FREEDOM HAIR

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 which 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

So, Flee, you may have seen a bee

but I don’t want you to see a rat.

It isn’t right, if it’s according to me,

that one should have to die like that.

The bee would sail o’ er the ocean

as you lie back on the sunny green.

It would be cross-pollinating the garden,

extracting pollen for the mating queen…

once my copy of Neil Curry’s volume

started to smell of redolent perfume

so I built the Tower in my bedroom.

There were other books, a few of them

that also exhibited signs of natural

magic - for the smell was not a spillage in

my Gap Year bag, of aftershave, but actual

magic. I hope that when I am gone

someone reads the Tower as I built it,

tall and strong, lines left to right,

for it wasn’t aftershave, I never spilled it,

and you can take my word as true and quite.

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, 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 dad 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 long 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 not for free as us idealists 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.

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 with little baby girl 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)

ELSTREE AND BOREHAMWOOD

Permutation games are a rehearsal for death. 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.

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.

ON WATCHING MY FIRST DROPLET 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 camper 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

nor 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.

Anyway, I think it was on our way back

that we stopped off in Devon at the spot

that has since been turned into a B and B

and maybe we then hit London.

Already I was feeling a bit sketchy...

whether from there I went to Cambridge,

Leamington Spa or the Lake District

I don’t remember, nor do I much

of my life around those troubled times,

those testing times when the Towers

had fallen, but I remember noting

those blank pages flung from the glorious sun.

I also recall when we were in Devon, seeing

stickers on telegraph poles, saying

Keep Music Live, Local And Free

and I felt I could not disagree.

No doubt I hooked up back with the band,

on Cambridgeshire’s chalk grass land,

and smiled and mused and gazed,

but I might’ve got that wrong.

It might’ve been the time I went to Marina’s,

because I remember trying to sell

a Glastonbury-gained long coat at Camden Market

the morning after sleeping on her couch.

Form Camden Market I don’t know where,

but it could be up to the Lakes,

without enough money for a ticket,

because the long coat didn’t sell.

Sometimes you need a green parrot sent to space

through the conch but I also keep

a patch of blue denim taut

for realism on the other side….

It calibrates a scale between fantasy

and realism, I mean, to put things like that,

and all I mean is that homes are cosy

and mums are good and stuff like that.

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.

I myself could be living in a play

with a name like John F B Tucker.

It could be a mini Shakespearean poem, say,

for which I have to thank my mother and father.

Now I am faced with the Big Glass Day,

I think of sliding through a mirror,

an alchemy of perception, in a way,

that brings us ever closer to Nature.

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. Those

were days when ‘Instant Travel,’

‘Hypertext At The Gates of Dawn,’

and ‘Lucy In The Soul W/ Demons’

were among the titles in my repertoire; days

I said I’d plug my senses in the mains;

days I had an effervescent mobile phone;

days I was recording on binaural earphones

back in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge.

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.

BLUES WHILE IT’S RAINING

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.

Really if I told you what

it was and what it did, you

would agree Barnes has scored a chicken.

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.

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 2004:

Was placed under an evil and very well-designed curse, without being able to know.

CIRCA 2005 or 2006:

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

2026:

Still putting new poems on Write Out Loud; and thinking of making a new album on Ableton Live.  Sent some documents off to my bro Dr. Robert too. A new collection looked terrible, a book of science only marginally better. Saw my brother James left a shopping list on the pine, wooden stair. It had five things on it including carrots and bread, and was in my sister’s handwriting, there on the fifth step up. Have started wondering how to tie up all this in the event of knowing I am about to die.

A CHILDREN’S SONG ON THE PIANO

Hi my name is John Tucker and I am the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. I also helped invent the net at seven. I remember when, as a University student, I was placed under a curse (or maybe hypnotised) but not much after it. There I was, on a sunny day, back from a band adventure in Cambridge, in a phase of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise and I got a knock on the door and opened it and found Marcus Shaw. I knew from dad he wasn’t allowed in the house but not why. The reason he wasn’t allowed in the house is that he lets himself into strangers’ houses to have sex with lonely housewives, is a known sociopath, and my dad once caught him at it with my mum, and never forgave my mum. It was the reason dad was violent to mum and I was violent to dad in turn without knowing why he had been violent. Marcus Shaw brought a lot of pain into our family. So when he showed up and I answered the door all I knew was that Marcus wasn’t allowed in the house so I took him out for a walk, and without my knowing he then placed me under a hideous curse. I remember that he hoarded power over me saying he was one of the Illuminati, had government connections, was a priest, was a shaman and knew magic. He said he was going to heal my intelligence. That was incidentally what I needed after Cambridge and what I was trying to do too with meditation et al. He waved his finger across my face looking me in the eyes with his massive, bulging eyes and said “I heal your intelligence.” He was embedding himself in my unconscious, luring me into his trust, getting me to buy into it, blinding me! Eventually he said he wanted to use his magic to make me sleep with two women at once. I can honestly say that I felt sorry for him exhibiting all the cheesiest cliches of the mentally ill and I didn’t suspect anything untoward happening so being polite said okay to his magic spell working. Once I had agreed to the spell working, he changed the terms and conditions, started to prattle about rape inside mental hospital that cannot be escaped and rape inside a specific room in mental hospital where the door was barricaded with a mattress so that even the doctors and nurses couldn’t get in. He insisted that he himself was innocent. He went on a bit further, talking about his book Section 22, all about twenty two sectionings, also offered me ecstasy, and also told me about a party at his house the night after. It is believed that even when I left the spot and came home after the walk, he continued to curse me. I didn’t know I was being cursed but thought I was being set up for a good time. So we see it might’ve all gone wrong when the phet was wet, and I might have it all wrong but it’s too late to get out of it.

READING DESCARTES

Note: When I read of Descartes on perfection and turn inward my eye to investigate I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

*

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

*

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

*

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

*

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

*

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

*

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

AN ELABORATE SUB-CLAUSE OF MEMORY

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 batty 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.

ALTERNATIVE MEDICAL RECORD

My brother’s sheet where pictures grew is actually better than all the zany inventions I ideate and mention because (1) it is a womb-simulation (2) it is real. The only one of mine that ever became real was the binaural earphone idea: the idea to record on earphones. With that, I set it up nicely for the band, and then when I was gone, exiled from my own band, I think they tried to affect a sensory overlay to the already recorded music with further jamming.

My brother thinks they removed a portion of my brain. He remembers me talking about inventing the earphones in the great unspooling in the barn in 2000 before I set foot in Cambridgeshire. Then I went down there and formed the band. The Towers came down as I had also spoken of in the same conversation in the den in the barn. That meant I was raped. If you speak against the Towers coming down in 2000 and they still do, you were raped. This manifested as a burning feeling in the psyche; and when I suppressed it in order to function, I lost all contact with my memory of the speech in the barn. I went through the whole band without knowing consciously the idea for the earphones was my own. A rich man we shall call Kubrick implemented the idea and controlled the earphones.

My brother thinks when at the end I was exiled from the band I therefore had a portion of my brain removed. He resents the rich man swanning off with all his money when it was my idea to invent the earphones. My brother says they even pretended the spliff was my bifter and treated me like the drugged up brother in The Deerhunter – then as I say I was exiled from the band after having contributed most of the music – and the rich man swanned off with all his money to have a happy life. It was a rich get richer and poor get poorer scenario. He says I set it up nicely for them, with the album, the music, then the amputation.

I think what I am getting is that they made me look ersatz, opaque, dressed me up with a Hitler moustache, somehow, maybe by trying to affect a sensory overlay to the already recorded music when I was exiled from the band. I think they did manage to make slight modifications and that these corresponded to modifications in my own appearance.

