THE MAKINGS OF A NEW COLLECTION

APOLOGIA IN VERSE

One was enough but I’ve done more

and many more hot on the heels

of achievement, trying to work out

who I am and what it all means.

2025 was a big year for revelations:

I found out I was marked, specifically,

by a failed experiment into

the maths of the new colour…

it means I need to augment my body,

body of work that is, so that

whomsoever it is looking back

can see the light fairly and clearly.

I also found out I may have lent

a little hand in helping invent

the net, at seven, and that my dad

might also have been sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness

from some dead rock star’s mangled book.

This was information I needed

and was absent for most of my life

like the oxygen the soul needs,

like the liberty of the human subject.

So I have had to come back on

and make amends even though

my work was never intended

to be about what you do. It also

dawned on me that my intended,

my evergreen light, my ideal

had even been with my little brother,

when I had left the school, so

for me to have come on, with

a book of love poems for her was wrong.

She may be a new parent by now,

so we needed to have a new pow-wow,

and re-organise the body of work,

with asparagus in Paradise left out.

MY FIRST

(for Dr. Calculator Ptom)

The best one was when I went through

what I went through and

was still homeless on the street.

I had helped invent the net at seven,

been the witness from The Lords And

The New You Know Who at eight,

was marked by a failed experiment

into the maths of the new colour,

attained the face of stars,

which might’ve been scripted in the Bible,

forewarned of September 11th in 2000,

written the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation,

recorded an album on binaural earphones, promising

to plug my senses in the mains,

had an effervescent mobile, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’

through every technological

inlet in the room before it rang,

become mentally ill but still

pushed on to get a First, writing

for example a portfolio of defaced bank notes,

hosted the Plough alignment for

a rhythm change in the White House,

and found myself homeless, sleeping

on a park bench in London, looking

at the satellites mixed with the stars.

There was a fox hunting, looting

bins in the park where my bench was,

so I departed, afraid, and went

to the steps of the local church,

where the last guy before me

had left some cardboard boxes to sleep on,

to have between yourself and the ground…

but it was still so cold, I woke

with a viscid mortar in my throat at dawn,

shivering, penniless and set about

the near impossible task

of getting housed in a

council emergency hostel

and when I was there

after a day of phonecalls

there was a corridor

with a lot of spare rooms

even though the streets

were filling with tramps.

That was when the riots broke out.

I wasn’t aware of them at first,

then someone told me

to leave my room, and I did,

went out onto the street,

saw the shop windows being smashed,

the city looted and burned,

and after a minute, I returned

to my bed to read poetry…

I did not participate in the riot.

But I carried on living

at the fringes of a wasteful society,

cycling around “food”

for a black dude

on a riot-stolen bike.

Eventually, I phoned my dad and said

I missed the air in the north

and asked him if I could come home

and he said it was fine.

And when I came home

my story would continue…

I worked at a numinous,

purple-bleeding screen

in an experiment into post-humanism,

built the Tower as an instrument

of philosophy, conducted

an experiment into a tape

with a pause where cut and re-

sealed in the flimsy reel,

and upon my father’s death

discovered the sheet

where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew.

Then I felt like I was being

just in surrendering the sheet

to my brother who designed it,

who laid it down, felt

like I was all about

democracy and freedom and fairness.

I still didn’t earn a penny

throughout the whole list

(and know I am leaving other bits out

that were also miraculous too)

but at least I had a home

even if it was just my mum’s.

Also around the time of my dad’s passing

we find I was bequeathed

an heirloom, meaning

the web-book I had written at seven

which had been in hibernation

in the attic all these years…

I also invented and falsified

the Nirvana barcode around this time

so was utterly surrounded

by creative things. I

don’t want to sleep on

the street again, and know

it isn’t right that I had to,

and yet remain very poor.

They say if I was on the left

I would’ve been paid,

but I had no political allegiance…

I drift to the left these days,

but still don’t get refunded.

And surely if someone

started to dole out payments

for attaining the face

they themselves

would become tyrants?

In the middle of the story

for whatever reason there is,

I became acutely mentally unwell

and have been hampered by that

in bringing you the Excellent News.

As I write to you, I think

I have things fixed at last,

where the collections

I published with Chipmunka

as paperback and e-book

even if they are terrible

are also made available

to read for free

on my Blogspot page -

and the other things I wrote

like the philosophy phase

under a nom de plume

can be ignored, as can

the self-publications

from before the collections.

As you can imagine

I don’t want to have gone

through all that and to be Anon,

and it could be a dangerous

decrease in Individuality

if I am forced to

(not to mention

against the law.)

Despite bringing things together

as I have online,

right now the job

isn’t completely done.

There’s not a good-enough book

about it all yet, and

I find that upsetting.

There’s no-one else

who went through

what I went through either,

no-one to really ask for advice.

Some say my best bit was Boot;

where the face was attained,

on a camping trip -

and how in the teenage band Oedipus Wrecks

I wrote the song

with the line

about the ocean

as only I could.

