POETRY COLLECTIONS BY THIS AUTHOR FROM CHIPMUNKA
Soundcloud Rain
The Sunset Child
Breath Trapped In Heaven
Brave New Tense
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.
Autumn 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.
It reminds me that my dad might call his poem ‘The Grit of The Angels,’ underline it with WD40, tap a nail in with a hammer and watch it spread its wings.
WOKEN EARLY ON A MONDAY MORNING
I’ve woken from a shocking dream.
I went back to Harecroft Hall -
the school I attended when small -
and looked in the woods for a game.
When the government drove me away
at the end the monster I’d seen
in that dream-kingdom of green
and clear as the light of day
had been understood the result
of nuclear testing nearby.
It left its death on the eye.
I felt the shame of the insult.
When I woke it was but the bird,
that monster, nothing more,
and still against the Hollow Claw
in spirit or was it in word.
That’s why I’d gone back to check,
to hunt for my discovery,
in dreams, where we’re free
as the running of the beck
but in dreams the bird became
that monster, in the wood,
and doing what they thought they should,
the government silenced my name.
The last thing before I woke,
I was driven off in their van.
For I’d seen upon my return
the monster they couldn’t shake.
They didn’t want it leaking out,
that there’d been a nuclear leak,
of which we could not speak,
with either sadness or doubt.
That’s why the monster came
in dreams but not the bird
in wake when still unheard
the witness was not to blame.
NOTES ON HYPER-VISION IN THE YEAR 2000
I
MILLENNIAL PEN-KNIFE TOOLS
A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!
II
MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES
I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter.
It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a first black President of America.
I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th and I don’t think that a good idea but someone might do that.
I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.
It would be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances.
I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician.
I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too.
I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment.
I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.
III
MILLENNIAL AMBITIONS
To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced.
To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly.
To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition.
To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else.
To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London.
To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion.
I would like to start the tradition of the post-poem.
I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer.
If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass.
To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old.
To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal.
To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.
IV
DIRTY WORK
“You know how dad told us all
he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?
That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?
That he sold his business when
the Berlin Wall fell? Well,
I think it might’ve been code,
might’ve been recourse to euphemism.
I think he was a pollen smuggler.
I think he had a pollen farm
way up high in the Moroccan
mountains and shipped tonnes
and tonnes of pollen to the States.
This whole art dealer nicknamed
Blue thing is just to protect us.
At least this is what I entertain.
I also think he named us after
The Doors, John, James, and Robert
and then they had a girl of course.
Have you noticed we are born
in a season each, going Spring,
Autumn, Winter, Summer, and
march right left right left in the hands?
There are also four compass
points, four seasons, four wheels
of a car and four dimensions
to the mapping of any point in
the spacetime continuum including
time. Now revolve that bifter!
After all I think Jesus himself
would be a proto-hippy stoner
poet in this day and age. Ah,
I love it when the Wizard of Oz
resolves into colour. There are
casual drug references all around us.
Mario mushrooms confer energy.
Tinkerbell’s dust makes you
fly. And in the Wizard of Oz
they lie down in the field of
poppies and see the Emerald City.
So hurry up passing that joint.
Or else we’ll never stop the war.”
V
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.
AWAY WITH THE FAIRY LIQUID
As if even Natural things are given over once again to a Barthesian world of product placement, it might be instructive to consider the healing of my busted, dusty Hooverbag lungs… once I was away with the Fairy Liquid. I became interested in the switch thrown. There were new maps sprawled on the point of a pin. I hungered after The Snowbell Prize. My brief fling with the politics of flight kept me up all through the Ancient Night. Another high-powered dawn was born but what was the WATTAGE? Well, I felt a leaf, I fell out of life, probably no-one else knew, but then there may be some. I wallowed in my lazy swamp, languishing, lizarding, long. Interstellar Artois was the effect of fat, planetary raindrops beating down on sad, Lucozade lights, lying lambent on the paving stones. DogMuckels was not what it seemed. Quantity Streets were typical of consumer culture. By now, the National Hypochondriac Service have sorted me out. My mood is made stable on a sterilised table. Fakeazade does not come free from the kitchen Tap as yet, but we are working on it. Erase the Dettol. There’s no such thing as cinnamon, but then again that is not strictly true. Well-weird this ward: words woke it: walls broke it: Weirds walk it: or they should, break it open to the light of day, straight away. There’s little to do except listen to the snap, crackle and pop of the cereal, cereal in the morning after a dark night of the soul in winter.
A HAPPY KNACK WITH THINGS OF DIRT
I had a happy knack with
musical concepts back in my youth -
one was to do with Nirvana…
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and so is dirt.
Another was when I came into possession
of a Pearl Jam tape that was cut in the reel.
After a delicate operation
to reseal the reel it had
a small pause in the music,
so the ideal was to do away
with the small pause, by chanting
“another, another, another fucking joint.”
My mnemonic for the strings became
Even A Dick Gets Big Erections.
I recorded a little album on binaural earphones,
said on the record I would
“plug my senses in the mains.”
I wrote a paper about whether or not
Lucy in the soul w/ demons
happens to be an actual substance
but it got lost, maybe in the void!
My first mobile started to reverberate
the rhythm of ‘William Tell’
through every technological inlet in the room
before it rang from home.
There was a call to tattoo
someone’s name on
Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
and finally the one that takes the biscuit
is when I discovered my brother’s
sheet where pictures grew.
The pictures it would seem
do depict the lyric to
a song I wrote back when
I was trying to be Kurt Cobain -
but still it wasn’t mine
because I didn’t lay it down.
That pretty much sums up
what I was doing with my musical youth -
and now here I sit ( ) striving
not for effect but still
struggling to just talk.
After garage and house comes library.
Voices could be quavers,
could be onjects,
could be syllabubbles,
could be sonic machinations
at the periphery of sound
and most importantly
the colours of the vowels.
They ask you to increase
your threshold of
Negative Capability.
Meanwhile there’s something I think I know
and shouldn’t impart
but it’s because
I have a heart;
and writing a letter Dear Music
could be instructive in mental health
in the future; and putting
Paradise Lost to music
shouldn’t be done
unless it’s going to be amazing,
so it’s an aesthetic
not moral question.
I also remember, when
Aphex Twin’s new double album
came out around the Millennium,
it was comparable to Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring.
I failed to make it an essay,
while my brother-poet Dedalus
was writing of how Autechre
is the heir to Wagner.
I look back and consider
the road of rock n roll cliché
as leading only to sadness.
It is a wanker’d planetarium of ego -
but then all of a sudden
and just like that
only songs can survive
the shipwreck of the soul -
because songs are Portable.
ENJOY YOUR FOOD
M & S Food, says the empty carrier bag
discarded on the bedroom floor -
does that mean Karl Marx
or Howard Marks?
Either way I no longer puff
the evil weed anymore
which back in the day
some Londoners labelled “food”
as if all the labels
in the cupboard swapped round...
and do the giggling stars
themselves not swap places
when no-one is looking?
O glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling!
How nutritious you can seem!
A shimmer, a glimmer,
a salesman’s pitch!
Speaking of which,
it is pitch black outside.
No stars illuminate the garden.