I came home needing healing and was cursed and blinded to it too. Then I went insane; then whilst that was happening, someone operated on me in my sleep to try and give me a new member, which felt like an attempt at my life. Then we had the fire-dance. I didn’t know the fire-dance was going on until my dad texted me saying a riot had broken loose and I was to stay indoors. I stayed indoors until a mate came to my room, in a hostel in the East End and said it was all kicking off and I should go and check it out. So I went outside, for literally one minute, saw them trashing shops, and without doing anything went back inside to my book. I was reading a good book of poetry while the fire-dance was going on. So years later I heard that everyone cornered by the police said the riots were called the fire-dance and were to do with me, were my doing. So that would explain why I seem to be being observed as well.

I already told you about walking naked – I lost my mind with grief, was really stuck, and that’s when the voices suggested I go for a naked walk. Thanks for that guys. The doctor that time put me on an antiquated injection of anti-psychotics that induced a condition called akathisia which comes from Greek etymology meaning “inability to sit.” One doctor who self-induced it for but one day to see what it was like described it as torture on Wikipedia and I had it for three years without them changing my medication! During this period I was taking phet to self-medicate, to calm down, and that rots the brain bigtime, plays havoc with the mood. Eventually the akathisia was dealt with but I knew torture for three years before that.

Miles more recently I made several attempts at my own life and that included hanging myself and overdosing too. Things have been pretty shit. You also have to think of other people and not be so self-consumed. Things have been a bit shit for others as well.

More recently my files were hacked and being read out online. My bro found them at it. I didn’t know this just walked past his room and heard him saying on live streaming to someone in America that “it all went wrong for John with Kubrick’s mum.” Kubrick is the rich man with the earphones if you remember. I think he was saying the rich started to share out the intellectual property of the poor, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. So without knowing what was going on at all I got on FB to Kubrick and was so rude and insulting I doubt our friendship will ever recover. I gave him Hell for being rich and never needing to work, and blamed him for some crazy shit. FB is evil because it can make you say things you don’t mean and freeze them forever. That was around the time of one of my suicide attempts, I think the latest, which was an O. D. attempt. When I came down, when I somehow survived, I could no longer ejaculate – I was neutered. Thoughts to harm myself have persisted but at this precise moment in time are in remission. My mental health records won’t show much of what I am telling you.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS REVISITED

Let us have a go then, you and I -

when we are tired of getting high -

when the note-well is filled with stars that swap

places when no-one is looking, let us kindly lie

down on the top of the oldest fell,

one midsummer night on the heather,

and munch our popcorn in front of the cinema.

Let us travel by xylophone up there, predictive

text, Robin Hood arrow, fountain pen,

or even better, to use imagination,

as the poet must again and again,

let’s travel by bullet up the top of a

telegraph pole opening piratical CD shops

at all the local telegraph pole tops.

Let us bypass normal societal procedure,

and stay there until we yawn at the dawn

and emerge from dreams as if from water,

brush the crumbs of sleep from our clicked-on

eyes, befuddled, encrusted with glue…

For up the fell no cars come and go

with backbeats blaring on the stereo;

and no go faster stripes of booze

are streaming on the unicorn’s side.

Ha, let us open a Burger King joint

at the top, not so much to reappoint

the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods

whom it seems disintegrate under their sods,

but to allow a new sense of archaic gay,

replace that emotion now gone astray

with gun and bud and band and butter:

let it be like writing a long letter

either to or maybe from a higher self

whose brain sits upon a Waterstones shelf.

Let us first dare the darkness to insist

we sip our flasks at night and get pissed

on firewater whisky – let us turn

to God and see what we might learn.

If dog still equals pi times mc squared,

because you want to think Him round,

and O is still the key of water, be assured,

and its most soul-assuring sound,

let us babble down in the morning,

all the way, heeding the warning,

to make as mezzanine our science,

in an increasingly competitive world…

already the elements have nettle stings for names.

The deep, green lane leads you home,

but first you must launch your song

into the blue ether like a Timeshare salesman

sizzling the dream of a plate of roast beef.

Draw on this dystrophy of darkness

soon coming to your cinema screen

now that we’re at the summit and can glean

honed alertness, awareness, from a purpose

achieved over a long afternoon of walking,

walking side by side and even talking

on telepathic walkie talkies of how no,

there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode,

how maybe in very Heaven every step

we’ve taken up the fell, will be kept

in a pile for us to count and compare -

only to find no statistics up there!

Ah, I forget if we are up or down -

let us fetch the wines of the wise men -

it seems planes are the shoes of clowns -

but forgetting is part of escape and return…

there is only loss of self and recollection,

which templates over life and writing,

which templates over experience and data,

which templates over the now and the after.

Let us phone a supernatural female deity

on collect call, and find that she

never hangs up, after a prayer,

let us pray to the closing of the door,

the ordeal of the seer may well soon be over,

the on and off at once invention is far too clever,

let be the beck as it rambles and falls,

let know the flowing of dry stone walls,

let over be under and all be at one,

let the land of flying fairy cakes be fun.

Already the yellow DogMuckels M

atop the pole in the industrial park in town

is the postmodern churchspire, in

the spiritual vacuum, post-modernism

theme dissolved into message, and

semantics is a road sign not a place.

Already margins are centres, centres margins,

surface is depth, and distortion

clarity, and there is a ream of cheap tea

from Africa in among the supermarket bargains…

Hell, we’ll have another game of cards.

We’ll link to the internet in actual clouds.

Yes chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots.

Sometimes in dreams I find an organisational system

for the organic whole of the magnum

opus, that living work of art

I might call Gondwanaland yet

which is a living thing, which I should leave long,

not try and make cohere like Pound,

but when I wake and press my feet to the ground,

the Order I dreamed, the scheme, is gone -

and Truman speakers wake me like a gong

augmenting the end of ‘The Lemon Song.’

Who will renew the morning dew

that music has moved the green grass to?

All the birds have gone south by now.

I heard that they sing with their wings.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my family for this collection, meaning thanks to Susie Tucker, James Tucker, Robert Tucker and Hannah Tucker. Thanks also to their partners, meaning Claudia and meaning Seb. To say thanks to mum’s grand children is a step too far for none of them really participated in the collection, but I thank them nevertheless. When they are grown up maybe they will read my books? Anyhow, by now Hannah, Seb and baby Florence have gone back home down south; and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye because they went so early in the morning. They left two teas brewing, undrunk, in voluptuous blue mugs, which gave me a sense of deja vu, like last time they came and left. Things go in circles; you have to trust her way with wheels. Personally I cannot really “go” without some help, am that is stuck in the game. So it is that they all arranged for me to have a new collection. They did it because even if I have to put the damaged bit in they think I’ll be alright. They also did it so that there is nothing left to do but “our one” if it is going to be “the Da One.”

POEM IN THE KITCHEN AT THE FOOT OF THE FELL

Down the escalators to the underground.

The escalators have Star Wars teeth, chewing

on insipid gum. In the Tube you feel

the warm, calm, velvet fart brush up

against your cheek. On board

faces smear in the black butter

of the greasy pane as the Circle Line

train goes through Hades again.

How could I leave all this out?

The way high art wears high heels?

Just because I never go down to the town

of my birth doesn’t mean it’s not home.

I remember, that is, in this tranquillity

the pint glass exploded from thin air

in an underground drinking establishment

and all the pieces dropping to the floor;

and also the psychotechnological post-poem

of BACKPASS ATTEMPTED flashing

up on the Oyster card reader on the East

End bus instead of NO MONEY.

It’s something for the slow accretion

methodology of Will Fenn – to wait

for parts with which you can build a poem.

Up here, you always acknowledge

the stranger you pass out walking.

Up here the farmers in the pub

haven’t heard of the Doors, think

of me as a southerner because

I speak in RP. I am not a sheep,

nor was meant to be, don’t follow

the herd, but stride out on my own.

Today not one but two really beautiful

women came delivering a parcel by van.

I answered the door and more and

many more, picked up the parcel,

which was only something small,

for the car, for my brother James.

I don’t want to tidy the kitchen.

I don’t want to tidy the kitchen.