But if I were to start or to restart

with the whole Oedipus

Wrecks set-list, it

would end in tragedy

at my expense.

One reason I want to test

how long I can make a new poem

is that in Russian Formalism they say

literature should elongate

the length and difficulty

of perception as an

aesthetic end

in and of itself.

Mother’s grand-children

are coming up

to stay with us soon,

and I should’ve had

children too. If

it wasn’t for this dreadful

mental illness I might…

if I had stayed with Danielle

when school was out

instead of going down

south to stay with Paul

I would be married

with children by now.

Instead I stay up into the night

like a vampire, in bad,

anti-social, Gap year pattern.

The Gap year pattern

is why they are trying

to axe me, like Syd

Barrett, for I was exiled

from my own Gap year band.

There are two of us here.

Hopefully now that I am not in debt

the books I pay to be published can be better.

For who would publish it when it’s this bad?

Only the mental health publisher!

Simon says poetry in England

wears a genteel facade…

what I find hard

to accept is that

poetry is dead,

as Dr. Bob tells me.

Back at the end of my degree

I got an MA place to read

Creative Writing, colouring in,

joining the dots, spot the difference,

but the funding fell through,

I couldn’t raise the funds,

so told them I could only

do it if it was free, which

they couldn’t do, naturally.

That was when I fell

to London, carrying

not enough money to survive

which quickly went on rent

and meant a sudden Lent,

meant, as I say,

I was on the street.

I still remember that fox,

in the park in the dark.

The city was his psycho-

geographic playground!

So I suppose there is a difference

between being financially rich

and being rich in soulful terms

and that though I am not

the former I am the latter.

There were holes in the soles

of my shoes where the rain got in.

I actually wore odd shoes

but not knickers on the head for a hat.

THE PLOUGH-SHAPED STAIRS

The Plough-shaped stairs are made of pine,

up we go to the creaky mezzanine,

to gaze out at the garden of Gondwanaland-green

through the Victorian, stained-glass window, then

up another bit to the top of the stairs,

to the landing, where the bedrooms are.

But now it is Night and mum comes

tottering downstairs and goes out,

out into the garden of Gondwanaland-green

and calls me out there to look at the Plough!

It isn’t in the socket, but abstracted,

miles away and aslant. “One of those stars,”

she says “is the North star, and always

points north whatever time of day it is.”

We look at the stars together, without pareidolia,

without imposing order on something

through use, just as innocent spectators.

Then when we come back in, I sit

at the table in the kitchen and mum -

she goes walking up the Plough-shaped stairs.

She is carrying things, water for example.

The Plough-shaped stairs are one of

the house’s best features. She goes

step by step, lifting her little feet,

all the way up, past the creaky mezzanine,

and towards the source of the music, emanating

from her new Smartspeaker in her bedroom.

The music is old but is still relevant.

PRAYER FOR RACHEL

May God bless and keep you always,

radiant angel of fragrance and grace.

May the poet still graffiti your name

on the wall around

the edge of the universe,

e’ en on the keel

of ‘The Drunken Boat’

(to translate ‘The Drunken Boat’

would take talent but

the graffiti on the keel

is for masters.)

It’s the day Samson cut off his hair.

They told him also

if he wants to keep hold of

a teenage love poem for you,

he should un-publish all the philosophy

he brought out under a nom de plume

and write another one for you.

Unsure what to do he or even I

think of how all the CD’s

we bonded over

are now scratched

and live in storage

in boxes in the attic.

May no trouble come your way,

may you see the light of day,

may you let your children play.

May the blues and

the blue cars go away.

I remember handwriting-sex,

unsent letters that went on for whole notebooks,

writing of the smiling light tunnelling

into your owl brown eyes as you read…

I went on big adventures there.

Now you might understand

this may be the last thing

I get to do before I die.

CUMBRIAN AIR

Cumbrian air isn’t

“air hair lair”

but it’s good strong air

that’s hard to tear.

I put some of it

in my pants

and all at once

started to dance.

But silly this seems…

sometimes I hear

gun shots resound

loud and clear,

in Cumbrian air.

It’s good for you

to breathe it in

when the sky is blue.

Beautiful place,

beautiful zone,

Cumbria is,

but I feel alone.

I moan and groan

about nothing at all

until I notice

we won the football.

BLUE POEM NUMBER # 357

My father was an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue.

We still don’t know what it was.

He died without letting us know.

It could’ve been Hitler’s paintings - smuggling

them over the old Berlin Wall, charging

the Germans for their return.

It could’ve been a pollen farm

high in the Moroccan mnts, shipping

tonnes of pollen to the States.

It could’ve been The Lords

And The New Creatures, for he might’ve been

sponsored by some philosophers to provide

the real, human witness.

He took his secrets to his grave,

left behind only a list of French vocab that

is a code to crack, in a little green book.

Now it’s the World Cup.

I remember dad never getting to see

Wayne Rooney become England’s top goalscorer

which he very soon after dad’s death did.

Wayne Rooney was one of dad’s

favourite all-time players.