The dark garden was once alive with eyes!
In here, wilted daffodils
that once signified peace,
love and happiness
in the very texture
of their yellow petals
now should be thrown out,
stoop down, instead of pout…
it must be sad to have to
stoop in funeral robes.
I look about me at other things
between myself and the walls -
a calender, a cork Notice Board,
a wall-chart listing the names
of the plants of the redolent meadows…
there is a dead telly wearing
mother’s black, funeral hat,
and a work of art made of wood!
There is more, adorning
the room but all of it is indomitable.
Anyhow I was talking of food,
in the traditional sense;
and there is little of it
but Baked Beans on toast is good.
It shows consumer culture
even stretches this deep into the sticks,
where finding sticks for the fire
is a prominent concern…
here at this monastic retreat
I would rather feel cold
than not have enough to eat -
but others are the other way round.
Earlier I had the crumbling cheese.
Before that a bacon butty for breakfast.
Now I am quenched and sated,
but like a fast car, made
to best drive above the limit,
the lusty engine drives me on.
I think it is water I should cherish -
that I should carry and sip a pint.
Already compress sans sugar,
I like to be, but find I can’t.
Even the Baked Beans have sugar in them.
Still, under the surfaces
hides the diary of a saint.
BACK AGAIN
Back again – at the honeytrap
of the flat, anti-Romantic laptop screen -
venting my spleen – but
to what purpose may I ask?
Is anything from this age going to last?
Is it all “use just once and then discard?”
I’ve been eating Take away pizza,
(vegetarian hot), bought
from the local Take-away joint in town.
I’ve been drinking Diet Coke.
At 42 the best would be done;
for peak time is over by now;
but maybe there is yet room
to incorporate the number 3484?
As if to arraign and inveigh against
the way even breath is costed
in totalitarian capitalism?
Sirens are calling from the rocks.
It’s time for my evening medication.
Any glance at the clock
around this time is a reminder
like the whole business
of writing is a machine
for remembering to take my meds.
The pills are not sweeties though,
in a sugar-coated world.
They are for srs difficulties -
to placate and suppress more
than address things in talking therapy -
for the paradigm of psychoanalysis
has been replaced by neuroscience
where all illness is seen as
chemical imbalances in the brain
which some think is rather crude.
So I ingurgitate my chemical food.
Now it is later. My brother has been down
for some cereal, cereal in the night.
He polished off the Shreddies,
but left some Weetabix.
It is I that was the seer
associated with the oldest fell, but
by now meds weigh heavily down on my soul.
Nothing by means of vision
nor wild hallucination either
has passed by these senses for a while.
I mean if I detailed a list of every access
of wonder, every inscape
of wings, every visionary
proclivity, every piece of
pollen in the pollen count,
it would take ages…
instead I start to think about a rose
poking its redolent nose
and its redolent pose
through stolid concrete…
micro millimetres of birth-push
will bring it standing
before an audience of waves
even though it is only an image.
Clap for the rose,
O audience of waves,
for it could dissimulate
the mating queen
from the green
pages in the flesh...
and we could do well
to pursue her fume
into a moon-glow chamber!
TEAR-JERKING SENTIMENTAL ENDING SCENE
The friends I’ve made
I’d like to keep
and brush their hair when
we get to sleep
I think this illness
is a monster
chill with the stillness
and love yr brother
the severed notebook
went on for ages
with no connection
in all its severed pages
I hate these voices
these infernal voices
I made my choices
they were not James Joyce’s
now I want to stay free
I want to stay me
I stay calm
in all uncertainty
and I want to stay cool
and not be the fool
who was the Smartest
kid in school
O crossroads of
all inward spiral
I hope your smile
does not go viral
the severed notebook
itches with skunkosis
in my back pocket
pre-diagnosis
and I now look back on
youth that’s flown
over the houses
into the unknown
today it’s snowing
there is no knowing
if the creative
juices are flowing
and I want to stay free
and I want to stay me
and I want to stay calm
in all uncertainty
yes I want to stay clear
as a morning beer
now that you know
I’m the ancient seer
and I live for you
GUTTERBY
Nowhere in my knowledge is it any more evident
that Nature is a great art exhibition
than down on Gutterby Beach
where I walked with my love…
there is no map to follow,
from Alex Garland’s famous novel,
for a curved A to B trajectory
will take you down to Silecroft -
but you can follow the procession of natural
monuments of rock as you go:
the first is Dark Fortress Rock,
barnacle-clad and casting a shadow -
for we liked to re-name things
as we wandered in animistic trance,
and booted the bruised football,
and noted the usual, single washed up shoe,
the pebbles gleaming but dull,
the gulls circling overhead,
the driftwood smoothed by hands
of mermaids under the waves,
the way the waves make
gentle love to the shore…
and what scent to the air as well!
The other rocks I cannot recall
the names of, but they were not fixed
and formal, merely impromptu appellations.
If you are lost and need directions,
following the rocks is in order
but I’m sure you’ll know how to navigate
the ragged beauty of the beach.
MY ‘H’
Like Norman Nicholson about to enter space
I thought I’d come back on and say
I will soon be giving up on words
and take up the wordless poem, having
developed a free and unique style
of stress-relieving, acid-casualty doodles…
they are elegant at every turn of the pen,
and would seem tribal to you.
Before I do that I thought I should empty my heart,
relate something about how we are
all but iron filings firked to the moon;
how we are flying into the filament of bird;
how I see the candle not the Bunsen-burner still…
but then we’d get the problem of the pollen count unsaid.
All those things I haven’t factored in like finding
perfumed moonlight in a clearing in the wood;
how I delight in the way that a bird
can fly from right to left and why too.
This time when I take the journey
away from words to the realm of distraction,
they might be letters, those doodles,
might be toy money, might be lines of law,
or anything imaginable. They might be my H;
and I will try to not come back again!
WALL IS SHIT
“Wall is shit,” as she said in a dream.
Or rather when I woke, feeling
befuddled. I soon found my way
downstairs and drank a cup and
took my morning meds and got back
to the wall. She’s right, it’s shit.
I’ve got wall-cancer or had it.
Rearranging regrets in permutations,
like bricks, won’t help anything.
METAMORPHOSE
I found a lump of something
under Black Combe’s summit,
under the watchful gaze
of its bald, blank forehead,
but could not identify it
in name nor in function
down here at the foot
where the cars come to pass.
I left little teeth marks
imprinted in the nugget
which was not a truffle
because of its savoury flavour.
It struck me that I should
leave the incognito thing alone,
eat a mini Mars Bar instead,
and go about my business.
MY DIAGRAM DIAGRAM
The sheet where pictures brown and blue
simply bloomed or maybe grew
was not the work of Winnie the Pooh…
I discovered it when my father passed.
Down in the smoking den in the barn,
smoke made ancient ghost-faces in the dark.
The pictures themselves seem to depict
the lyric to a song I wrote, way back
in a teenage band called Oedipus Wrecks
but the sheet is not my sheet. I concede
it is my younger brother’s, for he
is the one that laid it down. <BEE>
might well soon ensue from @
in the international language alphabet
according to him and his cutting wit.
The rest for me is but mere consolation
prizes for God’s unwanted children
whom it seems are still glad to be born.
