UNDER THE PLOUGH

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the floor 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.

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*

SAYING THE STAINS ARE GOOD

[a new song for acoustic guitar]

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.

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 across 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.

GOLDFISH BOWL UPDATE

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,

the local, parochial headline wants to read,

and crossed the water to the Other Side,

left behind my almost ascetic greed

so I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,

knowing not why the goldfish is dead,

knowing only that God is good,

hoping its soul ascends Heavenward,

imagining the newsflash on the TV,

or online for anyone at all to see,

but as the goldfish becomes history

I see it could be worse for you and me

for if it was my brother’s <BEE>

there would be damage in all Infinity.

ALL ONE WORD

Floss, Flo, Fliss, Flee are Florence

and are all one, but so is Flora -

forty three years Florence’s elder.

Blonde and pulchritudinous from school.

I hugged her once in a boarding school corridor.

I was quite Smart for a fool.

A drizzled Cola Bottle woman,

word-walk you my way into my arms?

The moment we should’ve kissed passed

and was forever gone and lamented too.

It’s not like I didn’t try to recapture

the moment of emotive Romanticism in words,

but by the time FB came lolling

it was too late, she wouldn’t befriend me.

I am hoping you, Florence, will

if not be a FB friend then a true one.

I guess what’s good for Flora and her

pretty pretext, her system, same for you.

ELSTREE AND BOREHAMWOOD

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.”

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.

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.

At least when I look through them,

they look really good.

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)

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 claim “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.

ANOTHER ONE FOR THE FLO’

Flo, Fliss, Flee, and most of all Florence.

You might find there is intermittence

like on the conscious/ unconscious

border in this. For one thing I write

to gather enough for the lifetime’s work of

a poet that can no longer ejaculate, because

I took an O. D. a year or so ago the likes of which

it was said to be genius to survive and yet

coming back down found I could spunk no longer.

So that is one aspect of my literature where

I believe I am in telepathic communion

with a father-poet called Neil Curry

who encourages me to do just enough.

But your mother and father had an other ideal.

They wished for me to leave a new one behind for you

starting with the sheet where pictures grew

culminating in a reckless confession

that delimits in plain English my rationale for suicide,

not that they want me to commit suicide,

just that if I do ever need to die, I leave our good book behind;

but then they went back down south, carrying

you, after the weekend and things changed…

I no longer had their vivid, handless input,

but only the voices and the people still here.

I decided against dying a rat, ratting

on people whom it seems I dearly love.

But keeping you in is a good thing, e’ en if

the content is not addressed to you always.

I mean starting like I started will be okay

because before I became a stump dumbfounded

if I may say that, I fancied a lass called Flora.

So sometimes I write for myself, not you;

but on top of that challenge I have writing

to you now, and not letting my family down

as was prescribed by my sister, your mum, H

whom it would seem I even taught the alphabet

on a child’s black board when she was very young.

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.

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.

BRINGING IN THREE LITTLE FELLAS

Fliss, Flee, Floss, Flo’ and Florence, hi.

I miss you, mum and dad being up here.

I also missed the boat proverbially

but there is no boat around these parts.

To paint ‘The Drunken Boat’ would take talent

but the graffiti on the keel is for masters.

Anyhow, I grow distracted from the point:

I should also weave in some little fellas: -

Matteo, Leonardo and Alle. Hi guys -

you’re coming back from Italy soon.

I hear Matty likes drawing, Leo

is very good at football and Alle,

well, I haven’t heard much of him yet,

but it’s going to be great having you all here.

You’re moving over to Marlow and everyone,

everyone is going to come up for Christmas.

What becomes of my bed and my bedroom -

which is after all an anagram of boredom -

is not to matter compared with the children,

whom it seems are beautiful, for example

I saw Leo give Floss a kiss on a Smartphone video.

He just went up to her and kissed her.

They were in Italy and it was beautiful.

One of those treasured moments. So

you’re moving over to Little England,

and so we shall see more of you up north.

A sense of good will to all men is upon me.

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.

SIBLINGS

Brothers are nice and sisters too,

always there’ll be something to do,

but they can elongate the queue

to use in the morning the upstairs loo.

There are also sibling rivalries,

to please the parents, and to please

the beauty queen who brings the bees

down onto their humble knees.

John Cleese says it like a brother -

no-one is any more clever than another -

that goes between your father and mother -

and your brother and sister and any other.

It’s boring not having a family,

and I do have my brother living with me,

but sometimes think in a different key

about what’s likely to never be

and yet with mother’s new grand children,

at least she’ll get some satisfaction,

and we are a tribe bonded in emotion

even if scattered across the ocean.

I hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays

on the piano for them in multiple ways

that mean the brightening up of days,

like a way to cure a transient malaise.

Siblings often squabble and fight

but judging by mine own, it’s right

that I would die for each of them tonight,

and leave them playing in the light.

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.

MY SILVER SISTER

My silver sister reaches me, chinwagging

over the treetops, over the distance

that is closed. I heard my first voice

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’d plug my senses in the mains;

days I had an effervescent mobile phone;

days I was still recording on binaural earphones

back in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge

even though I was at my own University.

This body is a terrible bean pole of

negative sexual energy, but she

sensed 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.

TRAVELLING HOME FROM MILLOM BY TRAIN

What’s the most obvious donk around you

and how many donks deep

and did the donk not 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.

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.

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.

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

the blank pages flung from the tired 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.

From 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 goodbye.

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 after 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.

I’M SORRY YOU FEEL LIKE THAT

The world has gone insane.

Reality is untenable.

Language is inoperable.

Life has emptied itself of meaning.

Society still bounds in circles

round and round the sun,

but the sun has grown tired,

and will one day expire.

Hope has been shattered.

Dreams are in tatters.

Everything seems black.

Religion is long dead,

more telly and football.

Values are in a state of flux.

The old certainties have crumbled.

