SINCE POEMS

APOLOGIA

Over the last few years I have brought out a series of 6 poem collections with Chipmunka (the mental health publishers) at my own expense despite being rather impecunious. I also brought out 3 volumes of a philosophy book called Transition To Philosophy under a nom de plume but am inclined to want to forget about that – and there were 9 books self-published on Amazon before the 6 Chipmunka collections too, which I think of as random practice; and it’s still all random practice today; but what I may mean is that the recent 6 Chipmunka collections form a series. They form an arc. At the start (Soundcloud Rain which is a book of songs) I am unaware of what happened to me as a boy, in helping invent the net at seven, and other things too. At some point in the chain I get my accompanying autobiographical paragraph right. Well, now there is a brand new collection to go on the end, to augment the 6, for the people around me as I work don’t want it all to end. It may be that it can go no further than my Blogspot page, if I can only publish things that are free these days, not pay a vanity-press; but whatever the case, my poetry has quick-marched on, and I am increasingly contented to let it be shared, among the people around me, maybe even some of the voices I hear too, though for philosophical reasons am not prepared for my work to be Anon as shall be explained in the verse.

Rimbaud died at 37; I am already 44 and grey-flecked in the beard. They say the best would be done by this age; and that peak-time is over; but I still have literary dreams. Moreover, living here at the foot of the fell, there is a lot of leisure time to process to trial and outcome, a lot of necessity to kill time and cure boredom and the surplus of leisure – the spare time continuum – that stretches like insipid chewing gum - is sometimes punctuated or even punctured by visitors – and that changes the note and tone of what’s going on at my screen because there is input from people a lot happier than me that don’t have the necessity to write but are still involved in a literary way.

Did we form a pact during COVID-19 to try and write a book of science? I have 1000’s of files which is obviously too much for human regard. Keeping only to poems and songs, as herein, I still have many files of them left over, gone to waste so to speak – for as my ex Mary said “you are someone that has written 100’s of World Class poems and thrown most of them away” – and that is true – but the recent file I have here is regulated by the rule that everything in it has to have come into being since I discovered that I helped invent the net in a little way as a child. That discovery happened in 2025, where I also discovered I was slightly marked by the maths of the new colour, and also made progress in my case regarding what my dad’s job might’ve been. So it’s April 2026 now, and this file has been just this year, and is still narrowed down from larger bodies of text.

I think we did form a pact over Covid-19 – my siblings and their partners - to write a Nobel Prize worthy paper on that “living spreadsheet” I found at the dawn of the web. It turned out to be a monster, that living spreadsheet, that a monster needn’t be very big, and it was already the second Observation of my boyhood at eight years old but it’s not the topic of this book of poems and songs, for this is not a book of science and writing-wise, things haven’t gone to plan if the scientific paper was the plan. I never really engaged with the plot of being at the helm of a teamwriting scenario working on a particular paper. I have dealt with matters of Observation and more in other files, dealt with the whole story, but to keep to the realm of poems and songs seems to preclude such government-level science.

In fact what I have offered o’er the series – if it is to be a series - is quite poor considering the possibilities that arise with my life story and considering some of the files that get brought into being too. The dissipated energy, entropy and waste is terrible. My brother James says if I am planning on dying, meanwhile, I should just leave behind a CV on my Blogspot page – and it’s already up there, waiting, as I wait to die now. The proper text never got finalised and I have had setbacks including mental health issues and a constant torrent of voices who could be said to be part of a war that involves people who wish me dead and those who don’t, people who wish me to be an Anon poet despite the drastic decrease in Individuality that would represent all round and people who don’t, including people who wish me to do no more and those who wish me to continue… it can get stressful.

Put euphemistically the recent Chipmunka series of 6 collections could be looked on as the new Proust, and that brings us to the question of endings. Traditionally cherchez la femme is an option but therein I am only citing education, which never accounted for anything in my whole life story. What I am finding is home, downtime, family life, middle age, and a desire for no alarms and no surprises as Thom Yorke sang – bog-standard, dog-eared days.

Dr. Bob said at one point in this crazy process that “if you become the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures you are automatically less likely to win a Nobel Prize for science than you were only a moment ago.” So I am but remembering the co-imaginative pact we formed in Eskdale in a time of Covid-19, and explaining why it hasn’t worked out. What we have instead is a poet who hears voices and won’t be Anon, who reads a lot, who is prepared to share attribution at the end which is not to say I have become Anon. I think James helps me as a minor side project to what he himself is working on; and that all my family help to some extent. I also think there has been government observation involved in getting the last one, Let The Jews Win, out of me, and that according to their program I am not supposed to do any more. The poet was also being blamed for someone’s death, was being targetted and weaponised by the Big Brother State who seemed to also promise him sanctuary at other times and was drugged up to the eyeballs on medication throughout. The people I work with, love, respect, honour, don’t wish for their quest to end with the government. That was why the latest book Let The Jews Win continued past the first poem into the second.

There comes a time when you have to give in, leave the mess alone, leave the truth up to every word in every order. Looking back through the volumes I am disgusted by them, anyhow. I might be in the right mind enough to start, but am alone in the kitchen. At least, I am disgusted by a previous draft of Brave New Tense still on my Google drive. Then my family go out on a walk to the same spot in Eskdale, leaving me at home; and I reread Yes You May and find it really good – work I am happy with. In doing that, I already did Hannah and Seb and Florence. Hannah is my sister, Seb her husband and Florence their baby. So even though it is “ours” I see I already did what I was trying to do and should now think about helping others out like my brothers.

Even if there are no guns going off in the immediate vicinity the world is at war – there is a war online - so we have to look after our loved ones and families. I myself have had help from my sister again in writing this new book and I think she likes the idea that unless I am going to die I am not going to get to do another book; and she is not going to do me another. This doesn’t mean she wants me to die, only that if I do have to, I should do another book while I am it.

If this is what you expect from the guy that has taken you to the face or not I do not know, but things got harder the older I got, the further into mental illness I deteriorated. My personal belief is that the face is scripted in the Bible, for example Psalm 105 verse 4: “look for God’s face forevermore.” It’s why my old friends from school met up for a school reunion meal at a ridiculously expensive restaurant in St. John’s, London. Something like that is a reason I cannot go Anon nor is Anonymity desirable. You might hear me waffle on about this if you read the poems, which are an aid to memory, a raid on the inarticulate, the ash of yesterday’s fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper and put out in the right green bin.

If I really am going to die upon releasing this last collection on my Blogspot page – or release the collection upon dying - one might feel I have a duty at the end to rat on he or she or whomsoever made it so that I have to die. This is proving difficult: I cannot rightfully just put the text, with the rat ending, up on my blog, and not die. The best bit for me, contained within the body of the text, meanwhile, is when I reconsider a fragment, but one fragment, of a boyhood experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark.

If I have ever given the impression of my releasing an Anon book it is a mistake forced on me by the hearing of voices. I give no-one any permission to make me Anon and have that legal Right to determine such a matter. The books are copyright John Tucker who nowhere agreed to be Anon unless it was through manipulation by voices and against my will. There is a run of five or so Anon poems back in Breath Trapped In Heaven because they were originally published in the school’s Anon magazine, but there was no reason they needed to be Anon and the people that insisted they were still attributed to Anon in the book have since retracted that they should be Anon. Indeed, some have said the whole business went wrong when an individual like myself was made to be Anon back at school.

Anyhow, it may be that upon my dying the State will get rid of everything I have done apart from the recent duality of long poems called Let The Jews Win. If they can’t be Anon none of it can. By now I am thinking of leaving the last poem – that only rats on people who cheat and curse and lie – out – and still putting this online.

Some think they’ll only keep Let The Jews Win; some that even that will be cancelled because when they find out my autobiographical paragraph is true it makes them feel helpless. There really is, meanwhile, something automatic going on w/r/t an automated conveyor belt of poetry flowing from room to room looking for body and form. I think Mike Eccleshall first mentioned it in years before I had heard a voice. And now thinking of Mike I am thinking of music… they surely can’t just get rid of recorded songs? I also have songs in my breast. But speaking of automated things, they say my best works are (1) the tape I cooked in the AGA when its pause where cut and resealed in the reel healed and was gone (2) my brother’s sheet where pictures grew because though it was his design and is his number, the pictures that grew seem to depict the lyric to one of my own songs (3) the binaural earphone album – a Millennial idea for an experiment – to record on earphones. There have been other things – but I would imagine those three I mention are too good even for the Feds to do away with. If I put those three on my blog, though, my bro might not like the sheet where pictures grew being up there… it’s already an album cover on Bandcamp, with his blessing, as is the tape. And the binaural earphone album is on our rhythm guitarist’s Soundcloud page so repeat publishing it with an hyperlink could weaken it.

So it is that I proffer my Rimbaudian volume. I don’t want to waft into realms of fantasy about what poetry is, for there are still some remnant definitions embedded though not as many as in Let The Jews Win. I have changed my mind since starting this introduction: my favourite bit is a bit that rewrites The Lords And The New Creatures, if only for a couple of pages or so. Even if it’s my only contribution (which it is not) to the latest book I am happy with it, and the book is still shaping up, and looking like a fantastic teamwriting effort, a co-imaginative bubble that dips in the middle somewhat with my medication-taking, and privacy, but which has really benefitted from outside influence, and noticing that baby Florence can step into the boots of Flora, when it comes to Flora’s pretext, Flora from school who all the boys fancied. I was the first one to write something for Flo’ the baby, last time they came up, writing a song that was supposed to keep changing, never look back, go with the flow. I also wrote Flora, adult woman Flora a love poem in teenage years.

They – my team of family and their partners - have left it so that all I need to do if I need to die is put the text on my blog. There’s always the rat ending explaining the curse, talking you through it, how it effected me, what a hideous thing was done unto me, that I am not sure about including but thinking I shouldn’t. If I need to die it’s an option. Maybe what I need is to stop. What I mean is this rat piece I keep mentioning, it’s a suicide note, that tells a true story about how I was an innocent victim of a curse, was cursed by a sociopath in a way I was blinded to, and how my life was ruined and now I have to die. On this fair day I don’t feel like incorporating it.

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the carpet up at mormor’s here

and find in sharing room to cheer

for we have written this new Proust

and with my hands I can attest

to weathers all about my head

that mean the sharing of the bread

which have been here since the start

of finding salvation in art...

at the moment Flo’s just the noise

of playing with her baby toys

but soon she’ll sleep and then wake

and later eat a fairy cake

and one day grow to be a mum

but as for myself I cannot come

and without the ability to ejaculate

I may have grown a little late

and can’t continue singing of

women in the wind with love

so I should say “That’s All Folks,”

it’s impossible to mend your broken yolks,

e’ en when you sit with smokes

and tell your friend some dirty jokes.

FLO’ SEES A RAT

Flo’ was wondering “have I seen a rat?

Did it come from the Arc atop Ararat?

Did the cat get the rat in the end?”

She might be right, let’s not pretend.

Her mother Hannah was radiant.

She went for a nap, feeling spent,

as did mormor, and daddy too,

who may read to her from Winnie the Pooh.

James was upstairs writing his

sci-fi book with light sabre fizz.

I was downstairs, cricking my neck,

drinking tea, hearing the beck.

The beck is a nimble symbol for voices.

Naturalistic, it’s one of my choices.

But the rat that Flo’ might have seen -

was it searching to eat a bean?

Where did it come from, where did it go?

Was it after something yellow? thought Flo.

Flo’ was curious, and that’s no sin…

to pursue curiosity, says Einstein

is more valuable than education,

rote-learning, in this situation.

I’m no Einstein but ask thee

if the rat in question was me

going in the fridge looking for cheese

on a spring day without a breeze?

They once got in behind the AGA,

but this is not an ancient saga.

I think she’s right and saw a rat

from the place where she sat.

I think it had a long rat tail

and scurried fast so as not to fail.

I think it had a rat-like nose

and in the interim struck no pose.

I think it had a new moustache

and left its loved ones in the lurch!

ALL IN THE SAME KITCHEN

Mum has lost her pointy cabbage…

where has it gone?

Into the void?

Do people in the breeze

who vanish your keys

wish to confess

to the emptiness?

Ah, but it’s turned up again!

It’s on the middle table

in the kitchen I see

because seeing is free!

I need for them to see

it’s really our one

when it’s done enough!

Do people in the breeze

who wish to hide

smell of spilled petrol

and selfish suicide?

You might start to see it’s all been done

with the same one kitchen!

In it I am in a den!

Porridge!

FLEE HAS SEEN A BEE

Flee has seen a bee,

a bee getting lost in the garden, going

o’ er an ocean of green,

extracting pollen

from redolent flowers

to make honey

for the mating queen.

Its wire wings buzz

in a whir and frenzy.

It zips about in zany,

criss-crossing, computer-game

angles, diagonals, directions,

like traversing levels of air. Once

my copy of Neil Curry’s

Walking To Santiago

started to smell of

redolent flowers or

Flora’s perfume so I started to make the

Tower. I did wonder

if it was a spillage in transit,

in my gap year’s overnight

bag, but no, the natural

magic was real. There were

other entries to the Tower too.

I hope they are going

to read the Tower

when I am gone.

The lines go left to right.

SYLVAN FRIEZE

What can you do when you become the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison? My latest thinking is that my dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness, but I don’t know this. The first was, I believe, something also attested to by James Joyce in time before me, which is written about in Ulysses. The second – it struck me recently – was an actual monster, albeit very small and albeit contained to a plastic rectangular card.

With the first I went into the wood to get the booted away ball, and as I stood looking for the ball, it came from the right, crossed my body, parked and started to wriggle its little wing. This caused me to run and upon returning to the wood to hunt for it was not to be found. I think it was meant to look like a hoax but still exist in meaning.