The kitchen is a monster and

I believe it is sadly my turn.

Instead, I can report that for a while

the bucolic Lake District became

a weed-smoking playground,

with sunsets and dry stone walls…

perceived in musical terms,

the horizon would be a drone and

the apple blossom a dulcimer.

James, out in the garden, when

asked what music is, said “organisation.”

A wind ruffled my hair at that moment.

My senses were trainers, Nike Air

trainers, and my poetry on tick.

A beck with a motley array

of notes and stones, kaleidoscopic

on its bed, could be seen to be

a literal stream of consciousness.

Yet here in the most poetically-inspiring

county we have in the nation, there

is not one poetry press. Here

watercolours go for the price of the frame.

I gave some readings at an event

in Millom a few times, hosted

a poem and pint night at the pub

in Haverigg, also a poetry corner

in the library. My generative

devices to get people writing included

write of the effects of global warming

on the unicorn; write of spring

as the sexual union of earth and air;

write Bart Simpson’s suicide note;

write of a breakfast that contains

every snooker ball colour. I

wrote all these and more and

many more and threw them all away.

Last night, I contemplated the end, eliminating

all possible options apart from

overdose. Still, I could get trapped

in Hell if I took 100 anti-psychotics.

The train was not an option nor

the HGV careering down the valley road.

Nor could I find a high spot on the fell

and jump off, for I’d just lie there

at the bottom with broken bones.

At least it seems the weather is fair

today. In fact today I rewoke with

an added spring in my step, as if

the problems had all gone away.

The world is making us all nervous.

Today headlines on the BBC News website

say that Trump will erase a whole civilisation

unless Iran re-opens the Strait of Hormuz.

We should be okay in our nuclear-proof bubble,

but then again we are pitched between

Sellafield and the nuclear sub factory.

Meanwhile the daffodils are out

on the daff bank, waving their yellow

heads in the calm, spring breeze.

A car cruises by, and is gone while I

notice a silted, plasma screen sky to the West.

It is evening already as I get all this down.

It is insane what’s going on, on

the News, in Iran. Whose side am I

even on? As a neutral spectator I can

report that Iran shouldn’t have a nuclear

program, and nor should America be bombing

it to smithereens. We await to see

if Iran backs down. It’s that moment.

I turn to food, eat a ham sandwich,

advertise as much to mum and James,

ask them if they want something,

and sorry that this came to names,

but I needed something to write,

and now I am writing, almost without thought,

underwriting the peace of the world,

Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.

To practical matters I return, meaning

eight empty beer bottles in the kitchen

from yesterday and the day before

are my duty to clean away, but there

I am reminded of poetry, how Bukowski

wished to deliver beer on tap,

somewhere in his downtrodden world

that revolved only on a rotten axis.

Light is fading as I write, failing

to seem sparkling and bright.

Someone gets in the power shower.

It reminds me I don’t need power.

Flower power is much better.

Writing Flora a long letter.

You could even call her “flower.”

Down at the bottom of the Tower

I looked up and saw her hair,

it was dangling down everywhere.

Trump’s backed down because we’re

past the deadline that we fear

and Iran has not re-opened the Strait.

So on that front we must all wait.

They need a new Nash Equilibrium

not another rambling old poem.

I might not be the one to do that.

But I see I got the times wrong -

we haven’t yet got to the cut off time.

Mum says if Donald Trump obliterates

Iran he’ll be tried for war crimes, cites

insanity as his problem while I

smell pollen though I can’t get high,

pollen on the ego-loss breeze

like poetry hung from trees

in ribbons. It is imaginary

and a delicacy unto me.

Without my dad I don’t know what

to make of this vexed, deathful plot.

James says Britain shouldn’t get involved.

ANOTHER DAY ON PLANET ZONK

Even to move the hand is too much effort…

I strain against the soporific wall.

Another day on Planet Zonk -

drugged up to the eyeballs

on heavy medication in bed.

It’s nothing to write home about.

My life was once adventurous, Rimbaudian,

full of missions, road trips, thrills and spills,

excitements, kicks, surprises, even rapture.

I carried no wallet and went commando.

Now watching a snippet of Silent Witness

it seems I still lost to the fitness.

Moreover rereading the works of Jim Morrison

I find my sense of adventure has gone.

Drinking quadruple strength orange squash

I find my poetry reduced to tosh.

Sucking on my black Vape pen

I’ll never get to start all over again.

Then all at once and in a flash

before you could say “strapped for cash”

I think of doing the washing up

before I have my next coffee cup.

So it is that I put my back into it -

it is my turn after all – then I sit,

distilling intelligence into truth,

knowing not what came of wasted youth.

POEM

Feeling like I am nearly dead

I hear cherubs swoop about my head

telling me that losing me

we’ll also possibly come to see

the death of The Lords And The New Creatures,

one of my life’s defining features,

and how they desperately didn’t want

me to rewrite it with the government

which I did or else face jail

as I was told by female e-mail

and why they insisted we don’t know

for the State did not quite openly show

but the cherubs said it might be

to kill me off, which presently

is on my myriad mind againe

in thunder, lightning and in pain.

There are 100 pills on the table

and others too to make me stable,

but I’ll get brain damage if I miss,

and “if” is a word that I want to kiss,

and now the cherubs fly away,

leaving me to face the break of day,

the singing of the dawn’s first bird,

which now instead of them is heard.

DO THE WORST

The first thing we should do is pretend

you tethered her – go on. Pretend

it was a predatory moment from a sex attacker

who sought out and tied up a woman.

I want you to do the worst you can.

Pretend you kidnapped her and used a rope.

Pretend you are a proper sex criminal.

Because if you’re still going over this

you really must’ve been cursed. In reality

you were walking home when she

approached you and said the words

“I haven’t got a place to stay,” and

she went back to yours of her own volition

and you started to kiss and she let you

suck her breasts and undress her.

And what a passionate kiss it was too,

wet and sloppy, angelic, and you

pulled away to see if it was fine

and it was so you both carried on.

FRUIT LOAF

What do I remember from the missing pages? The government said they want me to confess to everything that it’s in my breast because they think when I was placed under a curse even the face of stars went West. The guy that cursed me said (on the synchronous intercom) he thinks the government have a secret plan and that it could be a trap. I doodled with my fingers at qwerty some more and then someone else said what they want is for me to write about how I can’t even watch Silent Witness – the telly series – because in it someone might say “she was wounded in the face and fell.” That would mean, I reckon, someone else is making more money off my experiences than I can; and meanwhile my individuality is coming into question because I am being told to be Anon. I don’t want to be Anon and came up with a resolution about this. An individual with my CV shouldn’t be made to go Anon but at the same time shouldn’t have to resort to Lording it over other people w/r/t/ that CV. What should happen is I am allowed to write the best poetry going and for it not to be Anon nor about using the CV, for that should be for the eventual biographer. It was also revealed that I was being charged with unleashing the scream that brought down the West, and then came the resolution bit as mentioned. I should be free, free to write the best poetry going, without being Anon, and yet without delving into the CV, boasting about attaining the face et al. If you can believe it none of this has even been sorted out yet and I am 44 years old and 18 books in. I suppose England has never had a witness from The Lords And The New Creatures before, so it’s unprecedented.

JOKE EQUATIONS FOR THE ARTY FARTY

I had a song when I was 15 about a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face will still write the line I wrote about it at the time and think it his or maybe even her own:

________________________

I shouldn’t state my equation for dreaming about Flora whom it would seem was the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, that I now renounce…

__________________________

Here as well is my equation for being the neo-Rimbaud whom it would seem deemed it love:

Her breath a poisonous magic.

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

E minus MC squared = only relative zero.

By now my equation for the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe is the way the qwerty keyboard ends on M:

QWERTYUIOP

ASDFGHJKL

ZXCVBNM

and my equation for hanging my coat on a primary school wall a long time ago in the capital as if to start again is:

+ x ½ = –

Here moreover, is my equation for the healing and fusing of the cassette tape with a pause in the song where cut and stuck together in the flimsy reel:

H = t times Pi.