The meta-narratives have died.

Love has gone away.

Love has been lost.

Death smiles, on camera.

There seems nothing to do

but drink another cup of tea.

Without artificial sweetener.

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.

Wittgenstein says there is no one thing common to all games, not even the idea of 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 than “crisp, hot whiteness,” 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.

DOWN

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.

I also remember tiny, carbonated

electrons flying above park benches

when you’re down and out. I

hear scientific research has gone

into them. Maybe they are aliens.

I know the roof of St. Pancras Station

is an alien spaceship landing site

(which is the same as the flat plateau

at the top of Sea Ness up here.)

No, London is not without visionary

activity, if you drift free of the crowd.

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.

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.

FIELD OBSERVATIONS

Already Radiohead is a field

with a river down the way

where mad children splash and play

unaware of the guilt and the shame

unaware of the praise and the blame

unaware of the end of the game.

Their tender playfulness extends forever

as they splash and play in the water,

moving stones to change its pitch,

not quite minding which is which,

free to do just as they wish,

and on the river bank languish.

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.

ABSTRACT

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. I guess just because a theory is right doesn’t mean you should say it; but it is also better to have a wrong theory than no theory at all.

PREFACE TO ‘NOTEBOOK’

This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

NOTEBOOK

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Start learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees, birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…

Seeing as we can travel backward in time, seeing as we have equalled the speed of light, I thought we could revisit some choice excerpts from my boyhood and beyond.

Teacher rite elephant nite

everything lite lesson love

learn tell everyone Esso orange.

2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

a cloud, two planes,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

In our new pogrom there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

I have a scar+ that is red and black.

I found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full of dead skeletons.

He has spines all over him.

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers.

It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Folder graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. The system works quite well. The grass is always long on the Other Side.

The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums

where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap

and bells let peace form in blue notes

and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it

and wet let excellence sound out its criticism

and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting

and chloroform in the heart let see

if only Game Over was seen in nights.

The

sun

hanged

himself

from

a

length

of

daisy

chain.

Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.

Clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.

Break, bird with the skin of snake.

God rushed into the cold cod quick.

Behold! An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Barnes has scored a chicken

and wingers are allowed bikes!

Maybe a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except a swear word in every box, to go at the end?

Even A Duck Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings of the electric guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say, but my mother has changed it now.

Hey, my name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...

I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.

She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.

A glance

A blink

A fault in the stars

Her mascara slips into pools of black

A chance

A second

of Infinity

She flutters her eyelids

like spring’s first butterfly

The stars awake to notice love

she waits with open arms.

But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

Images before I sleep

Dancing, escaping memory

They seem to have no cares at all

They seem to know the name of love

They seem to be my sacred friends

Ancient messengers, waking at night

But I will forget them & never care

About what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it’s love

Just us & love Forever...

Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:

The light of all that’s good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams.

Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Soft

and

loose

like

yellow

pencils

scribbling

dreams

as

they

arrive.

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

Don’t escape at night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

Sometimes perhaps

down opening quiet

I am drawn down

long and alone and

my friend and my foe

recede into deep sleep

sudden and still

like a dawn behind

a screaming veil

where silence is born

and all that’s loose and tight

and all that’s light is light

like first morning

with no night

and wend my way

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live

the last poet’s

last poem.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?

Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.

When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:

[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].

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).

V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the streetname for E becomes F sharp minor!

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

Last night it seemed we couldn't sleep but maybe I was dreaming. The world expands inside my hands it's getting heavy. Of all the treasures I could choose I can't seem to decide. Today the shade was washed away where I would hide. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise. Last night it seemed we nearly died but maybe I was dreaming. It made me feel sooooooooooooo alive and soooooooo in love. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise.

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is inquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland.

It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows.

I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity.

Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains.

It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real.

Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven.

The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

If you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning. I can run you through a series of life events in terse precis that meant I arrived at such a culmination.

Well, at seven I helped invent the net: 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, I was the one to write it. By eight I was the witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who twice. By eleven who knew what was going on? By fifteen I attained the face of stars which may have been scripted in the Bible. By eighteen I forewarned of September 11th in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

After school I recorded an album 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 for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, worked the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discovered the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting one of my own song lyrics) grew.

I went through all that without earning 1p. Then as a summary of all of that which I had done, I invented and falsified the Nirvana barcode and in doing so attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams that swirl in digital, purple swathes about the head of the deranged seer...

So you see that it has been fast indeed! That Subaru Impreza! And Time does not pass but evaporate! And things live inside onions of themselves! And galloping water would be a cool thing to say!

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.

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one with the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels 

Immanuel Kant

will come to thee 

with immanence

You come home smacked up you come

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

boom

boom

boom

boom

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self driving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one with the sonic boom

knickers knickers faster than lightning

skin up fall out of bed

and did those feet

in ancient times

rain down, rain down,

come on raindown

and walk the sun

fatter, hippier, less well connected

always walk the hallways

down to create my own

and in the meantime

and in the meantime

I'll do the monkey bars with my legs

manic depression has enraptured my name

don't know what I want but I just want shame

don't know what I want but I just won't shave

rainy waif, rain always,

lay back and dream

on a rainy waif

now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

no more laaaaaaaaaa la's

removal van canes will be turned into furniture

we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir

you never see me dead near an inch of closure

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

“and a record made of sound

goes round and round, conveying

music to the speaker through the stylus,”

says the radio as I turn it on.

Well, although there is no

such thing as the Nirvana barcode

it opens up a discussion about

the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how

if barcode is rain barcode is phone...

and at least I have

the grace to come

back and say that the

extinction of consciousness

has no monetary value.

It is past dawn

and I see that

that first mobile

phone has gone.