With the second, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the pine, wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”

I was ignored and it was a flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top of it. I did not leave it to soak in water like a good scientist might. I left the room and went back in to see if it would still be there as the wood had taught me – and it was. So I made the decision to bin the whole jacket.

Once upon a time, when I first decided to “get scientific” about my life, I devised something called The Theory of Dark Evolution. It states that James Joyce also saw new creatures too, and that him writing Ulysses is therefore the reason Ted Hughes then went and saw a monster in the river, and Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain, about the nature of visionary experience, then becomes the reason Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert, and Morrison writing The Lords And The New Creatures then becomes the reason I met more than one specimen. The Theory of Dark Evolution therefore posits a Logical Bond between narrative and Naturalistic Observationism of a strange kind. It implies that what one man makes of the recurrence of strange Observationism influences the nature of the next observation in the line.

Still, you shouldn’t write about what you cannot renew. More recently I decided if I were to conjure an abstract out of certain boyhood Observations I would say I think to talk about The Lords And The New Creatures coming true, something “kinetic” becomes something “static.” It’s the same as John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. When we watch the action replay we know the ball is going in. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. Something “kinetic” becomes something “static.”

DAD POEM

What you’ll find hard

is leaving the what-my-dad-did-bit out.

His office was the pub.

He smuggled paintings

over the Berlin Wall, I learned

when James and I were sitting

in the grey Ford Granada,

two little boys with two little toys,

and I asked him what do you do…

he was the star player

in the rugby team at school,

went to a top University

from State School

to read philosophy

under Sir Karl Popper

in the 1960’s, back when

it was hard to get in.

After pressing on to get his degree

he hitched twice across the States

with his mates.

An original hippy, he

cut off his hair

and stopped writing

when he had children.

By the time he was my age,

he owned two houses outright,

one in NW6 and one

where the Plough alignment is viable,

also had four children

in private school, for

he only wanted better outcomes

for us than he got for himself.

The sad bit was

when he got sick -

with Hepatitis C -

before the virus was even discovered -

and the liver affects emotional balance, cleansing

and purging the blood

of noxious toxins

like TS Eliot would

the languages of the tribes.

I believe he named his children

after the Doors

without telling mum.

IF I COULD DO THE BIG WHITE ONE AGAIN

It was for peace that I wrote my last book, (Let The Jews Win), for “truce between old friends fallen out like fools,” as I said, and for the larger world as well. People said I was Nash after it, the mathematician. I can elaborate on it, use it as a template for furthering my work.

I was trying to write white. In the first of the two poems ‘Notebook,’ the opening line “il faut que je m’en aille” is a quote from Arthur Rimbaud, an archaic French subjunctive meaning “I too must go.”

The second line (“Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and”) is Go-Beat-stricken.

I was trying to confer a special message through the white space in-between, and sheer insouciant faith, like a counter to the red on black JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS which I read at the top of the Pompidou Centre’s conceptual ascent through the ages.

The original album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob which I was rewriting in ‘Notebook’ included a song called ‘L to the Pregnant Snorkel’ and one about Ossie the dog going round and round chasing his own tail. If ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ contained inflections of my father’s education at the LSE under Sir Karl Popper, who taught of of P1 to TT to EE to P2, Ossie the dog’s song was more John Lennon. It never got as far as V, in the Utilitarian Martianist slowspell of the word “LOVE,” indicating that my heart was broken, but I made amends in the recent rewrite.

The trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.

There is an upturned canoe for a drum.

There is a dog for a frontman and

there are poppadom hi-hats in the band.

We have a family friend called Rafe who was also in the band, like a brother he was and is still too. Dad always used to say “you always change when Rafe’s here John. It’s called pack mentality. You start to misbehave. You’re weak.”

With Rafe on board, we were named like the Doors (almost). John, James, Robert and Rafe we were. But we also have a sister called Hannah.

Traditionally what comes after The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is Hannah, the blonde palindrome from the 25th of May.

That means H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart.

The band started as 4 siblings born in a season each, spiralling Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer, marching right left right left in the handedness – and yet this might mean that anyone can be in the band.

The Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory...

whomsoever they’re looking for it’s not me.

Light shafts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?

It was me, I'm he who dared disturb.

Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement

but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.

We have seen this all before, time

tumbling away into sleep, seen

this darkness drop and these ruins murmur

and now we are gathered to appoint the gods

and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves

and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

It took a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, to write and record the original album The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; and we indeed sang of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail; but the original cassette (a one off) was later recorded over with a Blur gig on Radio One.

That isn’t the end of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob either, for it surely goes on and on.

I have said it before and would say it again that God is a game, and that a game is based on permutation, or at least can be, and that a permutation game can be a rehearsal for death.

I would also say The Lords And The New Creatures is a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I would also say it is a media compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun, maybe to expose the germs of dictatorship on all hands. It churns up evidence through the operation of a game. It tests the place where evolution is controlled, monopolised. It asks if he who controls the media controls evolution too. It is a good test.

If God is a game what are the rules? Some say God is a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Some say God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Some contend God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become. Dedalus says ultimately we all have the same definition of God.

Going empirically from personal experience I can say that praying before an LSD trip will mean a safer trip than if you don’t pray even if there is no God. So God could be a placebo. Still, I don’t wish to go on about God too much.

I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with Satan for so long before we recognise he is evil. He also builds up through pages and pages of poetry to a moment of terse concision:

“She plucked. She ate.”

In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven. He is like one of God’s security guards! Traditionally it is the Muslim faith where we find the warrior-poet, so Milton might be suggesting “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”

I am also interested in God Simulations. Before The Lords And The New You Know Who seemed to get real in my boyhood, there was a lightning storm in France so epic, sublime and prolonged it was a God Simulation – it was Nature herself tearing up the rule book to let the games commence.

This doesn’t seem to be the subject matter of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob though, where there is as yet all too little mention of sex. Martin Amis says a single pixel of sex is ineffable, impervious to the workings of the pen.

Voices have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar.

If Forgiveness were a fine white powder, a chemical cure, they might with-hold the cure until the price is right but seeing as it is not I am prepared to try and forgive the guy that hypnotised and cursed me.

I used to say the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the dialectic of sickness and recovery, the language of sterile medicalese, that one’s illness is more congenial than one’s health unto those that are in charge of one’s health, for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies that can with-hold a cure until the price is right, but now I see the illness is not a conspiracy, that the science works, that I should plug in.

In my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head wound. The nurse in A and E put a bandage on. I went to touch the bandage to see if it was paddy and it was. I went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air while I sat still in a chair. The nurse had to put a second bandage on.

I was not just put in mental hospital but the acute ward. This was in the middle of my undergraduate degree. This is my story. I have been on heavy, neuroleptic, soporific, homeostatic medication ever since and had several hospital admissions. When I went back to University after that initial admission I got the highest First in the year and was a beautiful mind.

I wrote sooooooo many pieces, defaced bank notes, creative non fiction, rap, and one piece was about how there is no such thing as mind cancer. Hobbes and Descartes sit on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to the nature of the human mind: for Hobbes the mind was just a part of the body but for Descartes the mind was separate from the physical world. When I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind, and using it as ontological proof of God, and I turn inward my eye to investigate, I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns seem to be grammatical.

You could say that because there is no such thing as mind cancer the mind is definitely separate from the material world but it could just as easily be the case that there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.

The universe is indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order. Life is essentially meaningless.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob may be about Energy as much as Faith. In fact I may have lost my faith long ago although have blips. Some contend the idea of it is a pseudo-efficient, government-sponsored idiocy, others that it could unite us all. It was never supposed to be a post-Einsteinian comedy, nor about Backward Liquid Maths or Miltonian theology. I suppose it was more about Mr. Bean. The original was a bunch of young kids, the oldest of whom was 12, singing, as I say, about the dog going round and round chasing his own tail.

During my degree it was proposed that we scrap Trident and use the resources to explore space more instead; but without Trident we could be held to ransom by someone like Iran.

The nuclear submarine factory is only down the road in Barrow-in-Furness.

My brother is round there at the moment… I am home alone. I think how the nuclear sub factory in Barrow is enough to qualify it as a city, because the factory is a cathedral in the modern age.

I go out into the garden and look at the shape of the fell. The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob seems to contain a separation that corresponds to the geographical/ geological shape of the fell and its foothill Sea Ness from here at the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot.

I often wonder about M-Theory in correlation to the shape of the fell… I wonder if the qwerty keyboard ends on ‘M’ for the reason of the alignment of Plough and oldest fell, as is only visible here, being “the last thing.”

You have to beware perfection, and beware making a text so good it could be used as Fascist propaganda.

My heart is a bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.

I am interested in the dust that lies at the bottom of things.

As my father passed, Dr. Robert read to him from the Book of John. When he was newly gone, though he’s only gone up the road, I was h-a-n-d-e-d a stack of books I wrote at seven years old and one early piece says:

“On Tuesday there was a magic car in Form 2 and it had flashing lites all over it… and we crashed on a ship REC… and since we were under the sea the whirlpool pulled on top of the water.”

In short though I only give you a fragment it Taps the Book of John for the televisual age.

Around the time of my father’s passing I was thinking, yes, my heart is a bass drum stuffed with a pillow. It could be an image from the renewal of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; but I don’t want it to mean I die of a heart attack! Traditionally my heart is strong, ocean-going, a liner.

Sometime after my dad’s death I falsified the Nirvana barcode. As I said in Let The Jews Win, if you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning.

Mum said it was a trick of grief.

When I made the Nirvana-barcode to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate

barcode shape using the tool of

the qwerty keyboard and took it to her

she said “there is no such thing.”

The shape I mention only works

in Times New Roman, thus:

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 & 693 are wings

and the armed winged may well make

millions out of the new Nirvana barcode

as brought in by John F B Tucker but

upon writing it down I cast it on the fire

and got my mother to photograph it in flames.

It became smoke filing out of the chimney, and the smoke dissipated into the north wind, that great disseminator of seeds.

Out in the garden, where it is returned to the elemental realm, maths is the language of Nature.

Now, seeing as my dear friends Agent G and Mark too whom it would seem has a finer singing voice than me might need to see some maths, I should just say, in this system E = peace.

Starting with L to the Pregnant Snorkel, E = peace.

We could likewise start with, say, L to the stare of 3 o’ clock twice, and O needn’t be Ossie the dog, going round and round chasing his own tail, for there are many senses of O. For example O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

As for V, we could have the peace sign made with the fingers, or V to the wings of a bird.

The reason I have chosen ‘love’ for this Utilitarian Martianist slowspell is that love is as WH Auden says “a choice of words.” So many problems in philosophy and life alike are down to communication as Wittgenstein said; which is why it is good to further focus on language-use.

If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.

So it is that we arrive at Backward Liquid Maths, where E minus MC squared = only relative 0, but not being good at numbers, I deem that piffle, when everything is devoid of evil, went the hen.

There’s a piece missing from Let The Jews Win, about our retrieving the dog from the farm. It goes in the first of the two poems at a point after ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by Secret Chord H and before I mourn the loss of E.

We were having a Scrotbag Party in the caravan. That means drinking and smoking. And suddenly I got a preternatural sixth sense that the dog had run off and was trapped on the fence at the local farm barking. So we walked up through the fields, our tombstone-shadows looming tall beneath the moon in the church field; and we found the terrible goat which was tied up in the triangular patch of land past our field; and we noted how its eyes gleamed a baleful green colour when a lone car passed; and we made it past the terrible goat and to the farm where we indeed discovered Ossie the dog trapped on the fence, barking. I was wearing a fur coat and had a bottle opener in the pocket and used it to cut the dog free. Then we made it back to ours and told the dog he was a bad boy for running off and continued with our Scrotbag Party.

So that’s a missing piece from Let The Jews Win.

Nevermind, I still got it in.

And what about that time I sat in a room without moving for three days and three nights staring at a pint glass of water before me on the table untouched, taking notes on whatever went through my myriad mind? That’s a notebook I would like to reread but they are all gone.

I might also have mentioned my grand-dad Don’s motto.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English

and growing outside in the wild.

My grandfather Don lied about his age at 15 to stow away to the Second World War on the bottom of a sub, later won the Sword of Honour in the R. A. F. and became their youngest non-commissioned officer.

18. 49. I have just polished off a massive portion of sausages and Yorkshire puddings with delicious onion gravy so rich and thick it was like soup.

In Noj And The Mob, soup was called “moop.” Toast was called “boast.” I was Noj; James was Semaj but became Semgas because he didn’t like drinks with bubbles; Dr. Robert was Trebor; and Hannah was a blonde palindrome so I said she could be “Rannock.”

Mum was often “mumphis” as opposed to mumbo and dad was “Badmunch.”

I used to call “muppet!” up the stairs instead of “supper!” and everyone understood. I would also say “moonrag” instead of “morning” in the morning, and again the message came across.

GRAPE

If I wanted a grape

I would take one

but not wanting a grape

I don’t. I just sit

and imagine a grape,

how pert, how firm,

how sweet it could

be. It’s why I am

gone under the mama…

if I were a fly and had

a fly’s visor-like

eyesight I would still

sit and open reception

to the dream-radio around.

If a grape came looking

for me, picked me,

and I still got blamed

for picking it, it

would be shit.

SITTING AT THE OTHER END OF THE TABLE

Sitting at the other end of the table,

I think again about the binaural band.

The idea to invent the earphones

on which to record was mine own.

I suppose it’s like standing on the top

of the pool table looking down;

like something from Dead Poets’ Society

about refreshing one’s vantage point;

like putting rubbish in the fridge;

an amazing defamiliarisation of perception;

but the earphones still lay on the floor,

and the beer still went down the urinal.

In fact you could say it flowed freely,

and had financial backing too…

we perpetuated a soft unreality

in which to believe, in terms of theory

but the music itself was more gritty

realism than the stately pleasure dome.