Now we have Harry Kane, but

without dad I can’t enjoy the match.

Without knowing of his line of work

it’s difficult to repeat the experiment.

I have a killer head ache and so mum

turns up her music even louder.

I loved my dad but we did

even fight physically over his job.

When you fight your dad you always lose.

I was bright at Prep School,

the most expensive Prep School there was, coming

top of English every single term,

but everyone else knew

how their father earned his money,

so I found it hard to get through,

get past a certain stage.

He told me I wasn’t allowed

to deal with it until he was gone,

to blurt family secrets in to the breeze.

He would say I was good at public speaking,

learning a poem and performing it

sometimes in the poet’s accent

in public… that musically

I was only average… that

I never came back from an acid trip

before Sixth Form was even out…

that at bottom I was not truly gay…

that I went wrong with the maths

of the new colour at a very young age.

Sometimes I’d rather walk

round the kitchen table

in a circle for hours than face

any more of my own writing

at the flat, anti-Romantic laptop screen.

But we won the football tonight!

We won, wake up!

Be happy with our nation’s win!

The opposition gave us a good scare!

I imagine part of the deal

was not talking about the deal.

I wonder what restrictions

this imposes on me and

if I already went wrong.

OLD

When I get old I may still want

to write Transition To Philosophy

but for me to leap ahead to that

would be false if I haven’t left school.

By now I face the problem

that my transition to philosophy may be over,

but the gist was we have to die,

atishoo-atishoo-we all fall down.

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the floor up at mormor’s here

and find in sharing room to cheer

for we have written this new Proust

and with my hands which can attest

to weathers all about my head

that mean the sharing of the bread

which have been here since the start

of finding salvation in art...

at the moment Flo’s just the noise

of playing with her baby toys

but soon she’ll sleep and then wake

and later eat a fairy cake

and one day grow to be a mum

but as for myself I cannot come

and without the ability to ejaculate

I may have grown a little late

and can’t continue singing of

women in the wind with love

so I should say “That’s All Folks,”

it’s impossible to mend your broken yolks,

e’ en when you sit with smokes

and tell your friend some dirty jokes.

AURORA FLOREALIS REVISITED

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

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

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

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

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

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

*ketamineguitar*

POLLEN DOOR

We all know of Flora’s pretty pretext,

which I was the one to spot and articulate,

even though I had never known her kiss,

which looking back was a mistake,

but never has it been so well dealt with

as when at the age of seven, I

separated the pollen from its name,

which I would like to do again,

e’ en if it be by quoting myself,

for Jim Morrison has a theory

that when an object is detached

from its name, habits and associations

it is finally free to become endlessly anything

and when that object is pollen

never has the theory been so beautifully tested,

never has summer love been so evident,

never has fresh air been so much the cause,

but it might be for someone younger now.

GOLDFISH BOWL UPDATE

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,

the local, parochial headline wants to read,

and crossed the water to the Other Side,

left behind my almost ascetic greed

so I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,

knowing not why the goldfish is dead,

knowing only that God is good,

hoping its soul ascends Heavenward,

imagining the newsflash on the TV,

or online for anyone at all to see,

but as the goldfish becomes history

I see it could be worse for you and me

for if it was my brother’s <BEE>

there would be damage in all Infinity.

FLEE HAS SEEN A BEE

So, Flee, you may have seen a bee

but I don’t want you to see a rat.

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

that one should have to die like that.

The bee would sail across the ocean

as you lie back on the sunny green.

It would be cross-pollinating the garden,

extracting pollen for the mating queen…

once my copy of Neil Curry’s volume

started to smell of redolent perfume

so I built the Tower in my bedroom.

There were other books, a few of them

that also exhibited signs of natural

magic - for the smell was not a spillage in

my Gap Year bag, of aftershave, but actual

magic. I hope that when I am gone

someone reads the Tower as I built it,

tall and strong, lines left to right,

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

and you can take my word as true and quite.

DEAR FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?

Dear Fliss or is it Flee?

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

Love,

John

(who might soon be snow or under the sleet)

THE FEE

We can’t tell what’s philosophy and what’s Felicity

but we already D’d that

when we did fliss or is it flee…

other contendors include flot

as in flotsam or flotbeat door

and just plain simple “floss.”

Already having done this,

I think I should let you know

that what I meant by saying

“d/ d/ d/ down”

in the one that falsified the Nirvana barcode

was nothing but the chord

on the guitar fretboard

and moving the D-shape down

a fret though it’s irregular.

There’s also the fee to pay,

which I can cough up for an heirloom.

I used to say fee instead of see

as an infant and it could mix

the verb to see and the verb to feel.

A CANOROUS CHIME

Someone gets in the power shower.

It reminds me I don’t need power.

Flower power is much better.

Writing Flora a long love letter.

You could even call her “flower.”

Down at the bottom of the Tower

I looked up and saw her hair,

it was dangling down everywhere.

I climbed up it into her chamber.

She was locked in by a protector.