If it makes any difference to you,

my little bro is a genius, who

designed the sheet

where pictures grew

and says <BEE>

might soon ensue

from @ in the international

language alphabet…

he did it for Flora,

subject of many a love poem of mine,

and it turns out

he had her, did her, loved her,

won her, got her,

in time past.

But who kissed who

is playground stuff,

and jealousy is a wasted emotion,

and I am proud

to be my brother’s brother,

and my mother’s son.

I would never begrudge my brother something I would want for myself or my mother either.

FLAGRANT RAPSCALLION

I

Apple blossom cheek

breath of wine

plates or confetti

he sips on disturbed

Nile insect

spaghetti

II

While that may be the ABC of aesthetics,

what I’m getting at is that

if a flower-press ending on cannabis

could = a dialysis a love poem

only hoping to impress poor Flora = a motor.

III

If I could sip from your eyes I would

and taste your name. Eyes of

deep undersea green, we
would skinny dip and fish

in them, drag out numberplates,

mangled car doors, crumbs.

The pretext is yours

and it is also my mum’s.

IV

If this were a fairy story

there’d be no happy ending.

No sumptuous consummation

will wait for the poet

at the end of a plot.

I think of a chain of music from star to star,

but therein am starting

to quote my old self again.

V

I’ve already lost my father

who was an international art smuggler

nicknamed Blue or so he said -

though once upon a time

I thought art was recourse

to euphemism for pollen.

The people from the future,

they don’t want his business to end.

VI

It’s good when the daffs come out in spring,

like yellow trumpets, broadcasting

their excellent news.

Excellent News was the ideal

in my New Beat youth, b/t/w/.

I was nomadic in those days.

VII

Before the daffs come out,

we have snowdrops like

pure, white flames

in the heart for love.

The long, dark tunnel

of winter awaits us now.

VIII

I sip tea, I sip tea,

unsweetened it’s

enough for me.

I’ve got a lot of washing up to do.

I tried to meditate today.

Come.

It’s good to get the washing

up done, because it is good

to make a clean space

for yourself before

you write – mess leaks in

to the brain when

you are in a messy room.

Now it’s done I can make a sandwich -

cheese, ham, lettuce, on special brown bread…

it has no added sugar unlike white.

At the moment I am leaving

the washing up to dry, but

soon will put it all away.

Then I can say “hey,

I pulled my weight today.”

So that I do, and that’s true…

I do a little bit more at my screen,

getting pithy about Place and Nature

then go outside to collect wood.

Sometimes I look at Nature and see

invisible sheet music flowing right to left.

If you like I’ll mention some scattered perceptions of the Lakes.

The fell from town,

when you’re driving towards it,

seems a great, slumbering

diplodocus, come

to fat and die by

the Irish Sea; but

nearer the foot

you can see it is

more Buddha levitating.

And when you mention

the slow ascent

up flat, gradual paths

I think more of a bullet

to the top of a telegraph pole

or even the kettle, rising

to its silent scream,

its steam Ariel returning

on Caliban’s chain.

Floating in the quiet

of a weightless dawn,

the buzzard is the crux

of the flux of time,

and all of Creation

his dark machine.

There are benefits living here, like

once I encountered a rare, red kite,

which sat resting on a fence post, waiting

for me like a warning or a reward.

Sometimes Nature is custodial;

and at other times, frightening, otherworldly…

in me, Nature is a great art exhibition,

but it can also be an immunity to Reason.

Some think of the future a lot,

and how there should still be

a place for Nature in that future,

to go exploring just to look at trees,

which like crows, dogs and

horses are Man’s friends.

Nature is the true architecture of State, at least unto some, while others would take a less staid and Conservative attitude.

Here we find mood as bracken frond.

We find dry stone walls creeping

in to the writing even of city folk, visiting.

I think writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug called “Strictly Free.” I think the Beautometer would be a good invention for fell walkers. I sometimes think of Heaven as a pile of statistics when I ascend the fell – that I will one day find out the exact number of steps I have taken up it and whether I held the record.

The powers that be could be clouds

rowing overhead on their sky blue roads.

And everything in Nature is only semi-state: even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline.

Well, nothing has changed to the map

apart from the wind-farm beyond the lap

of the tide, revolving its Mercedez Benz arms

to make electricity for the farms -

and also the cafe down the beach -

since Norman Nicholson neglected to preach. -

Changes to the place have been the net,

global warming let’s not forget,

the advent of the mobile phone

and increased opportunities for vice in town.

But who needs vice when literature is intoxicant enough?

Here, we find the beck is a fountain pen.

I sometimes stand by the beck, listening in.

(Dr. Bob says only those with their feet firmly planted can fly.)

I would be wearing my wellies, listening

to its most mellifluous applause,

the way she falls two feet

into a sound as sweet

as a kettle drum’s

metal petals of

silver bliss that

blossom on a carnival’s street.

Literature from the city is of alienation,

literature of rootedness repetitive,

and the city is the intellectual breeding station,

but countrylife closer how we ought live.

I

The reason my new work is not Anon is that I believe a writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

The earliest-written English poems, however, are attributed to Anon, the earliest recorded line being:

“Well-wrought this wall: Weirds broke it.”

Weirds could be weather-systems.

Combining the fact that the earliest subject is ruin’d architecture and the earliest recipe known to man is for beer, as discovered by monks, could make a poem’s definition “a statue of alcohol.”

The A595 is the main road connecting

the nuclear sub factory in Barrow and

Sellafield up the coast. On Sunday

the posse of motorbikes come

to this bucolic valley because the road

has something in the golden sector #

to do with its bends, its elegant curvature.

I went walking up the rearside of the fell,

and some one or two hundred yards in,

up the path and away from the A595,

encountered a rare, red kite

with dawn-charred chest, resting

on the fence-post, waiting

for me like a warning or reward…

II

Here from this seat now

I look about the kitchen, painted

a plush, Mediterranean coral,

at the indomitable things on the walls,

the notice board of cork,

the dead telly wearing

mother’s funeral hat,

the calendar with local photos,

the chart depicting the plants of the

Meadows, the clock, my sister’s art…

It’s a country farmhouse kitchen

with an AGA, where most of the cooking

is home-made, not from packets.

