STILL CAN'T AFFORD TO BE PUBLISHED

HELLO

Hello my name is John F B Tucker.

I helped invent the net at seven.

I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures.

I attempted the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark.

I attained the face of stars, which

might’ve been scripted in the Bible.

I predicted and forewarned of September 11^th.

I wrote the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation in 2000.

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, worked

the numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

conducted an experiment into a tape

with a pause where cut and resealed

in the flimsy reel, and was also the one

to discover the sheet where pictures

(seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew.

What exactly is it that you’re asking me to do?

If you are asking me to rewrite

my retracted first collection, Rose

Petals In The Ashtray, I don’t think I can.

The title came from my dad. When

first I brought it out, I did not understand

that the title had a meaning. My computer

was crashed from behind the screen

on the eve of publication, so I couldn’t

even get the right front cover, let

alone the work itself. It was half-remembered

scraps. So I had it retracted. My

family don’t want me to do it again,

even though I know the meaning now.

And the poems I put in at first have now

mostly been deployed elsewhere to better purpose.

“You’re right,” says a voice:

“we’re all so jealous we can’t

deem all the things in your list to be true.”

It would seem I am not allowed

to be a genius. And what would happen

if I confessed to having gone through

all that without earning 1p?

Then they’d say “if you

were on the left, you’d get paid.”

I have no allegiance to a political party.

What you’ll find with me is that

actually I am skint, single,

unemployed, medicated, mentally

ill, car-less, living with my mother -

that I live in a rural district

where there isn’t even a boat to miss.

I’m just trying to do the right thing

for the future and for history too.

WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG

It all went wrong

when I found a fiver on the floor

in the pub, in the time

of the alignment, because

then it was like

I was getting paid.

The band were up -

they were the cavalry, visiting

in a camper van;

and I bought myself

a whisky with the money.

I remember S then asked me

what I was writing

about and I said

A. I. that thinks the white

space between the

lines is the text.

It was true, I was,

writing about that,

but it was only

a piece of pollen

in the pollen count.

That means I had

quite a lot more going on.

UNSENT E-MAIL TO MY PUBLISHER

Hi Jason,

I hope you are well and not too overworked by us aspiring writers! I always get solid feedback from you and so I thought I would write. You asked me once which my favourite of the six Chipmunka collections is. I think the songbook Soundcloud Rain is the best one, because I even turned my best papers into songs especially for the job, for example one called ‘Instant Travel,’ another called ‘Lucy In The Soul With Demons,’ another called ‘That Black Natural E.’ I also wrote the song with the line about the ocean when I attained the face of stars, fair and square, back in the day – so the songbook was precious. Then we had the wee one, The Sunset Child, and all the maths I am still doing is already contained in that. It was maybe a shame I sold it to the audience as the true seven year old homework of the witness from Jim Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures, but it shows a degree of beautiful mindedness for me to not be privy to the book’s true efficacy as an instrument meant for storing the idea of the net in writing at the foot of the oldest fell. It was also true that it was the 7 year old homework of the witness! Then thirdly we had the love poems, Breath Trapped In Heaven. I thought it not too bad. Then that was supposed to be it, all I did, those three, but we had another in Brave New Tense that showed glimpses of a futuristic vision, and also another again in Yes You May that I did with my sister. All of those five were good. But then we had Let The Jews Win… by now I would like to leave that one out. I would prefer it if there were just the five collections. The thing about Let The Jews Win was that I was commissioned by someone I don’t even know the identity of who might be trying to get me to bring back the New Right. My brother says for me to go through what I went through, culminating in my discovery of the sheet where pictures grew, and to still have to redo my 12 year old thing – The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob – as we did in Let The Jews Win - could only be the dictate of a true heathen – whomsoever twisted my arm. I felt I had a good run prior to that and would’ve liked to have done more, even though it was probably maddening for you guys to have me send so many versions and to never pay the full amount. That is if it were up to me I would like to retract Let The Jews Win and maybe do more collections, and maybe think about them very deeply, and still be in a position to pay my good publisher. But I am being told by people I don’t even know that I am no longer allowed to do that, and that I have to give up - the same people that made me rewrite The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob in Let The Jews Win. I am contemplating retracting Let The Jews Win because it gives me pain. It screws everything up by repeating all the best bits of my oeuvre, all of which we prefer in their original context. I think it was the Feds that got me to do it! Either I am going to just ignore it, or I am going to go ahead and fully retract it from publication. I would prefer to retract it myself, but I imagine it wouldn’t be popular with the Feds. If things were up to me, I would retract Let The Jews Win, and work on a truly beautiful and hard-won new collection to publish with you guys, but is it up to me? It doesn’t seem like I have that basic freedom anymore, from what I am being told in torrents of voices. They threaten me with prison if I don’t obey them. Please advise me on this. For example, it may be best to just ignore Let The Jews Win, rather than have it fully retracted, but then again what about my Rights to pursue my own work?

