Giffords Circus, Minchinhampton Common, August 2013

 When Giffords Circus pitches up on your green,

Conventional wisdom is mesmerised:

Enter the Big Top’s strange circumference

And Euclid’s straight-line space-time dissembles

Before your very eyes, Ladies and Gentlemen!

All is magick, spectral, alchemical,

Performers and audience conjoined in spectacle:

Clowns, dancers, musicians, tumblers, artists,

Balancers, acrobats, aerialists,

Fire-eaters, madcaps, funambulists,

Calumniators, vituperators,

A faux dancing bear, contortionists,

Backbiters and nonchalant trapezists;

A post-modernist rewrite of ‘Hard Times’,

Coketown, Bounderby and Gradgrind vanquished

By Mr. Sleary’s travelling circus:

What is your definition of a horse?

‘Quadruped. Graminivorous.’

‘You musn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman …

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman,

And ‘Fact, fact, fact,’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind;

But welcome to Giffords Circus:

Fantasy, insight and ingenuity,

Invention, intelligence and imagery,

Chimeras, inspiration, flights of fancy,

Where nothing is what it seems,

And certainty is a fool’s paradise,

In Giffords Circus, Theatre of Dreams.