PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED POEMS (CONTINUED)

PART FOUR:

ANON SONGS FOR LUKE B

POEM

Fee the red

beat the swivel

gore a bean

what the money

turn it warless

loot the wheat

cheaple the bottle

crash the hash

bone it good

own it a problem

deal the country

mara the tryst

pull up a cloud

drug the word

read your text

see the guns

on the earth

leg it away

eat the mushroom

chain the laser

sever the O

free the bread

not the doh

we the law

(C/ Em/ G/ F/ G/ C)

NOTE ON TEXT

It should be down to the writer in question whether or not he or she goes Anon. I consider this work the first and only work I have done that I have personally agreed to be Anon. Anon is the most famous composer of all time. Anon is also the author of the earliest English poems. The first line is “Well-wrought this wall: Weirds broke it.” Weirds could be weather systems; and combining the fact that the earliest subject is ruin’d architecture and the earliest recipe known to man is for beer, as discovered by monks, could make a poem’s definition something like “a statue of alcohol.” Normally I take the stance of John Stuart Mill: that a progressive country can quickly become backward if there is a decrease in Individuality. Normally, I also take the stance of my father: that a writer has a Right to a Name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you. For there are valid arguments against being Anon. But still, an Anon work was required of me, to give back to society, and I am putting myself into it too, to give as I say, to make something that is ours. The problem I had with Anonymity is that all previous work that they were trying to make Anon was against my wishes and was only falsely Anon, for it was really written by myself, as myself and to retroimpose anonymity was false. And if an Anon work is required of me, despite my CV, I should rather have the Right to determine what it is going to be, and that would mean I give myself to it more as an art form that requires skill. So it is that it depends on the content as to whether or not I am happy to provide some Anon work. To go against a writer’s desires to be Anon or not is illegal for a reason. Now that I have the present text herein, I am hoping that I might consequently not go Anon with other work that they have been trying to take away from me. For if it is Anon it means you didn’t really do it.

– Anon

ALL THIS CAN CHANGE

The earliest source I can find still in print

is Binaural Songbook.

Then we have things like

57 Paintings For Art Therapy

The Field of Rock N Roll Science

John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem

Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy

The New Beat

The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn

Word For Stained Glass Windows

154 Shakespearean Sonnets

Then we have some Chipmunka books for example:

Soundcloud Raid

The Sunset Child

Breath Trapped In Heaven

Brave New Tense

Transition To Philosophy (by Johannes Bergfors)

Yes You May

There’s more on his blog.

Poems superimposed on photos.

And there are 36 poems with a magazine…

he would rather forget some of those.

Then you realise

he’s also done the music…

he has ten albums or long E. P’s.

They are only demo standard.

All this can change.

HAUNTED BY THE MOTH

Since I was cursed by a hypnotist,

and made to walk the plank,

I have been haunted by the moth

that likes my scented candles,

my bare bulb three floors up

in the night-time while I

read the New York School.

The midnight moth flits about

a little bit e’ en while I sit

and work during the day.

I’m so badly bruised I might be

disaffected, so badly torn

I might never feel good again.

Happy days may have flown.

The moth is dull but with its wings

it carries my life away with it.

You should learn not to listen

to the moth. Ignore the moth!

I’m riddled with guilt about

something not really my fault.

Had it not been for that

I might’ve been the best.

It’s down in my bones and

in the meantime, voices everywhere.

That’s what I mean by the moth -

the rate and frequency of a female irritant.

It’s not a word-chord synthesiser

at the edge of selection allowed

in the band, not magic alphabet

radio, no, not the new,

synchronised word, not even

Smart-talking – when it’s the moth.

They let you believe everything

is on tick, and don’t leave

you alone, but then it

turns out they want you to be

Anon and you don’t want that,

because you’re an Individual.

Sometimes you want to turn

the moth out, set it free, otherwise

sleep under stars in the garden.

The colour of pain turns dull.

Yellow is not the colour of pain.

I preferred it before it turned dull.

The screech of the moth

I find is absolutely terrible.

COLLARED DOVE

I see a collared dove fly

and it lifts up my heart.

Into the filament of bird

I travel on. Birds

are for flying, not

for special perception.