We have no neighbourhood or amenities

and country life can be quite dull,

but recently I felt elated

for capturing a partial alignment

of the Plough and oldest fell

on my new Smartphone.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance

but I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

III

It’s a myth that countryfolk are stupid

just because the rhythm of life is slower.

The region is an actual religion.

It’s why my dad didn’t take too kindly to racism.

I was amazed the kite didn’t fly away,

as I stood there gazing upon it.

It’s as close to a bird of prey

as I have ever got out in the wild.

Apparently, the Vikings named the hills and the Celts named the valleys… this should be easy to remember because you can picture a Viking being able to see the mountains from the sea as they travel across; and the Celts likewise lived in among the valleys so it would be natural they named them.

Obviate not titivate, sate

your quest for meat and fling

to your bright ring, your

peerless orbit, your wheel

of hunting, out-stretch

wings to be engorged on air’s

ranting, rock-strong

sockets braced against crushing,

uprushing rivers and sail.

Eventually, it did fly away,

but not until I made the decision

to continue my walk, to leave

the moment, the spot where I stood.

Seeing its wings unfold,

seeing it fly away, I took a left

up the rear side of the fell, following

the path beside the beck

and – still not knowing

what the bird was, only storing

an image of it in my brain -

reached the cairn at the top.

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

When I got down again,

and back to my home on

this side of the fell, I

looked the bird up in a book,

and found it was a red kite.

For some reason I thought

I had found the golden eagle…

there was a rumour that a pair of them

had moved into the area.

So I was actually disappointed

to find the bird was a rare, red kite,

which it certainly, judging

by the book of birds, was.

That afternoon, I got a phonecall

from my ex gf on my mobile.

I told her: “I’ve just seen a rare bird.”

I also told her I had given up cannabis;

asked her if she still smoked;

but what she said and what she was doing

when she said it, I shall not say.

Simon says the River Goyt

might become the Styx in Heaven.

I say the rhythm of the River Goyt

beats blood to my head like a cold muscle.

The word ‘goyt’ might actually be Celtic thought-patterns meeting Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.

Back then I liked music by people such as: Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and Autechre. I also still liked some guitar music by people like Hella and Shellac, and my favourite act of all were Radiohead, ever since they filled the hole left behind by Nirvana. All of it was better to listen to when high.

Dr. Robert says: “the brain actually releases cannabinoids naturally for moments of signification like reaching the top of a mountain. If you flood your brain with cannabinoids un-naturally, meaning and signification become aleatory, a mess. There is suddenly meaning at any point of intersection in the crazy palimpsest of memory.”

Kurt Cobain sings:

“my heart is broke,

but I have some glue,

help me inhale,

I’ll mend it with you,

we’ll float around,

hang out on clouds,

then we’ll come down,

have a hangover.”

I

Now we’re just enjoying the peace on a calm, autumnal Sunday. It’s a time for expanding your threshold of Negative Capability… I am also taking care of my mother, who injured her arm on holiday. It’s her birthday today, so I gave her a book, and like every other day made her a fire and made her a morning coffee.

We need to get some new Vape juice

because there is only one bottle left.

Tesco is going to be closed for a few weeks

after today so we should stock up.

Apparently they are going

to redo the fruit and veg section

so that the fruit and veg is stored

in a series of closed compartments.

Now for the E as I try and summon up a purpose for this. It is healing, of the self and the soul of the world. It is truce between old friends fallen out like fools. It is air for the tortured soul to breathe. It is an experiment into more advanced modes of being.

II

Sensation precedes thought in art,

chain is made from same as key,

waves make gentle

love to the shore,

homework tonight is

to remember your dreams,

and this we know,

there is no ‘we,’

I am the third person

immaculate, free…

you know the routine

by now, the score,

and more and many more,

but let’s not dwell

on school-made things

when outside birds

sing with their wings

and freedom flies

and freedom flows

and the music never stops.

SYSTEMS

If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear

not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell

in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here,

where the dream of love meets the oldest fell...

to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the

old colours of the vowels in English you can

find pasta, tea, air, hair, clothes, loo-roll, water, that your ordinary

speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-

air poem – quick get it down, get it down! -

your notes on hyper-vision echo in the air.

What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern

ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?

For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!

For writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet or not!

VISION

“Look Fufie I can fee feep.”

‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world.

There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn. When he opens his eyes he sees cloud-forms floating by outside but the rest of this no, not-so-special-perception is gone.

Something about being a Starvationist.

Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.

Still there is no such thing as Time.

Optimus Prime is a time when wasps leave fag-burns in the apples, apples with toe-nails embedded in their cores, and the air has a plaintive, melancholic, wistful, elegiac note and tone… it’s when the leaves start to fall down.

Down in London we only had a postage stamp garden. I used to sit out there with my brother and observe ants on the blades of grass. I would ask myself if I too were but an ant unto some higher God.

I remember having a love of hammers, also sticks. My brother and I played light sabres with sticks. It used to drive our nanny mad.

When we were down in the London house, sometimes dad and mum would take us out, maybe to the planetarium which filled me with wonder, or to the Natural History Museum. I loved to see the great whale in the Natural History Museum and imagine all the plankton he ate. The tone of mind of natural science was savoury as cheddar, not sweet.

When we were up north there was a sense of being free-range. John Barnes was my favourite football player, the reason to go outside and kick a ball against the wall. I had a Barnes poster on my bedroom wall. If we were listening to a match on the radio and Barnes’s name popped up I would awaken with a jolt and get excited.

At a young age I learned all the capitals of the world and knew them better than I now know even at the age of 43 in 2025.