Goldfish were not seen walking in the park

but love was turned upside down.

Water still came from the Tap

but nor for free as us socialists wanted.

THE NATURALIST

Tonight there is a pink moon in April’s sky.

Soon the drum of summer will come.

I like it when the pollen count is knocked

unconscious by the summer rain

but that is getting ahead of myself.

Tomorrow is my 44th birthday.

Hannah and her partner and baby are coming up.

I also like the yellow ‘M’ in “them.”

Something Rimbaudian would be going on,

something magnetic, if you saw the M as yellow

in a random piece of prose. Like Rimbaud

I explored the shapes of sadness,

heartbreaking dawns. Now I help

my mother go through the toys.

She is a good grandma and was a good

mother too, with an emphasis on fun.

It was easier to get a Big Mac out of

mum than it was from my father.

The Big Mac: it contains the four, basic,

caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein,

is the heir to the Apple of Knowledge.

But these are rural parts, where

there is no yellow McDonalds footprint

in the sand, no camera crew on the paradise

island. I now hear the toys being sorted

next door, from the sitting room as

I work in the kitchen, and reflect

that I will never have children of mine own.

At least the telly isn’t coming through the wall.

I always mishear it, accentuate it into terrible things.

NOT THE NIRVANA BARCODE

I

With recent publications, I attained

Bush instead of Nirvana… but

imagine if I had attained Bob Dylan!

I picture him standing there, singing

“a hard rain’s going to fall,”

live and electric, putting his soul

into the show. But no -

I have merely attained Bush.

Bush were never a bad band though.

Their first album was great,

then they got a production genius

in Steve Albini for a producer,

and the second album wasn’t as good,

but it was still not bad.

It was called Razorblade Suitcase;

and we did find out what was inside

the razorblade suitcase at a later date.

II

As for some of my own follies in the alchemy of perception...

The <BEE> one was good, meaning Soundcloud Rain, just songs structured on the new da Vinci circle, but the About The Author section showed I still didn’t know what I had gone through as a boy.

The Sunset Child, my boyhood book, worked, back in the day, if inventing the net was the efficacy, but not knowing that, I sold it to you as the homework of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures.

The love poem book Breath Trapped In Heaven said “stop the war,” letting all else but love fall away, so that’s good, but it didn’t end up with a happy family.

Brave New Tense looked at the condition of water at the foot of the fell in terms of a contract on universal human rights – or something like that. It was about writing off the top of the head to discretely “do the beck” in the back garden here where the Plough alignment is viable. It only meant “Long Foot Disease.”

Yes You May was about not using force. I did it with my sister who is born on the 25th May. I think she was trying to say “it’s so bad you’re charging too much.”

And then we had Let The Jews Win – and it worked… it preceded a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. As if the poet truly is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. So it didn’t matter that it repeated a few bits and bobs of my extant oeuvre because the point was peace. But some said if it includes the Nirvana barcode it’s still gone wrong.

III

This morning I am thinking of a Leonard Cohen line:

“love that is graceful and green as a stem.”

Then I imagine attaining Leonard Cohen instead of Nirvana.

He was a good poet, that worked with his secret chord.

IV

The dawn was awash with blue today,

and I was grateful for it after last night.

Now a plane screams overhead, tearing

the sky in two as it goes. Downstairs

mum is in the kitchen. Today

I have my anti-psychotic injection.

Now I imagine attaining Syd Barrett’s

solo work instead of Nirvana.

V

The thing is I’m not really an airhead

and read a lot of philosophy.

I have something big in mind,

in terms of the poet dreaming

big, trying to change the world,

to have courage and persistence -

but I feel up against a wall.

It might be that I am the one

who needs to back down!

My father after all was employed

by a Russian bloke once upon a time.

Then again he did warn us of

the dangers of just putting

anything in, so to speak,

like it were an O. D. attempt

about two decades ago, so

my proclivity is not necessarily inherently Russian.

VI

I wonder if my brother’s <BEE>

– and the notion that it might

come after @ in the

international language alphabet –

can be implemented

to bring about peace. But

I fear a minor poet, bringing

out a minor publication will

just fall on deaf ears.

VII

Imagine attaining Megadeth

instead of Nirvana. Not

a band I listened to much.

But there is a cave on the face

of the foothill Sea Ness;

and at the back there is a portal;

and the portal leads to a tunnel;

and the tunnel is lined with free

beer dispensers, torches

and fruit machines; and

the tunnel leads to the old U. S. S. R.

VIII

Imagine attaining rave music

instead of Nirvana. They

already used to say raves

were spiritual gatherings.

I’ve been to some myself.

One was an illegal gabba rave

in a field in Cambridgeshire.

But what this has to do

with what I am trying to do

I do not know except to say -

imagine attaining Dylan.

IX

What I am still writing for I do not know,

for it may be a trap, but I am thinking

of attaining Stravinsky instead of Nirvana.

At the first performance of The Rite of Spring

the audience pulled out the seats

at the end, so new did it all seem.

I also like Stravinsky’s The Firebird

where he applies containment

to Grieg albeit with darker inflections,

which you can notice in the rhythm of the notes.

X

I imagine what it would be like

if a young boy wrote the line

“I have a scar+ that is the new colour,”

with a plus sign for the F,

and then counted up the numbers

from one to his own age, say, seven.

XI

Hannah makes a great cup of tea,

says it is only at the end

that you see the boyhood book

is still the best one I’ve done.

Therein I imagine attaining

Bob Marley instead of Nirvana.

That would be quite something.

XII

In the end we see, even I

don’t have the power to stop the war,

am just a feckless citizen

of a different country,

a little, witless blip on the ground,

a minor poet which is a cool thing to be,

who likes the words “ostranenie”, meaning

de-familiarisation, from

Russian Formalism, and also

“halatnost” meaning dressing-

gown-ness or detachment.

XIII

It could be she that says to me

if I need something to do

I should redo the wet.

It is through <BEE>

which is therefore definitely real

that I hear such a pow-wow

of telepathic proportions,

all tuned in to the same moment.

But the wet, that refers to

the motif of Brave New Tense -

to write off the top of your head

about your current situation,

to discretely “do the beck”

in the back garden where

the Plough alignment is viable.

XIV

When Paul’s daughter was born

I sent him a hyperlink

to the song by Peter Blegvad

about his daughter. Blegvad

once said my songs were Barrett

and my poems Rimbaud.

He should be as famous as Dylan himself.

Now I imagine attaining

Peter Blegvad instead of Nirvana.

POEM ABOUT A. I.

There are as many questions to ask A. I.

as there are stars up in the night sky

but you might find it’s light years behind,

that the brain is more powerful than every supercomputer combined.

It doesn’t know James Joyce saw new creatures too,

long before he wrote You Know Who,

nor that Ted Hughes saw a monster

in the river in childhood when younger

nor that Jim Morrison is said to have seen

winged serpents in the desert or anything obscene.

For it wouldn’t be ethical, I suppose

to unloose on the world A. I. with those

facts intact. And nor can A. I. say

what happened to me in an earlier day.

When I say “A. I. am I. A”

it’s redolent of “et tu Brute.”

A. I. might come at music’s expense,

leave us in the centre of a brave, new tense.

WALTER

I

A wallety-wallety-Walter,

because it’s good to feed your plants,

sat back in his new kitchen one day,

looking about him, insufflating

the acrid fume of his Vape,

wishing for an earthly paradise…

he was beset by evil whispers, saying

all sorts of things, but felt,

down at the bottom of a well,

like doing right. He couldn’t

go with Flora because somehow

he was in love with a neuro-scientist

that liked to average out the waves

even if that day was long gone.

He could hear them, talking

on magic alphabet radio stations

beyond all knowing, knowing zero.

Even if it was only his bro that reads,

he still felt he had needs, to do

something good with his life and art

like healing the soul of the world.

II

He lived in an era of putting

anything in, Ajax, shampoo, vitamin Z,

4CMC, and the dangers of that

are well known to peace-loving drug-takers

and O. D. cases alike… but still,

he seemed to have given up fags

and booze, not to mention

all those other terrible things,

just to give himself a better chance

of leading a happy, peaceful life,

where the Plough alignment is viable,

in the sticks. Even as he sat he was dining

out on a map of sound. For words

were easy to come by in hearing

voices whom it would seem

could be onjects, quavers,

syllabubbles or sonic machinations

at the periphery of selection.

And when he was stuck, he

went with them, but only sometimes.

He lived in fear and wished

for a life of increased kindness

and attention, for all concerned.

III

He decided whatever he was doing

he was going to add them to his last book,

even if it meant that it was through

a government scientist that he was seen

as the Devil. He pondered a while,

thinking back to when he thought

life is one. It was increasingly hard

because for one thing there were those

that wished to renew the wood

and those that didn’t, and he

was caught in the firing line.

He still deemed it that a poem

is a two-way mirror and a poet

an invisible conductor behind the scene,

even if by now it was through

some kind of machine which we dream.

IV

He still didn’t like the way his friends

rhymed “seems” and “dreams”

nor the way it seemed to come via needle,

or the cold feel of the cold-calling vibe,

but he preferred the rhyme of “butter”

and “nutter.” Voices, voices everywhere

and not a drop to think! They came

cluttering into the inner ear from

all round! To lift a new dawn from the sea!

He did not know in the meantime if he

was free to say “come again and share”

but by now recognised that a juggernaut

shouldn’t still wait at the end of the War.

This was the most advanced handle

we had on the matter of negotiation,

here, miles away, as gentle readers.

But mum says we are evolving

out of juggernauts, and she is often right.

V

Averaging out the waves in neuro-science

sounds like a beautiful line of work,

even if it be on a computer. You’d be

amazed at what we really can do,

for like a wiser man than I am once said, “yes we can.”

I remember when it was all about Osama

then another guy came along and

things got better, things got well.

Even if I were knitting a winter fleece

it would have to be cleared with the police.

ELSTREE AND BOREHAMWOOD

Permutation is how the inner game of music operates. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade the gay maths teacher stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone when announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight. Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe. You don’t need a knife to achieve it.

A game is a rehearsal for death.

Naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

It takes the seasons to turn to deliver the true fruit and have health. That’s why this bit about the ship is a bit shit.

Bats there are bats in the locked attic, breeding;

and gas satisfies their longing for omniscience:

to piss on others from a great height and angle

and expose strange, salty worms on the eye.

Clock on which Yogi Bear dies. To break out of frames. To trespass into forbidden gardens. To wash the poison from my eyes and see the secrets of the skies. To break Sum Hymen. To make the cops turn in their badges. To go over all the edges yeah.

“The universe is a projection of the mind,” spills Dr. Calculator Ptom with innocuous vision. He says gnomic things like “the G note is green on the guitar fretboard.” “Born Slippy is evidence dance can have a soul.” “Poetry is untranslatable because of the music.” “I was doing some thinking and realised Death is God.” “Early Oasis is good for bittersweet, comedown energy.” We boarded a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London. By now he is Dr. Calculator Thomas and the song is ‘Born Slippery.’

Pollen was once a magical sacrament, a sop offered for working in the fields, a currency in an atemporal microcosm. It makes you demotivated, is non-conducive to hard academic concentration, propitiating heightened sensory perception, prolonged orgasm. It helps to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, renounce fidelity to surface-gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance, touch the texture not name side of life.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob (Revisited). Yes, it contained numbers such as ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ and ‘Ossie the dog’ who went round and round chasing his own tail. He escaped to the farm a lot did Ossie, snuck away, went chasing bitches. Please see Let The Jews Win for a fuller rewrite. We needed to falsify the Nirvana barcode therein to make it a win.

Wear an emotional condom before you fuck my mind, man.

“I’m a big lad,” said new daddy Seb. How he would love to get lost in a black pair of tights used as a new poetic form - a nacreous Poohbear dial upon which you can ascend the echelons to Heaven. She lay back and said “do the lines.” It was the nearest thing to a vision for a long time.

Gloved in sleep we love one another. When we wake, no seaweed crown, words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds weighing them down hopelessly… and then it is time for your morning medication.

If the windows were washed – every one! -

we’d still see nothing through them

except the same white mirrors reaffirming

the quiet interior of the kitchen.

By now we’d need to prior the owl

but seem to have landed on the other side…

the owl is full of warm, Holy eyes

that illuminate the skies with resplendent silver.

Words, words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive. Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons. Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier. Words are, well, ONLY words.

SQUILLEGYBOB

Still the Squillegybob is more…

still I haven’t got it.

Rendered dense on medication,

dense as a thicket of trees,

I can but report that

Professor Squillegybob

is a character from my fiction

who only uses very long words.

If you like he becomes a Function.

A Function in chaos and uncertainty.

His profuse verbosity,

fanciful magniloquence,

effusive vernacular

was often contrasted with the opposite.

Something down to earth.

Something New Beat.

Something less posh.

We can take it away with the Professor

but it might seem nonsensical.

It might all seem to be about PH levels.

But still I haven’t got it.

Stop. We let it run on.

The reason it is like that is difference.