Yours exasperatedly,

John F B Tucker

STILL CAN’T AFFORD TO BE PUBLISHED

While I sit here writing

I am aware I cannot afford

to pay for another book

when we cannot afford

to heat the house in winter.

I still wonder which bits

they think to be untrue,

possibly the face of stars

where three were gathered

in the name, not just me.

If it’s the being the witness

from Morrison, the philosophers

that sponsored my father

to provide the witness

have even been to prison over it.

But I am not interested

in providing evidence

for the unfaithful and sceptical.

I know the story to be true.

And I don’t care if you do too.

It wasn’t until the year 2025

that I found out my dad

might’ve been sponsored;

that I was specifically marked

by the maths of the new colour;

and that I really did help

invent the net at seven.

That doesn’t mean everything

else between those events

and finding out is false.

I would prefer it if my victories

were done with pen and paper,

were made of ideas, were

like mathematical proofs,

but many are not. It

doesn’t mean I am not

a beautiful mind, just because

many victories are up in the air.

Now, voices say I can’t be on

the left because I have differed.

They also say we can’t

undo the recent government-sponsored

pseudo-efficient idiocy

even if it was on the right,

because it undoes the truce.

They also say if it’s true

what I went through

they think I really am

on the right. But I still don’t have

allegiance to a political party.

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.

WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG (2)

It all went wrong

when I didn’t know

I had helped invent the net

because I was so young

when I wrote that book

that I didn’t know

what was going on

and then went through

all that I went through

without owning the program.

THEY’RE AFTER YOU

Hidden parts of government

hold a monopoly on evolution,

can send a snake by telepathy

and don’t change hands when

a new government comes in.

Consequently, I imagine, as

someone that not only helped

invent the net with them, but

as someone who did all those other things,

that I am a right nuisance.

Take the event of The Lords

And The New Creatures, coming

true, or the fact that I also experimented

in the new colour as a cellular mark -

these facts of life must be

a nuisance to those that hold

a monopoly on evolution. We

might even deem what I went through

to be a triumph of the human spirit,

a cause for a carnival, to reclaim

the ability to evolve from

tyrants that forbid it. And

what if they suppress this poem?

And what if they don’t allow it?

It would be a sad day for us all if they won.

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.

POST-MATCH ANALYSIS

Even though the State think it evil it makes me smirk and remember dad. I cannot tell if he wrote this before or after he contracted cancer, but cancer was always likely with his incurable Hep C. He had Hep C from before it was even discovered and was too far gone before they discovered it. He still got up with the sun and went up trees with a chainsaw even when ill. He said he was co-existing with rather than suffering from. I actually thought his poem, even though I have missed out the French accents, was a timeless classic; and I am pleased with my own introduction and translation too. It makes me feel like I can return from visual radio to the world of tidy scholarship!

However, there is something of an osmotic porosity to the poem that leaves it open to hermeneutic autonomy, so I might’ve got some bits wrong. We had to include it because the way we dealt with seeing the new creatures in this book was even boring, ushered along by government science towards the next chapter. It is also good to show you that the things I have been talking about really happened, and I have needed help, and it has become a problem.

It might still be alright to publish the document if we say my father’s poem was not science but the occult. For when you deal with the wood it seems you are making a scientific discovery but when you run away and then, plucking up courage, return to the wood, you find the thing not there. So it is less scientific and more about magic, and indeed seems evil to prattle about now, which is why I like the phrase “Barnes has scored a chicken,” a recourse to euphemism for what was there before even if it is a lie.