I can also pinpoint my first coming to awareness, which is my earliest memory, the same: we were on holiday in a chalet at a place called Brockwood Hall in Whicham Valley because we’d come up north to do something to the house which was being rented out at the time; and I found not one but two plastic yellow submarines in a Cornflakes box. My mum said “you like ‘Yellow Submarine’ don’t you John?” to which I responded YES and just like that clicked on. Though I could understand my mum I couldn’t quite understand my dad. His speech was like microphone static, and I realised I would have to start trying hard to understand what he meant.

I think that day I was allowed only one plastic yellow submarine and sailed it through the air with my hand on a dank, dullshine day outside the chalet.

INVINCIBLE LOVERS

I’ll tell you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'

(circa 1997)

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.

DEATHBED 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER

A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.

Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.

Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.

Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.

The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.

The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.

The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

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

When you lose your concentration you die.

Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.

There are too many words in the world.

Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.

You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.

All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.

Without difference no contradistinction.

Everyone is my brother and I love them.

The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

There is no more mapless space.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life.

Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card.

Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.

It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself.

Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.

All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.

THE DAWN

Dawn leaks out, its light slipping

through the dark fingers of the trees.

If I bring this to publication,

it will mean wood.

The woods are a traditional

testing ground in literature.

These days things are wireless.

I might’ve gone right

when I asked Paul

what colour is white?

What is a while?

Is this where the truth

flies or the truth fairy?

In the past, being the witness

from The Lords And The New Creatures

I might’ve been burned at the stake.

When you’re gone we hope

the doors will

open up enough.

Maybe we can

do the new creatures again.

BROTHER POEM

My bro is the most intelligent

person I know, who designed

the sheet where pictures grew

and did it for Flora too. I

keep looking to him for clues

as to how to be a normal

human being, but he just says

“I think I am weird.” He

doesn’t much like the maths

of the new colour as a cellular mark,

but I think he thinks sadness to be

the musical key of intelligence like me.

I overhear him down in the kitchen

from upstairs, three lumps,

maybe meaning “I love you,” some other

bangs and crashes, maybe a sentence

extending to the loving of

my whole family, then the back

door, anything to keep the

back door closed, I presume.

The reason I can’t come down

is the Flood, is floodlit.

The Flood were the band that

recorded on binaural earphones.

Now I hear the Tap, go on

for a long amount of Time,

like the tears of a brother dying.

EIGHT PRECEPTS CONVEYED IN ORDINARY SPEECH BY ‘BLUE’

My dad was a failed writer himself. Like Rimbaud he stopped writing and took up smuggling, art smuggling in his case. Before he died he managed to do away with all his writing except for a little green notebook containing a list of French vocab as I shall show you and also conveying Eight Precepts in ordinary speech to help me with my own writing.

1. All writing is fiction.

2. It is rude to write of the living.

3. A standard of truthfulness should come before the need to the sell a story.

4. A writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

5. “Why not?” is not a good reason for writing a poem.

6. You’re supposed to get the ball over the other guy’s head.

7. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

8. Literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness alone.

I like them all apart from the moral compass one, because it could be seen as being a bit reductive and old-fashioned. One of dad’s examples of “sheer cleverness alone” was William Burroughs because of the cut-up method, but Burroughs was found on Ted Hughes’s bookshelf and Hughes would definitely appear a writer of moral compass to me. So things are not so black and white.

DAD’S LIST OF FRENCH VOCAB

Ma fossette dimple

(Steak) A Point medium

Saignant rare

Deux converts? (deux personnes)

Veilleuse (petite lumiere)

CODE (grand lumiere)

la cote Rating, letter, number.

Un chien mechant - vicious

dog

La pourboie - tip

greviste de la faim - hunger strike

gacher (fig) bungle

parvenir a - arrive

pouisuivre - pursue

s’ agride - to be about

la hausse - rise (prices)

loisirs - leisure

Londres – cette cite meconnue (unrecognised)

une ville ou le pictoresque et l’ insolite (unusual)

le guettent a chaque pas

(lie in wait for)

des flaneurs lounger

lavabo -

etang - pond

brasserie = brewery/ beerhouse

atelier - workshop studio

(lit) occurrence

l’ incident = avec un autre eraducteur

l’ accident = mishap (he backs into

me while I’m on the

beach)

from a carpark attendant. Correct?

de l’ essence

Mettez 20 litres…

Remplissez…

ebrilles

erabe-crevte

huitres

pommes vapeur (steamed)

Limandelle meuniere

equenelle

paysanne

prune

epine - thorn

corail - coral

le lievre - hare

lapineau - bunny (rabbit)

shapes at Gritte du Grand Rue

l’ elephant et la trompe - E & trunk BUT le tronc d’un autre

l’ oreille de pire

le crinoline - crinoline

l’ aile de papillon - butterfly’s wing

l’ ile de puigouins - island of penguins

le sapin - fir-tree

la trousse - truss

le mammoth, le rhinoceros, le cheval,

le bison, le bouquetin (ibex, wild goats)

le nid d’ ouns - bear’s nest

______

charcuterie - pork butcher

papetrie - stationer’s

unblock - pad

brulene (coffee)

la digitale - foxglove

la fougere - fern

l’ ajone d’ or - gorse

le puits - well

quincatlerie - ironymongers

hardware

une planche decouper

- chopping board

en hetre (made of) beech

le gite - house, shelter.

deguster - taste, sip

cedre bleu - cedar…

bon apetit

bonne soiree

bonne nuit

un briquet - lighter

le medicine done

non-aggressif

parallel

MY TRANSLATION

Break, bird with the skin of snake,

it was but a little mistake,

to be or not to be that is the question.

When you went back in the wood it was not there,

and that is your petite lumiere,

then you would need a law

to make your General Theory.

You went wrong with the maths

of the new colour as a cellular mark,

and became vicious, no son of mine,

but helped invent the internet

for nothing as a little boy.