It rises from right to left, fluttering

its wings in a frenzy, furiously flapping,

leaving the ground, ascending

an echelon of fresh, fell air, taking

flight in a flurry of feathers

and disappears behind

the yew tree. A bird

could be a portal of discovery.

It could lead to light

even if descended

from the pterodactyls

whose dawn chorus out-shone

the colours of the vowels.

REMEMBERING SPRING

Barnes has scored a chicken.

But every time I confute it,

it grows back, like a tree into which

you have carved your name, healing.

It wasn’t Barnes, wasn’t a chicken

and wasn’t a goal. So Barnes

hasn’t really scored a chicken.

But then you need a proposition.

And “Barnes has scored a chicken”

grows back. Because it is about spring,

renewal, rebirth, growth. So

you have to prove it wrong again.

It could be that the proposition

is right in terms of recourse

to euphemism and wrong

in terms of factual data. Every time

I prove it wrong it grows back,

but that may have all changed now.

This might’ve been an epitaph.

ERASING THE DEBT

(for Simon Pomery)

My father told us he was a fine art dealer,

smuggled fine art o’ er the old Berlin Wall,

sold his business when the Berlin Wall fell,

was codenamed “Blue” and donned a faux

Australian accent for the job; but I found out

it was pollen that he really smuggled, that

art was recourse to euphemism for pollen,

that he had a pollen farm up in the Moroccan mountains

and shipped tonnes and tonnes of it to the States –

a fluffy kind of stuff that crumbles under

the thumb, replete with mascara bruise,

peacock feather, butterfly-wing and velvet flare;

that that was how our private schooling was funded;

for all the schooling of his four children was

“the only thing worth spending money on”

or so he said; and so a minor footnote in history

became a front we learned to see through.

VOICES ON THE INTERCOM

“To what do we owe our win?

Gather round brothers and listen in.

The blue cars have gone…

they work for us now. I mean

we may have become part

of the new government. I hope

we all get on. I mean it might be time

to let those that curse and hypnotise us

off the hook. If you think

they’ll put you in prison

after all you’ve done, you need

a wash. We won’t let it happen.”

THE GENIUS

My latest thinking is that my dad was (possibly) sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Already at seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was I that wrote it. At eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand. At eleven I was marked by a boyhood experiment into the maths of the new colour, and it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. Soon enough I attained the island of penguins. It may have been observed on the other side of the universe. In 2000 I predicted September 11th, spoke against it, also prophesied the God Particle, the alignment and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation. After school, I recorded an album on state of the art, binaural earphones. I had an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I climbed up on the binaural earphone album and said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a tattoo of my name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and discovered the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew. It was my brother’s sheet originally, so I surrendered it over. It then became time to start bringing books out, including a falsification of the Nirvana barcode, and also for a while I attained visual radio broadcasting dreams.

I AM A TROLL

I’m so groovy,

they’re making me a movie,

I’m so cool

they’re closing down my school,

but something you don’t know,

don’t know if I should show,

your little mind might blow…

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I’m so sorry,

they made me say a lorry,

I’m so smooth,

they’re getting me a booth,

but something you don’t know,

don’t know if I should show,

your little mind might blow…

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

THE PROTECTOR

You used to play for England

but now you play for me

when all I find is words unkind

you protect my sanity

You used to be a winger

but now you play anywhere

to get between myself and the scene

when people are in the air

You used to score for nothing

but now you score for peace

when screaming eyes are in the skies

demanding a swift release

You used to be left footed

but still could use your right

emblazon my soul with your England goal

I think they should make you a Knight

LOVE SONG

I left my comfort zone,

travelling by mobile phone,

through the six inch gap,

to make the stranger clap,

sitting on my seat,

thinking on my feet,

eating crisps and drinking tea.

I said goodbye to things,

surrendered angel wings,

underneath a rock

found a pretty frock,

proved the face of stars

with my old guitars

and took a drug called Strictly Free.

Then it came to pass

the moment was made of glass,

that shattered on the floor

and left you wanting more,

and everyone could see

the sheer insanity

of the world afloat in space.

At least I sent a text,

feeling rather vexed,

to have my message sent,

despite it being Lent,

and have it bounce around

and come back to the ground,

trying to send my love to Trace.

