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