That lightning storm in France,

so prolonged it was a God Simulation,

through which I drove for hours,

that was Nature ripping up the rule book

to let the game commence.

You still don’t know about my art deal,

but when I die will find the sheet

where pictures grew down the barn.

The State think the uprising

was to do with the house

where the Plough alignment lives.

London, it is a city unrecognised,

a place where the picturesque

and unusual lie in wait for the flaneur.

The garden up here meanwhile

is an eco-toilet. Thanks for helping

dig the pond. I find with James

that still waters run deep.

There is a difference between

an incident and an accident meanwhile.

I hear you jumped out of a moving

vehicle, is this correct? If 2001

was about the Future State, I

would say it was on the left. I myself

think Nature the true architecture

of State, but still dream of

things like steamed apple juice.

My sons are named after the Doors,

and then the fourth was a girl of course.

You are born in a season each, spiralling

spring autumn winter summer, marching

right left right left in the hands

as if military zeal will always win.

Of five shapes I could mention, one

is your trunk, but the trunk

is an autre trunk. The face of stars

is better called the island of penguins.

Trust the fire-dance. The order

of the colours of the vowels is

scrambled because they are wild animals.

French for a bear’s nest is le nid d’ouns

but some things are universal in

international language, like equality

and liberty for the blacks, with which

I align the unblocking of my notepad.

Tell them flowers made me unwell

on a chopping board made of beech.

That we will burn down the house

where the Plough alignment lives

should we get in any trouble for any of this.

I haven’t had a drop of booze for years,

and it’s not wrong what happened in the wood,

and now I bid you all farewell and prepare

to smoke a spliff in a parallel universe.

THE FALL

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.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, 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 seeing 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 last time I read it.

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 (they said) 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 sometimes conjure 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.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, ACT TWO

I

The sad rag I drag across my vision.

When it’s over we don’t lament, don’t cry.

There is no catharsis, in the denouement.

No journey from tension to resolution.

As far as the map goes, we are nowhere.

The map could be an App, in the strange case

of my mother’s flower-press ending

on cannabis. When it is mirrored in words,

sometimes only death is a valid full stop.

Maybe, it isn’t until the cannabis stops working

its physical poem on the body that the flower-press ending

on cannabis starts to = a dialysis. And

if a love poem hoping to impress poor Flora =

a motor it could be best when blind,

before you have the system or pretext framed

in your mind. The fittest is a she and

she is the Real E more than street ecstasy.

But what I mean is when TS Eliot comments

that Hamlet has no Objective Correlative

he might as well mean that Ophelia

is one of the most beautiful women in literature

and it is not believable that Hamlet eschews her.

But he’s got work to do. He’s got things

preying on his myriad mind. Anyway,

here I sit on a fresh spring day, plinking

buttons as if it were a naff Casio keyboard

and it still isn’t working. I tried death

and that still wasn’t working. I took, if you

will remember, a new overdose, of 200 anti-psychotic

pills at 10mg each, where they say just 200mg

is enough to kill you, and yet I survived.

The dose I took was too extreme and might yet

come at me again in a second wave, have me

trapped in a dim and evil in-between world

where you can’t even hear your own prayer

in your own head, between earth and sky.

It doesn’t even bear thinking about.

II

Images that remain extant and roots that clutch?

I am a magpie bladder filling in the dark

with details, up a ladder, guarded by a spark.

I have collected metaphors for years.

Everyone thinks that when I renewed

Jim Morrison it was the best I have done.

I am but an iron filing firked to the moon.

I see the candle not the Bunsen-Burner still.

I am travelling into the filament of bird.

Once I discovered perfumed moonlight

in a clearing in the centre of the wood.

I remember days we used to smoke pollen.

It can propitiate a state of hyper-vision.

Also see demotivation, tangential-mindedness,

the way it is non-conducive to hard concentration.

But I love the sense of peacock feather,

mascara bruise, butterfly wing and velvet

flare under my thumb, as the lump crumbles.

Sometimes they put petrol in hashish...

a petrol spillage is not without its own rainbow.

I am hoping I am at the end of despair.

That I can buck up and have a happy life.

III

I don’t think we should make war

on Ronald McDonald even here, where

we find the telluric, magnetic, gravitational foot

of Black Combe but no McDonalds or DogMuckels

as my father called it… no, I rather think

one should use one’s time at the cryptic crossroads

to denounce all violence, even cartoon varieties.

Between the daybright and the twilight,

when the sky is drunk on molten gold,

may your life suddenly become perfect,

and out at reality’s starry faultline.

TS Eliot’s compositional method has antecedents

in piracy and grave-robbing. In Modernist

times they really cared for poetry. Our

time is said to be postmodernism though

even he is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Whatever Modernism means, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. If Modernism

is a crisis of authority, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. If Modernism

means Reality is Untenable, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. They say

the only major difference is that while Modernists

did away with all the grand narratives,

and stopped believing in anything, they

still believed in art; but postmodernism

even renounces fidelity to art itself.

They even lose faith in artistic representation,

that is, and start to further embrace weirdness…

it was when I wrote an essay on postmodernism

in the first year exams that the faculty

knew I would get a First. But in other areas

of life, time’s arrow is out of joint.

I remember saying to Tommo from the band

I would have no problem getting a job

because by now I had a First Class Honours degree,

and that was at the alignment, which concurred

with a rhythm change in the White House,

meaning 2008 for sure, but I hadn’t yet

even got my First until 2009. I wonder

what is going on and whether Gravity

has actually torn the fabric of spacetime.

It could be just me and my melancholy moods, misremembering.

In the first year we do three subjects

and I elected politics as my third instead of

a very popular course on outer space,

and I sometimes wish I had done the latter.

I seem to recall we read both Hamlet

and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

in the first year, that Hamlet was declared

Shakespeare’s autobiography as a young intellectual.