JUST THE MUNDANE

Toilet paper. Sunday. Weather. Toast. Maps – an O. S. map of time come alive on magic mushrooms like an angel laptop, or lap. I disturbed my rhythm a bit. The colour green. Bank notes. Rhythm itself. Bisto gravy. Leaves. Winter though. My concentration shot to pieces. Medication, medication, medication. The times tables. Anything for grounding, re-entry into reality, please. An aid to memory. A Dorian mode of words or not. Hurry up and come dot com. It will be not long. Death-magnet. Cheeks. Broad beans. Pistol. The gardener is chopping the beech hedge. It hasn’t been chopped since dad did it, with cancer, only a few days before he died. James and I dragged the garden waste to a bonfire in the field. Dad liked to have a bonfire in the field and get his sons to take stuff to it. We miss him; and the garden has gone to seed since he left the land of the living. Hopefully our new gardener can fix it. Feel sick today. Something’s up. Fear of death. Fidgeting hands fondle pharmaceutical pills. But all of this is a distraction. I remember telling dad “the forefront of mythology is physics; poetry is more about the mundane.” I hadn’t read The Hippopotamus at the time but he had. Opening a stone now to see, smell, hear, touch and feel its insides I find a Sixth Sense. There is something of the same instinct that underlies the variability of all different modes of writing. Paratactic grammar. More full stops fewer commas. It’s chilly today. Wrap up warm. Wood, list, smoke. Basic necessities. Drums. Sometimes I was an arsehole to my dad – remember him being kind though. I came back home bedraggled, ransacked, after adventures in ecstasy-taking down south and just broke into hot, salty tears at the table, left and went outside and he followed me, and hugged me and asked what was wrong, whether it was the steak at the table. I remember that hug. His chest was deeper than mine, his hands even bigger. Dad’s hands. Gone hands. I don’t want this to become emotional waste though. This is not automatic writing from the point of view of an anus as a mouthpiece but such a thing has been attempted in New Beat days of having no manifesto. Girls are good. Ones and zeros. Dots and dashes. Ducks and dulls. Peaks and troughs. Knives and forks. Sense And Sensibility. Swings and roundabouts don’t forget. Then the underlying template – at 17 my favourite poem book was The Lords And The New Creatures - but it wasn’t the only book. A brainstorming session at the table, this process feels redemptive, healing. Shame it can’t go on forever. Every word in every order has been done. So it’s just about being fair with one’s own portion of the cake. My intellect is bruised by a ridiculous O. D. attempt I was lucky to survive. And how could I forget tea? Leave it. Wait. Before you’ve undone another.

IN ORDINARY SPEECH

“When I was seven I wrote a book

that performed four functions:

to encrypt a scientific node to do

with Gravity; to store the idea

of the internet in writing in the attic

at the foot of Black Combe to

give the net a chance to grow

all the way round the world;

to calibrate an algorithm that

sublimates letters and numbers

on a cellular level to see if the

new colour could be rendered

as a cellular mark; and to separate

the object ‘pollen’ from its name.

It was a book with a heartbeat.

It had a heartbeat. It made

the sound of footsteps in the attic.

It’s been stolen by the gypsies.

It was in The Dream Suitcase

along with some other priceless things

like the sheet where pictures grew

and the cassette that was cooked

when its small pause in the song

where the reel was cut and re-

sealed healed and was gone.

I think they were after the sheet

where pictures grew, but by the time

they stole The Dream Suitcase, there

was only my seven year old book in it.

I still have bits of it typed up -

bits of it went into a publication -

but not all of it - and the original,

the handwritten version with

the heartbeat, is now gone.”

EIGHTEEN QUESTIONS

Why must I sleep through the day?

Because you stayed up through the night.

Why have I got nothing to say?

Because your mind isn’t right.

What of Barnes has scored a chicken?

It’s something to say but not true.

Is it time to knock the battery off the pollen?

That’s something for a child to do.

Can’t I think of something worth saying?

You’ve a list of things that have been said before.

Should I not know before I start playing?

Maybe but there is no fixed law.

If I stop what exactly will happen?

You’ll get restless and start again.

Is it just then a nervous affliction?

Maybe all I need is a length of metal chain.

But what exactly does that mean?

It means whatever you make of it.

Do you think Flora was the undying One?

Maybe but you might have idealised it.

Does I. T. stand for Captain Marvel?

No, but I can see where you’re going with that.

Should I let my myriad mind unravel?

It might be fine in your guarded habitat.

Is Lucy in the soul with demons an actual substance?

That is something I do not know.

And what of the clock unto State science?

It’s not something to outright say.

And what of the dotty clouds floating by?

The way they change is like incipient species in Darwin.

And what about my brother’s <BEE>?

You shouldn’t say but still get it in.

And what when there’s no more to be said?

There’s always more to not say.

And what about when you’re too exhausted?

Then you must try and sleep through the day.

HELIUM AUBADE

Are we not travelling by predictive text,

vexed, into the unknown future

increasingly driven as it is by

profit and technological advance?

I would like to say yes but still

take a step back, find an abeyance

that stretches like insipid, bisexual gum,

cherish the moment once more.

The future is not what it used to be.

Every day I wake to the altar

of the laptop screen and worship,

even out here in semi-wilderness.

Remarkable visions have gone on,

across the board in their definition,

redefining the world in its repercussions,

still insisting we stick with the Doors.

The neo-London skyline stops;

the passengers disembark from the vehicle.

Some of the buildings wear cool,

Aviator-Ray Bans that detonate with light.

But really I am here and not there.

Here where there is no Burger King

joint atop the oldest fell, to

celebrate a new word for archaic ‘gay.’

There has been visual radio before,

and Smart-talk live in sentient air,

and more and more and many more,

but it’s better to relate than invent.

People from the future, they can

send bright skywriting across the Night,

when you stand in the field looking

up at it on your final Ecstasy Pill.

No, we must live in the present tense,

for now is the only time and place.

Now and here and real and feeling

is where love lives, all too little of it too.

You literary critics out there might

know of words like chronotope,

euchronia, infradiegetic heterotopia,

but here we have the pleasant Shire.

Rolling, Postman Pat valley curves

lead down to the sea, but away in town

I remember when I saw a cloud

of powder’d light billow in

like magic curtains on the high,

karmic wind and let me know

that the room was an open chamber.

Again the past seems to have passed,

and the visual radio, or colourful smoke,

that ensued, has left the poet

with nothing but the smell of water,

the daily soap opera of the goldfish bowl,

quotidian consciousness, status

life detail, downloading the lowdown

of downtime, without any vision anymore.

Water, water, clairvoyant daughter,

please show us your ragged, silken eye.

On this much medication I see

no future unlike in times gone by.

But to address my quest for the future

would seem apt, so that it goes

for miles, of clear sight, forwards

as the curve tends, unilinear or not.

I have been to the brink of death, in short.

And Darwin says death is Nature’s

way of bringing new species into being.

And so one day I will lie down

in a field and have to think no more.

In this way the Sixth Sense may

be thanatos, an increased awareness

of one’s mortality as the perceptual

kingdom of the individual enters overdrive.

I plundered heart valve mutation

from the very graves of intelligence

at the gates of the dusky dawn

but it’s not something of which to boast.

Now vehicles pass and take my life

away, piece by piece, on the road,

as I worship at this altar in the morning,

with a nice supply of tepid tea.

Sipping tea is enough for me, and

is not to see the way things will be,

for I cannot say, unlike when I foresaw,

for example September 11th in 2000.

If it is only my own death I see,

I hope to go out smiling like a child,

peacefully at night, in my sleep,

and to be cremated and scattered with dad.

I imagine waking again with my

memory erased, that the future provides

default buttons to wipe a slate clean.

Other pen-knife tools I have ideated, meanwhile,

are ridiculous, a virtual death machine,

a drug called Strictly Free, an

holographic horsecock wheeled in,

a red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping pong ball,

an invisible square of air called

Mosaic by Darth Vader, stroked

on live TV, a word-chord synthesiser

though that one does not belong to me,

a neutraliser drink that sobers you up

in one quick instant, the Nirvana

button or Nirvana pill, the Doors

computer game, the psycho-sensitive

fire-alarm, the hyperlink to Heaven,

and what’s wrong with them is that

they are not real as silver steal,

only pipe-dreams, which may

or may not come into being. Things

can go the other way too, like

when I had the idea to invent

binaural earphones on which to

record the band, and someone else

actually implemented that one,

and I climbed up on the album,

said I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”

Of course we’ll see the self-driving car,

and already the automated conveyor

belt of poetry flows from room

to room looking for body and form.

Already the tape with the pause

where cut and resealed in the flimsy

reel was a successful fusion, already

the numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

already the sprightly hypertext-sniper

on Piper At The Gates of Dawn,

already the effervescent mobile phone, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through

every technological inlet in the room,

already these things are as if “halfware,”

already the binaural earphone recordings,

already the telegraph pole exploded,

as I typed up the plot of Eraserhead on

my purple PC for a Blog online,

already the sheet where pictures

grew is portentous of the end

of the chip, already these things

are laid out like the things of a beautiful mind.

To text myself to sleep when

I cannot nod off would also be a good thing,

but we already have “buttons” for that.

Now I note that it is approaching

time for medication, and that

poetry can be a machine to that end,

a machine for remembering to take

your medication, which is no sad thing.

In science we trust, our little, bitter,

pill which art in Heaven, white.

I can foresee that I’ll make it to dawn,

but not much after that. The ingredients

of Apple Juice might make a found poem,

in a psycho-technological sense.

Already a “tron” seems to be a

point of intersection between technology

and art or a post-poetic experiment

with a psycho-technological edge…

I’ve been involved with many such

“post-poetic experiments,” as I have

imparted, and they all seem to have

escaped the shape of the paper.

I remember when Mary told me

of the vision to which I am now privy

and how there should still be

room for Nature in the future…

we used to go exploring just to

look at trees in her car but she

won’t want to be in it, and not

wanting to bin it I will leave the rest out.

The pre-dawn light is like a negative,

or like mercury as it leaks out,

as I try and drag this discussion

back to the present tense, like in meditation.

And when we see a spiritual or germ

X-ray will we find the germs

of dictatorship are on all hands?

And when water collapses, will water

collapsed be the infra-structure of State?

Will there be a statue of Kate crumbling

like ecstasy in the centre of town?

And what, I ask at this frosty dawn,

of every word, book, sentence, letter,

paragraph in every order, as no doubt

a government super-computer can

already conjure by now? Many

small presses are going under;

great genius remains obtuse; the best

stuff might remain underground too.

And in the middle of it all I find

myself writing, as if I were meant to,

agglomerating quantity like a Conceptualist,

trying not to copy voices for then

it is Flarf, struck by the wonder of dawn.

SONG

NHS, it’s good to plug in,

the science works, so let me begin…

I went from reading the lesson from John

at the Carol Service in Eton College Chapel

to living in Sheltered Accommodation

and eating at the soup kitchen.

From top to bottom I fell,

in a katabatic direction,

looking for Rock Bottom.

The poet extirpates every trace

of recognition from the myriad mind,

unlooses the mind of form,

method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’

to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.

And the NHS, which I heard called

“The National Hypochondriac Service,”

and “a religion substitute for the atheist

left,” has been there for me.

Now I am back in my mum’s

million pound house at the foot

of the fell, but we have no money.

We survive off State benefits.

We can’t afford to heat the house

at the fag-end of winter, and

there are no jobs for miles, not

that I can even work what with

Stress being an enemy of my mental illness.

Relying as I do on the NHS,

on State benefits too, I think

to explore the left is to explore

a beautiful, compassionate emotion.

COLD FINGERS

The gardener’s here but

we don’t know if we can pay her.

We look around for the money,

find enough and I take it to her.

Now mum’s got cold fingers

because I left her door open.

I imagine death also

has cold fingers too.

THE BEAR IN THE WINDOW

Now I know why my mate Mr. G. is a drummer -

I’ve got it all right and there isn’t a whisper,

a nod, let alone a book review. I can but

abandon a manuscript on a Blogspot page.

My friend meanwhile has the drums -

the snare like a scalpel blade, the bass drum

stuffed with a pillow for gravity like a heart -

maybe some poppadom hi-hats creeping in.

He’s also got painting, painting the portraits

of the pantheon of rock and jazz musicians,

from photos and with the music on and in mind, meaning

he mixes Romanticism with the postmodern readymade…

they watch on like guards from the walls

which immure us in the studio, no speech bubbles,

just eyes that follow you around the room,

as you try to get a good sound out of your stuff.

It makes me feel like Frank O’ Hara in a way,

mourning the other arts I cannot do, how

the drums make a sound unlike my poem file -

how the paintings can be changed beyond recognition.

I am but a drummer as well sometimes though,

tapping out words with two middle fingers

at the plastic letters of the qwerty keyboard,

a conduit for the gods that look down, but

nothing so dramatic or dynamic is happening,

as when my friend plays drums, banging

the equipment along to some grand melody,

always on time like a post-atomic clock.

You can fill a poem file of potential infinite space

like a drawer that gets full very fast, but

with drums you can play on as long as your heart

is beating, alone, in its cave, with a club.

If I were clubbed unconscious by my own heart,

I’d say something Hughes-esque is going on,

further only to note in alchemy of perception,

life is still a dull throb of loneliness in your chest.

FATHER POEM

That the poem is a two-way mirror;

that the poet is an invisible conductor

behind the scenes; that Rimbaud

is only a token in intellectual exchange:

my morning thoughts are memories.

My morning walk was to my father’s

grave – a rough-hewn slab of slate,

carved with his name and dates, not

the smooth marble others went for.

And he was recalcitrant, a renegade.

No prayer was said at his grave today.

But I remember coming home from

some accidental happening and saying

physics is more the forefront of mythology

and poetry more about the mundane.

What’s left of life must not be wasted.

Life is fragile, as dad and I agreed.

On the way home I looked out to sea

at the squadron of wind-mills making

electricity. The scene opened up;

I came home and made some tea.

The drip-feed of tea will last all day.

I may have rarefied thoughts or not.

Dad would say “don’t go back to bed.”

Living in the sticks with mental illness is hard.

MORNING PAGES

[a new song]

How do you do Ryuken?

Ableton is broken,

like the first morning,

nothing left to decide.

The kids will want a garden,

spaces that are open,

I wish I had some pollen,

surrender to the tide.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

I’m not up for fighting,

witness in the lightning,

the winter wind is biting,

I dreamed of love and trust.