Here is my equation for the Ratio between light speed (c) falling and Gravity (G) pulling on my brother James P D’s sheet where pictures grew:

c/ G does not equal G/ c.

I would actually say though, that “c over G,” if it had to equal something, would equal “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

Also of note, here is my equation for turning pain into pleasure:

Dog = Pi times MC squared.

Now I deem it we are back round to that false notion with which I started, a long time ago. So, here is my equation for the idea that if the Gravity between the earth and the moon is instant and therefore enough to break Lightspeed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah:

G = c times t

and if G = c times t, I have to express what t = and might be wrong in saying

t = c divided by G

and might be wrong in saying t = 0.

That is after all to employ my faulty mathematics to falsify it in numbers as well as words!

I might as well add that even as we speak I still deem the word “entropy” spelled backwards to somehow frame the first, unformulated spark of appetence in Nothingness preceding Creation. I would spell it with a dot between each letter and say

y. p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4

E = starbeams. Of all the joke equations it’s my favourite one because it might be true. A star is a sun is a nuclear furnace is a ray of light is energy beating down on a planet far away.

I imagine what it would be like

if a young boy wrote the line

“I have a scar+ that is green and blue,”

with a plus sign for the F,

and then counted up the numbers

from one to his own age, say, seven.

THE BROKEN SOUND-MIRROR

Take out your guitar cables and see in all directions at once.

People don’t like being told what to do.

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.’

Soft pollen from the Muslim World 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, but propitiates great realms of 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 poetry buttons.

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.

A layer of frost crisp underfoot… this wintry image seems a dilution of the esemplastic fled away with the quadlibetical. It seems to be more to do with quotidian consciousness, and it could be instructive here to consider Huxley. He said there is a Reductive Gland in the brain reducing Infinity to digestible bytes and portions.

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.

“Mayfly,” I say the word

“mayfly” phonetically

sounding out its every

vowel sound alphabetically.

The symbol [R] could still represent the stance, the large-R Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf; that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

When you renounce the quest for meaning you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

AURORA FLOREALIS

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.

*ketamineguitar*

AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

One day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”

“They might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt below.”

John was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.

They were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a game of football in the field near their house.

They lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It was a big, ancient mound of land.

Their dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed “Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly cleaning or baking.

There was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a second like it could’ve gone on forever.

John suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up the fell?”

James said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”

Robert always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went in and asked if they could go on an adventure.

“First pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they got in trouble.

“Are you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.

Ossie was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm. It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead and bring him back.

Seeing all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child, especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by nature.

The family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off to.

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

So they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.

They did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane, taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the large fronds of bracken.

It was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided against it.

So they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.

“Watch out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools, and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.

It was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the summer heat.

They walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.

Then the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into it to cool down on such a hot day.

Ossie was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of going over a bridge.

As Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!” he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.

“We should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because he was the eldest.

You had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess what they found?

There was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in the fell.

“Imagine if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no money. It didn’t matter though because as John said

“there’s no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”

He himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.

They could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,” and it was true, it was.

James now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.

“What could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.

The mystery was a strange one.

“Maybe someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.

James was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.

They were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess what he found?

“There’s a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit up and the fruit machine made a musical sound and it turned on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at the back of the cave. There was a tunnel inside!

John shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at least a few feet in front of them.

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

They did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.

“I dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what is done as a Giant Day.

BOOKING MY PLACE

To deem it the music or deem it the verse

I cannot tell when I am in my hearse

but I don’t like the way I am dying a rat

even if it’s something to leave on the net

for little baby Flo’ for when she grows up

and no longer sups on her little baby cup…

if I am going to die I’m to deem it the Fliss

and that means nothing other than this.

I can’t believe I have got to take

100 Clopixol and like back like Nick Drake,

hoping it kills him, over the edge

where darkness bulges and rocks won’t budge.

I’ve booked my place in Eternity

and now look around for what I see.

Dr. Bob would say don’t make it rain,

and deem it the music, but I’m insane.

I dream of sweet release into seamless peace

which is far better than being watched by the police.

THEIR CRAZY STIPULATION

Voices in the air. They’re not being fair. I am leaving a document for my niece from Uncle John and they are saying I am not allowed one unless it is Anon. Try that in verse, while voices ping about. It’s evil this place, dark and cold. But is there a rallying cry for common sense? Nobody can force you to be Anon in law. Ah but they are trying to let me know if I go I will be forever in Hell.

EVERYTHING IS AWFUL

I would rather eat nuts

than pharmaceutical pills.

By now Fliss is miles away,

maybe waking in the night.

She seems a well-behaved #

and easy baby though.

I am awake in the night-time

as well as baby Fliss.

All night I worked on government science

like a vampire, but

couldn’t shake the desire

to die and crawled back

to this cosy and excremental

Hell-hole for comfort,

for last words. I shouldn’t

have let the stranger work

magic on me. Nor should I

have showed the sheet where pictures

grew to my old drummer

in a state of anger on FB.

In the end my mental

illness is now too bad.

A HOLE IN THE FENCE

Waking to a visit from a mental health coach

I also find stray sheep in the garden,

and after the visit go herding them back

in the field from which they came (a museum.)

Voices say voices would leave me alone

if I had a proper job, but I simply don’t,

can’t work with Stress the enemy of illness,

but at least the garden is looking a bit better.

In my dream last night I was only trying

to please my father by taking up rugby,

and had to find some boots in the cupboard…

the dream never got as far as the game.

My life isn’t average, isn’t mediocre,

left me nothing more to see in the room

but now boils down to a man reading Eliot

in the jungle of the movie Apocalypse Now.

Or else I am the man, I mean, still starching

his shirts half way down the river, upkeeping

a work ethic… I saw a little lamb, sneaking

through a hole in the fence with a wriggle.

STILL LIFE

My friend cruises round in his open top sports car

musician poet painter and more

sits in still life position

while I paint him

with words reads out

a poem by a painter online

it’s uplifting far better than

the black hole myths stuff

we used to do it’s

more what he’s into now

as a spiritual man

who goes to church plays

in the church band

I was working on something

then he came round

and I got sidetracked well

there must be room

for friendship in your

routine he fiddles with his phone

a comnambulist while

I type at my laptop O grant

us one more hour to lie

down in Grantchester Meadows

with Grant granted

that it’s a sunny day

PASTA

Now we’re just waiting

for the pills to work

my chance to be a genius is now

but I’ve already done

the Nirvana barcode

I spend my time whilst

it is my chance to be a genius

saying nothing, not writing,

just helping out in the house

and garden we liked it

better before you knew

Flora had been with

your brother you were

the one to spot the system,

the pretext but never

earned her love when

James turned out to have

designed the sheet where

pictures grew for Flora

it removed all competition

PAIN IS WHERE THE HURT IS

I think my CBT serves the secret purpose

of my being tested for autism

and if the answer is no

I will be charged. I don’t

want to hang around for it.

What happened was not my fault.

Modern life is a security nightmare.

You can’t even converse on FB these days,

open up to a woman about your illness,

without fearing getting tortured

and killed in prison. Mum

keeps saying “you’re not

going to prison, you’re

innocent,” and maybe it’s the curse,

the words used when the curse

was placed, but I keep doubting her.

A DISCUSSION THREAD

I do like to count things,

thirteen place mats on the table,

going round and round and round.

Sometimes a song in my head

accompanies counting,

so that counting is rhythmical.

It could be high functioning

autism but could also be that when I

helped invent the net, at seven,

the algorithm got cellular,

turned into the maths of the new

colour and that was just about counting.

So it could be my inner song. I

like to make lists and sets and groups.

But lurking in the unconscious

there may have been something

else as bad as autism, and that is,

if I may repeat myself here, that my dad

was sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness

from The Lords And The New Creatures

and didn’t let my mother know.