It is even with some good humour that I ask “what were they thinking of in doing that to a young boy?” but I still don’t know the reason it materialised then and for a time, if there was any “they” who were “doing it.” It might’ve been a brave efficacy to liberate evolution from the hands of tyranny, from, that is, powers that hold a monopoly over it; but it may have been a bet, and who betted what we don’t know, but we are starting to think dad had an art deal that led to the Observations. If it is the case that hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution, as the philosopher John Gray says in Straw Dogs, and can send a snake via telepathy, and don’t change hands when we vote a new government in, meaning democracy is a sham – then one might start to understand my experiences in a celebratory way, in a way that could mean a carnival in the street – but I hesitate to to take this stance because I am but a humble citizen who knew he was doing the right thing in volunteering to get the ball from the wood that day.

I wish I could say less, but there’s always more. It might be that to understand it, even if it is understood as part of an American media compression experiment, one would need to go through the frame of Locke, Berkeley and Hume – some indigenous philosophy. And imagine what would happen if it was the last Observation in a chain that included James Joyce, Ted Hughes and Jim Morrison as well as myself. That is, imagine if we all evolve out of juggernauts.

Dad used to say bend ze knees in Classical, Popperian, East European Jewish accent (he wasn’t Jewish himself but was taught by Popper at the LSE.) He would’ve also said I got the wrong end of the stick. Even Jim Morrison would say that. He mentions “the dry end of vacuum boat,” and for me, he is saying there that if we get in trouble, we’ll tell them to see real specimens was the wrong end of the stick. In other words as Wallace Fowlie contends, the new creatures are metaphors, alibis in disguise for the law-hounded poet. But at least Jim Morrison seems to concede that Observation will happen even if it is “the dry end of vacuum boat.” He does mention that “we need a witness to the killing,” which betrays that his more high minded efficacy was stopping the Vietnam war.

Anyhow, I heard it said that what happened to me was one of the unluckiest things that could possibly happen to anyone, but here I go again, breathing. It happened when my father sold his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall – or at least said he did. For this I would cite the bit in Morrison where Jim says “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War, meaning when my father sold his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War came to a close, it had to be me. This is only a theory, derived from when I had Reiki to block a curse and still didn’t know what my dad’s job was, and sought answers, and looked inside. And is it true that to win with such a thing you would need a knife to plunge into it? And what if cinema was the Transforming agent involved in its arising and if it was what would its texture be made of? And does the fleeing witness think “we need to get a cube inside it,” quite randomly, and before science lessons have even begun at school? And what about the wait in conversation between the age of eight and receiving his father’s last notebook upon his father’s death decades later? My father may have been too conservative in his older years but at least he didn’t stoop to tell us in face value terms what was going on, but retained opacity. The poet delights in a wilful opacity, bats, black magnets, firking, encryption and code, to bring us the excellent news.

And when I tried writing poetry about it the best I got was a Shakespearean sonnet about eating a breakfast of every snooker ball colour, and leaving the plate to soak in soapy bubbles afterwards. I suppose you could also write about yesterday’s take away and that that could be your nearest thing to a Dorian Mode. But as I keep saying, to still be talking about the wood would be evil. I forgot to mention that writing about running away from the acute ward, and the cops finding you and bringing you back, could be formal procedure. I was aware at the time of words like “aperture” and “prism,” but had at eight not yet got as far as saying “the universe is a projection of the mind.”

Now I recall in random access memory how at the table, dad said one day, quite late into his life, that “it was a mistake,” and that seems the limit of it; but my poor, Finnish mother was still in the dark about the whole story at that moment and won’t have got it. Now I reflect on how Dr. Bob says if you are unlucky enough to become the witness you are automatically even less likely to win a Nobel Prize for science than you were before.

