Tuesday 14 August 2012

Salt and Pepper


Salt and Pepper: water towers, brother and sister,
Curious cruet among the cranes,
Vastly visible across the vista,
Of the great Ging Gang Goolian plains,
Behind the crumby grey-brown boxes.
Salt: a monument to modernity,
Conservatively contrived from classical orthodoxy,
Creamy grey arcaded cylinder ,
Topped by a plain tiara,
White concrete construction copying carrara,
Much loved material of the fraternity of fascists,
And their courtiers, like le Corbusier,
Whose Art Deco antidotes to ostentatious ornament,
Demand our obedience, and will not betray,
Their hideous ideology, or ever once relent,
To any feeble mortal need, mere human requirement,
Salt nodding to Pisa, while remaining ram-rod rigid,
Through 80 years of baking heat and winter in the freezer,
Symbolic of purity – cold and frigid.


Older brother pepper: red-brick phallus, now redundant,
Excited, perverse viewer of Victorian values,
With Venetian bell tower beauty,
Which should find repugnant,
The rows and rows of tiny terraces,
All around his feet,
Early Edwardian, greedy builders buildings, mean,
In this open space obscene.



Wednesday 30 May 2012

Erdigg


You harbour within a crazy cornucopia,
Of burr walnut whirls, whipped into a frenzy
Of frames,
Featuring mercurial mirrors,
Darkly dappled,
And a plethora of peerless pier glasses,
A guilt of gilded girandoles,
Collectively, reflectively, 
Throwing back the much restricted light,
To illume a time, now out of sight,
When, with a surfeit of servants,
You were a community contained,
A curiosity cabinet of characters,
Carefully catalogued,
Courteously classified,
With the painstaking passion,
Of the Collector, unrestrained.