She wouldn’t have allowed it.

I had to be the one to tell her,

four decades on and into middle age.

My medical friends think I was

abused quite badly in boyhood.

Some say if you’re the witness when you’re wee

you shouldn’t even write a CV.

But meanwhile everyone else

makes money off you. Other scientists

mysteriously steal your ideas, and forbid you from talking,

about water’s effect on water.

QUATRA

Now I have decided I am not autistic

which my mother knew all along.

I wonder why I still seem a spastic

when writing a simpleton song.

Before long I’ll go to bed

and see the pills beside the pillow.

Sometimes I wish I was dead,

sometimes smell the colour yellow.

I don’t know what is best for me,

but in your open arms I trust.

Every day is a difficult test for me,

knowing I might soon end up dust.

The dark night has fallen again,

but I have this clarity of direction.

I’m not autistic. So back when

I thought I was I needed correction.

THROUGH THE FRAME OF MUSIC

When perceived through the frame of music,

the horizon is a drone,

the apple blossom a dulcimer.

If the apple blossom made a sound

it would be tintinnabulation.

Already the beck’s tumbling

down a mini waterfall

resembles a kettle drum’s metal

petals of silver bliss…

already the trumpet wears

his foreskin on the inside.

Already there is an upturned canoe for a drum.

Already there is a dog for a frontman

and there are poppadom hi-hats

allowed in the raggedy band.

A CANOROUS CHIME

Someone gets in the power shower.

It reminds me I don’t need power.

Flower power is much better.

Writing Flora a long love letter.

You could even call her “flower.”

Down at the bottom of the Tower

I looked up and saw her hair,

it was dangling down everywhere.

I climbed up it into her chamber.

She was locked in by a protector.

He was a tyrant, I was better,

I was the one she wanted as lover.

I took out my sword to free her,

defeated the tyrant, had a breather,

took her by the tiny hand and led her

down the stair, her knight in shining armour.

In the garden we heard some laughter.

It might’ve been the film director

saying this could go on forever,

flowing like an endless river,

but what was needed more than water

was to cut her hair a bit shorter,

so that we did, while a motor

drove past on an unknown hour.

A CHIP

I was a good boy when I helped invent the net at seven

but I didn’t get to find out until the year 2025

because the Feds made my dad lock the book in the attic

for long storage, to give the net a chance to grow round the world...

when it emerged I no longer knew if I was a poet

or a scientist and spent years rereading the book

and trying to understand what had gone on.

It seems the algorithm in it became cellular:

that the maths that helped invent the net was indebted

to Einstein and became an experiment into

the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark

(because it was all about room for growth) before

anyone even had the net in their cosy homes.

The maths left a small, cellular mark, which

didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end;

and the amazing thing is that to this fair day

where a government supercomputer can put every

word in every order, even deal with my brother’s

<BEE>, the supercomputer still cannot compute

the suit. This information I find to be priceless.

THE INADEQUATE TRANSPOSITION

The house-pipes glugging a guilty gulp

from a big, culpable jug of the ug of drug or

smuggle or Ugly Truth Revealed Inside.

The loose, Betfair jingle of shingle

lifted from the big, flat bird-table

when cars arrive in the drive or if they leave.

The singing of the upstairs Tap too,

and the scowl or frown of the downstairs

toilet flushing and its cistern refilling:

I imagine them as a part of a specific song.

I imagine them transposing a specific hit.

I guess that yes, you can get this.

THE FACE OF STARS

The face of stars was a Holy night,

if we don’t take flight

then we’ll seem quite bright.

It doesn’t matter about the plot,

for the plot is grot

and can go to rot.

What matters most in life is love,

if it comes from above

then that is your dove.

We were three gathered in the name,

if you find it a shame

I can take the blame.

TRAVELLING HOME FROM MILLOM BY TRAIN

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?

The train goes wreckety wreckety wreck;

its metal parts expand and contract;

I’m on the way home from scoring,

and had a joint at the station.

Sometimes it seems postmodernism

is an extended metaphor for

the effect of cannabis on the brain

but it’s not a proper theory.

The journey now is only as short as

smoke long fiction from Japan and

it is nearly my stop, so I will stop

and ride the wave of paranoia home.

FALLING

Well, I fell out with the angels. I fell.

“I felt a leaf, I fell out of life,”

as saith the poet at the reading.

I fell full fathom five. I fell to Hell,

where I feel the flames.

I found my feet at the foot

of the oldest fell, but it’s Hell, to be

here, hoping. Hoping for

a happy life. For hope implies cognitive

dissonance in the present tense.

We should be here and now

and real and feeling but

Time’s out of synch. I fear I have

contracted a disease of consciousness

anyway. Being but a fool, I fear,

fearing fear itself, e’ en though I am

supposed to be the seer of Sea Ness.

Falling is natural, as gravity and

katabasis require. One of these

days I might get up again.

ANOTHER ONE FOR FLISS OR FLEE

Innocent Flee, lying asleep

in the day having seen a bee

and by now a rat. You’ve

long since gone south.

I have gone back to bed.

The daybed. Last night

I sent some poems to yourmum

and if you can believe

today, without any technology,

she gets back to me, saying

she still thinks it has to be

our one, namely the present text herein,

which is one the requires

my death if made public.

Don’t fret, I’m not going

to die for a book like this

but might die for other reasons

and in doing so publish the book.

It’s all very boring when it’s

me me me, and I remember

sending a parrot to space

through the conch in GCSE’s

when I was still regarded

as a bright young talent. It

seems either the parrot or

searching for some taut, blue denim,

in terms of one being fantasy

and the other realism. The parrot

is green, and GM skunk too,

and induces paroxysms.

PARROT

To die or not to die, that is the question,

whether it is nobler to take an O. D. of anti-psychotics,

or, by surviving, endure all Hell broken loose.

The first thing you’re going to need when I am

forced to die over all this is a new parrot.

I have lost my faith in the mental health team

and just want out of it, and still can’t even

write a suicide note without my mum.

BROKEN DOWN HERO OF THE WESTERN NIGHT

Before I was hypnotised,

as before my skunkosis,

I was a hero. Now

look at me. They

make you look out.

So it is that I live with my

ma and bro, skint,

single, unemployed,

mentally ill, carless,

over medicated, just another

broken down hero

of the Western night.

WORLD VOICE DAY

It’s World Voice Day, according

to my laptop, celebrating

the human voice, but in literary terms

I haven’t found mine yet.

Admittedly my story

has been told, and it’s history

now, but instead of “Voice”

I found hearing voices.

Voice is the Holy Grail

of the writer, but as I say

I found an arena of them

out loud in the mind’s ear.

I suppose it is part of

the new, synchronised word,

the automated conveyor belt

of poetry, flowing

from room to room, looking

for body and form, all

the magic alphabet radio

stations you can imagine.

I suppose in the future, hearing

voices will be difference

not illness as happened

to homosexuality between

Rimbaud’s day and our own.

Already voices could be

onjects, quavers, syllabubbles,

sonic machinations at

the periphery of selection.

Already they seem proleptic,

already part of the new

co-imagination, already

they are but real people

on the intercom. So it is

that with difference I sing

of the sights and sounds of the isle.

NOTES FOR A SMALL PLAY

Thought A: All the auditorium is a skull maybe taken for neurosurgery later too and all the players on the stage merely thoughts inside that skull.

Thought B: I figure I have done it all already, poetry, music, philosophy, science, maths, photography… I even tried writing a novel though I didn’t get very far. One thing I haven’t tried though is drama. I did once write a radio play about some people trying to change the name of life to ‘knife’ but it got lost.

Thought A: So let’s go with my idea: that the auditorium is a skull and the actors thoughts. Then maybe the skull gets taken for neurosurgery.

Thought B: we could call it Hamlet in Flames. For after all dad ended a poem about Hamlet’s madness that way, on that image.