ENTRANCE
I got a First from Lancaster University in a time of difficulty created by mental illness. Last time I wrote one of these was nearly twenty years ago and I was at the time reading Proust waft into elaborate sub-clauses and privileging the language at first hand, whatever that meant in its New Beat fashion. Because it’s a tried and trusted measure I can report that by now I am reading Wittgenstein. What a philosopher! In Wittgenstein I believe I have found ‘my philosopher.’ He says a lot of pain is caused by misunderstanding the logic of language, and hopes to remediate it with a process of elucidation. I myself believe in Will Fenn’s idea that love is grouped with language not God, and so we should tend to our language-use. This is why I wish to further pursue literature on a course.
THANK YOU JARVIS
Thank you Jarvis Cocker
for the best first LSD trip
anyone could ask for.
It was taken with a prayer
at my first Glastonbury,
when Dylan was on
at smouldering sunset
and we squelched in
the good, glad mud, wearing
bin liners over our boots
and huddled together
for a heartbeat-to-heartbeat
then you guys came on stage
at Nightfall just as we came up
and it was electric, the
way you kicked in
with The Fear, the
lights, the music…
it all left you feeling
Glastonbury should be free.
Those were happy days,
writing 12 poems for Natalie
on the roof of the house
where the Plough aligns,
playing gigs in Oedipus
Wrecks, in London pubs,
not to mention
the essay in detention
about a green parrot sent
to space through the conch.
The leather jackets used to
hang round Camden Town
and once we came up
north on holiday and
attained the island of penguins!
Already love was grouped
with language not God,
already love was
a choice of words.
And where are we now?
And what happened when
we were supposed to
meet up in the year 2000?
People can change
beyond recognition fast -
a bad trip, a school too far -
then old friends are discarded -
and forever lamented too.
THE BEST ONE I’VE DONE SINCE I WAS A STUDENT
Your pretext extends beyond
emptying space of the human form.
I note how philosophy and poesis
differ on the notion of the system:
in the former we hear of the triumph
of so and so’s system, but
in the latter systems are not
to be trusted for they rule
with fear not with love.
Whenever I think I’m through
with all things loving you
my mother comes in the kitchen
and starts chopping vegetables.
As if for humour, gravity and katabasis
she makes me put asparagus
in a pint glass with water
at the bottom like flowers.
Then I might insufflate
the vapid fume of my Vape;
and then I might recognise
I left out the crisp packet.
So to love’s infinite, polyform permutations
I turn but have to turn away
where you love me not,
and all I haven’t got, and so
no longer do I cling to the dream.
I hereby temper the wild,
Romantic, impassion’d
proclivities of my temperament,
learn the falsehood of my opinions
and journey from idealism to pragmatism.
I hereby abjure nursing
the suffering of my ideals
if only to free you in spirit
which seems a gentlemanly thing to do.
A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in,
light it and write it, burn and unlearn,
can lead all the way to the loony bin,
make you forget how to spell
Winnie the Pooh. Or how
old you happen to be.
It was an endless sea.
I was knocked back
at a remove from
my own consciousness.
I was unable to see
the international language alphabet
because all I could see was
the international language alphabet.
It seems like hiding
from The Waste Land
inside The Waste Land…
and what a refreshing change it makes
to not be manufacturing fakes
in the land of flying fairy cakes.
YOU WERE COMING HOME
(for baby Florence)
I was walking through the clouds,
with a song against my ear,
and when I made it through the crowds,
there was reason enough to cheer,
‘cause you were coming home,
yeah you were coming home,
and I just want say “hey! Go with the flo’!”
for you are such a beautiful one,
as beautiful as the English sun,
which so often tries to hide,
and we love you deep inside.
You’re coming with your mum and dad,
protected by a red guitar,
and though you’re uncle has gone mad,
you’re still going to be a star,
‘cause you are coming home,
yeah you are coming home,
and I just want to say “hey! Go with the flo’!”
for you are such a beautiful one,
as beautiful as the English sun,
which so often tries to hide,
and we love you deep inside.
SONG FOR LITTLE BABY FLORENCE
It’s funny writing for you before we have met
but I’m the uncle that taught your mum the alphabet
now she types much faster than I ever could do
and she’s gifted the world with a beauty like you
it’s a celebration just to have you around
it’s a time for listening to The Velvet Underground
it’s a time for breaking into spontaneous song
welcome to the family which is where you belong
soon you’ll be walking and will make them proud
like I was once walking up on a cloud
and you’ll know the meaning of the verb to love
like I know it too with my excellent bruv
it’s a day of happiness to first have you here
it’s a day for cheering and for drinking beer
it’s a day for playing with the toys on the floor
and for going with the flow as before
MOTLEY FRIDGE MAGNET LETTERS
What a strange man,
whom it seems
comes in the kitchen
and asseverates
that “the face of stars
was scripted by Jesus”
and then launches
into a braggart monologue about
whatever else he got up to
in an extraordinary life
before he even left school,
until his mum puts
a stop to his boasting.
What must it be like
to hear someone
determine something like that,
and more to the point
what must it be like
to have not attained
the face of stars?
It doesn’t make
the others feel like playing,
that the strange man in question
had obtained the vision,
a cosmicomic smile
on a round face with two eyes.
VORTEX
A tear-jerking violin
in a rainy rugby match
wants to be Arthur Rimbaud
but cannot make the transaction
for all that it dreams
that the heartbeats are stars.
Cigarettes hold it back
from running too freely
as you may well know
and even homemade LSD
that makes movement leave traces
like the pollution of cars.
Its sunset comes in upturned jars.
It has been with the ocean.
It has been with the shapeshifter.
It has been with Nintendo.
And it knows that science
would soon have little to counter,
and it knows that imagination
doesn’t make it unreal,
and it knows of the vortex
where its song resonates.
It knows.
HURRAY
After Flora comes gay
in the international language alphabet.
After acid comes Bic
and acid is a bet with the mind,
the marriage of Alice and Pan,
a spirit-level for the spirit -
but after Flora comes gay.
It might be why I am so bored,
sitting here typing away
at the foot of the oldest fell,
skint, single, mentally ill,
medicated, car-less, unemployed, living
with my mother still in the sticks,
no neighbourhood, no amenities,
a pretty place nevertheless.
There doesn’t seem a place for me
in the overall Social Order,
except sitting in the kitchen, venting
my spleen at a laptop screen, supping
drinks like I were a chinwagging
tea-hag of Time like my dad.
My best work was all
about the 25th of May,
which is my sister’s birthday.
I contemplate the four collections
I still have out with Chipmunka
and am not too displeased,
though when they say
I should redo the now-retracted
Rose Petals In The Ashtray
I know it’s now too late.
I took an O. D. the likes of which
it was genius to survive
but coming back down
from the chemical equation of it all
I lost the ability to ejaculate.
Now the local lasses say
if I’ve not got the juice for them
then I am gay, and so
I think I am, but it might be
that I am cut off from the verb,
the doing word, that is love.
I have had a gay experience
or two before, but walked away,
wishing I were with a woman.
O WHERE IS THE NET?
O where is the net,
pussy willow that smiled on this leaf?
Is it in the trees
and in the breeze?
