Single storey, long brick building,
curtained stage and wooden floors,
overture beginners, teachers,
scouts and guides in Sunday chorus.

Sounds of pennies dropping,
scraping chairs, coughing, iching, scratching,
and fidgets tiny bladders filling.

Holy high days came in cycles,
Whit Walks, banners, carnivals.
Many living on in stories,
since their final church parade.

Constables hay wain crossed
the Stour, wooden wheels creaking,
countryside colours clouded,
trees shrouded Flatford Mill.

Lowry's people were going to work,
guarded by furious chimneys,
darkness conductors, limbs aching.
Beneath the plumes short lives streamed,
inhabiting a rent collector's dreams.

Thin models for humanity
suffered Salford's acid rain
from satanic wage slave mills.

Granite tiled floor,
more interesting than Internet,
jagged streaky veins,
dense masculine stones,
polished gunmetal bloom.

Trying to establish patterns, symmetries.
Should I miss my appointment?
There's never time to persist.
Temptatioin of a timeless world.

They come in their hundreds of thousands,
floating magic carpets over our seas,
drowning, crawling up cruel sands,
bringing raw life, fuelling unease.

Salt for our wounds.
Tonic for our lethargies,
exorcizing the liturgy of myths.
Earth's orary grinds on.

I watch a small lump of fat
fall to the lawn, surrounded
by birds. A plucky starling
takes it to a quiet spot.

Grandad grew frustated with ploitics
at work. He turned his back,
took his pension,
started working for himself.

Greedy persistent pigeons press
stealing starlings' earnings, pecking,
flapping, asset stripping.

The old man worked night and day to build
business. But the predators swooped,
their beaks and claws tearing at his skin.
They broke his heart. Today we bury him.

Polluted sources running through
the mind - others wastes. Ambitious,
power-seeking sources fill
tributaries trickling poison
throughout mankind. Confusion
at the confluence of influence.

Shadows of eternal night.
Seeping through the veins, a flow
of falsehood, rhetoric creating
unnatural pain - phantoms
dreamed up in others brains.

Some birds can't keep formation,
stretching every sinew,
exhausted with the effort,
many blown off course.

Others defy the common purpose,
seeking their discoveries,
shedding feathers like words,
revising what we understand.