FIELD OBSERVATIONS

Already Radiohead is a field

with a river down the way

where mad children splash and play

unaware of the guilt and the shame

unaware of the praise and the blame

unaware of the end of the game.

Their tender playfulness extends forever

as they splash and play in the water,

moving stones to change its pitch,

not quite minding which is which,

free to do just as they wish,

and on the river bank languish.

THE ISLAND OF PENGUINS

The island of penguins was a Holy night,

if we don’t take flight

then we’ll seem quite bright.

It doesn’t matter about the plot,

for the plot is grot

and can go to rot.

What matters most in life is love,

if it comes from above

then that is your dove.

We were three gathered in the name,

if you find it a shame

I can take the blame.

ON A RENEGADE FLIGHT

My head is burnt

I fried my brain

as if prefigured

in James’s stain

I do say James’s

but it’s mine as well

as if the rest

can go to Hell

so don’t take drugs

they only lead

to bad outcomes

where dreams can bleed

I’ve bored myself

with my own tale

the bread is dead

the past is stale

when all at once

I get some tea

and that’s enough

for this new me

whom it would seem

stays up all night

as if to escape

on a renegade flight

SONG IN THE WEE HOURS IN THE KITCHEN

The voices won’t stop

oh why oh why

I am not a shop

that sells them pie

I think at the top

they have to lie

down here I flop

as time goes by

what shall we pretend

to fill this hole

and shall we ascend

a telegraph pole

and will metal bend

to greet your soul

with ears that lend

and a mine of coal?

I’m under the old

chemical cosh

and feeling cold

and in need of a wash

and being bold

splash the dosh

before I can fold

on this bunch of tosh.

I’m guided by voices

just like the doors

and make silly choices

without good cause

they are not James Joyce’s

nor are they yours

as the dawn rejoices

in the great outdoors.

FLUOXETINE LADY

Fluoxetine lady you shine so bright

in the dungeons of the night

what immortal band or lie

dare frame thy fearful telemetry

I crashed on your sofa last night

as all the world was in unmanned flight

and sensed a disturbance in the Force

then saw at once a winged horse

it was going past outside

in the world we sleep to hide

but that was just my imagination

as I looked through a Sony Playstation

Fluoxetine lady I love your curves

and see the way your mirror swerves

to keep you but cannot contain

the beauty bursting in my brain

JUST ANOTHER LET DOWN

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey bro – what do you know?

It’s always raining at the station.

Hey dude – it seems a bit crude

but is it time for medication?

Hey sis – if I give it a miss

they say bad things can happen.

Hey man – I do what I can

to help my mother in the garden…

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey friend – where does it end?

Is it with another let down?

Hey mate – what’s your fate?

Is it arriving at a new town?

Dear Sir – I hope you concur…

it took us all this way just to get down.

Dear Maam – you’re a cherry palm -

I hope you like your new night-gown...

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey dad – it makes me sad

to know we’ll never speak again.

Hey mum – it’s not that I’m dumb

it’s just that some things are in vain.

Hey ho - here we go -

trying to sing away the pain…

Oh yeah – I’ll meet you there,

where we discuss my brother’s stain...

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal.

HERE COME THE WAVES

Here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s move our bodies

and dance a little bit

and when they come

in all shapes and sizes

that’s when we need

to average out the waves

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s see through music,

let’s rule our kingdoms with song

don’t pave the wave,

unless you’re a slave,

unless you want

things to turn out wrong

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s let the phet

be a little bet with the myriad mind

and when we lose

and have the blues

that’s when we choose

to not continue colour-blind

FOUNDSTEIN

(a new fingerpicking song)

How do you do Ryuken?

Ableton is broken,

like the first morning,

nothing left to decide.

The kids will want a garden,

spaces that are open,

I wish I had some pollen,

surrender to the tide.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

I’m not up for fighting,

witness in the lightning,

the winter wind is biting,

I dreamed of love and trust.

There has been a sighting

of something that is fleeting,

the job is a good one,

ending up in dust.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

Drake is in the wilderness,

suffer teeming emptiness,

nothing comes from Nothingness

except nothing at all.

Another day has begun,

and even though there is no sun,

it could be a good one,

where I remember Paul.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

HYPOTHALAMUS

She said her name was Freedom,

and love is born in chaos,

desirous for your whisper,

your hypothalamus

controls the universe,

the universe-hearse

is in your soul-hole…

but don’t break the Hollow Claw,

waving for the raven’s throne,

for it’s not against the law

just to always feel alone

alone as a stone

in the great unknown.