At seven I wrote a text, encrypting
a sophisticated node to do with Gravity, storing
the idea of the net in writing
in the attic to give it a chance to grow
all the way round the world, also conducting
an experiment into the maths
of the new colour as a cellular mark, and separating
the object “pollen” from its name.
This was before the world wide web;
and the cloud is mentioned
before the net in the book!
The net already existed
in the American military,
but the net is ancient…
it appears in Lowell, as it
appears in James Joyce as a prophecy.
I even heard Shakespeare
had a son called Hamnet.
Yes I would say it is blowing in the breeze,
but also exists as a stack in California.
That’s where they eat acid-tabs
and come out with microchips.
THE ABSOLUTION OF HANNAH
My sister has been the only one
that knows I am a G.
She has known I am a G
since we lived on Lynton Road
and I played her a song and showed
her a Smashing Pumpkins tape.
I was the one that smuggled her
in my bed at night when we were young,
to play I Spy in the fecund dark,
spider spider on your back
which finger did that. Now
she has a little baby girl of her own.
She had to keep trying
as I do too when it comes to my work.
I imagine nothing could be more
exciting than her keeping trying
and nothing more boring
than me with my work.
Even when she was born
she was a little ray of light,
deft left hand born of another
deft left hand, meaning my mum.
WINDOW
I look out the window – two cars,
contiguous or co-extensive to each other.
Also the yew tree guarding the gate.
Above it the sky is unblemished blue.
The window is a narrow one too.
Leaves of Virginia creeper
have crowded its edges. I
also see how overgrown
Everything has become, the drive,
the ivy hedge, the flower-bed, the lane.
If my father’s passing galvanised us
to do up the house and build a patio,
we soon enough let the garden
go to seed in his sore absence.
The levels of green have gone obscene.
In fact the garden has got gangrene.
Through this defamiliarisation
of perception, this ostranenie,
I look out and note how the wind
wags the leaves like dog tongues,
and sways the trees, like the tree’s boughs
are bouncing a basketball or stroking a cat.
I hear music leak in from
another room where once I sat.
POEM
Because I am not after you anymore
because I am not after you
because I am not
I dare to take strength,
take courage from the rain
it isn’t even raining though
but a warm summer night
where I have taken my medication
and sup on artificially sweetened instant
coffee, free of clock-time
I am no sad king
alone with his kingdom
only poor old John
my skis dangle from trees
when I hear the ego-loss breeze
and Google my senses
in the garden that is gone
I picture buried treasure
on the end of a line of string
it tautens and tightens
to a chain of music from star to star
WEIRD SEMEN
Semen spills like silver water,
under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,
splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber,
turning your lover into a mother,
knowing that love is the answer,
not quite sure of its favourite author,
dreaming of things like a cure for cancer,
meaning to see through the surface of the mirror,
loving the weather now it’s summer,
wishing the song of its moment is over,
into the filament of bird forever,
travelling as fast as it can and faster,
feasting its eyes on the river,
needing not to borrow a fiver,
scurrying not in a state of fever,
nor currying favour to get with Flora,
Batman and Robin over its shoulder,
desirous of her slenderest whisper,
thinking of renouncing religious fervour,
feeling like it is a slave no longer.
THE GENIACK
He helped invent the net at seven,
with parts of government that are hidden,
when the idea of the internet
needed storing in writing
in the attic of radio static at the foot of the fell.
By eight he was the witness
from The Lords And The New Creatures twice
which some say was his dad’s business,
and he stayed quiet as a mouse.
By eleven he was marked
on the hand by his own experiment
into the maths of the new colour
as a cellular mark, though
it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end.
By fifteen he had attained
the face of stars, as one of three
gathered in the shame, a vision
scripted in the Bible perhaps.
By eighteen he had spoken against
September 11th in the year 2000,
also written the highest-marked
English literature A-level exam
essay in the nation at 100%.
After school he recorded
an album on binaural earphones.
He had an effervescent mobile, reverberating
the rhythm of ‘William Tell’
through every technological
inlet in the room before it rang.
He hosted the Plough alignment
for a rhythm change in the White House,
got a First despite mental illness,
had his name tattooed
on Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
worked the numinous,
purple-bleeding screen,
built the Tower of magic books
as an instrument of philosophy,
conducted an experiment into a tape
with a pause where resealed in the reel,
and upon the loss of his father,
discovered the sheet
where pictures grew.
Then he falsified the Nirvana barcode in writing
and attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams.
I would say they have given
Nobel Prizes for less; but
the man in question never earned 1p.
He looks back at the list
that covers one page
as if it is enough to retire on.
He asks himself what he has ever provided
for the species in terms of writing.
Despite being 1000’s of files
deep into a virtual Brainforest,
an inchoate morass, a teeming data-tree,
despite having many self-publications
and amateur albums
at the last count out there,
he hasn’t managed to get it down.
But he has offered some good things -
it is not true that it has been
all life and no writing.
Even if it had just been
his seven year old paper,
where the idea of the net was stored,
he should’ve deemed it a win.
The text in question contained the line
“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”
He used a + sign for the ‘f’
and then counted up, using
times, dates, inches, numbers, ages and more.
NOTE ON METHOD
Monopolising indigenous wisdom
in regimented metres is not for us.
Old-fashioned, out-moded writing likewise.
I like a poem to have something
behind the words and if not
to at least be New Beat, instant, easy,
the language at first hand.
Poems should come from within
or if collaborations then a source
you know and trust not forced
upon you by distant voices.
You shouldn’t try and dictate
truth nor what your children wear,
nor how they wear their hair.
They are only young once
and we should forgive them.
We should let them play and ourselves
attain the state of Homo-Ludens too.
And I’ve said it before but
my brother’s faded blue E-comedown
T-shirt from the year 2002
is preferable to monopolising
indigenous wisdom in regimented metres.
THE VIBE
The singer’s the self-avowed
“peacock with the brightest feathers,”
the sound variegated in texture,
the soundwaves almost 4D
and all about it seems beautiful
like Piper would to our fathers
and the words are sweet as getting
head from Clemence Poesy...
I like to float on the artifice of organic emotions
through synthetic sounds.
Voices, voices everywhere
and yet not a drop to think!
When one says I should write of
Candyblasta – my mate’s band -
another says to keep it digital
and only posit an hyperlink!
The prevailing emotion I knew
when first listening was terror
and yet terror was concurrent
to a magnetic attraction
that drew me in until it seemed I
couldn’t get past ‘Thunder’
without feeling like my head
was literally being kicked in.
So I stopped - though I thought it
an excellent album until it came
to effect my mental health
with an earth quake in my head…
the digital pulse was racy,
the waves compressed, the game
won over our band who
chose to just smoke weed instead…
I would say you don’t get to win
Battle of the Bands and get
a First Class honours degree
from a top 10 University
at once and I elected the latter
and that I do not Regret
for all the laser lights that
flicker in the old Regret Industry.
So Fry says it is penetration.
Penetration of the is-ness of life.
It punctures you in the soul
to hear such scaring and emotive stuff.
It went through the walls and
I through it like a heated knife.
It contains computer game inflections.
It seems unreal as drinking Duff…
For spiritual reasons I think
‘Black Cloud’ is the best one and
my second favourite would
have to be ‘Fell From A Ladder.’