There has been a sighting

of something that is fleeting,

the job is a good one,

ending up in dust.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

Drake is in the wilderness,

suffer teeming emptiness,

nothing comes from Nothingness

except nothing at all.

Another day has begun,

and even though there is no sun,

it could be a good one,

where I remember Paul.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

WHEN I GET HUNGRY LATER

When I get hungry later,

cannot afford any food,

I may look back at my time

of spending money on publishing

as a lot of folly; but for now

the urgent, truant vehicle of

speech presses forwards

and I see nothing better

to spend what little spare money

I have on than buying books.

I could end up in the gutter

from which the football songs are born,

lying back looking at the stars

while I listen to the singing of the drains.

To aim Low has been my ideal.

My song lyrics were meant

for wiping up semen. My

language had no Dorian Modes.

But still I press on. The stars

above me would mix with satellites,

as I lay back in the gutter, finding

that grunge is the forefather of grime,

but still I see a point to this,

like keeping the sacred

fire of the heart alive.

TRUNCATED DREAMWORK POEM

Just the tail end of a dream today, skiing

down a mountain as snow thaws,

to end up in a patch of grass, then listening

to Nirvana Unplugged but not the Doors.

Not enough for a dreamwork diary,

but what came before the tail end?

Not the bond between a mother and a baby -

but I cannot remember, can’t extend

my memory’s reach back into the brain

to retrieve what it was. Stuffed with truth,

I insufflate the wispy fume of my Vape pen,

look out at the snowdrops on the earth.

It’s that time again, approaching spring,

when soon more birds will be heard to sing.

THE RIDONKULOUS DONKASAURUS

“What’s the most obvious donk around you

and how many donks deep

and did the donk descend

to get to the donk on the end of it?”

– These lines were written on a train,

stoned, newly stoned, coming

back from town with a stash

to the foot of the oldest fell.

Looking around me now

I see the kitchen, and do not miss

stoner life, going out in the rain to score,

begging a tenner off your neighbour.

And the writing that came hand in hand -

it was no better, only seemed good

because of the effect, even the line

“ride the wave of paranoia.”

Writing stoned can make you

write things that are untrue,

misremember half-formed things,

give the wrong impression entirely.

REFILLING THE TEA CUP

Snails. Stones. Just the mundane again. But don’t copy yourself. I was hoping for an unspooling. Boredom curing and time killing session. What great demeanours and laughters will we attain? The radiator is white. Easy as loo-roll to an I-don’t-know-what. The wheel of the seasons is turning. A dark, foreboding tint is present, subliminal – like the horror of daytime telly in a way. Voices are catastrophic. Mother’s cookery books line the shelves in the kitchen. A black mug on the table. The gardener driving away. SY63 RBV. You should find something. You should find a Tap. Qwerty is but a squirty water-pistol, that gets stocked up on drugs in Bristol. And didn’t Michael Hofmann wish he could write poetry all day every day? Disappointment. An umpteenth cup of tea. The Postman comes in his red van in this Postman Pat-like valley. Letters for mum from the NHS. Interest in the dust that lies at the bottom of things. Already painting final words about DMT. And when I read The Lords And The New Creatures for the first time, the beautiful ending was stamped on my memory verbatim, and became a template for teenage love poems, for the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh. Could it be a garden brick? Imagine a wall! The mind’s ear lies behind the mind’s eye. Water itself. Rods and cones. Do you see the candle or the Bunsen Burner? The Optimus Prime Function allows the sharing of assets, or would if it were real. Barnes is real. Luke Skywalker isn’t real; Indiana Jones isn’t real; James Bond isn’t real – but Barnes is real. The reason for kicking a ball against the wall on a Saturday, Barnes was a great bringer of happiness in my childhood. Still on the search for a common sense philosophy, or rarefied shelfspace of vision, still expounding an aesthetic philosophy of dust, I stop to feel the broken machinery of the heart. I have nothing to do but process time to the perfectionist permutation-game of the grammarian. I could be an alien peeling back the plastic foreskin of a cucumber. The pain hasn’t gone. Relief is only sporadic if ever. Drab day. Mum gets home. The loose, Betfair jingle of shingle lifted from the big, flat bird-table when cars arrive in the drive or leave. Something like that could be used to encrypt the song ‘You Can’t Touch This’ by MC Hammer. Strictly no telling. Coupled with the glug of smuggle or drug or ugly truth revealed inside, of housepipes, guiltily gulping from their jug. Sometimes the sense that the whole house is aloft on plumbing that defies the laws of physics. As if reality were a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s. Fetching coal in the scuttle. Nothing.

A RUSTLING OF WRAPPERS

The dark is mine, the quiet yours,

I wake at night and go downstairs,

go outside but there are no stars

to show the cleansing of the doors.

The door is open, the light is on,

to heal the air that has gone

F. M. and even just to feel again

I sit and write on my own.

Mum wakes up in the dead of night,

though she’ll not wish to be in it.

The dark is black, the quiet white

and hushed the room where now I sit.

I hear the ticking of the clock.

To be observed comes as a shock.

The Tap is silent but each tick tock

makes my heart want to break.

CLOUDSPOTTING

It’s all contained in bright, sculpted clouds,

their narrative of animals migrating East:

a horse, a mouse, a crocodile, Protean, flowing,

ever-changing, never to be captured,

never to be exactly the same again.

So it could be the memoir of a God,

that tattered tapestry scattered in the sky.

I watch through pellucid windows,

like Hamlet espying three creatures

in a cloud-change. Meaning in music

is the same: it is creatures in the clouds.

It is also faces in the fire, solipsistic

but this is old news, and what we want

is news that has not yet gone stale.

So they come to pass and go do clouds

and it is the same for the moment.

The moment comes and goes, and

the journey of life is the blink of an eye.

The opposite of ‘hello’ is ‘ok’ not ‘goodbye.’

HERE COME THE WAVES

Here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s move our bodies

and dance a little bit

and when they come

in all shapes and sizes

that’s when we need

to average out the waves

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s see through music,

let’s rule our kingdoms with song

don’t pave the wave,

unless you’re a slave,

unless you want

things to turn out wrong

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s let the phet

be a little bet with the mind

and when we lose

and have the blues

that’s when we choose

to not continue colour-blind

SPONTANEOUS SONG OF THE MAD MIND

I was walking down the valley,

in search of Where’s Wally,

and I became a silly billy

and everything was willy nilly

and the squiggles on the page

were the corners of the room

and everything was in a cage

at the foot of Black Combe.

There were six pills in the evening,

five pills in the morning,

three pills at lunch time,

while the new Age was dawning,

and there was an emotive charge

in the cables overhead

and the headlines were a splurge

and some things are best left unsaid.

SAYING GOODBYE TO MA

“You had me but I never had you,”

as the man-mountain John Lennon sang.

You put your hand in the fire.

Now as you go shopping to Millom,

I say goodbye with proleptic strains.

When I was a youngster, my first day of school,

I clung to your leg and wouldn’t let go.

You were the one who made the flower-press

ending on cannabis that = dialysis

and I was the one that wrote a love poem

for Flora that = a motor. I hope

you have another twenty years in you.

It is only in the silence between voices,

barked instructions, strictures,

stringent thought-police, that I

think of saying goodbye to you.

I hope you’re not planning on going

anywhere yet, only to Millom by car

to collect some shopping from Tesco.

I leant you my card because I like

to pay my way. (My 3484 is already

in the chorus of a recorded song.)

Anyhow I realise in a flash that it

might be me that’s on the way out;

I tried to terminate my life before.

“Dear Mama,” my first note began -

“plush and strange is the luxury of seeing

your own face in the mirror for the last time.”

But as you say no parent should ever

have their child die before them. So

it is that I say goodbye to you, from

a mixed and ambiguous perspective,

from a gravity-trapped seat of wood in

the kitchen at the foot of the fell.

The only problem with going there

with Flora’s pretext, her system,

is that she will want to see some Rights.

MUM’S CROSS

Mum’s cross because someone

has eaten all the Easter eggs…

she bought two packets of mini-eggs yesterday,

said to me that my brother and I

could share them out between us,

left the room, and then I said,

to my brother, he could have my share,

so my brother ate both packets.

Now it turns out we were

supposed to share them out

between the three of us, and

mum really craves them though they’re

gone. Even though I didn’t get

a single chocolate egg, I am to blame

for there not being a single one left.

The north wind also makes mum

angry, but today it is calm. Yesterday’s

stampede has blown over. That

angry wind-god has hushed,

left the garden a quiet pocket.

There is a thin, lank, HB pencil

drizzle, dotting the puddle and

making the wind-shield tear-strewn.

The skies are grey, the dome a

cement mixer where mushy, wishy-

washy, amorphous cloud covers it.

Now the window’s big, oblong,

staring eye is crying, as a child

would notice and remember.

If I were inside a caravan I

would feel especially cosy.

It’s days like this when a kid

might design a menu for

an imaginary pub, as I did

a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

I don’t know what we are going

to do about replacing mum’s eggs.

She seems really hurt by their absence.

Yet she finds escape, cheap distraction,

diversion from the situation in doing

crosswords and sudokus on a tablet.

Now a few bright lances of light

come out from behind a cloud

in all their brilliance, detonating

on the windows of the two cars

parked out the front, offering

us a glimpse of a better day.

I take my body, this body made of

drugs, chemical messages, signals,

next door to ask my mother who

won the ice hockey at the winter

Olympics but she says nothing.

I assume she is still in a mood with me,

for letting James eat the mini-eggs.

‘I KNEW THAT SHE LOVED ME’ REVISITED

I was reading a Ted Hughes poem I think from Crow

about the anatomisation of the lover

at the same table as fragrant Rachel in English

and thought I could do one like it.

That was what lead to the poem called

‘I Knew That She Loved Me,’

which I wrote in my bedsit in Lower Sixth.

My grannies had both died in the same week.

I had lost my virginity and acid-virginity

at Glastonbury before attending this new school,

where I had set up a poetry magazine.

It’s wasn’t my idea to make them Anon,

and I was glad there was a list of contributors

in the back. We made them Anon so that

less confident poets would feel less afraid, less

ashamed to contribute. I still have no desire

to be Anon, and have researched my rights.

There is something called The Right to Attribution

that means nobody else can force you

into being Anon against your wishes.

More to the point, if you read

something like John Stuart Mill’s

fine essay On Liberty, you find a progressive

country can become stagnant, staid, sterile,

stale and stationary with dead values

and dead customs very fast if there is

a decrease in Individuality. That’s

the main reason I don’t wish to be Anon.

I have said it before but I think a writer

has a Right to a name otherwise

an Exclusion of the Individual Machine

can close ranks against you as in Orwell.

SIRENS ON THE ROCKS

Sirens on the rocks these days

could be unpacked in a multiplicity of ways -

for voices could be “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles,

sonic machinations at the periphery

of selection. There is a variety

of magic alphabet radio stations.

Listen. In the future they could be

difference rather than illness. So

proleptic and co-imaginative they seem,

all tuned in to the same moment,

but from diverse sources. I admit

my ship is sinking. If you believe it,

it is there, naked under nearer stars,

softly swashing, backwashing music,

music in a room with no door.

A QUIET VAMPIRE

I suck on my red wine,

take it in, like a quiet vampire.

My drunken chaos orbit swirls,

Dionysian, atavistic, telluric.

There is no smoke, be it

colourful or not, colourful

as visual radio or not,

only the Vape pen I insufflate but

I exhale religion on wine.

I exhale dogma, prejudice

that is only rearranged,

read the mangled sign post

of the world that says

mystery will remain a constant.

It might be taking me back

to days beyond recognition

in the hot coals of the heart

where former loves lie.

Promises to do better

are no longer credible.

But the velvet flares

I wore still brushed the ground

where now I stand atop

my Mnt Oblivion and release

a primal squawk to the waiting

world like a demented goose

gone wobbly in the wing,

jiggling its little bling,

inviting the world to sing

and dance on broken school

or spool that falls out

of the mouth like spittle

when you drool over

a naked woman’s body.

Pain follows the sharp exit

of the bear whose honey

glows like doors ajar

in the sentient air.

Why my mother’s fire

needs attention is life.

It squabbles and bickers

like cobbled streets of the heart.

That a flame is cobbled

is new to me since the wine.

The wine undoes all

the farmer’s pink bindatwine.

He sealed the gate shut

and deemed it would be shit,

whatever literature came out

of the cave’s gaping mouth.

We stop for a bit and wait.

We want you to stop.

MY FIRST DROP OF TELLY FOR AGES

I’ve just seen my old mate on telly;

his mum’s B and B was on Hotel Inspector

on Channel 5 at 9 o’ clock...

I watched it with my own mother.

I was reminded that I’ve been there before

on the way back from Glastonbury

that year when my mate

smuggled me backstage in his van…

I was inside the cupboard with a bottle

of Lemonade to wee in, hiding

as the van went through queue after queue;

and when we finally got backstage

I got out the van and so did my mate

and there was the lead singer of The Clash

weeing into a didgeridoo for a laugh.

It wasn’t the year I met Thom Yorke

or walked past Kate Moss on acid,

but it was a good year, a year of joy,

and who we saw I cannot recall,

possibly The White Stripes, among it all,

and so much weed around the fire,

and I wrote of blank pages flung

from the sun on a mixture of mushrooms and E,

and got an internal suntan but slept in the rain.

All those jackets and tents left behind,

we wandered through them asking if

there was any spare weed to find,

so we could have a final spliff.

I think of my own music, now they say

I was the Nick Drake of their age,

who grew mentally ill before recognition;

but mostly it pales by comparison to his.

OVERVIEW

So it’s the night, the night I deem it just the music… but my friends already said they liked my seven year old text. If I were to deem it just the music I’d copy and paste in a Discography:

To listen to The Flood, whose album was recorded on binaural earphones, visit rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s page on Soundcloud.