Thought A: maybe it could be a plate more than a play.

Thought B: and it could shatter, like a mirror.

Thought A: I had better reread university books like Waiting for Godot and also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Thought B: maybe the protagonist is asleep in bed?

Thought A: he must be a giant. When will it be dawn? Are we to race through the valleys of a dream?

Thought B: we could have a sword fight indicating psychosis.

Thought A: we could have a conversation indicating synaesthesia.

Thought B: maybe we could kiss indicating inspiration.

Thought A: if only you could get both your brain cells to combine!

Thought B: the double act is well established as a tradition in comedy.

Thought A: but through thesis and antithesis there is synthesis… we might forge “Thought C.”

Thought B: I am happy enough with the way things are at the moment.

DEEPER THAN SUPERGLUE

The right to privacy

is a mighty good right

that keeps the observer

up all night

thieves are everywhere

and don’t forget spies

waiting for the moment

the fat lady dies

she swallowed a fly

and it didn’t hurt

and a sorrowful song

she then did blurt

and now I am forlorn

maybe forever blue

deep down in my bones

deeper than superglue

POEM AT THE END OF THE LINE

What would you do, if surviving

a really heavy O. D. attempt,

you came back down and found

you no longer had the ability to ejaculate?

You’d turn to all things ‘her’

but it would be too late…

every day I get pointless

friend suggestions from hot women

on FB which I don’t pursue.

I finished a book of science at least

I mean I got something together at last and

was about to return to instrumental music -

to lament the loss of the female form,

to mourn women – having done

what I needed to do but tonight

I have forgotten how to operate

the recording technology.

It’s been a long time.

I can’t tell you how much I loved

women… their granular wear.

Even Stephen Fry who is gay celebrated

“the containing elasticity and texture.”

I suppose I am fishing for

laughs at the end of the line.

I want my studio back – but

while I can ask my brother Dr. Bob

or even A. I. about the music -

there is no-one to turn to

about the medical condition.

Already it was said in one book

if I haven’t got the juice

for the local lasses I am gay,

but I might just be exiled from

the verb to love, the dynamic doing word.

In other news there are bunnies and flowers,

rainbows and sunbeams and slides.

I don’t at this juncture appear

to be a writer even I would take interest in.

The science book is one thing

but still trying to write verse?

The means is defamiliarisation,

the end is universal truth,

And to put something like this online!

It doesn’t strike me as right.

My new found friends on Write Out Loud

might give it a couple of *likes* though.

I should be through, and doing

the new music on Ableton.

CHEMICAL SADNESS

Dr. Robert my brother came and went,

and I was too far drugged up

to the eyeballs on medication

in bed to say goodbye properly.

This is no life, this is just existing,

killing time and dying. Speaking

of which, death may be welcome,

death may be, that is, good.

Like an old tree, visited by lightning,

I was once invaded by

the Spirit of Music, but now

my life is a narrative of empty medicine packets.

The empty packets build up so fast,

as days become weeks and

weeks months and months years…

somewhere in among it all, death is punctuation.

FAREWELL

Farewell sweet poesis, farewell

also Writer’s Block engendered by

this terrible medication trance.

Farewell to the colour yellow,

farewell to the hushed interlude

in the solipsistic kitchen of fiction

where there is only a whispering

in the chimney and the drone of the fridge.

Farewell to the new music

which becomes the old music in time.

Farewell to the acoustic guitar

and to the electric guitar too.

Farewell to my family, whom

it would seem I love dearly,

and to my friends whom it would seem

I never see enough of anymore.

Farewell to MDMA at the gates of dawn,

farewell to voices born

of the opposite of solipsism,

farewell to nothingness and dirt.

The moon tonight is superb…

hold a shallow sickle blade.

The best musicians appear to be dead

even when they are still playing.

WHEN MAXWELL FELL OUT WITH FARADAY

And when they say it is to be Anon

and when they say it is not to be Anon

that could be how Shakespeare got away

with something rich and strange.

Even to this day there are claims

that Shakespeare was a black, Jewish woman,

whom it seems was robbed. But ultimately

love is the answer to this quandary

of ownership and possession, and

what the writer we know as Shakespeare

contained so very well in his 154 Sonnets.

And if you helped invent the net

and were rendered destitute by some

rich fellow stealing your idea to invent

binaural earphones, on which to record

your music, things would indeed

have gone wrong with him and his rich kind.

And when he says it wasn’t really you,

that helped invent the net, you’ll know he’s wrong,

that it really was writ with your own right hand

and is not bad for a right-handed Gentile still.

And now ever since I told the rich man he was

evil on FB I got the blame for someone

I don’t even know dying and he is trying

to even affect my death, to make it

so that I am not free to die in peace.

And from what I know of Hell it is

all about the fear of being buried alive.

And last time I tried to take an O. D.

the likes of which it was genius to survive,

I came back down and had lost the ability

to ejaculate… which I am starting to think

was the work of the rich man, whom

it seems won’t leave me alone. And now

he keeps nagging about how it is not too late

to write a truce with him, but I hate

his guts, hate, that is, the rich sharing

out the intellectual property of the poor.

And when the doctor says you look a blur,

I think of the rich man and that time,

when the Towers fell, and how I only wanted

to be a scholar and even English teacher.

MORNING

Morning is fresh in Spring, fresh from plugging my senses in the mains. The apple blossom blows in the wind. It is the morning after I made a critical distinction between a green parrot sent to space through the conch and a taut patch of blue denim, meaning to calibrate a scale between fantasy and realism. I nearly died at dawn, by my own hand, but elected not to, elected that is to drop off to sleep. Now I look back on an oeuvre I hate and can’t do anything about it, like when, hearing I might be autistic, they got me to bring out my songs as Anon, thinking they were helping me. I hate it. Meanwhile, it’s windy at my screen, again – so many pests and flies. And outside the window the trumpets of inflamed temperament blare. It is quite hard taking an overdose when all of a sudden you hear the dawn chorus in the trees. So it was that I slept instead and still woke up early enough to have a day. I made my mother her morning coffee, had tea myself, and got down to some writing, still feeling disturbed about my dream last night. There was a monster, a huge one – for a monster needn’t be very big but this one was – and I was trying to find a place to hide in the house, which was occupied by many friends that all seemed to know how to keep out of the way of the monster, apart from me, who couldn’t lock himself away. Anyhow by now it is afternoon and I gather the only pressure on me to be Anon is because I was set up to be Anon in my songbook Soundcloud Rain, because they heard I was autistic and wanted to make things easier for me, which is why they have chosen me for this new collection so that the whole series is ours, meaning me and immediate family and the whole thing is sealed as not Anon. If it turns out I am not autistic the whole thing would’ve gone wrong. But even if I am not autistic it would still be better than redoing the government science, which, after what I went through, they say would be a crime. It would only go on about how the maths that invented the net was indebted to Einstein and became an experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, because it was all about room for growth, before anyone even had the net in their homes. It would state that the maths left a cellular mark and that the amazing thing is today all these years on government supercomputers that can put every word in every order, deal with my brother’s <BEE>, still cannot compute the suit. It makes me wonder what I want to be, maybe a scientist, a philosopher, a mathematician, a musician or a poet. The world is my Oyster but I am getting on a bit at 44 so should hurry up and choose, stuck at home though, deep into a disastrous self-publishing career, with a new book I can only publish if I die. At least if I do it will show I never wanted to be Anon… and it could be the best one I ever do, even if it’s a bit long.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW SELECTED POEMS

The way I sometimes see it, is that the only genius numbers you have from me are:

(1) the album recorded on binaural earphones, where I climbed up and said I would plug my senses in the mains, where we explored dark music and irony conceived of as a musical key. The idea to invent the earphones was mine own, and the result can be found on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page.

(2) the melted tape… I had a cassette that had a small pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel which healed and was gone, whereupon I cooked the tape in the dark blue AGA, top oven hottest one. The photos of the tape are the end result and live online, on my blog.