I still can’t imagine the
dynamic of being in the band
and how these sounds are now made
at keyboard, computer and compressor
and so I might stick it back on
and see if I can’t finish the hits
and see if the earth quake
has subsided enough to endure
the meaning with-held,
the loving of ourselves to bits.
The way art is salvation.
The way they know it the cure.
Ah yes, that’s right I love
that delight in a wilful opacity,
the wide-eyed wonder, the
Romance and the questing wire,
the music moving in time
but finding it moves in Eternity,
the backward glance at our being
in Germany sitting round a fire.
The Romancing of the soul
under far-fetched fading stars
has not died even though words
have put tired costumes on
and I still hear the same old band
even though there are no guitars
and under Gondwanaland
all the pollen has now gone
and under the green hill
has gone the ecstasy pill
and we’re hiding from the
terror inside the terror as well
and sadness gene is smitten
with dreaming gland still
and that’s just what but
TS Eliot at a Speak N Spell…
I think of some kind of heart-
valve mutation gleaned
from the graves of intelligence
at the gates of a dusky dawn
where wave forms terminate
and no intellectual property is owned
and how I sometimes curse
my mother for my being born.
My quest for meaning still
goes on and in music we
find meaning is faces in fire
or Hamlet’s three creatures in cloud
in other words it’s solipsistic
and we’re insane to be
so frightened to touch it,
when it is so scaring and loud….
it would sit on my mantelpiece
if it were a painting, above
the fire that dances and entrances
with its hundred myriad tongues
and in the end the X we seek,
the enigmatic ‘it’ is love
and now we ground our dreams
in the soulfulness of songs.
Often we sat in rooms
with slick BPM’s sliding down walls
and so often I felt then
a loner in the corner of the disco
and Tetris pieces falling up
in my New Beat notebook or Paul’s
wishing I could sing and dance
in a morning scene, al fresco…
now the switch is thrown
and it would be invidious for me
to moan that someone’s mum
was used in the Plough alignment
and now although in tone
I grow a bit more accusatory
it is not for the friends I remember
from this seat of containment.
It seems too mean to say
“I’d prefer someone moving rocks
in a river to change its pitch,”
so to the holistic reading I turn
not wishing to be too reductive,
when books can change and locks,
and gone is the old ethos to
light it and write it burn and unlearn…
the old armour would come off,
we would with laughter renew our pact,
peels of it, and become again
as if chinwagging tea hags of Time
of which of course there’s no such thing
when held by music to be intact,
and in the Other Room the songs
still seem to rhyme and chime,
chime like bells, reverberating
up in the fells and strike a warm,
psychic chord, like The Lords
And The New Creatures with me
whom it seems is not an errand boy
but hears a voice looking for a form
and finds the apotheosis of
form to be Portability.
You say it’s dull, poetry, and
to be fair it is, the routine,
but to this alchemy of perception,
I am bound, to this experiment,
for poetry seems to be more enduring
than music even if medication
now dulls the blind white light
of vision towards which seeing is sent…
at least now our scene has found
a literary voice that’s not gone wrong,
wrong as making bleed a woman
at the age of sixty four,
which hardly seems a visionary
thing to do with one’s song,
and doesn’t seem possible, while my
blind white light is a door.
I’d dance in a sensuous graffiti
of blind white light in the basement
of the party in the office block
where every floor represents a decade
in music, drugs and fashion in
days of self-debasement,
if Candyblasta came on, but
I just can’t go, so I’m annoyed.
I remember when Night got burned
and we listened to Aphex Twin
and Mark said no, we must listen
to Nick Drake instead
because he could not tell if
the vocal in Come To Daddy was a demon
which I assume means he does not
know if it’s real or in his head.
To go on to make dance
music is brave and beautiful too
and it’s mellow and pleasant
not digital punk, not an affront,
and I also remember when
it was written in blue
“John is a living art installation”
in the year 2000 on the front
of my New Beat notebook
as if I have grown opaque
and a delicate operation it has been
to make me come aware of this bummer
but I wouldn’t really mind, as long
as I can still eat birthday cake
without leaving me feeling
the rusty metal saw of anger…
“there is no virtue beyond fashion,”
is one of the frontman’s lines
and I myself also wondered
if it was not the same for vice
and the Tourists flock to an acid
casualty terrain full of mines
deep in the earth in the middle
of sleep but it isn’t nice.
That day I stood on the chair
in the abandoned Primary School
and announced to their band
who were there that I was gay
I regret and retract and was
only trying to play the fool
to liberate myself through shame
as one among us would say...
we ransacked the tumulus of
postmodern selfhood for treasure,
Tetris pieces falling upwards
on the page to ecstasy,
always falling into line with
a quest for sensual pleasure
to make our visit to the Brain
Jewel Centre exquisite with mystery…
the point so far is that I still
put the music back on;
it waved away with freakish
intensity and seemed very rich;
and it is but a Mario mushroom
I am on and it’s not gone;
and the songwriting tradition
all of a sudden eloped with glitch
whom it would seem was dreaming
of doom drone or whatever
and post-punk too was in
love with emotional hardcore
and indie dressed as Robin
Hood fixing its cap with a feather
and Candyblasta took to the stage
so mum took to the dancefloor.
She shook her bits to the hits
and other mothers did too
even though some sounds
were a bit busy for them
and the processed beat
went for a day trip to the zoo
where in a cage was found
the very godfather of Grime.
He’s grown quite hairy now
and too long in the tooth
to make is as a musician
so he’s sticking to the written word
and he wants not to shock you
but to shock with truth,
maybe of the musical kind that
with the mind’s ear is heard.
We like the ring of timeless
familiarity to our tunes
like the lyric of Lucky
from OK Computer by Radiohead
and think that planes are
long since the shoes of clowns
and love our friends to bits
and are better off than dead.
So I hope to popularise the rival
band from back in the day
even if it’s only a few hits
to their Soundcloud page
and champion the underdog
like John Peel in a way
because I think Candyblasta
are one of the best bands of the age.
What age it is I do not quite
know but it is a Digital one
to which I find adapting
hard despite the net
existing in my seven
year old flights of imagination
before it was invented, which
is published don’t forget….
So the sound is now turned off,
it’s later and a day of snow…
the music exists in memory
where it warms me like a fire,
leaves the mind – that temple -
feeling somewhat aglow -
and so I feel that this must
not become a spent flyer…
if in Nature there’s no noise
only sound, and only the machine
can make noise, I’d say
it is then counter-intuitive
that the electronic music
I hear in Candyblasta’s scene
is mellow and soulful sound
and I don’t know what else to give.
If there’s only loss of self
and recollection of self after,
there’s still life and writing,
there’s experience and data,
there’s escape and return,
and so now it is with laughter
that I look back at Cambridge
and wonder what of later …
to stop the war’s a good cause,
to cure cancer another one,
to help out the next witness,
although the game may have seen its end,
and although it’s small, although it is
only us lot having fun,
which we would in time past,
I can also promote an old friend.
And what was love back then?
Handbags and waterpistols at dawn?
We saw the advent of phones,
e-mail addresses and more,
saw the Towers come down,
felt the need to mourn,
but still came up with melodies
as if they broke the law.