He was a tyrant, I was better,

I was the one she wanted as lover.

I took out my sword to free her,

defeated the tyrant, had a breather,

took her by the tiny hand and led her

down the stair, her knight in shining armour.

In the garden we heard some laughter.

It might’ve been the film director

saying this could go on forever,

flowing like an endless river,

but what was needed more than water

was to cut her hair a bit shorter,

so that we did, while a motor

drove past on an unknown hour.

SIBLINGS

Brothers are nice and sisters too,

always there’ll be something to do,

but they can elongate the queue

to use in the morning the upstairs loo.

There are also sibling rivalries,

to please the parents, and to please

the beauty queen who brings the bees

down onto their humble knees.

John Cleese says it like a brother -

no-one is any more clever than another -

that goes between your father and mother -

and your brother and sister and any other.

It’s boring not having a family,

and I do have my brother living with me,

but sometimes think in a different key

about what’s likely to never be

and yet with mother’s new grand children,

at least she’ll get some satisfaction,

and we are a tribe bonded in emotion

even if scattered across the ocean.

I hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays

on the piano for them in multiple ways

that mean the brightening up of days,

like a way to cure a transient malaise.

Siblings often squabble and fight

but judging by mine own, it’s right

that I would die for each of them tonight,

and leave them playing in the light.

AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mystery was a strange one.

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

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

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

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

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

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

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

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

MUM’S MEASURING STICK

My mother took me out

on a mother-son bonding trip

- oh, only down the garden,

to the veg patch, where I,

as if gallantly, dug her a trench,

and after she planted

her potatoes, raked it over

again too. Here she comes now

into the kitchen, saying

“this dry weather is good

for the door,” because the door

used to swell, because it is wooden,

and offer much resistance

to being closed. I am out of

breath from working. I left

the veg patch first, carrying

two paper packets in for the sitting

room fire. I was in hospital

yesterday or the day before

after another O. D. and

don’t feel up to much work.

Still, when mother says

the dry weather is good for

the back door, she might mean

working with soil is good for the soul.

And she is mostly right.

She has a lot of magic sayings

hidden in the treetops, does mum.

You can drown in a puddle.

Language is a creature.

Imagination is a muscle.

In politics there are no wrongs

or rights. Just because someone

is good to you doesn’t mean

they are right for you. Actions

have consequences. The brain

only heals when it’s asleep

and even nightmares are

healing. Giving makes

you feel good. Poetry is not

the entrance and exit of life.

Of course she was the one

who made the flower-press ending

on cannabis that might = a dialysis,

and I was the one that made

the love poem for Flora

that might = a motor, and who

spotted the system, beginning

with ‘if.’ That system, I would

think of as my Equilibrium,

but it is on second thoughts mum’s

Equilibrium. I don’t like cooking

vegetables in the kitchen, or digging

in the vegetable patch after all.

So it is that when I sit here ( )

in the kitchen, because it has

a good table, a good chair,

and internet access, writing, and

mum comes in to cook, it augments

any work on Flora’s pretext

if I just write down what she

says, about preparing food.

Now I’ve made mum a coffee

for her flask, from the instant

espresso machine, her second

of the day, and she has gone

back out there, to the vegetable

patch, leaving me indoors.

And the bluebells are out

and some have more bells

than others, but all of them are nice.

And mother comes back in

with some layers of clothes removed.

And the dishwasher is still going

round and round like dreams

in the recycling bin. And mother

goes back out again, back

to the veg patch because

her work is not yet done. And

the dishwasher has stopped revolving.

And the fridge’s drone is heard.

And in the fridge I have a sausage roll.

And the sausage roll comes

from the local butcher and is made

with real, Cumberland sausage.

And out there, the fresh, spring air

sings that love is not dead.

MAKING MY WAY

My mates want to see what I can D

when I’ve made sense of the one

where I am said to havehelpedinventthenet.

I like the way it kicked in

with a story for Andrew

after the vision of the net was had.

Stefanie wants me to D the government science

but it seems too long and

too much like hard work.

Even when I finish it, bring it up,

they say it’s not right to publish,

and so in the end we still deem it that

to be the one to meet the mistake

is a bit shit, but at least

I also discovered the sheet.

I was used for the sheet…

this is why we all agree if I am made

to go Anon something’s gone wrong -

and if the government maths that helped

invent the net left a mark

we all agree something went wrong.

THE GAME OF MONOPOLY

The game of Monopoly has hidden places.

Snakes and ladders isn’t for telepathy.

Dice changes hands to signify power.

The business of democracy is as Marx said.

That’s why Crime And Punishment is my favourite book.

It’s a spiritual or germ X-ray that reveals

the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

My father was sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness.

When I was seven and liked the movie

All Dogs Go To Heaven very much,

I stored the idea of the net in writing

in the attic to give it a chance to grow and keep it free.

I am away for the next two weeks on holiday

so please send your e-mails elsewhere.

You needn’t be very big to be a good batsman

at cricket, just look at Sachin Tendulkar.

