Writer and broadcaster GP Taylor has submitted the following poem.
He is a New York Times best-selling novelist. He writes fantasy fiction and spends most weekends and many weeks writing in the southern Lakes.
A film of one of his books is on Sky and Amazon films and is called The Adventurer, The Curse of the Midas Box and has an all star cast.
He can be followed on twitter at @gptaylorauthor
He said he wrote it 'after having 'a beautiful weekend in the Lakes' and then exiting through a Cumbrian town.
Monday morning in a Cumbrian town
Grey slates,
wet like dragon scales
rest on dark stones
windowed and doored.
A nowhere town
of fat women in thick tights
with delinquent brats
that dangle from their fingers
like broken street lamps
They trip, tramp
to the market place
where a fish seller
offers them Hake
from the back of a van
where every Monday he stands
as cold rain washes cod skin
from his nicotine stained fingers.
The kids blea
t as they are dragged throug
damp streets
weather washed with
autumns first flood.
The sentinel tick tocks
and chimes the hours
a fine town clock
etched with names of the noble dead
that only on one day in November are read.
Ignored with eyes of those who pass by are Boothby Bentley Craven Coal Lives no longer remembered in the morning as the shop keeper wipes the bloodied knife on his butchers apron having sliced a steak of salt marsh lamb grown and grazed on the grave where the slave boy sleeps.
And on Faraday Road
they trudge to school
aged teachers with lessons learnt
Who dream of making geniuses out of fools and building cathedrals from broken bricks.
Cyclist speed by
Old men in skin tight Lycra
Panting on pedal irons
Of gossamer carbon
Sprinting out of town towards
the barricade of Pennine hills.
And still, as the town wakes
One by one cardigan clad shop assistants open doors towards the empty town And the road leads in and the road leads out But no one stops.
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