(2000)

FLOPS

It’s just another problem

for me to sort out,

intelligence is sadness,

intelligence is doubt,

the band aren’t with me,

the band have gone,

we still don’t know

if my first word is Anon,

the music I am writing

is meant for the book,

I’m still feeling empty

from the things that I took,

with Colgate toothpaste

you can’t go wrong,

I want to put a roundabout

in the middle of the song.

A WALLETY WALLETY WALTER

I was walking down the valley,

in search of Where’s Wally,

and I became a silly billy

and everything was willy nilly

and the squiggles on the page

were the corners of the room

and everything was in a cage

at the foot of Black Combe.

There were eight pills in the evening,

six pills in the morning,

three pills at lunch time,

while the Golden Age was dawning,

and there was an emotive charge

in the cables overhead

and the headlines were a splurge

and some things are best left unsaid.

WEATHER-WASHED VIGIL

Here I sit ( ), still in

the solipsistic kitchen of fiction,

checking the file, anxious

that my brother is still in it,

that my friendships are still intact.

My brother hasn’t left

his room all day, but

will likely get up in the night,

wake us all up, making

beans on toast. Therefore

I am. The voices recede,

the emotive charge at the end

of The New Creatures comes

into play, like a cable

above a twilight wood.

Birds scatter. Night falls.

“We deem it the best you’ll ever do,

and the rest are just scones.”

LOOKING BACK IT WAS ALL CRAP

Looking back it was all crap…

the only good bits were my brother’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet

also the red and black thing I did at seven, when I put a + sign for the ‘f’ of scarf in the line:

“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”

That, after taking care of Einstein’s E, means I did to maths what my bro did to language.

And to articulate Flora’s pretext, system or “equilibrium” was cool.

But I never tasted her kiss so maybe I shouldn’t have done.

Even the Nirvana barcode was rubbish…

I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard – but recent information indicates it was sent to me by someone else.

Getting into Warwick, I had the idea that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, but it’s not up there with my brother’s <BEE>.

And when at University I also wrote a paper about how “Lucy in the soul w/ demons/ might happen to be an actual substance.”

GIVEN THAT <BEE> MIGHT BE MY BROTHER

The children of our friends are growing up to do <BEE>.

The idea is that <BEE> may soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.

Given that it’s my brother who came up with it, my brother might be <BEE>.

Given that my brother might be <BEE> I should write about him.

He is working on an epic sci-fi novel set over 1000 years in space.

He is left-handed and even dreams creatively.

My dad used to say with him that still waters run deep.

He used to be a rugby player at school but took it no further.

I would say that he is a Bentley among the Ford Fiestas.

We share what I call “co-imagination” and what he calls “sympathy.”

Given that <BEE> might be my brother, I would say he’s a genius.

I would say he’s a genius though was never good at school.

He says “a dog is a dog is a dog is a dog.”

He says “if you buy cheap you buy twice.”

He spends most of his time shut in his bedroom at his laptop.

He plays chess online and also other computer games too.

I once got him to read The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison.

He said it was good but not as good as his own work.

His own work is yet to be seen, read, appreciated.

Unless that is you count the sheet where pictures grew.

The pictures seem to depict the lyric to my song.

But the sheet is my brother’s for he designed it and laid it down.

He is not a poet or songwriter in the traditional sense.

If <BEE> is my brother I’d say he’s invented a new art.

He’s actually a good chef and makes a nice chocolate mousse.

He makes spag bol according to a traditional Italian recipe.

I think he thinks philosophy is a kind of spaghetti.

The way he likes spaghetti best is al dente.

THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG, CAMDEN TOWN, CIRCA 1997

Nota Bene. Oedipus Wrecks were a three-piece, energetic too, in the mould of Nirvana, who played gigs just before the Millennium in London and the surrounding area. We took our name from a friend of the band called “Dr. Calculator Ptom,” whose wit we have to thank for that name that so suited us. We were, or I was, aiming for Doors lyrics and Nirvana riffs. The genre I had in my notebook and my mind was Grime already in those days as a mid-Atlantic equivalent of grunge but in the end we were said to have foreshadowed Doom. Oedipus Wrecks was basically about still singing along when The Lords And The New Creatures getting real had been too horrible and disgusting. I’m going to show you the lyrics to the set-list interwedged with paragraphs of prose about the surrounding time, and pertaining to a crepuscular twilight zone.