I should’ve left the second to soak in water but instead

threw the whole puffer jacket away.

Then the tear up the front of mine bike -

maths left over from the rules of Monopoly.

That’s the one hidden parts can’t allow.

Moving swiftly on, Rimbaud attained the face.

In 2000 I spoke against September 11th,

wrote the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation, predicted

the hunt for the God Particle from looking

at dust in a late ray of light angling

in, and founded a religion based on the elephant.

Next up, recording on binaural earphones,

(O plug my senses in the mains!), the

effervescent mobile reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every

technological inlet in the room before

it rang, hosting the white eyebrow

for a rhythm change in the sea, the tattoo,

hypertext or sensory overlay of a name

on Piper, the purple-bleeding screen,

the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

the tape I cooked in the AGA when

its small pause where cut and resealed

in the reel finally healed and was gone,

and then I was the man to discover my brother’s

sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew, brown and blue,

as if the work of Winnie the Pooh.

If these latter things are numbers, I

also invented a new and impossible one:

the Nirvana barcode I made to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode

shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS

Who is in the writing team?

I am for sure. With my massive brain.

But there’s also James, deft

left hand born of another

and who designed the sheet

where pictures grew.

Then there’s Dr. Robert

with his New Beat PHD in English…

he has a family now, three boys

and is married to C.

She herself was a biology PHD.

You’ve also got Hannah…

Hannah hopes the whole thing only

goes on in the happy world of Haribo;

says once you renounce Starbucks

cool, new shit can happen.

She says of my work that wall is shit.

Her daughter is Florence

and her husband is Seb -

who works in design, is Australian

and in many ways is the most interesting.

So that’s the team – but

there’s also my mum.

She made a flower-press ending

on cannabis for my dad; has

also been known to “do the beck”

in her poems by writing,

discretely, off the top of her head.

AFTERWORD FROM ‘TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME THREE’

Pollen. The one thing missing is pollen. My father retired here and smoked pollen, drifted, at this monastic retreat, this spiritual tonic. I say that is the only difference between him and I but by the time he was my age he had four children in private school, two houses owned outright (one in London NW6, and this one where I am now in the north), also two cars, and enough money to retire on. I have next to nothing compared with him even though he only ever wanted better outcomes for his children than he got for himself. And I think my pollen-smoking days are over.

Granted that the Transition to Philosophy has been made now, what were its causes? Living with mental illness in the sticks is difficult. Trying to be a poet on top of it is even harder, and it is made even harder again if you don’t know a single person that reads your poetry. I’m not going to rule it out because I would never rule out poetry just wake from the false economy of it all. Instead I get to structure my free time, my convalescence, by saying I need to read Spinoza (because he too was cursed) and also need to move on from Wittgenstein to Quine (who is more recent). That seems like pragmatic thinking, to structure my surfeit of leisure.

I just think living here, a slowed down pursuit is in order. We are far from the accelerated postmodern lifestyle, and though consumer culture does touch us in little ways, we exist in a nuclear-proof bubble of bucolic beauty that lends itself happily to philosophical contemplation. It means that I think I have actually made the right decision in selecting philosophy for a lifetime’s pursuit now, even though it bores my sister rigid. It used to bore me rigid too! If ever I picked up a compendium of European philosophers and looked in the Contents page, furthermore, I would look at the listed indigenous philosophers as somehow lesser to the Continental ones, and think to myself that maybe one day I could, if not create an immanent, Kantian tradition in England, then at least maybe write a book of philosophy as good as John Barnes’s goal against Brazil. It’s hard and necessarily so. I find with a life story like mine, which I needn’t go into again, there is a balancing out, democratic mechanism that stops you “winning.” I always respected my dad’s choice of degree, anyhow, and envied my friends who knew more about philosophy than I did, because I chose to pursue English Literature and Creative Writing. I guess to be making or to have made a transition to philosophy from the Liberal Arts is a dream come true, but I am still as yet to receive any feedback apart from in voices that I keep hearing.

If I were to go up to the attic and could locate dad’s files from his undergraduate days, which still exist, I would be bombarded with hyper-specialised terminology, nomenclature, technical terms that remain beyond me. This I find disappointing because as a reader visiting philosophy intermittently down the years, I don’t expect the writer to be slacking. I don’t expect an endless license for pub speak, or what my father called “latitudes for bullshit.” There would need be some precision and exactitude. There would need be some clarity. Even if I don’t understand the language of Logical Symbolism very well, I still provided that, or showed promise, when I ideated and falsified the Nirvana barcode.

I make some tea and think about things and wonder if it is simply too much to ask someone with my mental health issues to produce beautiful work. I know I had a breakdown and was hospitalised during my degree but still pushed on to get my degree before there was any diagnosis given. If I look back at my degree, from before the diagnosis, I see a lot of beautiful and promising work. If it hadn’t been for the diagnosis I might’ve extended my undergraduate dissertation on the work of David Morley (a gyp scientist-poet) into a whole book; and I might also have written a similar book of criticism on The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison except without telling anyone that I was the bleeding witness! These would still seem like good books but I fear it is too late because of the books I have put out there in illness and also because I have let my skill-set slide into disarray and dissipation.