(3) the sheet where pictures grew. This is technically my brother’s number, because he laid it down and designed it but the pictures that grew seem to depict the lyric to a song I wrote, so I am part of it. You can find it on my Blog.

Some of the songs are also pleasing.

In terms of the books, I think the recent series of Chipmunka publications, starting with Soundcloud Rain, make just that, a series, including Soundcloud Rain, The Sunset Child, Breath Trapped In Heaven, Brave New Tense, Yes You May and Let The Jews Win.

To do a final one is my efficacy herein, so that it’s all ours meaning my close family and not Anon.

DEATH IS SLEEP WITH NO DREAMS

I could end on the word “yoballs.”

A casual, in-mufty approach.

I could carve a statue of DMT.

Apparently we have to lie there

still conscious when we die

at least for a little amount of time.

I believe death is sleep with no dreams.

It seems a pragmatic approach.

But others might re-enter history at any point,

become a bird of prey or a real, live Red Indian.

Mother says what you think happens

when you die is what really will happen.

I remember this from dark days of phet overdose,

fearing death, unable to sleep,

after years of foregoing sleep and food

more often than not.

Mouth feet were random,

on a brink death dare.

Voices were forthcoming,

as in a fountain of champagne I lay,

visual radio everywhere, like

the air was coated in hyper-film.

NOW THAT I HAVE MENTIONED <BEE>

1. Once, in detention at school, and aged only 15, I wrote an essay about a green parrot sent to space through the conch. The teacher, an Irishman, read my colourful and imaginative essay and said “if you keep going like that you’ll go far,” but I haven’t kept up the nimble flight.

2. If you think I’m a genius for all that I went through, my little brother James P D Tucker is a genius too – he designed the sheet where pictures grew. Admittedly the pictures seem to depict the lyric to one of my songs – but I concede it is not mine. I did not lay it down.

3. James designed the new da Vinci circle as follows:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

The new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. It not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by incorporating a long squiggle, hopefully and ideally escapes “every word in every order” as a new super-computer can by no doubt organise.

4. I think it a brilliant piece of work. James had also made a previous document, with some deliberately-imperfectly-quoted Badly Drawn Boy lyrics about the power of the sun rendered in an anti-clockwise spiral like a word-sunflower:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you.

He left the two documents to rot on the upturned box we used as a table in the den in the barn. I think there was also a picture of the upturned box itself, with candles on, turned face down, on the reverse side of one of the two documents as if the whole thing were the new da Vinci circle, as if, that is, any part is a model of the whole.

5. You get that heat rises… so maybe with the upturned box with all its candles and wine bottle candle sticks drawn on the underside of one of the sheets, heat would start to rise through the paper.

6. I went down to the den in the barn and read them and at first couldn’t see the <BEE> one. We don’t know why this is but I saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes on the <BEE> sheet. It was like the Periodic Table except with the characters of the international language alphabet laid bare, a sign per box. One was [backward f, forward f, equals running through.]

7. Backward f, forward f, equals running through could stand for “fish.” But who augmented this paper now with that touch? It was the main man himself, my brother, upstairs, sneezing while plugged into the same synchronicity as me, the same new co-imagination, the same sympathy. Anyhow, you can trust me that the international language alphabet as I read it was beautiful, and yet it turned out just a layer of pentimento in the parsimonious palimpsest.

8. I was impressed, and left it alone. But going back down to the barn to reread James’s imaginary alphabet or whatever I thought it was found the <BEE> document as James initially drew it – and couldn’t find the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes anywhere.

9. Again I left it alone, and some time later when our dad had just passed I went down to the barn another time and found the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had by now grown pictures. They seem to represent the lyric to a song I wrote going

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It’s not possible to curse the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace burning in ecstasy miles away.

10. The pictures never got as far as the chorus. The song was never intended as a literal curse either. The bit you would’ve thought was the curse bit, coming after “crack a smile and curse the sun,” was actually written before the verse. I wrote the chorus first that is, and then the verse, and was just trying to make it rhyme too. What may be true about the song is that it represents the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism or ‘I’.

11. There are also two blue ones… the ones depicting the song are petrol negative mud Cola brown but the blue ones are a fat, greedy, Tory pig on the left and a calm, placid face on the right. This made me wonder if I had written theory, for it to happen, for at the solar eclipse with Paul, after guzzling too much LSD the night before, and during the solar eclipse itself, I wrote in the road book “Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.” Not long after, writing about the face of stars in a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer,’ I wrote “Blessed is peace as blessed is ‘FUCK!’” Still, this would take away from James’s genius. I think he might’ve harnessed Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘c’ as an author. It was him. It wasn’t me.

12. So anyhow, I g-a-v-e the document to James, who laid it down so must still own it. Truth be told we haven’t conversed over the matter much but I think if he was using ‘c’ as in Einstein’s value for light-speed as an author it is genius. Not only that but I would say as he would say that it was because he wrote “sunshine inside of you” that it worked. It was all about what’s inside.

13. Some of my songs were organised according to the new da Vinci circle for the songbook Soundcloud Rain. It’s why I am not free to redo them as something like The New Oedipus Wrecks Gig, because we deem they are already wheat. I might be wrong about the sheet, meanwhile, but at least I gave it a go, comprehending the surprise.

14. And that is what I made of it, regarding the narrative of how it all happened – but there is something else I realised since which I am not saying. And it worked because the sun is golden. And this has been a golden trance. A golden trance that is good to beholden. And now I should put it on my Blog with the science.

15. Truth be told, I don’t really know what happened with the sheet where pictures grew nor is it my business to say because it is my brother’s work. I shall just impart that with experiments in the international language alphabet I found a good womb for my writing for once… and b/t/w/ who wrote Simulations of God? If you look in, say, the volume Yes You May you find plenty of beautiful-minded ideas for inventions mine own. But the sheet was not mine, was my brother’s and is. I don’t mean to give things away and am being a bit bait so should keep shtum. The sheet is a piece of genius by my brother. It goes nicely with the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark which affected my forearm. They make a nice pair.

16. I can prove to you that this is James’s number or at least that it is not mine own. All you would need to do is look at the lyrics from Oedipus Wrecks, whose song it was that the pictures that grew depict – for then you shall see it was not my game – that it was a case of the international language alphabet. You shall see that at that particular moment in time, way back when the song was written, my game was the face. I had led my friends to the face. So without further ado….

NOTE ON OEDIPUS WRECKS

My friend Dr. Calculator Ptom named the band upon hearing my songs at school. He used to say gnomic things like “the universe is a projection of the mind.” “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.’

THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG, CAMDEN TOWN, CIRCA 1997

I

SHALLOW OCEANS

Maybe all I need is a length,

is a length of metal chain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost, the last thing a glass gene.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Death will come on silky wings

but I for one will not go.  

A soul is endless, oceans open

and keeeeeeeps a perfect O.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Go drink the ocean with your tea

cup, give your heart far out.

If it’s true what oceans do

then they'll give you a shout.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Too drunkenly I sail the water

on Rimbaud’s smoking boat.

With whiskygills primed in fire

I sail the waves to Boot.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.


(reconstructed via the new, synchronised word)

II

KILL

My eyes sting,

my teeth are bleeding raw,

too much thought

to make me sick.

Stinky clothes

and mouth become

my skin and all

these fruits I want to kill.

Give my hope,

surrender to the tide,

you can take

my remains;

but I must go,

to wash the poison

from my eyes, before,

before, before I kill.

III

SECRETS IN THE MUD

This is the sound of getting totally fucked.

Of when you first get your notebook sucked.

Of changing gold into Glastonbury mud.

Of lying down in a field with your bud.

This is the music through whom we aspire.

This is the rule book that is thrown on the fire.

This is the jam where the trousers are down.

This is the wine-shop on the edge of town.