We should walk away talking of flowers instead like in the Neil Curry poem ‘Skulls.’ However, my knowledge of botany is very poor: my favourite flower name is self heal but I couldn’t tell you if I have ever come across one in the flesh. I liked the line in dad’s poem “tell them flowers made me unwell on a chopping board made of beech.” Transmitting something as specific as that and as accurately as that using only a seemingly innocuous list of French vocab must’ve been hard, and that is why I think dad’s poem brilliant. He was an original hippy and would’ve smoked pollen until the end if he could’ve done. He didn’t approve of skunk, though, because it is Genetically Modified. One of his working definitions of poetry while he was writing the French list was “the ash of yesterday’s fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper and put out in the right green bin.” Another was simply “winter women’s work.” I seem to remember he also said poems could be people, people on the roof fixing the TV ariel who had been up there for months in all kinds of weather. He wanted to put a pick axe through the telly, and listened to the radio talking all night long. He wasn’t a bad husband or father.

IN LIBERATION SERIF

If I can’t show the new creatures

I shouldn’t talk about them, likewise

if I can’t show the result

of the experiment into the maths

of the new colour, I shouldn’t mention it.

I keep saying it didn’t turn out to be

the new colour in the end, to be fair.

And the government have made it clear

I’m not allowed to talk about the time

I was in A and E after an O. D.

and the non-white, female medical professional

had to help me go for a pee, because

she confirmed that I was twin tone

and said I had reinvented the human form.

Without my wishing to show you

I shouldn’t talk about it anymore,

so an opportunity closes down.

THE ONE POEM ONLY CLUB

My one, alas, is ‘Notebook,’ according to James. It might be all I need. If I list mathematical triumphs, they would include attempting the maths of the new colour at seven, writing The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, falsifying the Nirvana barcode, speaking against September 11th in 2000, inventing the number !00%, exploring the form of defaced bank notes – and you get a taste of all those things in ‘Notebook.’ If I were joining the One Poem Only Club, it would probably be my only entry. But I could improve on the last attempt considerably, I feel. Even though I could, I won’t, because it’s been published in a book called Let The Jews Win.

There are other entries I like: my mum made a flower-press ending on cannabis for my dad, with a running commentary on the Taxonomic properties of the plants. My brother designed the sheet where pictures grew for Flora. I could elaborate on both. Problem with me is I can no longer ejaculate… I took a previous O. D. to the one I already mentioned, the likes of which it was genius to survive and coming back down lost the ability to ejaculate. So does it not mean I have to stop writing poetry? And turn to maths?

One of my friends into A. I. did mashing the y-key. Another friend had one going:

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

Another friend started with a difficult small one, encrypting a node, then scrapped it and wrote a much longer one. He felt afterwards he had “done poetry” and continued instead with music.

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.

UNSENT E-MAIL TO PUBLISHER

Hi Jason. I hope you’re well as always. Please could you advise me on the following issue. It seems my latest work (Let The Jews Win, where I rewrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob) was actually commissioned by the New Right, forced on me, with the threat that I would go to prison if I didn’t do it. We think that it’s not very good, and that whomsoever got me to redo my 12 year old stuff even though by now I am the guy that discovered the sheet where pictures grew is a heathen. I’m either going to ignore it or retract it, but I fear nothing will get better unless I actually retract it. The same people who got me to do it are forbidding me from doing any more. My basic human rights are in question. I have the money to fund a further publication with Chipmunka but am left feeling like I will go to prison if I do. The first of the two poems in Let The Jews Win is called ‘Notebook’ and just borrows bits and pieces from the oeuvre, all of which we prefer in their original context. I say all this in fear of prison. The second poem is for Flora and a) I can’t even ejaculate anymore because of a medical condition b) it might be my brother’s. The only problem is when they have got me to retract Let The Jews Win, (the people), they’ll try and get me to retract The Sunset Child. That’s my seven year old work. And I still might not get the Right to bring out any more new work. I want to go in a mathematical and philosophical direction but that might just be my present mood. There should be a deal that if I retract Let The Jews Win I get to keep the others still. The Sunset Child is precious to me. It was passed down to me upon my dad dying, who had saved it in the attic for thirty years waiting for the time to be ready. Do you think I should retract Let The Jews Win? My family desperately didn’t want me to do it, because in my doing it, our collective quest ends up with the government’s victory. Some people think Let The Jews Win is the only legit one, and the only good one, but I hate having to stop, and so to do away with it seems a good idea.