Further ideas for books were multifarious and I never got any of them done. When dad was still around he fed me ideas. I also had ideas myself that might’ve been approached somewhere in the epic data-tree of it all but were never finalised. So the question remains as to whether or not someone with mental illness like mine can even produce a great work. On the course Dr. George Green said to me once “survivors can only write a scream,” but I take issue with this because some of the best poets of all time had mental health issues, including Blake, John Clare, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, James Schuyler of the New York School, and more.

In my dissertation on David Morley I interviewed the poet in question on whom the dissertation was about and we discussed in part whether or not writing is therapy. He said there is more to it than that; he conceded that writing can be physiological, like a kick, that heals you – but as I say said there is more to writing than mere therapy. You get that back then I was doing it because I thought I was doing good, saturated as I was by all the reading, head full of ideas that were driving me insane as Bob Dylan sang – and if it has changed, if I am no longer doing good, the change has crept up on me un-noticed. I was the likeliest guy in my year to attain a modicum of academic success, towards the end of my degree, but now it seems beyond me, and I also have this terrible backlog of messy plates, so to speak, meaning the self-publications and vanity-press publications that only demean my own name. It’s like the situation can’t be fixed unless I snap to and make a work that gets published through normal and formal means. I would love to have written, say, a book of criticism on the work of David Morley – and my dissertation was a good start. I would also love to have written a book of criticism on The Lords And The New Creatures, without giving the game away, and again, after my degree and before my diagnosis made a good start (though the document I mean was like the rest of them, wasted on dead computers in the end.)

My dad’s ideas for books for me included walking in a circle around the Lakes; included exploring the origin of Liverpool F. C. football songs in pubs and gutters; included a campus novel where a Muslim is being watched by the State and a breakthrough in nuclear fusion is suppressed for monetary reasons. Around the time of my degree I was on fire, and one idea was for a book called Action Thriller where you cut up an action thriller into many pieces and make an action painting a la Jackson Pollock at your screen and still call it “Action Thriller.” I started that one but never finished it. I had a radio play once about some voices contemplating changing the word “life” to “knife.” I also started a real play where the auditorium was a skull and the actors on stage thoughts. I actually had 100’s of fairly decent ideas and a lot of innate ability and know how but the mental illness really has stopped me from doing anything properly. My brother Dr. Robert had the idea for me (seeing as I was at the time an English Literature boffin) to write as many sonnets as Shakespeare – 154 – and I did – and it was self-published on Amazon – but to tell you the truth by the time I did that, there was only really one good sonnet in the whole book. It wasn’t the first time I had tried that number, but the third. The first time I tried it I went over the limit and did double the amount. I sent the first 154 to a publisher and he said it was “commendable but I won’t be able to sell it.” You have to remember these publishers are a business.

Dr. Bob is always telling me “poetry is a dead art form – do something contemporary instead.” I suppose it could be the NFT Haiku, then. Well, without making them Non-fungible tokens as such, I did recently submit all my best miniaturist poems to photographic backgrounds and made a set of about fifteen… I probably told you this already. My ex gf put a *loveheart* symbol by all apart from two on FB, so I guess to make that connection is a good thing, but it’s nothing srs compared with a transition to philosophy. What you might remark on is that the transition means producing something even more obtuse, purist, obscure – as if I were migrating in the wrong direction! The whole business of this transition comes back to the question of whether I can still produce good work with the mental illness I have or whether it is now beyond me. I think the illness might make you even more sincerely devoted to the idea of producing good work than ever before, but carrying it out in practice becomes difficult. And I’ve got all these books out now which only a few years ago I hadn’t, and I don’t feel like I have started while people will tell me I have done enough! My Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, though dyslexic, asked me to loan her one of my books, and I don’t know which one to give her. That’s a sign that none of them are any good. She wants to look into them to understand my illness better. I’m either going to opt for Soundcloud Rain (where my songs were structured according to <BEE>) and The Sunset Child (my seven year old book that underwrote the net); or I am going to give her the much more recent first volume of Transition To Philosophy – which at least came from within!

I need support to know I am doing the right thing in trying to make a transition to philosophy. It’s not like I know how to write “logical papers.” I think I’ve been too greedy and yet can’t isolate one good thing I have done. There hasn’t been any “help” from a corridor or department. I’ve just been diagnosed and left alone to do what I will. My friends that actually read philosophy or some psychology at Oxbridge all got help with funding for an MA and some a PHD and went into neuro-science or psychiatry. I didn’t get help because my family’s money ran out on school fees. My dad sold the second house (in London) and moved us up here permanently and they still ran out of money on school fees. What I contest myself is that there is no limit imposed on me and my spare time continuum, my lucking in with this piece of string length period of reflective time. I have that is nothing to do and a wonderfully bucolic place in which to do it too. There must be some limit. And here I am reminded that Man will always create work even if there is none available. Like here, we would move an unused pile of rubble and next week move it back. Dad was always getting us to do things like that. There was a summer, furthermore, when pollen became a currency in an atemporal microcosm as if he were setting up a Republic at the foot of the fell where the Plough alignment is viable!