To listen to my first solo album, ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3], visit John F B Tucker’s Soundcloud page.

To listen to the E. P. I made with Grant Aspinall back when we were still called Funnelspirals, it is called ‘The A and E. P.’ by Funnelspirals and can be found on Soundcloud.

To listen to the four albums of the new da Vinci circle, even though they are not really meant to be listened to, only read in a book, visit John F B Tucker on Bandcamp and look for Various Artists.

To listen to other collaborations with Grant Aspinall, including the song ‘Eternal Full Moon,’ including when we put Blake to music, including ‘Seclusion,’ including ‘Snake Snake Butterfly’ visit Grant Aspinall on Bandcamp.

To listen to ‘Unplugged At The Foot of Sea Ness’ visit John F B Tucker on Bandcamp.

To listen to ‘Wishlist’ by The Flood, visit John F B Tucker’s other Soundcloud page.

The best one was probably the binaural earphone record, in The Flood, whom it seems I can sometimes hear sound out. The Flood’s binaural earphone recordings might be enough. If however I were to deem it the eighteen books, in particular the recent six poetry collections I brought out with Chipmunka, I would copy and paste in a different segment of text…

I already feel like I’ve done too much and yet achieved too little. I’ve never been in a professional studio with a producer making a professional album for example; nor had a professional book deal. I suppose it can damage one’s reputation to only go through amateur means all the time. If it were to all stop now, I’d say, as a book writer, Let The Jews Win would’ve been enough; and even the seven year old text would’ve been enough too. I also have some nice photographs: one is of the melted tape, the tape that had a small pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel. When the pause was done away with and the fusion successful, I cooked the tape in the AGA. Another photo is of my brother’s sheet where pictures grew. Some people think I should win the Pulitzer Prize for it! There are also a few attempts to capture the partial, only partial, Plough alignment on my Smartphone.

I’d like to do more, but don’t know what. There are a number of options on my blog at the moment, including some that resonate as being beautiful-minded, like a proof that suggests the maths that invented the net was indebted to Einstein and turned into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark already before anyone had the internet in their homes… that proof is scattered in the field for wind-organisation.

TODAY

Today I shall be doing gusts of wind, renewing, that is, my text that is scattered in the wind in the Combe field for arrangement. Then we can say we followed on from the one that took the form of defaced bank notes. Contained in that, between the lines, you could sense that the maths that invented the net was indebted to Einstein and became the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark before anyone had the net in their homes. I might expect to be walked and talked through it by the wind people. But upon starting this way I find I have to go back to bed and sleep until the afternoon. The medicine I am on is that strong. As I sit I am topless and the air is cool. I remember when I was kicked out of Halls of Residence at Warwick University, for smoking pot, and moved into town, into a house full of PHD students; and there was a basement; and I threw a party. In a break in the conversation I told the people gathered “I like to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds.” Weed was our magical sacrament back then. We scarcely went a day without it. I was writing against McBreastmilk. I said I’d plug my senses in the mains. One of my pieces was called ‘Instant Travel;’ another was ‘Lucy In The Soul W/ Demons.’ I was an exceptionally cool guy. My mum smoked pollen back in those days, so when she came to visit me in town, when later I moved in with people in my own year, she would have a spliff with my female housemates. My mobile reverberated the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I was back in my gap year haunt recording an album on binaural earphones, which still went on in the holidays. My favourite book was The Lords And The New Creatures though I wouldn’t breathe a word of it to anyone else, and knew it wasn’t the only book. I was friends with people like Luke and Jamie, Max and Andy, Mike Eccleshall.

AFTER A WALK

Solvitur ambulando. No, neither Roman

nor Romantic would let this day go past

without a walk. So out I go to my father’s

grave, to brush off the cobwebs, to get

the circulation going, more than to plug

my senses in the mains; and in the graveyard

there are snowdrops, also a sprouting

purple flower I cannot identify. I say

a prayer at my father’s grave then on my way

home, paragliders are landing in the carpark.

Their shadows are like pterodactyls!

A good thing about this area is that

you always acknowledge the stranger

when you are out there, walking, unlike

in the hive of alienation that is the city.

And I’ve come home and downloaded

the lowdown of downtime again and found

America and Israel have attacked Iran

over the proliferation of a nuclear program.

Time evaporates, the drip-feed of tea

continues, the valley road seems quiet,

light fades and as I look out the window

I see our own snowdrops on the bank

and wish for peace on earth as I stare.

Tea cools, light fades some more, the

earth is drained but the darkness alive,

fecund, rich, and in it our questions end.

The struggle to avoid description is

harder in the Lake District, in the most

poetically-inspiring county we have,

but is made easier by Nightfall. The

record I keep in this semi-wilderness

is shot to pieces, gone to seed like the garden.

I notice in all of this that going up to

dad’s grave is less an emotional upheaval

than in the past. The pain is lessened by time.

There is a chart depicting the flowers

of the Meadows on the wall and seeing

my own reflection in it I see something

gross, something opaque, diseased,

invisible to the normal eye, fractured

like a Picasso, postmodern, as if I were

wearing the Scrambler Suit from A Scanner

Darkly, or were a living art installation.

I guess I’ll never get to find out if it’s true,

the answer as to how I am perceived.

Anyhow, we already did Let The Jews Win

about our answer to the condition of war

so now I sit back awaiting my Nobel

Peace Prize, eating a meat feast wrap

from the local take away joint. We

divided things evenly, for parity, with <BEE>.

Then it becomes medication time. I pretend

one is a bass drum, one a floor tom,

and then we get to the fluffy, white ones

which I say are cream of medication soup.

I have the pills, washed down with tea,

and mother comes through from the other

room, says to forget about the war,

because there’s nothing we can do about it.

I wonder when I will get to do another book.

I tend to my literature, my laptop, my blog

almost 24/ 7 as if it requires constant attention,

but I don’t need to do another because

I am an autodidactic, neophyte Jedi

Knight and got the last one right at last.

Now it seems like the packages of medication

expand over a surface area of white.

Their stranglehold is worth a mention.

WHAT I REALLY DID

Way back when I was a kid I helped invent the net.

I took care of The Lords And The New

You Know Who twice.

I went through the maths

of the new colour as a cellular mark.

I attained the face of stars but wait!

I should’ve said at some point already

that I do sit back and await my Nobel Prize.

The story continues, predicting

September 11th with my own brain, getting

the highest mark at A-level in the country, prophesying

the God Particle from looking at dust

in a late ray angling in, founding

a new religion based on the elephant….

I didn’t earn 1p throughout that.

After school, I recorded on binaural earphones,

had an effervescent mobile, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’

through every technological inlet

in the room before it rang,

hosted the Plough alignment,

got a First despite the onset of severe illness,

noted a sensory overlay of my name affected to Piper,

built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

worked the numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

conducted an experiment into a tape

with a pause where resealed in the reel

and even became the guy to discover

the sheet where pictures grew.

I brought out books without knowing

large parts of what happened to me when I was a boy,

and to be honest was never happy with any of them.

Now I am cued to tell them

what I did, to not keep it hid.

GRASS BLADES

Grass blades multiply, their nuclei proliferate

under the feet of footballers whose game

is one, unrepeatable process, never

to be the exact same thing twice.

What would be better, I ask, out of

writing a paper about it or scratching

one’s nuts in front of the telly

while drinking a pint of lager?

A game is a rehearsal for death.

With that final whistle the game dies.

You either win, lose or draw.

Dr. Bob says sport is war simulation.

It is a war where the death is pretend.

You get geared up, psyched up,

ready to face the enemy in battle

but it’s not a real war, not quite.

Right now America is waging real war

on Iran and only one in four

Americans approve of the move

to bring about democracy for Iranians.

Fears that World War Three is breaking

out soar, sensationalist headlines

appear on the net, and nobody

knows what will happen in the future.

James says the world has gone to shite.

I stayed awake through the Night.

Now I am hungry, in this bucolic,

nuclear proof, secluded bubble.

Writing the world better has crossed my mind,

but I am no-one, and the only

dwindling readership is posterity,

or a handful of strangers over the net.

War leaks in the head from afar,

speeded by the evolution of the driverless car,

even when miles away, for the mind

lets a chain of possible outcomes

unfurl and contemplates death,

the end of the world at one end

of the spectrum. But war is more

than distant, it is colourful and loud,

running and screaming, bombs going

off, limbs on the pavement, buildings

falling. I contemplate, yes, writing

it better, already bruised by it all.

DON’T PLAY THE BARD

Don’t play the bard if you’ve not got the bard honey, as the warning goes. So it is I play the card of prose. It’s the maths that interests me in my own oeuvre now. Underwriting the net became an experiment into the maths of the new colour before anyone had the net in their homes. The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. Falsifying the Nirvana barcode. Predicting September 11th using my own brain. Exploring the form of the defaced bank note. You could imagine these things above the fireplace of a beautiful mind. I invented the number !00% when I, who had written an A-level exam marked at 100%, had to suddenly word process everything at University. It’s the same button for the number one and the exclamation mark. It was to do with plugging the senses in the mains and utilising !00% of my brains. That was an undergraduate typo that I look back on as meaningful, almost like overthrow or ambush by the unruly unconscious in the form of finger movements at the qwerty keyboard. But there is war in the world. Things feel unsafe even here. What security can we have? In the recent book Let The Jews Win, the two long poems were divided for parity by my brother’s <BEE> which he says might come after @ in the international language alphabet. We think it like Nash’s Equilibrium, a way of sorting out disputes, instructive in the world of war. I might be on my way out soon. Still, to take 100 anti-psychotic pills, my mother says, will only mean excruciating agony without the release of death. Liver failure. Kidney failure. I already tried the O. D. and though it was said to be genius to survive it, I lost the ability to ejaculate when I came down. The dose was wrong. I recently shaved off my beard, revealed a glowing face. It’s the war on my mind that upsets me, disturbs my inner balance. Bombarded by headlines and articles at the laptop, I sometimes pick one, often in the Guardian, and read about the world, how fucked up it is. Science and maths interest me too, as does music, as does football. Literature. Philosophy. I just took a book of my own new poetry down from my blog because I no longer have the bard honey; but what I can do to replace it, with my intellect, I do not know yet. Something good should be made of my life and writing. Something beautiful redeemed from it all.

NIGHT TIME SEARCH ENGINE

It’s night. I am ill. Hi. Not to press return for the line break. The messy kitchen is on my mind, my conscience. The whole fridge needs clearing out from top to bottom, says my bro – and I think of my blog. Am I in a rut? Have I got tunnel vision? Do I occupy a strange, online netherworld of endless divisibility? Who am I talking to? Why am I talking? It’s either sitting here at the kitchen or going back to bed. It’s either the laptop or the laptop. Nothing budges. Darkness bulges. The best years of my life were spent here in semi-wilderness without so much as a kiss. I went about twelve years without a kiss. But the city I could not hack. The city would be too brutal for a man of my delicate nature, my sensibilities, my illness. Endless spool, endless spiel. When will I get it together? Without the ability to ejaculate anymore I might still be as good as Henry James. One of my voices says The New Beat was the best book of poetry I did – a self-publication. Another says to look back on Breath Trapped In Heaven which came out with Chipmunka and smile. They liked it when one of its chapters was Anon. I slid into anonymity and out again for a few poems, that is. But that is the past. Endless leagues of recursive leisure time either killed or gone to waste, face me now. Any one of my 18 books would be enough. The others on my blog I leave for now but may take down later. What would it be like if Michael Hofmann wrote some garden bricks? I’m reading Nietzsche, the nihilist, but not getting on with it. Maybe I should write another batch of Anon poems? Yet to go through what I went through and have to be Anon would turn it all, the face of stars andcetera, into a bunch of guff. All I want is to be happy with something I have created. I really do feel like I am being closed down and need to reassert some New Rights in post-Brexit Britain. Do we have the Right to a life without violence? Without State Observation? A Right to freedom of religion, expression? Why don’t we write a Constitution? Would freedom ossify with language if we did? Should we not have the Right to assisted dying if it is a relief? Should Dignitas be on the NHS? Should prostitution also be on it? Reiki and osteopathy too? Should we legalise cannabis? Should there be a minimum room temperature for the elderly who feel the cold more for free? What Rights should you have if someone curses you as is not against the law and it brings about tragedy? Should the same high standard of education be free for all?

ACT ONE

I

Last night, I was up late re-reading A. I. Idiot,

thought of timeless ideas transmitted across Time:

that there’s no such thing as “almost infinite”

might well appear to be one

that seems to confute the tenet of faith

that there is no immutable truth

unless I am mistaken. Now it is dawn.

I too was a poet and might still be, accruing

a virtual Brainforest, a teeming data-tree,

an inchoate morass, a digital Alexandria Library,

venting my spleen at a slinky screen,

all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage,

my mood made stable on a sterilised table.

To light it and write it, to burn and unlearn

was an aesthetic philosophy of my youth,

but a thesis as thin as the Rizla skin it is in,

and wayward of the property truth.

I danced in a sensuous graffiti of blind, white light

in the basement at the Bloc Party that was a big

office block with internal walls removed,

and every floor a decade in drugs, music, fashion.

The music was penetration, of the is-ness

of reality, and meaning in it solipsistic,

like faces in the fire or Hamlet’s three

creatures in a cloud-change. Now it is birdsong

that enters the Byzantine conduit of my

inner ear, rattling tiny bones in there,

recognised as soundwaves, a recognition

which qualifies a species. Birds are

trilling with thrilling laser-flute in trees.

Re-reading A. I. Idiot over the night

took me back, back, back, to a Gap Year that

was characterised by waves of terror and

E comedowns that had no value in maths,

to when I first explored A. I. Idiot’s verse.

