Shepton Silence

 The drains glimmer like celebrities

In the sodium light

And families watch them on TVs

On some slow Thursday nights

The tree leaves are turning yellow too

And a sickness hit me this week

I stayed in bed

As the world it sped

Past equinox and winter seas

Come along to Shepton

You're sure to suffer some shocks

Come along to Shepton

Where we've all been put in the stocks

They take vegetables

From recycling bins

And hurl them at you in the docks

And they judge you if you're an artist

And they judge you if you are not

Come to Shepton in the summer or 

While the Church bells toll

While the men drink cans on the gravestones

While the youths are playing vandals

And Van Gogh cut his ear off

I told you once why couldn't you tell

That these kind of landscapes may clear off

All other escapes from hell

I lay my cards on the table

Yet The dog ran off with my shelves

I built up reputation yet

I couldn't control all my selves

Don't personify all the animals

The Llamas on the hill are not Gods

Though they look like enlightened beings

Still you must look at the path they have trod

No I come back now to St Paul's Street

He of faith and of fire

Branding the love of a creator

Into the dogs collars of a choir

If I shove the book off the table

If I even try to call up a friend

The telephone exchange holds the cable

And we meet in the middle and end

If I yank a wire

will it hurt

All those vandals with candles

Down wells

If you live in the valley

Do you wish for

A higher home near the elms?

 Do your wings beat like headless geese

Following yet going in circles

The arctic is one I can think of, I guess

But not one I mean ever to go to

Underneath us are copper and fibres

Underneath us, are caves and dells

Beneath us the water is eating

Like worms in rotten apples

The rock is like their candy

In geological time it dissolves

Yet we like miners from the North

Blast holes along the stream bed

Waking from the long sleep

the dragon trapped there by the elves

And we burrow like scientologists

Into the heart of ourselves

But like dwarves our hearts are greedy

For the gold beneath the mountains

Like kings we can't rest in our sleep

Until our coffers overflow like fountains

Mountains

Mountains are like nerve bundles tied up in knots

Tense packed strings of wires fossilized, baked

Bended, frozen

But before these feeling times of tumultuous floods

And bruising, burning, tortuous

Moments had been forgotten

They survived as eviscerated rocky facades

Flakes of time millimetres thick only

Lain down like rings in a tree

Buzzing in the Nerve tree

In the roots of the bundle of the body of the land.

Red Burn

 Down from the dark, titanic mounds

Runs the Titans blood

Sometimes white as milk

Sometimes dark brown

Dirty blood from its deep arteries

Over salmon flesh, over cod yellow

Over the red Wrasse fish body

That heaves in the Glen

Whose gills breathe rain water

Whose lungs are damp caves

Whose Leviathan mass lies

In these watery graves

 

Whose back is a whale- une Roche Baleine

The whale bone ribs have been bent into waves

Whose oil and blubber are buried deep underground

And ambergris in its gut are the minerals yet unfound

They’ve been hunted by Geologists with their hammers like harpoons

Ready for the conquering like men who want rock from the moon

River

 The river babbles, shelves in clam-like semi-circles

These C letters it is spelling out

Constantly, clattering, changeling

Calling in chains

That run like white sausage strings

Over stone rails

Bulbous and fat as onions rolling

Down a cobbled hill

Chattering and chasing each other as children do

Racking and racing as horses out the stalls

All from the starting line over the head of Steall Falls

Dragon Fly

 Little beastie

Fearsome in is proud mantel

Scales of multi-colours

Wings of thinnest hair netting

Squashed so its guts spilled out

Trodden under foot of exploring geologists

In their rush did they find the rock was still there?

Did they try to squeeze Life out too from that?

Like blood from a stone

I don’t care

Skin and bone and hair that is where life is

We are like hurricane hunters chasing after

Something that is already dead

This is red, that is not

Time is not dead though

Time ages and we can only remind ourselves of by how much

Of by how unimportant our lives are by looking at Rock

Hard, never blinking, always staring no matter what

Rain gets in its eye, 

Like Heroes of the old world

They survive or don’t quite out last everything

Slowly decaying eroding

 

She held this fledgling in her hand

Like it was more precious than all

The Rocks of time and the world

As a giant holds a seed

Or a mother her child

That they know will grow into a flower

Then upon a rock she placed it

Ticking, for the seconds of its life

And let the fairy nymphs of the river

Have its body

Path building or making ends meet

Here we are all sat down

Amongst the turf that’s turning brown

By the stream which fecund flows

Over rocks in rows and rows

Here we stand beside each other

Sister to sister and brother to brother

Beside the mountain

Beneath the cloud

The echoing falls which talk so loud

A new line

 Monads, epistles, fevers, colds

Cool drooling mouths

Faces of fools opening, closing

Laughing and falling

Like all of human nature

Into the gene pools

The River out of Eden

The long charade

The pictures and shadow play

The aching archipelagos

Abandoned island rock

Out on a precipice

On its own a ticking clock