of the door

We either wait out side and decide our future dies

And that of generations yet unborn we sacrifice

Or we make a stand here and now 

and say no more building put away your spade and trowel

Let's reuse the old buildings let's plant more trees

Let's put our heads together and this problem might ease

Fly estate agent

 Why don't flies become estate agents?

They seem to really like visiting my house

And letting themselves in, looking around 

quickly from room to room

Then diving out a window

Once upon a time in Shepton Mallet

 Swooning in the afternoon

Following flies with my eyes

Hearing, clearing

The Foreign words

Hollow

She is standing there 

Someone fragile

Yet strong

Every woman

Everywhere a vase

And I am the eye of Babylon

Piercing in the quickness of a care

Piercing in the shallows of the stream

Woken broken with a care, from a shallow dream

Lapping in the inch high water of life

It flows just about, just married wife

Just divorced, just about on speaking terms

Just

And cutting the kite string it floats up

Into the stratosphere and I no longer

Think I know my own face

I have forgotten it

And so will you one day

Cinderella works in the barbers

Sweeping up the hair

The Verger mutters to himself

As he spreads the butter knife

The collared dove is cooing

The Polish sit on gravestones

Their Labradors open doors

To the afterlife

The Queen of Sheba is up there

She used to be a harlot you know

The night comes in

Her clothes come off

And the world moves on with its show

Cleopatra works in Ladbrokes the gamblers

She's taking bets on the horses

Raising the stakes on a possible invasion

While Rapunzel is in the hairdressers

She's arguing with Cinderella

Buggs Bunny walks in looking for something funny

But they use the stick and not the carrot on him

The Dardanelles are the good fellas

Every town needs its gangsters

Here they are supplying drugs to minors

Here's Peter Pan stoned out of his mind

On the park bench, With Tinkerbelle

Sprawled in a Corner

Wendy saw them, then ran to the barbers

To tell them the Church was on fire

They rang hell's bells, the fire brigade

And came hurtling down the street on their engines

Their ladders were reaching up to the tower

Where Rapunzel was waiting

Prince Charming he came shouting

Ranting while running down stairs

What's all this I hear about farmers

And what's that I heard about bears?

Well the three bears have moved 

Into the neighbourhood

And now Goldilocks goes to school in the wood

She tried to stay white, for they said they don't bite

But she ended up bitten quite good

Now Red Riding Hood is a mummy

And she works in the seven eleven

She's got to make sales targets this month

Or her little dwarves will have empty tummies

Oh yes she's relying on benefits

I mean her husband is an ex miner,

He mined all the coal, now it's snow white as his soul

And Snow White's has turned rather black

You see the wolf with baleful eyes

Something's eating him up deep inside

As he marauds down the street

Looking for meat, or just looking

For the life he was owed

Don't worry young man,

Oh young rabbit

For you're living in Shepton Mallet

It was tinsel town once

But now the time is upon us

And the clocks face has turned away from the sun

Even the sun dials are broken

And astronomy is all out of whack

I'd like a time machine, visit a time so green

When fairy tales didn't end up so black

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

She had kittens

 She had kittens

You said

I said boys or girls

You said both

I imagined an impossible world

Kittens, really, from a woman's womb

I hope they are normal

I mean as normal as wombats at Wimbledon

As whimbrels at Wombleton

Angry fur balls

Or merely sage

Wise beings, these kittens

At least on the page

the be-all and end-all

 the be-all and end-all

 

the most important thing:

We all agreed that winning was not the be-all and end-all.

Moo cows

Moomins

Moomax

Moopin

Primax

Mirrormoo

Shoe wax

Shimmershoe

The largest event in Northern Europe

The Dinosaurs never saw it

The flammingoes

Parrot style

Filming

Carrots while

Waiting for oranges to turn red

And Robins where do they go

In the summer hey

Ball on ball, on ball

Like Newton and his apples

Je m' apple

Give me an apple

How do you like dem apples

Appellation trails

What mint tea could bring

Starving

Of oxygen

Hot street