Melody was embarrassing then
according to Thom Yorke at least…
this could be time to quote
some words I like from the band -
“went for a walk in the West,
started to yearn for the East”
as if there is more creativity
on the go with the left hand!
Truth be told I doubt I will
see either my band or theirs
ever again but still write
as asked to by a little voice
who visited me at the foot
of the fell in graceful airs
and asked me elongate his
freedom as if I had a choice…
a band is a good thing
though Lockdown was a band too -
I’ve been in many, probably
too many, but it’s not about me,
it is about them, who
would blow you away, but who
are also like a trapped
sparrow which I need to free.
In international language
and in new religion but
not that “new” exactly,
we put our faith and I
hitch-hiked on the wave
like I were truly New Beat
and now your stuff’s all online
you’ll surely never die…
if there are still too many
songwriters in the world, writing
too many songs too often
I’d rather Mark than me
writing songs but then
again to do the lighting
would be fun and it seems
I have been chosen for the poetry!
To destigmatise mental illness
would be another good cause
and when they were up they were up
and when they were down they were down
and the waves of the sea
went round and round of course
and I went on the road in England
when I went down to town
on the day of A-level results
and went busking with Paul
and that’s where Mark found us
whom I can address as “you”
and that was when lofty
empires started to fall
and now I’m harking back
I’m starting to feel blue
but you were the one who taught
detunings as much as E
and the same crumbling of
moral values is in each
but I am not complaining
for it was plain to see
whatever was happening then
it was like we had found The Beach
and no, there is no secret
chord H, it’s a metaphor
for some experiential pleasure
that lies unknown and beyond
and I still believe in music
in a room with no door
as much as the pulchritudinous
and platinum blonde
and when I was kicked out
of Paul’s house by his mum
and lived on your floor
and other floors as well
the most Rimbaudian days
of adventure had come
and so I must ask myself
of my own Season in Hell…
I loved the days we shared,
the levels we found with guitar
which meant all were equal
and all are equal still
and I think of all my friends
when under the evening star
and look up and see something
like a little Nirvana pill.
O liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle, bitter pill,
I still pray, which now art
in Heaven, give us this day
our come down at dawn,
when the world re-wakes palely,
which happens in the human heart,
give us peace, love and
beautiful music too - amen.
It’s what the world needs right now,
peace, love and music for sure,
being as it is thrown into chaos
and Hell-fire without excuse
by which I mean I am asking
kindly to please stop the war
or else I’ll never get over the
chemical sadness or cosmic blues…
but who do I ask, surely not
the other band whom
my mother seems to support more
than me in Battle of the Bands?
I suppose anyone who visits
the mirror here in this room
near the beach where there is
room to roam on golden sands….
I hope to show that life
is one under the sun and there
is only one love, to be fair
to the friends I gather on this raft,
whom it seems can visit the
foot of the fell in sentient air -
even when their love life
and wife has made them daft…
the data-tree I collect has 1000’s
of semi-recursive files,
and yet what efficacy can
be more brave than this,
which is to gather up my
room full of reflected smiles,
and remember that the breeze
still contains a dissolved kiss,
and the sea isn’t green said Syd
and I love the queen, he said,
and what exactly is a dream,
and what exactly is a joke,
and I happen to believe the lyrics
which he wrote were rather good,
and it is not impossible, you
see, to mend a broken yolk
and the food is cooking in the AGA,
and the Night has come again,
and the war can unsettle you,
leak in the head from afar,
and the friends I kept are still
sacred connections on memory lane
and if the alphabet is a suicide note
the Dude has lost his car,
and when I hear the sound of
Mark’s new band I lose
the cosmic blues I had and ponder
what lies behind the song,
and the bruise that swells,
often nonplussing the queues
is assuaged and all you had was righteous
when I hoped you’d be wrong,
but hearing the rigmarole and bling
of this brief fling with the old
politics of flight, I try and
travel by predictive text,
and most of the stories from the
band days in Cambridge are untold,
and most of the Hoovers still
leave us feeling very vexed
and rock n roll’s not dead yet
but dad’s generation already did
what we learned to do as well,
and ladder’d tights are a form,
and so it’s good that Mark
didn’t just emulate Syd,
and the grimy, Nirvana blue light
sabre ink of guitar is warm,
and music is only music, not
brain surgery, not a scientific breakthrough,
but still it keeps me awake
at night reorganising saturnine stairs
and it can make you feel emotion,
can make you shed a tear too,
send shivers down your spine,
make stand tiny, baby hairs,
and the lion from the heart
of Poem Records has packed in
twanging the guitar in endless
fretboard masturbation again
and the brain is not a computer
for it can selfheal, and the sin
of consciousness is not really a sin,
when we stand in rain, in pain
and I don’t think, knowing
Mark he’ll know what a Zionist is,
but he knows how to sing
and to reach me and my mum
likes his voice, and jests
that it’s unclear as light sabre fizz
who should win Battle of the Bands
and chew bisexual chewing gum.
A move towards a common currency
is made with immediate effect,
and music is leading the way,
a way we can feel the same,
and in a way your art will suffer
if all you do is get wrecked,
and Morrison says when play
dies, then it becomes the Game!
You can’t rip up a computer but
you can tear and share bread like
we did when food was scarce and
method mad and music moved
in time but belonged in infinity,
where the Jedi keeps a solar spike,
and so what’s lost is regained,
and life is one, and love is proved.
My friends from London whom
I took to the face of stars,
and went on adventures with
don’t care who sings the best,
as long as we stop the war, for
it was not just new creatures,
the efficacy of Jim Morrison,
but peace as a manner’d request.
While here at the foot of the fell,
I hear the shower going
like the engine of a ferry,
I also stop shovelling food,
for I am full and so shall not
be too greedy, knowing
that modesty is graceful, and
that graceful is usually good.
My love won’t speak in nonsense
or Shakespeare or prose -
to me it is but silence through
which you can easily hear
the birds of dawn start talking
before the sunlight shows
the world stream in, so beautiful,
but I shall not shed a tear.
When we went to Berlin, one of us
was Beavis and one Butthead
and that may be why we tied
the knot of rugger-borealis,
not just any old knot in a
random piece of driftwood,
and I seem to recall it was you, M,
who that evening played Beavis….
We chinked our drinks and challenged
the dawn or rather Night,
and changed our strides, our
outlooks, pouting for the giant camera
that floats on high o’er
our heads with a flash of light,
and we frightened the skies
and just got closer and closer.
Now the dog is by my side,
and like snow to a petticoat earth
I surrender to the present tense,
rinsed by cleansing flame,
yes like snow, not surrender
like a rented thing to death,
and try to not cheat myself out
of winnings in this little game -
I think I really love you, guys,
and you’ll know who I mean,
whether it is my band or yours,
clingers on or the centre stage
and I risk my self esteem to say
that, miss our happening scene,
and have not much to show from
it but the rest of the fire-wage.
My mother drinks another drop
of gin in the room next door,
drops the telly remote
and I hear it with a thud,
think of how I don’t even smoke
cigarettes now, not anymore,
let alone the previous obsession
I had with genetically modified bud.