If I said “I fried my brain,” would it seem

more aesthetically pleasing? My father

ended a poem on the words “Hamlet in flames,”

to convey Hamlet’s madness. I inherited it from him

like a family business. Love’s language

is that of heat, flames of desire, burning

passions, et al. Hamlet in flames might

default to science, or love, or even smoke.

The Lake District is Nirvana Unplugged in New York.

Go write about spring as the sexual union of earth

and air, go write of the effects of global warming

on the unicorn, go write Bart Simpson’s

suicide note, go write about a breakfast

that contains every snooker ball colour.

Go write The Love Song of the Circle And The Square.

I told the men in the Ambulance when I was on

the brink of death some crazy shit about my rationale…

I genuinely thought I was a gonner, and couldn’t even

operate pen and paper. I’m amazed that I survived.

IV

Everything became a bit of a blur.

I lost the ability to walk, talk, write.

I am growing to be quite a connoisseur

of pharmaceutical pills (a bunch of shite.)

Now Hamlet in flames is back at the foot

of the oldest fell and will get better,

eating warm salad and mum’s summer food,

beautiful dishes cooked by my mother.

If you want to see some acting try Paul.

We shared a tremendous creative empathy.

We drifted apart, though, a bit like Sal

Paradise and Dean Moriarty, you see.

V

It’s about a man’s right to dance, dance

in a sensuous graffiti of blind white light.

A man as cool as my dad, who may

or may not have been sponsored by

some philosophers to provide

the real human witness from The Lords

And The New Creatures – should still have

the right to dance. I mean if he is not dead.

For my father lies some one hundred yards away.

Under the earth in the churchyard. My

father – he might’ve been an art smuggler,

or maybe art was a cover story for pollen.

A man as cool as him, as I keep saying

should still have the right to dance, dance

in a sensuous graffiti of blind, white light.

And it’s clean inside a flame. And

it is green inside a flame. And what was

he into in the end but the ash of yesterday’s

fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper

and put out in the right green bin?

And what were his feet but black unicorn feet?

And what was his art but people, people

on the roof fixing the TV aerial who have

been up there for months in all kinds of weather?

VI

When smoke spoke I went into a dream.

Back then, I thought the band name

‘Open Poem Opium’ was a good one,

and was but a handful of copper coins.

Visions have stretched across the board,

staggering insanity, boggling the mind.

There was even a real inscape of wings.

But what smoke said when it spoke I forget.

It slipped away, through my fingers.

My saturation levels have been high.

With smoke speaking it was more

the wilful assignation of a voice to

the psychotic episode, arranged from

the most nearby and portable materials around.

It was partly superimposition but

it was real, real at the same time.

So we opened up a whole new chapter.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, ACT THREE

I

Ah these dog-eared, bog-standard days,

waited on by sheer cold terror,

often leave me feeling lofty in the Night,

reconfiguring some kind of error.

I have never been found guilty of rape nor

murder and am my mother’s kindest child, but still

horrorism gets in my bones and it’s like

the Night has seen my mind all o’ er again.

In September in 2001, melody became embarrassing,

singing in tune blasphemy, music a sin.

What would I do to be sitting on mum’s bed,

as she reads from Roald Dahl all o’ er again!

Something went wrong with my psyche

in the year I left school. Being prescient

doesn’t pay off, for I spoke against

September 11th in 2000 in the barn, a fool,

and when the Towers still came down

despite my speaking against it I was therefore raped.

This manifests as a burning feeling in the psyche.

The word ‘psyche’ incidentally derives

from Ancient Greek etymology, the word kopsiche,

meaning “ghost.” Ghosts of course can

travel back in time, one scholar visiting

Ancient Greece finding the Greeks tremendous

actors who wore long cloak, buskins

and Native American Indian head-dress.

They must’ve looked tremendously impressive.

But when the Towers first fell there was no

time travel backwards, only Hell in my mind

and I downed whisky to suppress the feeling

and read TS Eliot in the night-time and

tried to keep my hand in a scale as it were

but I lost all contact with my memory

of even speaking against September 11th

in the year 2000, by suppressing the burning.

I still had to carry on and I did write a piece

called ‘Instant Travel’ for an entrance portfolio, also

‘Hypertext At The Gates of Dawn,’ also

‘Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,” whom it seems

may or may not have been an actual substance.

And we recorded in a badass, Rimbaudian band

called The Flood on a pair of binaural earphones.

That means they had tiny mics inside and

were simply laid on the floor where before

there may have been need for a studio, so

we explored dark music, irony as a musical key.

And I don’t want to ruin it for you now

but I did climb up and say I was going

to plug my senses in the mains. Our

Floyd was very Freud indeed, and I stole

quite a few books I did not read, and

I fell behind with my reading but so did she,

as we smoked too much gorgeous green GM skunk,

and I tried to put it right and went round

the bend and yet have got a degree since then.

One minute you’re thinking about TEFL,

next you are 44, fat, single, unemployed,

carless, mentally ill, medicated, living

with your mother and brother in the sticks.

II

But what we need is a parrot sent to space

through the conch as in fantasy more than

a patch of blue denim kept taut as in realism.

Having said that my days of green skunk,

paroxysm-inducing and potent, are over. I could not

hack it with this mental illness anymore.

Anyhow it is dawn and I have been up all night

in vampiric, anti-social, Gap Year habit.

I don’t know how people can send signals

but I believe I am being helped sometimes

by holding a telepathic conversation

with a father poet whom it seems knew

I had helped invent the net before I did.

What’s needed is more and much more again

on the post-Eliotious masterpiece for then

I could augment my rewrite of Jim Morrison

with another collection of ink droplets

trained in squad-drill formation, prefigured

in stars as much as flocks of starlings.

III

David Morley says poetry is the opposite of

money, echoic of James Joyce in the Tower.

If he picks up a poem and a bank note and

burns them we feel different about the fiver.