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]

THE ISLAND OF PENGUINS

One night, two friends and I from Dr. Calculator Ptom’s school attained the island of penguins, out night-walking in Eskdale, on a camping trip in the Lakes. It was a vision in the truest sense of the word, both in its containment of the divine, as in our being three gathered in the name, and in it possibly being born of Rimbaudian derangement of the senses. I am then said to have proved the island of penguins with the first verse of the first song at my first gig. The problem, however, is that if the line (or maybe two lines) belongs to the house I should possibly be made to be Anon with it all these years later. Then again if you take the line/s away from me surely that would mean attaining the island of penguins has become a regrettable event – which nobody wants to see. To this day it still hasn’t been sorted out. The line came into being for me one day when I was reading Rimbaud, and was never intended to be proof of the island of penguins. In the meantime it transpires that the island of penguins might’ve been observed on the other side of the universe!

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)

MEANWHILE

In the meantime, Dr. Calculator Ptom (who named the band but didn’t play) liked the movie La Heine, where there’s a gorgeous bit of urban poetry about society falling from a high-rise building, thinking to itself “so far so good, so far so good” all the way down. I had some poetry myself, or thought I did, inside me, as well as writing what I thought were good words to the songs.

III

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?

IN THE MEANTIME

Meanwhile, Dr. Ptom and I were part of a group of intellectuals, a circle, who watched weird films like Eraserhead and The Warriors and The Doors. We even kissed so willing we were to try new things. We would have tried out a new alphabet had we the opportunity. Dr. Ptom was a poet too… he had one about Zeus and the conjunction of souls I liked but knew I did not understand.

IV

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.

THROUGH THE WOODS

On the night we boarded a train not knowing where it was headed, we fell asleep, and were woken at dawn, in Luton, by the conductor, who let us off not having a ticket and sent us back the same way from which we came! We ended up sleeping in a suburban wood, under leaves, when we got back to Radlett! I remember mostly that it was cold! We could still find a portal under the leaves and open it and find stairs that lead down into dark earth, and follow them down and find the Nobel Prize Ceremony inside… all sorts of besuited gents sitting down. Or we could take the route of New Realism instead.

V

MOTHER IS DEAD

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,

I wish that I had been there,

been there to saaaaaave Jesus,

I'm sure he meant to please us.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

We're young and filled with semen,

we're going to break some hymen,

we'll make the cops turn in their badges,

we're going over all the edges yeah.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

EMILY’S GARDEN

Emily was my first proper gf; and one night Dr. Ptom, another lad and I went round her house to see her and two of her friends. We were about 14 or 15; and as soon as we got in the house, Dr. Ptom and I went straight out into the back garden, where there was a trampoline, and started to send a green parrot through the conch to outer space, so to speak; and we started cackling like hyenas; and the end result was that it was the end of my relationship with Emily.

VI

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.

FAREWELL TO THE DAY

I remember well when I had to say farewell to the day. We were down at Will Fenn’s holiday house in Devon; and I was tearful that I was moving on; and Dr. Ptom said “there’s going to be a massive, John-shaped hole in my life now.” I am 44 and still hear his voice on magic alphabet radio, or the intercom, or whatever you want to call it! Although he didn’t play an instrument or write the music, he wanted to invent a word-chord synthesiser to go in our band (which was otherwise a three piece.)

VII

THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)

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

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

and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.

Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-

waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts

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

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

awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give

me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The

ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.

||||.

TOAST

The latter song, looking back, sees the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism. “I’m the only one left,” it went; for I was smuggling The Lords And The New Creatures. But I never intended to literally curse the sun if that is even possible; for the chorus was written first, the bit you’d think was the curse, then the verses came second and I was just trying to make it rhyme. It did strike me about twenty years later that it might’ve looked like I was trying to curse the sun, but that was never an intention at the time. The song was also the one that was used for my brother’s sheet where pictures grew, pictures seemingly depicting that lyric, and he says <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. It’s a shame we can’t use the sheet where pictures grew. My presentation on Oedipus Wrecks would benefit from it but I am forbidden from showing you my photograph of it even though it was my discovery because it shouldn’t be online. In fact, the whole business of my being the new Syd might necessitate a revelation of the sheet in the presentation, but as I say I am newly banned from showing it.