We shouldn’t be lounging
round paying no lecky or rent,
self-indulgent artists
licensing our long lethargy,
like I did back in the day
before voices came Heavensent,
like voices do now which seem
proleptic in a way to me
and by now my mood is
made stable on a sterilised table
and all I can do is vent my
spleen at a slinky laptop screen
and all of a sudden Cain pulled
out a gun and killed Abel
and now that is a story even
if it be a fictitious one
and nothing became of my music
because I walked off to get a degree
and bad things started to happen
when I made that move then
but fuck the curse that I was placed under
for hey this is not about me
it’s about the other band who
came together out in Berlin
and how the architecture was
mournful in corners and mongrelised
and how the beer was cheap
and how the autumn changed our moods
from glad to sadness and how the
public transport epitomised
the efficient functioning of the
heartbeat of the city, and how the dudes
in the other band and I walked round
drinking and without sleep
and how the rhythms of feet
on foreign pavements were noted down
and how we slept in cars
and fathomed the endless deep
and how I was yet to discover
the verse of Michael Hofmann…
and what a Germanic sound you
guys have gained now, like Kraftwerk,
made for the Digital Age where
it could pass through the soles of your shoes,
and get you dancing, in the
corner of the club where druggies lurk,
and then look at the evaporation
of your famous cosmic blues,
and the songs you write are great,
and I miss the age of the CD,
but can borrow a rhyme from Simon
of Autechre and Black And Decker
and down in Devon they say
keep music live, local and free
and by now I feel I already sound
like a grumpy old fecker
and some say music should be
all around us all the time
others that those whom
the Gods wish to drive mad
are sent music In their heads
be it Classical or grime
and I think we are one dreamer,
and our dream not just a fad,
and when the tumulus of postmodern
selfhood, the burial mound
is unpacked and some things are
not mine and some not yours
I hope we all look back and cherish
the breaking of ground
and remember the days I slept
for a year on student floors!
I am an algorithm of a selfhood,
an ontological excavation and
an existential detective case
peeling back layers of falsity
to reveal nothing underneath,
and I started as all one band
at a smouldering plasma screen sunset
in Cambridge’s elegant city
and I felt a fine mesh net so finemesh
it was but static grey smoke
and fleck neither retaining
nor permitting anything at all
and I fart out of the wrong orifice
for a moment and a joke
and I hope pills were God Simulations
and did not make you feel small
for I am ohms and I am waves
and I’m underwriting the name
of the nation, and I am bigger
than what I myself comprehend
and some might say that in Keats
Autumn is already Optimus Prime
and soon this winter women’s
work will come to an end.
My business is to show comity
between the other band and mine
and thus that life is one, to
reconcile a polar attraction,
to elide antagonistic elements
with music, to find a wine-
slick in a dream-meet experiment
that’s gone straight to Heaven.
We used to drive down motorways
in two cars, each one giving
the other wanker signs as we
overtook in the long game,
and sleep was for the weak
and the big liquid dream was for living
and life was green and life was
clean inside the purgatorial flame.
Now we moan about ageing,
and not seeing each other anymore,
and reach each other still through
telepathy, psychic powers,
and the car’s done some miles
and I’m sadder than before,
and on the floor of the wood
you might find gilly flowers.
They glow and radiate,
they smell like her perfume,
they dissimulate and denote
the transience of what we love
for beauty can be transient,
even here in this room,
where I hear the fridge drone
and the electric light’s above.
Meanwhile, I am so glad
some of us attained our dreams,
and it’s not the case
John Barnes is the only one,
and all the things I have to say
are embedded deeper than memes,
and what was it all about but
corrupting taste, having fun?
An hyperlink to Heaven, that
is my latest ambition, that my
latest invention, far better
than Facetube, that neologism,
whom it seems is already
marked, which is why I sigh,
here as I traverse the hypothalamus,
like a dark, dark chasm.
My Facetube was marked by an
experiment into the maths of
the new colour when I was a kid,
which is why I am too
ashamed to get it out, why
I live without enough love,
and hope the same thing
will never happen to you.
This is private information,
and fat chords ring in my ears,
sounds come cluttering up
into the labyrinthine conduit
of the inner ear, as I write and
quest after free beers,
on this seat which is not
such a bad place to have to sit.
NOTE ON OEDIPUS WRECKS
My friend Dr. Calculator Ptom named the teenage rock band upon hearing my songs. He used to say gnomic things like “the universe is a projection of the mind.” “The G note is green on the guitar fretboard.” “Born Slippy is evidence dance can have a soul.” “Poetry is untranslatable because of the music.” “Death is God.” “Early Oasis is good for bittersweet, comedown energy.” We boarded a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London. By now he is Dr. Calculator Thomas and the song is ‘Born Slippery.’
THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG, CAMDEN TOWN, CIRCA 1998
I
SECRETS IN THE MUD
This is the sound of getting totally fucked.
Of when you first get your notebook sucked.
Of changing gold into Glastonbury mud.
Of lying down in a field with your bud.
This is the music through whom we aspire.
This is the rule book that is thrown on the fire.
This is the jam where the trousers are down.
This is the wine-shop on the edge of town.
Chorus: Glastonbury, you should be free, and all you have in your big city,
you hit my G, you make me see how I want to see,
lights go down, lights come on,
and all my sadness seems to be gone,
although I still love to be what I dream I am.
[guitar solo]
II
OCEANS SMILE
Oceans smile with liquid eyes
and fill themselves with rain.
The tide goes out and leaves me
lost, the last thing a glass gene.
Follow me to the resurrection
while the blind get crucified.
My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.
Death will come on silky wings
but I for one will not go.
A soul is endless, oceans open
and keeeeeeeps a perfect O.
Follow me to the resurrection
while the blind get crucified.
My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.
Go drink the ocean with your tea
cup, give your heart far out.
If oceans smile with liquid eyes
then they'll give you a shout.
Follow me to the resurrection
while the blind get crucified.
My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.
Too drunkenly I sail the water
on Rimbaud’s smoking boat.
With whiskygills primed in fire
I sail the waves to Boot.
Follow me to the resurrection
while the blind get crucified.
My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.
(reconstructed via the new, synchronised word)
III
KILL
My eyes sting,
my teeth are bleeding raw,
too much thought
to make me sick.
Stinky clothes
and mouth become
my skin and all
these fruits I want to kill.
Give my hope,
surrender to the tide,
you can take
my remains;
but I must go,
to wash the poison
from my eyes,
before, before, before I kill.
IV
SNAKE SNAKE BUTTERFLY
Snake snake butterfly, lay me dead & close my eyes.
Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.
Give me your alibi; give me chains to stop me fly;
give me night to soothe my blinded eyes:
so I can see the secrets of the skies.
We must rise, freedom falling from our eyes,
unlock doors, it's a perfect time to die,
and it's okay ‘cause baby we'll go insane
but don't reach out too far for the flame.
Snake snake butterfly, lead me to the Other Side.
Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.
V
VITAL SIGNS
Smile like a smile just to smile,
cast to Heaven for a while...
let's rip holes in the boat,
throw the captain overboard,
throw the angels off the bridge,
death comes and stops me getting
bored of life's soul-machine.
What we need is energy,
show me all your vital signs,
what we steal is what we need,
what we need to feel alive,
for I'm alive with vital signs.