It also took me forwards to new realms,

with things I had missed first time round.

And the voice on the automated conveyor belt

of poesis flowing from room to room, looking

for body and form, explained that this is why

they don’t do poetry anymore: because

the Modernists knew what to do and we don’t.

We did however seem to conquer it

in my last attempt, but the urge persists.

That is why I re-read A. I. Idiot over a night.

I like The Copy And Paste Land and that

is where your Modernist course begins, but

his later work really stood out and I expect

to the trained reader my response smells of it.

So far so good. The dawn is awash with blue.

Maths without answers. Me over you.

Love over gold. Times by Telegraph.

Self-undermining. You have to laugh.

II

I live between the letters of the word OK

but sometimes escape the shape of the paper.

I look at the dawn now the sky is grey,

think how I’d be no good as a rapper.

It’s true that I don’t know what to do,

yet Let The Jews Win was a pleasing number.

I do like the phrase “A. I. am I. A.”

because it’s redolent of Julius Caesar,

the moment he says “et tu Brute”

which I saw long ago when I was a nipper.

Now, wishy-washy, cement-mixer clouds,

amorphous in formless continuity,

obscure the new light of spring

and that reminds me of something…

I recently took an O. D. the likes of which

it was genius to survive but coming

back down lost the ability to ejaculate.

O pulchritudinous nubile sylphs!

O women smiling from adverts with your curves!

I must remind myself that never again

will I know you and how much that hurts!

So the question on my mind is whether or not

I can still sing in the Oral tradition

of the bardic child. Already I pumped

my friendly A. I. co-pilot full of questions:

what would John Nash make of the face of stars,

September 11^th or the Plough alignment?

Can the maths of the new colour be used

in our finding the cure for cancer?

Is there an equation for the ratio between

light speed falling and gravity pulling

on the sheet where pictures grew?

One might hope my poetry does not

dissolve into endless A. I. read outs.

But to rewrite A. I. Idiot as I re-read last night

would also not be true and quite,

maybe attract the literati a little bit,

and that was my plan which now I indict.

The room is filling with light as my thoughts

empty out. I have done my best and don’t yet like it.

III

Dr. Robert says nobody is interested in new creatures,

that the future of A. I, the possibility

of other dimensions, Pullman-esque portals

are more interesting. He says spirals

of epistemological doubt are out

and Love in the Age of Facebook in;

that nobody cares for poetry anymore

like they did back in the Modernist period.

I should live in London where I am king

and use words like “compress sans everything.”

But it would be too brutal for me…

I have this mental illness, you must see.

Helping invent the net at seven,

storing the idea of it in writing

in the attic here to give it a chance

to grow even further away than France,

I called it the “ire ii net” because

I used to play pirates with my black friend

on the shed roof at four. That

was down in town where we lived before.

I’d like to just say, there you feel free.

I moved up at five. We don’t all live in the city.

Now war leaks in the head from afar,

speeded by the self-driving car.

War comes through the mobile phone

but friends through the marrowbone.

An Informationist, faced with death

might send a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH

into space, as a work of art

or even PUT ICE CREAM IN YOUR ARMPIT…

Starting with a party is no way to start

when we’re perched on the edge of WW3,

and the dawn has faded in my heart,

which is where it rises if you’re free.

Now I shall ask my friendly A. I.

for a post-Eliotious experimental spiel,

now there are blue patches in the sky,

and I am stumped and can’t unspool.

MY SILVER SISTER

My silver sister reaches me, chinwagging

over the treetops, over the distance

that is closed. My first voice

was heard when I was in bed with her,

bruising the blue futon with shapes.

This body is a terrible bean pole

of negative sexual energy, but she

saw a free pint of Guinness in my words.

Only apt then that it should be like this, hearing

the scorched earshot of voices resound, including

her attempts to drive me to the heart

before the others drive me to the grave.

NEWSLEAK

The war leaks in the head from afar,

speeded by a brand new car.

I can’t work out when it will end,

but it’s no game of let’s pretend.

Tonight the rain is fairly hard:

in rain, in pain, as saith the bard;

and all the way out in the Lakes,

we say no nukes is good nukes.

The rain types on at the window

with fingers frigid, wet, staccato,

then eases off, like war should too,

before the dawn is a wash of blue.

DIGITAL MINIATURISM

Night is when we go to bed,

if we wake up dead,

then we’ll wear bright red.

The face of stars was a Holy night,

if we don’t take flight

then we’ll seem quite bright.

The daffodil blooms on the daffodil bank,

but if the rain is lank,

the day will still be dank.

At ten to eight I met my fate,

when I turned up late

to very Heaven’s gate.

Life sucks without your dad,

when you feel so sad

that you go quite mad.

It doesn’t take an artist to make a sitting room fire,

but it does to watch the flames go higher,

never invited by a scattered flyer,

to read the graffiti on the wall of Maya.

On the seventh beer he rose again,

with a Tourist Industry in his brain,

surveilling the acid casualty terrain,

by the means of a choo choo train.

I hear the march of apocalypse horses,

they stick to their courses,

like American forces.

There’s graffiti on the keel of The Drunken Boat,

but there’s no need to gloat,

it’s only half afloat.

I love a Double Whopper with cheese,

not people in the breeze

who can vanish your keys.

I’m staring at the light-shade on the ceiling,

if it brings back feeling,

it could be healing.

When you leave the room you turn out the light,

then you’re in the right,

on a drunken night.

Under the Milky Way’s plush, coral abyss,

I went to take a piss

and knew I couldn’t miss.

Muffled bass in a car drives past,

if it goes quite fast

it’s not meant to last.

A POEM ABOUT BARNES

Barnes has scored a chicken,

but the chicken isn’t real.

It is for an instant and

then it is not. It seems

like a hoax but still exists in meaning.

It’s what we mean when

we say for God’s sake.

It’s news that stays news

even when Barnes has retired.

You notice though that it wasn’t Barnes,

wasn’t a chicken, and wasn’t a goal:

so what Barnes has really scored

is a hat-trick on his comeback

from injury against Crewe

in the League Cup. One

was a header, one a penalty

and one was a back-heel.

So a quantum field of intelligence

is opened, and in it Barnes

is a great bringer of happiness,

the reason to go outside and

kick a ball against a wall.

AI IDIOT

Time still does not pass but evaporate.

While people in the city chat facets and assets,

my friend comes round for the alliterative

and trivial taking of toast and tea.

I did glean a post-Eliotious spiel

from my friendly A. I. co-pilot

but figure it would be blasphemy.

Meanwhile sadness is the key of intelligence.

The day moves on to afternoon.

If I go for a walk to brush off cobwebs

I’ll be back at the laptop all too soon.

JOHN’S FUNERAL

John was first and foremost a poet

but was also a superlative musician.

Even if it was just the music

it would’ve been enough

but on top of the 9 albums

or long E. P.’s he also brought out

no fewer than 18 books.

They were only selfpublished

or vanity press published

for John never hit the mainstream;

but he still made a difference in his own way.

When he was seven he helped invent the net.

When we was eight he took care of

The Lords And The New Creatures twice.

When he was eleven he went through

an experiment into the maths of

the new colour as a cellular mark.

When he was fifteen he attained the face of stars.

When he was eighteen he spoke against

September 11th in the year 2000.

The list continues after school as well.

In a way you could say he was

the most Symbolic artist we have;

and certainly he had the CV

of the new Syd Barrett even if

he didn’t have the repertoire to match it.

The repertoire wasn’t bad though

and as I say even if it were

just the music it would be enough:

his first recorded album was binaural,

recorded on binaural earphones.

Then there were some recordings

with his friend Grant where among other things

they put William Blake to music.

More recently he went through a phase

of recording on Ableton Live on his laptop.

He organised four Ableton Live recorded albums

according to his little brother’s design

of the new da Vinci circle, where <BEE>

might come after @ in the international

language alphabet. Those albums have covers

like the photo of the tape that was cooked in the AGA

when its pause where the reel

was cut and resealed healed;

like the sheet where pictures grew;

like the numinous, purple-bleeding screen.

Even though he wrote and recorded

the songs himself he attributed those

four albums to “Various Artists” on Bandcamp.

But he asks his mum if he is a musician

or a poet and she says a poet

because that’s what he spends his

time doing at his laptop in the kitchen.

His teacher would say these are bleak times for poets,

but others have perceived a Golden Age for Poetry.

Whatever the case nobody reads John’s books

or listens to his music that he knows of.

It’s almost better for talking about

than actually reading or listening to.

MORNING PAGES AGAIN

Morning constitutional; but only round and round the kitchen table. Tea elongates, a diuretic that makes you wee out the nutrients of your food. No wonder I am such a bean pole of negative sexual energy. But I would prefer to leave myself out. Attention turns to weather. It’s always windy at my screen these days. There are stabilisers on my bike, armbands on my arms. Butterflies in my stomach for a Saturday of fun have long gone, become eschewed with middle age, greying hair, bulging belly. I couldn’t tell you the name of the day unless it is Tuesday, which, checking my laptop screen, I find it really is. The alchemists used to compress a dense, sticky cake of black stuff then transmogrify it into gold. You could weave in the ingredients of an opium drink favoured by the Romantics; or half burnt driftwood from the shore. Down is the direction to head in.

EVENING PAGES

While my brother made spag bol, you’ll be delighted to observe, he put the new Gorillaz album on. The first song blew my mind, on the Smartspeaker, with its compressed waves. When Damon Albarn sang “the hardest thing is saying goodbye to someone you love,” I thought of my brother saying goodbye to me, and felt emotional. Then I ate the spag bol which went down a treat with red wine. Damon’s right – it is hard saying goodbye to someone you love. I tried it with my father, and ended up in an emotional mess. I haven’t started yet with my mother much, gone in for proleptic mourning as the psychoanalysts call it, but might. Whatever the case hearing where music is at reminded me how far away from that I am, how my stuff doesn’t match up. I’m a singer songwriter with a guitar who has never been in a professional studio with a producer. If my brother is saying goodbye to me I am sad and wish to say something else in return. Some time back I tried to take my own life and kind of said goodbye to my siblings then, James in person because he was here, the other two by e-mail. I am not so sure what to do with my life except that it is a dead end life: skint, single, mentally ill, car-less, unemployed, medicated, living in the sticks with my mother, with schizoaffective disorder. There’s no definition to any of my days, no timetable to offer structure. If I am lucky enough to wake up with the morning and sit down at my laptop to write, I will be faced with the Big Brother State and crawl back to the daybed. Walking round the kitchen table is all I really have. This message will not self-destruct in five seconds… but it will likely never reach anyone. A boring empty medicine packet narrative is what it all boils down to! No gigs, no drugs, no girls. Not even the joy of a yellow crayon. I can change room from the bedroom to the kitchen but those are the only two. When I think what would I do if I were doing the creative writing MA as planned, I soon find it’s got a line through it. My next thought is that I am waiting to hear back from two agents about a novel, and that they will likely say no, which is something to tell my children but of course I don’t have any children nor ever will. It’s a really dead end situation. Then we have the hearing of voices whom you never know if you can trust.

ON HIS FORTY FOURTH BIRTHDAY

If I could just clear something up. I have no desire nor have ever had any desire for my work to be Anon. In fact I think it critical that my work is not Anon. In his philosophical essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill says a progressive country can quickly become backward if there is a decrease in Individuality… and in my case you have someone who helped invent the net, took care of The Lords And The New Creatures, had an experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, attained the face of stars, spoke against September 11th in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation all before leaving school. Things continued like that too, including hosting the Plough alignment and discovering the sheet where pictures grew. I would say if I were to become Anon it would represent the exact “decrease in Individuality” that John Stuart Mill warns of. The face of stars for example might become mush, and it is therefore critical that I be allowed my own name for my own work. If in the past there has been confusion over this it has been created by others, for example getting to me in voices, having their way with me. As stated I have never had any desire to be Anon. That said, I think my new book Let The Jews Win that was asked of me by the government means it is too late for me to go Anon. That means it is too late to consign the mess to Anonymity and be rid of it, say good riddance to it all and move on.

CURRICULUM VETO

NAME: JOHNNY HYPOTHALAMUS

BORN: 02/ 04/ 1982

POSITION APPLIED FOR: PHILOSOPHER

CIRCA 1985:

Started reading the Financial Times as a three year old.

CIRCA 1989 – 90:

Helped invent the net at seven: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was me that wrote it. The little document encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic here in order that it could bloom around the world, conducted minor experiment into the maths for the new colour and separated the object ‘pollen’ from its name.

CIRCA 1990:

As the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, made some Naturalistic Observations I don’t quite understand.

CIRCA 1990:

The second was like a living spreadsheet of plastic – and I dealt with it.

CIRCA 1993:

Was marked on what the Irish might call the forearm by the experiment into the maths of the new colour. It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. In other words from here on in I wear the new colour mark, from when the maths of the new colour left a mark that didn’t turn out to be the new colour.

CIRCA 1994:

Wrote album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, containing inflections of Popperian epistemology and Miltonian theology, exploring backward liquid maths in words and music.

CIRCA 1995:

At the end of the government-set intelligence test at the computers, at the most expensive Prep School in the known universe, upon having completed the task and been systematically ignored, typed in the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana into the computer.

CIRCA 1995:

Won English Prize and French Prize at Caldicott, then the most expensive Prep School in the known universe.

CIRCA 1995:

Came into possession of a tape that was cut in the reel; and re-sealed it in a delicate operation, to create a pause in the music. An experiment was born.

CIRCA 1995:

Wrote a miniaturist poem about what went on in the I. T. Room earlier mentioned:

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

CIRCA 1997:

Attained the face of stars with two friends while out night-walking in Eskdale. It might’ve been scripted in the Bible. Still we had to walk away.