I mention pollen but it would do me and my mental illness no good in all likelihood if I got back into smoking. By the time he was my age my father had sent his children off to boarding school and had enough free time to smoke it. It went hand in hand with his being an original hippy… he was that is an original hippy in the 60’s and after University hitched twice across the States. He travelled far and wide. He cherished chance encounter. He talked to anyone, at any station in life. I miss the guy sometimes. What would he say though about my philosophy? He would suggest I am sure that in not studying it at University, I am wasting my time. Even so, by now I have probably read more philosophy than he ever did. But I never had to attend lectures or seminars or get by on a course.

I think you can tell that even when I try and make the transition to philosophy I still behave as a poet in my speech. I can’t extrapolate where the curve tends for me next. I heard it said there is “no literary heartbeat in Cumbria.” Norman Nicholson was alright because he was arch-Conservative and found publication opportunity with another arch-Conservative, T. S. Eliot, at Faber. I don’t think, though, that there is a single poetry press in Cumbria, which is said to be the most poetically inspiring county we have – so this is a very sad thing. Professor Paul Farley of Lancaster University writes of selling timeshare at a place “where the sex-lines terminate,” but that (he says) is elsewhere. I notice in telling you this my memory is intact and some of what I read still sticks even if it was a long time ago. But the question remains as to whether or not any good writing can come from someone sooooooooooo mentally ill. We might also reconfigure the question w/r/t/ place: can any good writing come from a situation of isolation in the countryside where you never see anyone else apart from your housemates, never go anywhere, never attend a reading for example?

City-life might be a hive of alienation but can also energise good writing. Here in the countryside, the writing life grows repetitive. I literally dream of beautiful papers at night and all of them are beyond my reach, my education, and probably my ability too. This is tragic, or at least saddening. I may need to just “write stuff” while I accommodate the death of my poetry. As Freud says the pleasure principle goes out into the world with the nose of a clown and finds the reality principle. Same for a poet who dreams of starting a new religion or a Revolution, or even a movement, or even publishing a manifesto from a school of thought. He learns the hard way that it is likely not going to be possible.

Now I suppose I will go to bed and read of Wittgenstein. Even when you have nothing to do with your time and are signed off work with mental illness, you still have to go to bed – and that can be the hardest thing, the most depressing thing, because it is still right that you should get up in the morning, not stay awake all night.

WITH RIGHTS COME RESPONSIBILITIES

I know a man, let’s call him Henry, spoke against September 11th in 2000, who was therefore raped when it still happened. Everything from the same conversation also started to come true… his own idea to invent binaural earphones on which to record his music was “implemented” by another guy. Same for his idea for a book. In 2001 he was in a band, recording on earphones with the rich guy that implemented the idea… they tried to dress Henry up to look like Hitler, pretended the spliff was his bifter, treated him like a living art installation. He didn’t even get to mention that the earphones were his own idea to invent. This is because when the Towers fell down he was therefore raped; and this manifested as a burning feeling in the psyche; and when he suppressed the burning feeling in order to function he lost all memory of the conversation in the barn in 2000 where he had shown prescience. The formative years of his life were spent under these conditions.

When he finally got out of the bad landscape, came home to the Lakes, he was placed under a curse by a maniac. Things didn’t go well for him ever after. He became acutely ill, which some close to him believe dates back to the rich man that implemented the idea to invent the earphones. This rich man, he would never need work a day, and at the end of the band swanned off with all his money to have a happy life whilst Henry was rendered destitute. So as I say Henry went home to the Lakes and was cursed. He became acutely ill. After becoming ill, there was an attempt at his life in his sleep – or what seemed to be one – which turned out to be an operation to give him a new member! Oh, it worked for ten minutes. Then the fire-dance blamed it on Henry even though he didn’t know it was going on or when he found out participate. Then when his dad died they all made him go for a naked walk when he was in a broken state.

More recently his files were hacked and being read out online… Henry’s brother caught them at it and said, on live streaming, “it all went wrong for Henry with that richman’s mum.” Henry walked past his brother’s room when this was said, thought his brother had meant the rich guy’s literal mother, and that it was the richman’s mother who had made an attempt at his life – so he got on to FB and gave the rich man Hell. He wasn’t sure what happened then, on FB, but he was so insulting to the rich man and his mother that their friendship will never recover. Now, after a recent O. D. attempt “Henry” has also lost the ability to ejaculate. He thinks it is the rich man’s influence.

The problem Henry found in pinning the Hitler moustache to his so-called mates was that in the band he had a lyric going “I’m going to get your freshness back, plug my senses in the mains, it’s just a blood-rush to my brains, I’m going to get pretty much fucked up, flee the world on a midnight plane, dance with the aliens and the insane.” Indeed, Henry, made to look ersatz by his band, was in a world without Rights. His doctor told him he looked “a blur.”