Back to Hell to plunder wings,
let the ritual now begin,
come and ride the waiting beast,
ride it gone into the fire,
ride it to the waiting feast,
my baby's waiting to get higher,
to get higher, to get higher...
what we need is energy,
show me all your vital signs,
what we steal is what we need,
what we need to feel alive,
for I'm alive with vital signs,
yeah feel alive with vital signs.
Come again there's much to do,
don't you know that I love you?
VI
HEAVEN KNOWS
Heaven knows and walks away -
but what it knows it will not say.
It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space?
Heaven knows and turns its face!
Heaven’s filled with silver eyes.
Heaven’s hills all harmonise.
I hear its angels when they call...
Heaven knows and lets them fall!
[reconstructed]
VII
MURDER IS DEAD
Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,
I wish that I had been there,
been there to saaaaaave Jesus,
I'm sure he meant to please us.
Murder is dead,
murder is dead,
murder is dead.
We're young and filled with semen,
we're going to break some hymen,
we'll make the cops turn in their badges,
we're going over all the edges yeah.
Murder is dead,
murder is dead,
murder is dead.
VIII
THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)
I'm the only one left, left to shoot my
own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile
and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.
Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-
waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts
lament. Come on baaaaaaaaaby, you know it's e-
asy, don't say maaaaaaaaaybe, let's go crazy. Death
awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give
me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The
ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.
||||.
[Note: when years later I discovered the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures grew, and the pictures seemed to depict the lyric to one of my old songs, this is the song.]
TRASH COMPACTOR MEMORY
Factory work is noble slavery.
Human error saves your life. It could be
a manufactured wing-shop. We spend our
nights in the stentorian guts of a
monster with a firehose, and cycle
home at fire-streaked dawn. Money is but pa-
per and metal. Water is but liquid
crystal juice. I’m also interested in
God Simulations. You have to stand a-
lone in Nothingness and dictate the pa-
rameters of your own existence. Ask
yourself “how am I?” you find there’s nothing
there. The madman laughing in endless re-
cognition of God. Brave telescopes stroke
the stars. O little, bitter pill which art
in Heaven. I see through your mirrors in
the Big Glass Day, I see through your costumes
in the summer parade. The world of Stuff
and Things is not amenable to the
world of Transcendental Metaphysics.
These hands, these two, mute, useful tools, cannot
grip the water. We practise symmetry
on the supermarket shelves. We’re ali-
ens looking for life on Mars, aliens
trying to make life in jars, aliens home-
sick for the stars, trying to find home in the
all-night bars. I’ve abjured nursing the suff-
ering of my ideals. Glow in the dark
stars on the ceiling fade. The blood-orange
dawn after a dark night of the soul is
more colourful and joyous than ever
before. I find this on ecstasy. Ec-
stasy got me talking to some strangers
at the lamp post called “Reality Check
Point” about the possibility of
injecting smack into the Univer-
sal Mind through the agency of snowfall.
I get my arm-wrestling strength from the void.
My energy comes from the void, that is.
Death, death clean as sugar. The fear of death
may be all that stops us being free. Dread
of dread and you’re already dead. We need
catharsis by chaos; need to see dist-
ortion is clarity. Gnarled tree fingers
snap so easily. Nirvana buttons.
Nirvana pills. The mind all around you
on a slinky screen. Phew! What a cluttered up
mouthful! I am spitting teeth! Buddha knows
his cage bars are but the pyramidal
shafts of light when the sun is nearing the
horizon but behind a mountainous
cloud out to sea. Elephants have mourning
too. Sadness is an indulgent emo-
tion. Life is fragile. The forefront of myth-
ology is more physics and poet-
ry more about the mundane. The songs you
write reflect the colour and shape of your
guitar. O computer-face of psychic-
rash, the benign, smiling virus is spread-
ing. That travelling bit of mess that goes
with the clock. That party-crawl of senses,
crawling home, puking, apologising
profusely to inward grace. “Go to waste,”
was the command, from the end of a branch.
There’s a hole in my arm where the rain gets
in. Stop fobbing me off with your compli-
ments, man. If the England captain can’t un-
derstand something it’s not likely to be
genius. The plane exists on 2 di-
mensions including Time. The pyramid
exists on 4 dimensions including
Time. But to turn a plane into a py-
ramid is a 1 dimensional step.
The spies are out but the spiral’s in. Love
is a search for much small proof. I wish I
was away with the cloud-change, I wish I
was away with the starbeams, I wish I
was away with the mothership, I wish
I was away with the fairies. My feet
are in the clouds, I’ve got oxygen. Im-
agine if we changed all the ‘ands’ in the
world to ‘buts’. If you reverse what they say
on the News you get nearer the truth. The
Lock Up where we record on binaural
earphones in Cambridge is a giant brain.
We’re barefoot on the beach in days that have
lost their names. I listen until your words
are a warm, forgetful rain. I am strong-
er than heroin. A grain of smack in
the Sahara. A statue of Kate crumb-
ling in the centre of town. Under Ant-
arctica, black moon, fire sky. I don’t
have heroes I only have friends. O cross-
roads of all inward spiral I hope your
mind does not go viral. Co-imagin-
ation is the key. Is-ness has been coined
before but not co-imaginative
vision. An orange dramatically
increases in is-ness after but half
an hour of meditation. So does a
glass of water. If I woke inside a
novel I’d kick a full stop down the street.
I’d crash my face into water at dawn.
No more would my consciousness be knocked back
at a remove from itself. The brain is
not a computer for it can self-heal.
I love you because you have ten senses.
I love you because you have ten senses.
I am but an invisible conduct-
or behind the words, the two-way mirror.
FOR THE FLEE
With Personism I address you,
and still wish to undress you
with secateurs preferably,
now the fretboard is a sea,
e’ en though it’s too late,
for hot cabbage on a plate.
This bubble, this apostrophe,
enrichened by catastrophe,
it pops and leaves the day
exhumed from wet clay.
I can only hope to deduce
that it is time for juice.
I am happy with the App
that fell down into my lap.
Such darkness as cast aside
by the roving of this tide
stinks a bit of the stench of black
owning less than a lack.
O you only turn me down
like the frowning of a clown.
Mother shoves it in the AGA,
at the end of this saga.
THE POLLEN’D DISTRACTIONARY
I invented the word distractionary
to contain such neologisms
as comnambulism, meaning
online sleepwalking, as
funger meaning hunger for fun,
as filence meaning delicate speech,
as amazeballs to replace archaic ‘gay,’
as emocracy, meaning rule by emotion,
as agovernment, meaning
the opposite of government,
as gravitolution and evity
which might go without saying,
as co-imagination, as in to be
diagonalised by omnijective
interface of random access
co-imagination, which is not fun,
and I thought isness was another one,
as in music is penetration of isness,
but it was already done in Joyce,
whom it seems knew a lot of these,
and I have just recollected another,
not just “indwellable” meaning
the opposite of indomitable,
when it comes to cinema,
but the word entropy spelled backwards,
as if to frame the first, unformulated
spark of appetence in Nothingness, preceding
Creation, yet again, even though
the universe was born in silence
not appetence as far as we know.
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