Ronnie McGrath St Roud and Other Gloucestershire Saints

I am tree/cornucopia of the fertile land/my food is an earthly substance known as soil/I am internet and other connections beneath ground level/beneath eye and sea level/beneath the vaults of the Subscription Rooms where tea and cakes are served to the underground beats and the golden songs of yesteryear/if you lean into the Stroud marketplace and listen to the people's conversations/them who chomp on Dave and Helen’s apples/them who fill their shopping bags with the spoils of Jim’s winter vegetables/them who hunt lion’s mane and use their magic in honour of the deep-thinking mushroom/you will hear them casting spells of old in honour of Solstice and the Salt bread maker/they butter/and they ball like fairies on a transcendental  flight/but I/who have been here since the dawn of time/rooted to the soil before the moon was feminine/and men were just a wombed-man in transition/have seen the olive stall stuffing nutrients into children’s pockets whilst their parents chew on patchouli plants that have grown out of Joni Mitchell’s footprints/yes/we are all saintly now/and if you don’t already know it/proud to be made in Stroud/proud to step in at a moments notice/and extend the lease of angels/when the heavens was up for sale/and if that was not enough/we community our kitchens like we community our voice in service of the communal poem/some say the S V A is an acronym for  Surrealist Visionary Art/it is the one place where you can have a coffee with Breton and have Dali and Magritte wait your table/it is the one space where you can mingle with artists whose paint streaked faces are a reflection of what automatic writing looks like in an outward expression of non-rational thought/or is it just an ode to some abstract place from which they have come/their expressionist brushes in hand/ mark-making/pulling easels  out of pot holes/whilst the centre of this/otherwise ebullient town/morphs into various forms of asemic writing/know this/fellow scribes/artisans/and quilt makers/there are fluffier punks than those/who claim to know the etiquette of liquorice sticks/I am tree/cornucopia of the fertile land/my food is an earthly substance known as soil/I am internet and other poetry readings beneath ground level/beneath eye and sea level/beneath the vaults of the Subscription Rooms/Stroud and proud/