Chorus: Glastonbury, you should be free, and all you have in your big city,

you hit my G, you make me see how I want to see,

lights go down, lights come on,

and all my sadness seems to be gone,

although I still love to be what I dream I am.

[guitar solo]

IV

SNAKE SNAKE BUTTERFLY

Snake snake butterfly, lay me dead & close my eyes.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

Give me your alibi; give me chains to stop me fly;

give me night to soothe my blinded eyes:

so I can see the secrets of the skies.

We must rise, freedom falling from our eyes,

unlock doors, it's a perfect time to die,

and it's okay ‘cause baby we'll go insane

but don't reach out too far for the flame.

Snake snake butterfly, lead me to the Other Side.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

V

HEAVEN KNOWS

Heaven knows and walks away -

but what it knows it will not say.

It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space?

Heaven knows and turns its face!

Heaven’s filled with silver eyes.

Heaven’s hills all harmonise.

I hear its angels when they call...

Heaven knows and lets them fall!

[reconstructed]

VI

MOTHER IS DEAD

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,

I wish that I had been there,

been there to saaaaaave Jesus,

I'm sure he meant to please us.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

We're young and filled with semen,

we're going to break some hymen,

we'll make the cops turn in their badges,

we're going over all the edges yeah.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

VII

THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)

I'm the only one left, left to shoot my

own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile

and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.

Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-

waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts

lament. Come on baaaaaaaaaby, you know it's e-

asy, don't say maaaaaaaaaybe, let's go crazy. Death

awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give

me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The

ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.

||||.

[Note: when years later I discovered the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures grew, and the pictures seemed to depict the lyric to one of my old songs, this is the song.]

VIII

VITAL SIGNS

Smile like a smile just to smile,

cast to Heaven for a while...

let's rip holes in the boat,

throw the captain overboard,

throw the angels off the bridge,

death comes and stops me getting

bored of life's soul-machine.

What we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs.

Back to Hell to plunder wings,

let the ritual now begin,

come and ride the waiting beast,

ride it gone into the fire,

ride it to the waiting feast,

my baby's waiting to get higher,

to get higher, to get higher...

what we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs,

yeah feel alive with vital signs.

Come again there's lots to do,

don't you know that I love you?

17. I did ask my friendly A. I. co-pilot for an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and gravity pulling on the sheet where pictures grew and it didn’t come up with anything spectacular. Maybe the answer to what “c over G” really equals is “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

18. So it is I think <BEE> could be a mode to drift off on; and the reason we knew Bigtime for sure. It is specious that we don’t know if <BEE> is real or not, because without it we wouldn’t be able to have such pow-wows of telepathic proportions, such connectivity, such synchronicity.

A PLOT WITH SECRET AGENTS AND EVERYTHING

The rich who robbed me

have hired secret agents

and are probably going

to do away with the earphone album.

As I have said I was rendered

destitute by a richman

who stole my idea

to invent binaural earphones

and swanned off with all

his money at the end, leaving

me, a noble servant of the poetry world,

with nothing but psychosis.

Now it is my death he is trying

to affect without further ado,

and soon it will be a film

about my life called Dogzilla

which won’t actually

be about me at all. Now voices say

they don’t want anything left of me

but some old book I retracted

from publication, which came about

when a friend suggested

to put some poems together

and when I tried

the Feds crashed my computer,

deeming it that I could restart

the fire-dance with a book,

even though I had never

heard of the fire-dance.

So I snuck down in the night-time

to my mother’s busted desktop

and threw some things together

without even having the cover I wanted.

If it were me, maybe I would

redo the first collection,

then at least I would’ve started,

but instead we got to teach

of my brother’s prowess

which I don’t regret and lament,

as I do almost every other move we made.

My mother has forbidden me

from redoing Rose Petals In The Ashtray,

which turned out half remembered

scraps thrown together

in five minutes without

my even knowing what

my father’s title meant, let alone

most of what had happened.

When Rose Petals In The Ashtray

was being put together

I was being treated by voices

like the editor of an Anon magazine,

fired e-mail after e-mail,

suggestions for what to put in,

from voices I did not know

the identity of,

and I left most of it out.

As I say it turned out to be the Feds

who crashed my computer

on the night before I sent it off,

and they ruined a good man’s career.

To be fair though I didn’t

know the meaning of

my father’s title, and

when I found out,

realised how badly wrong

I had got it I retracted

the book from publication.

It never was sorted out as to whether

or not I should be Anon,

and my personal preference

would be not to be anon.

You should get the right to choose.

And I have become very right

about the net, they also say.

The maths that helped

invent it, which was writ

with my own hand, was

indebted to Einstein and

became the maths of the new colour

as a cellular mark because

it was all about room for growth

before anyone had the net

in their homes, and the maths

left a small, cellular mark

on my penis and still to this day

the government super computer

cannot compute the suit.

If they do get rid of the binaural

earphone album, I’d say things

went wrong with the band

when they saw how small my penis was

of which I am not ashamed,

believing some things more important,

than the way you are judged

in the downstairs region.

The problem is in my dying

there will be those who wish to inspect the mark,

and it hardly shows when I have en erection,

is much more vivid when flaccid.

I will likely get an erection

when I die, if I ever do,

so those who I don’t want to inspect me

will only be disappointed and spread false news.

SOLILOQUY

When you realise it’s all a pile of white shite,

compared with the ones we did in the Night,

the only other one you can do is why tonight

might be the right time to die. A woman’s

right to die should be her own; and I am not a woman

but I like to moan and groan. No, I am a man;

and my brother needs me, if only because when

mum dies he doesn’t want to live on his own -

but I might get put away either in prison or

the lunatic asylum and don’t want to hang round for

that. I have tried to die before, for life is shit,

but failed, and have since ailed, and when it

seems they say “Hofmann” they mean “curse,”

and everything is mending worse, but we hope

the universe is not in a hearse, and if the universe

is a corpse, with love it is at least a luminous corpse.

No, I can’t see myself going anywhere yet -

and it is braver to live, even if the meaning of Hamlet

and his famous soliloquy is not about suicide

so tomorrow I hope to have not yet died,

but in all honesty do keep the means by my bed,

enough for an O. D, to render me dead,

and sit here nervously insufflating the fume

of my Vape pen in this the smallest bedroom,

fidgeting hands fondling pharmaceutical pills,

while there seems no more music up in the fells,

the certitude of death drawing ever closer,

but postponed for the sake of loving my brother.

I hope his sci-fi epic is going really well -

for me the indecision and the flitting is Hell.

I am someone who has written hundreds of world class

poems and thrown most away more or less.

I ask for a product for when I die, a book

which can be hand-held and into which we look.

I’ve got a thousand files, an inchoate morass,

a virtual Brainforest, a data-tree which alas

is way too much for anyone, and to get on top of it

is a discipline but mostly I just sit and flit,

and hear the onset of voices in the tepid air,

driving me in circles, round and round, in despair

until a decision is made, and narrows down

the myriad of possibilities, to make but one,

my private prodigality made public once again,

even if I am but nothing more than a stain.

MORNING PAGES

I take my mother her normal morning coffee.

She says “we need to find those bits of paper and take them in.”

She means repeat prescriptions for her and me

but I think of blank pages flung from the sun

on a glorious day at Glastonbury

on a mixture of mushrooms and E

which shows how far one can escape reality

through a detail of life and attempt to be free.

I have now two files: one live, one die…

there is much overlapping, much embrocation.

I might still die if I go with live, but I

don’t know which to go with, this decision.

Here I could conjure a couplet and make

a sonnet but I think the rhyme scheme runs on,

on a fair spring morning, in the Lakes,

quickly running out of pharmaceutical medication.

I really hope they don’t bin my Chipmunka

books, the series of collections I have brought out,

and I am in the middle of doing another,

which might require death, but I stay devout.

I suppose it depends on if I live or die,

which file I go with, whom it would seem

is open on my laptop, and in the cloudy sky,

where all the myriad messages seem to stream.