Throughout it all Henry was going through a personal crisis about not knowing whether or not he was gay. He would break down in tears and say “I think I’m gay.” While it was true that he foresaw September 11th and couldn’t remember, he was at the time never gay. He may have thought he was built like Adonis while actually being a munter, but he wasn’t dim. They may have deemed him to be dim, but when he was in the zone, he wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation. That may be part of being a savant. He was actually diagnosed autistic relatively recently and is now stuck with it. If the police ever come for him that’s what we’ll say – “he isn’t here.”

MATTEO’S APHORISM

“To be a philosopher you need to face up to life.”

And for the aphorism I cite the reference of my brother’s little boy… there I was trying to wrestle, to grapple with some of the things that left me wounded – the hurt – and when it was done, overheard, in a busy house, my little brother’s little boy’s aphorism. I don’t know if I can use it but it’s the right thing to say at the right time. It shows that we are all sharing. It shows that all papers are part of the same book. It’s a good job the young ‘un piped up because otherwise I wouldn’t have been on a philosophical path. So my own brother thinks that even though I have opted not to pass on my genes, it is the younger generation that ages us and makes us sages. Even though they are playing with Play-Doh they make us wise. Just for a minute it’s the young lad Matteo’s text. This is why they don’t like it when at the end because of all the unique experiences I went through I can’t share it and it’s all mine!

ENOUGH THANK GOD

Again young Madame is with us -

and has taken to me, an ugly brute,

because I played tea set with her, sipping

tea from miniature empty cups.

Little bay Flo’ has no lyrical bedtime

but is tucked up safe and sound now.

This should be her father writing

but alas it is me, occupying the screen.

The day has been a rather hot one,

and I have taken to dad’s old office

because it’s cool and also tidy now.

I picked 8 books off the groaning shelves,

including Quine, which I might like.

When you mix technological advance

with linguistic change what do you get?

You get me sitting here writing,

amazed at the innocence of the children.

It was the first time I played tea set

and I am looking forward to playing

football with the boys on the beach.

SUMMARY ON A SUMMER EVENING

The best bits of my philosophy book were:

(1) when I read Descartes on perfection and turn inward my eye to investigate I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

(2) when I read Saul A. Kripke on persuading a sceptic that by “plus” he doesn’t mean “quus,” I think of my seven year old book where I wrote “I have a scar+ that is red and black,” using a + sign for the ‘f’ of scarf.

(3) when I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I recall a state of relational undoing I got into in my bed as a boy, where I would close my eyes, or get under the cover and lose the room, forget which way I am lying, where the wall is, lose all orientation and what a delight it was.

Off the top of my head that’s all I can remember but it went on for a long time in a similar vein.

YOU DON’T NEED A MANSION IF YOU ARE FOR REAL

To the one who says

I should be writing

about mind cancer

because my mum is blue

you might find that

even though she is blue

there is still a bed for you

whomsoever you are

whenever you need it

at the foot of Sea Ness.

LOOKING BACK

Looking back, I think how from different

parts of the country, we could be heard

to resound around and me the centre, mixing

megalomania and paranoia like they’re the same…

we gave teamwriting a good go, but

so many hot topics were off the playlist,

the way the living spreadsheet was a monster,

the way the maths of the new colour

could underwrite cancer gnawing

at your genome or was it undermine?

Instead we fell to ideals of family,

ideals like friendship and Night

by which we mean love. We have shared

some cracking meals and cracking times,

and now the younger generation are upon us,

who will hopefully grow up to look back too.

WELCOME

Welcome to life my name is Pain.

I will be your guide to the labyrinth.

I will sharpen your faculties up.

I will tell you what’s going on.

It is not a living room but a dying room.

It is not a TV but a death-box.

This is a message at the womb-door.

This is a warning or disclaimer.

Don’t expect anything good to happen.

AFTER CBT

My CBT specialist came round today, as opposed to our meeting in the hospital, to see the way I work, when I am writing. I showed her my blog, gave her two of my paperback books, and she got me to do some writing by hand, inbetween voices, to prove to myself that I can reclaim the creative moment, still write even when not guided by voices. It was about the room I was in, which I said was a cool room in more than one sense, including temperature, and a room where my father used to smoke, though there is no smoking in the house anymore… I mentioned slabs of slate that make the table and the wooden book shelves on the walls, how they are “groaning” shelves, that contain slow centuries of books, answers and questions compressed into pages. The last thing I wrote before the time ran out was that “the room is full of portals” because of the books. I managed about 120 words which was more than I expected. It turned out she writes poetry too and deems my even having one book, let alone however many it is, as genius.

NO MORE TEA

I’ve been exploring philosophy for a long time now, changed my name to a nom de plume in Johannes Bergfors, to bring stuff out, but tonight, tonight played my brother’s young lads two songs on the guitar: one Syd Barrett, the other David Bowie; and apparently I did it so well they want me to get back into the music again.