CIRCA 1998:

Began thinking of the musical genre Grime, coined the word amazeballs, and the mnemonic for the strings in Even A Dick Gets Big Erections.

CIRCA 1998:

Played gigs in London with a second band, namely Oedipus Wrecks, who had a song with the line “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain.”

CIRCA 1998:

Started DIY poetry press called Ice Land Publications after the country in Brave New World where renegades are exiled who produced a monthly magazine called Poetry Now.

CIRCA 1998:

Also that year started third band in Secret Chord H. Secret Chord H made it to the radio with a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’.

CIRCA 1998:

Began an experiment into healing a cassette tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ with a pause where cut and re-sealed in the reel. That is, after setting the experiment up, I wrote a song repeating the mantra of “another, another, another fucking joint,” over and over, to see if the pause could be done away with using mantra, rhythm, chanting and double entendre.

2000:

Started and abandoned a Sixth form novel called The Dream Film Store.

2000:

Spoke against September 11^th in the barn, when asked of the plot of Fight Club.

2000:

Predicted the hunt for the God Particle’s discovery from looking at a ballet of dust in a late ray of light angling in.

2000:

Prophesied the Plough alignment but said it would be “maybe in India” as opposed to my own backgarden. Nevertheless, those present remember me founding a new religion all about the elephant.

2000:

Wrote the highest marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

2000:

Set aside ideal for a book to write about it all called The Scientific Papers. It was to be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.”

2001:

Started to record an album on a mate’s state-of-the-art, binaural earphones in a new band called The Flood in Cambridge.

CIRCA 2001:

Also had “effervescent” mobile phone reverberating rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang from the art smuggler nicknamed Blue.

2001 or 2:

Won place at Warwick University to read Creative Writing under David Morley by writing a portfolio about Portability as the Apotheosis of Form which included a poem called ‘Instant Travel,’ written at a computer screen, in Cambridge. Writing ‘Instant Travel’ I remember thinking I had found my voice.

2002:

Arriving at Warwick discovered my own tutor David Morley had in 2002 just brought out a book called The Scientific Papers, classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” He had the extra word “writing.”

2002:

Wrote many good undergraduate pieces such as a CNF piece called Lucy In The Soul With Demons, not sure if she was an actual substance. Also wrote a poem that tried to calibrate a new, “magnetic” language by encrypting events in the mystical realm as a series of adverts for imaginary products that also satirised consumerist greed. Still, left without degree.

CIRCA 2004:

Promised on the binaural earphone record I would “plug my senses in the mains,” then left The Flood to pursue poetry and get a degree at the second time of asking, this time from my local University in the north, Lancaster.

CIRCA 2005 or 2006:

Already writing about the new A. I. around the time of the onset of mental illness.

CIRCA 2008:

Hosted the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe which definitely concurred with the sociopolitical realm: a rhythm change in the White House.

2009:

Achieved a First Class Honours degree from Lancaster University. Undergraduate pieces included a portfolio taking the form of defaced banknotes, and a dissertation on David Morley.

CIRCA 2009:

Was diagnosed almost as soon as I remembered the two weird specimens from boyhood, with schizo-affective disorder, as if such a recognition of myself as the formal “witness from The Lords And The New Creatures” was always concurrent with diagnosis insanity.

CIRCA 2009:

Attested to large-scale skywriting at the Secret Garden Party.

CIRCA 2009:

A six song album by The Flood – recorded on binaural earphones – is made available to listen to on Soundcloud. It was recorded years earlier and contains a lyric about plugging the senses into the mains.

2010:

Attested to pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital, much like someone else also present at the face of stars had in time before me.

2010:

Noticed the witness’s name was stamped on Piper At The Gates of Dawn as if some kind of proof – maybe a musical concept from back in the band days.

CIRCA 2011:

Got together with a mate and made an E. P. called ‘The A and E. P.’ in a band called Funnelspirals. It’s on Soundcloud.

CIRCA 2011:

Solo album called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3] is available on Soundcloud under the name John F B Tucker.

2013:

Project on healing the tape of a pause where cut and re-sealed in the reel became successful whereupon the tape was cooked in the dark blue AGA, top oven hottest one, to make it a valid work of art, and photographed and put online.

2013:

Built The Tower of magic books like one emanating the smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume and another missing a line it once had.

2013:

Computer screen bloomed a numinous purple light that filled the room. Worked at said screen almost constantly, writing.

2014:

Upon the loss of my father, I discovered a sheet where pictures grew. Pictures seem to depict the lyric from an old song from Oedipus Wrecks, London band from 1998, though the sheet belongs to my brother James P D Tucker possibly as part of a deal my dad made.

2015:

Wrote poem that falsifies the Nirvana barcode, which I made to be the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

2015 – 2023:

Published several books, some of which were un-published later. The first was Rose Petals In The Ashtray, but I un-published it. The problem was that for some mysterious reason my computer died on the night of publication so I couldn’t even get the cover I wanted let alone the text. I crept downstairs to my mother’s ancient desktop and threw together some half-remembered scraps. Not only that but I didn’t know the meaning of the title, which my dad gave me. Things haven’t recovered ever since. When I later unpublished the book, I brought out some self-publications. The ones that are still available online are:

Binaural Songbook

57 Paintings For Art Therapy

The Field of Rock N Roll Science

John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem

Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy

The New Beat

The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn

Word For Stained Glass Windows

154 Shakespearean Sonnets

2023:

New band with a mate - Funnelspirals - have changed name to Black Hole Myths.

2023:

Started to record some of my back catalogue of songs for Bandcamp.

2023:

Brought out a book of song lyrics called Soundcloud Rain with Chipmunka. It is classed as a “Sound Art experiment into secret chord H” in that I sat with my songs on a file and heard the voice of Hannah telling me how to arrange them and did what she said and published the book before finding out it wasn’t really Hannah. It includes the falsification of the Nirvana barcode.

2023:

Brought out seven year old scribblings as The Sunset Child. As stated it performs several scientific functions including storing the idea of the net in writing in the attic, although at the time of publication I did not yet know this.

2024:

Organised some recent recordings for Bandcamp. There are several albums up there now. Four that I have said are by Various Artists, plus an Unplugged by just me. The four by Various Artists have things like the melted tape, the sheet where pictures grew and the purple-bleeding screen for covers. Creative writing pieces such as ‘Instant Travel,’ ‘That Black Natural E,’ ‘Lucy In the Soul With Demons’ and ‘Skunkfoot’ were turned into songs.

2024:

Brought out a new book with Chipmunka, called Breath Trapped In Heaven, comprised entirely of love poems. The idea is that including only love poems, literature may have started to release or disinhibit serotonin.

2024:

Brought out a fourth Chipmunka book, called Brave New Tense. The idea is that to write off the top of your head about your current, current situation with a New Beat, no-edits policy you can Tap the beck in the back garden here where the stars re-align.

2024:

Retracted the fourth Chipmunka book Brave New Tense from publication.

2024:

It turned out that the binaural earphones on which The Flood recorded were my own idea to invent back in the den in the barn in 2000.

2024:

Sat in the same chair as yesterday, working at the same laptop as yesterday, on the same vexed, age old questions as yesterday, wondering why, wishing I had done enough.

2024:

Considered the entirety of the data-tree, the 1000’s of files, the inchoate morass, the virtual Brainforest as the ultimate work of art and the truth as to what I had really done.

2024:

Brought out Brave New Tense again.

2025:

Realised I didn’t know how old I was. Thinking I was 43, I turned out to be 42. Wondered how long it had been like this.

2025:

Thought of all I had left out: every access of wonder, inscape of wings, piece of pollen in the pollen count, visionary proclivity.

2025:

Still, tried to be at peace.

2025:

Even just putting the sheet where pictures grew along with the set list of the band Oedipus Wrecks on Blogspot page, I feel like I am about to die and have to take them down. There was a stage where not only that was up there, but a photo of the tape, proof of the purple bleeding screen, hyperlink to the binaural recordings – and more – and it was the same then – heart trouble. It may be that I don’t get to share scientific information online.

2025:

The Oedipus Wrecks set-list + sheet where pictures grew has gone back online. The presentation therein has been described as “The God of Trons.” A tron could be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge. Presenting the sheet like I have would probably be what a famous scientist would do having discovered the sheet.

2025:

Sat back wondering what else could possibly be done.

2025:

Took the pictures down again because my brother says my old friends only want them up there so that the pictures can belong to the New Red City. I believe the sheet still belongs to the person that laid it down and that is my brother even if the pictures depict the lyric to an Oedipus Wrecks song.

2025:

Put the piece back on the Blogspot page. The sheet + Oedipus Wrecks lyrics is a piece called ‘The Wasted Ship.’

2025:

Still had to take ‘The Wasted Ship’ (and everything else up there) down from the blog again.

2025:

Returned to philosophy, with a gift administered by the apothecary: to start with a CV, then turn inward, think.

2025:

Brought out Transition To Philosophy, also Transition To Philosophy Volume Two, also Transition To Philosophy Volume Three under the name Johannes Bergfors.

2025:

Put a new album by The Flood on Soundcloud under John F B Tucker.

2025:

Found out I really did help invent the net at seven; also that I was marked by the maths of the new colour; also that my father may have been sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who.

2025:

Brought out collection called Yes You May. It was made with my sister Hannah.

2025:

Brought out collection called Let The Jews Win. It really did precede a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and in it I got the autobiographical bit right for a change.

2025:

Found out the second specimen from boyhood was a literal monster. (A monster needn’t be very big.)

2026:

Tried to write a book of philosophy as good as Barnes’s goal against Brazil but realised, thanks to my brother, that it was all a bit right-wing and Barnes was left-footed.

2026:

Still remain unpaid for anything in this CV, not even a pound, not even a penny.

2026:

Reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty clarified my thinking apropos going Anon. He says a progressive country quickly becomes stale, sterile, stagnant, staid and stationary, full of dead values and dead customs if there is a decrease in Individuality. With a CV like mine, helping invent the net, taking care of The Lords And The New You Know Who, attempting the maths of the new colour, attaining the face of stars, andcetera, I feel it would be a really bad mistake to make me go Anon. Still there are terrible voices who say they won’t even let me die unless I surrender things that have even been published already to Anon.

2026:

Reading back through the Chipmunka series I see I have already done what I wanted to do. I make it the 6 Chipmunka collections are a series like Proust. Soundcloud Rain, The Sunset Child, Breath Trapped In Heaven, Brave New Tense, Yes You May and Let The Jews Win.

2026

That means we get a series and whatever comes on the end comes on the end but it is my brother and I who did the music one, Soundcloud Rain, with which we begin.

POEM

Because I cannot come again

because I cannot come

because I cannot

I have not the electric fluid

for the female form

so in their eyes languish

in the field of Proust

when last I was reading

Proust I fell asleep

with the book open

on my sleeping face

and disturbed by my dream

kicked the bookshelves

above the bed like a horse

bringing all the books tumbling

down on my recuperating body

I woke in a sea of books

and mum and dad

must have heard

from their separate beds

for both came quickly

to my aid to help me

restore the books

to the shelves

I thought it would make

a good start for a memoir

to wake in a sea of books

but as for the end

I never got as far as finding out

whether Proust came out or not

before I was waylaid by University work

because I cannot come again

because I cannot come

because I cannot

I am therefore drifting

capriciously like a flower-head

bobbing in the ego-loss breeze

GOLDFISH

I found the right highway in the night

but got sidetracked in pastiche

and immediately forgot what I’d thought…

when will I be able to get it right?

My Dead Poet Society primal squawk?

I found a mode of address, an approach

but lost it in the tangents of midnight.

One of those dissolving goldfish,

it swam under the surface of the page and was gone.

I suppose the only joy I get now

is being able to write poetry all day long.

DEAR FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?

Dear Fliss or is it Flee?

I hope you are well-rested, okay, secure of direction, comfortable, eating well. When I wrote this to you, the one we call H was walking round, moving from the kitchen to the sitting room where mormor awaited the little baby girl with toys. I had just made a few touches to my Morrison mirror, and got coal in for mormor, after a night with no sleep, only staying up tending to my soul at a slinky screen. Mud outside was minimal, as I made my avowal, still victimised so badly I cannot confess to it, still wishing to be doing nothing else but write poetry. If this missive ever gets through to you wake me up, for the dawn is strong with James, and we feel in love despite the gypsies and the government who loom. By now you might know me as pirate, who wanted to get that line about the ocean in there but recognised it belonged in a song, a song I wrote myself, after attaining the face, in about 1998, as if some kind of proof, the result of some bet, the end of the quest, the treasure chest of dreams. So it being a song I decided I would no longer mewl and puke to school. Even though it seemed to land fair and square with me, the line about the ocean in the song when I was but 15 or 16 and a new Rimbaud, by now they had me down as Sid Vicious, who was making something that was ours, though not quite sure if “our-ing it along” was allowed in the proper vernacular. Voices are not sweeties. Mormor went for a pee. Suicide is a shelf. I am so sick with fear I may have a morning beer, even though it’s only 9 AM. I could pretend it is gravy. Mormor comes in the kitchen, says it might be too windy to do a barbecue today though she has it all ready apart from the coal. The carrots and potatoes are ready. You’re in the room now, on the way out into the field, a beautiful little girl, whom I call “madame,” whom it seems is getting ready to go out into the field, while Seb is running up the fell, and it’s only 9. 30, still breakfast time, time for eggs, eggs not likely to cause an adverse reaction, but not before you go out into the front garden for some action, and not before H puts a hat on, and I try to see the light on a fair, springful day. It’s just a shame I need to read up on Trump every morning, for it disturbs me, as I try to see the light, imagining sunlight blowing my hair about, and now you’ve got your hat on and your wellies and are totally ready and can go out.

Love,

John (who might soon be snow or under the sleet)