It’s all just paper and metal to me who

once upon a time kept the net free and

perception is ready for alchemy. To distil

intelligence into truth is the key, and it

might not be me that says this but sadness

is the musical key of intelligence, hence

Great Danes are shapes that make me sad,

sad as cats and dogs in the hay when

it rains on a Saturday. Yes you hear me:

sadness is the musical key of intelligence.

IV

Things are looking at the point of turning

from something promising to something

too right-wing, so I contemplate my grand-dad Don,

who was a military man all his life, voting

Conservative every time, apart from at

the end, the very last time, joining in

the celebratory genesis of the Labour Party

under Tony Blair. It didn’t make him

a hypocrite or an evil man to explore

the left as a sudden otherness, to the norm,

even a beautiful, compassionate emotion.

My first thought is of giving something away

for free even if it’s just 2p but I can’t

afford it so my next thought is to turn to music.

“I’ll play the swan and die in music,” as

Shakespeare says. He knew love is the answer.

IF ONLY WE COULD

If only we could redo The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob.

I often contemplate a number sequence that leads to Heaven.

Things leave me stranded, counting manically,

the objects in the room made into lists, sets and groups.

Traditionally what comes after The Road To Heaven

by Noj And The Mob is meant to be Hannah.

It’s not that I can’t do it anymore, although I am

drugged up to the eyeballs on Western medication:

only a moment ago I saw an online headline saying

Trump is going to set off a nuclear weapon soon.

We can’t have that, never in a million years.

I wonder if the children of my siblings are by now born

members of the band, who will need to take it forwards.

So we get that even though I have a new one

prepared, I might need to start again.

What I mean is I might need to show it,

because it might be my last chance to be a genius.

NOTEBOOK REVISITED

Yes, friend, I too must go.

Because I am looking for the Promised Land.

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.

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 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.

It seems to be a Nintendo innuendo that

her breath a poisonous magic.

Then you’re faced with Hanif Kureishi,

a bit of The Buddha of Suburbia.

The anatomisation of the female

could extend for longer and longer…

her ankles are delicate ornaments of ivory.

You’re also faced with Pinchbeck

whom it would seem, in Breaking

Open The Head, talks of the division

of people into those that like

and those that don’t like mushrooms

as the most ancient division in civilisation.

That’s why I didn’t feel it was a gaff

when I wrote the original, after

poring over a Ted Hughes poem in English

at the same table as fragrant Rachel.

She was never to be my cosmic bride.

MUM’S MEASURING STICK

My mother took me out

on a mother-son bonding trip

- oh, only down the garden,

to the veg patch, where I,

as if gallantly, dug her a trench,

and after she planted

her potatoes, raked it over

again too. Here she comes now

into the kitchen, saying

“this dry weather is good

for the door,” because the door

used to swell, because it is wooden,

and offer much resistance

to being closed. I am out of

breath from working. I left

the veg patch first, carrying

two paper packets in for the sitting

room fire. I was in hospital

yesterday or the day before

after another O. D. and

don’t feel up to much work.

Still, when mother says

the dry weather is good for

the back door, she might mean

working with soil is good for the soul.

And she is mostly right.

She has a lot of magic sayings

hidden in the treetops, does mum.

You can drown in a puddle.

Language is a creature.

Imagination is a muscle.

In politics there are no wrongs

or rights. Just because someone

is good to you doesn’t mean

they are right for you. Actions

have consequences. The brain

only heals when it’s asleep

and even nightmares are

healing. Giving makes

you feel good. Poetry is not

the entrance and exit of life.

Of course she was the one

who made the flower-press ending

on cannabis that might = a dialysis,

and I was the one that made

the love poem for Flora

that might = a motor, and who

spotted the system, beginning

with ‘if.’ That system, I would

think of as my Equilibrium,

but it is on second thoughts mum’s

Equilibrium. I don’t like cooking

vegetables in the kitchen, or digging

in the vegetable patch after all.

So it is that when I sit here ( )

in the kitchen, because it has

a good table, a good chair,

and internet access, writing, and

mum comes in to cook, it augments

any work on Flora’s pretext

if I just write down what she

says, about preparing food.

Now I’ve made mum a coffee

for her flask, from the instant

espresso machine, her second

of the day, and she has gone

back out there, to the vegetable

patch, leaving me indoors.

And the bluebells are out

and some have more bells

than others, but all of them are nice.

And mother comes back in

with some layers of clothes removed.

And the dishwasher is still going

round and round like dreams

in the recycling bin. And mother

goes back out again, back

to the veg patch because

her work is not yet done. And

the dishwasher has stopped revolving.

And the fridge’s drone is heard.

And in the fridge I have a sausage roll.

And the sausage roll comes

from the local butcher and is made

with real, Cumberland sausage.

And out there, the fresh, spring air

sings that love is not dead.

UNDER THE PLOUGH

In sentient air I picked up a title,

apt for anyone down at the foot,

that felt like a good container for some

experiments I made and had underway...

if the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland

and the ecstasy pill under the green hill,

then what has gone under the Plough?

Maybe nothing but Duff Beer!

Really under the Plough the dancers

have not gone, nor the houses, where

from time to time, resting from

the dance, the workers sleep…

ah, it is their land, those tireless farmers,

who drink port down the Miners Arms,

and farming is the most noble profession

unto the Ancient Greeks. I have

stood under the Plough before alone

though The Plough is below as much

as it is above. It would better to be all one

than alone, and love one another.

Because of the shapes she is made of,

I trust her way with wheels implicitly,

and trust the man on telepathic walkie talkie

who surrendered the title to me alike.

We are the workers, we dig soil,

turning it over for the future plant.

We are the future we want to see.

We are the changes we want to happen.

We are the new creatures secret among us.

We are not accidents or mistakes.

We play Head Snooker and pot the black.

We are free and we are without debt.