VIII

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]

BEDROOM

I remember when I had started my new school Oundle going back to see Dr. Calculator Ptom in Radlett and playing a new song I had written since the loss of my virginity and acid virginity too. I was in a new band called Secret Chord H, and this new song was called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ and was all about love. One commentator in Ptom’s bedroom where I played it said my voice had gotten a lot better.

LOVE POEM

And why not stick getting head

from gorgeous Flora

on the end of it?

You notice that she can

only speak vowels

when it’s happening.

But to write a poem

to recite during fellatio

is another thing.

I have waited all my life

for this moment

to arrive and now

don’t want to waste it

talking about

the music of King Crimson.

You notice that

her name is a rainbow

that you can taste.

Down the corridor

she walks and into

your open arms…

“are you alright?”

you ask her and she

says “yes” to that.

You hug and get

a hard-on hugging her

and so you suggest -

“do you want to sneak

into the changing rooms?”

which are to your left.

Again she says yes

and inside you start

to kiss. She fumbles

for your cock, feels

around and gets it out,

and then there you are.

A dream of wish

fulfilment in all truth.

I never even kissed her.

But your opportunity

to recite a fellatio

poem has arisen.

O drizzled Cola bottle

woman, word-walk you

my way into my arms?

THE BOAST REVISITED

That I didn’t earn a penny

is why my life sucks

and I wonder if it was scripted

into The New Creatures

and then became a farce

where there was nothing I could do

that would earn me a penny

but I don’t really know

and am rich in soul if

not in money and that

is the more important thing

as long as Benefits keep me alive

which they do seem to do

while I get busy writing

trying to give back to society.

TUNING A HARP

Inside my mind I think

they are tuning a harp.

A guitar crashing in the night

is not the same as

the colours of the vowels.

My brother meanwhile

thought he had left

some Crinklecut crisps lying around

but it turned out

he hadn’t bought them,

had picked up something

else instead at the shop.

On the subject of cuts,

I don’t believe

in cuts to benefits

or to the tax on the rich,

and nor does my bro.

It’s why I might need

disobey my father’s ghost

and present an Anon book.

I remember writing on skunk,

a yellow M on the end

of the word “them.”

A spare time continuum

where the eye walks the plank

to affix the end word

of the next sentence down

to the end of the present sentence.

An hypertext of the word

“pi” was floated over

the prose like

an astral body.

Back in Sixth form, b/t/w/,

I wrote a gorgeous piece

about the city. It

was the witness’s city

and even though

I was only 17, and

it was never finished

I wouldn’t change a word.

I have covered 1000’s of files

with words in my time

and there is worth

in all of it somewhere

even if I say so myself.

So much remains

wasted on dead computers.

I do love the friends

I have made so dearly

that I might need

to present something Anon.

All of the files I have open

and I go and write another

poem as if to obviate-not-titivate

when I cannot decide.

There is science

and philosophy

and maths

and fiction

as well as verse

and music in

my laptop’s backrooms and more…

When I was a kid,

there was a big family mystery

as to what happened

to my brother James’s Gameboy

when it went missing

and I as the witness

even entertain

in my open-ness

and uncertainty

that it was transformed

into the second specimen itself

such were the evolutionary

possibilities at the time

and I have 1000’s of files

of writing in that mode.

If I was threatened with death

upon completion

of the next book,

it would naturally

make my writing

too frugal and mean.

Death is a form

you can write against too.

I don’t intend

on going anywhere yet

but I remember

when my dad said that

and now I miss him

and wish to know

what he would advise

but it could be alright

if I manage to stop.

Then there was the period

A. I. became a pronominal

act, way before the

A. I. we know today.

If I could remember

every move I made,

every turn of mind,

the list might stretch to the moon.

A shadow page poem

is written in the dark.

A helium aubade

is written at dawn

when you’ve been up all night

wrestling with the dark

night of the soul.

I even tried making

the turning of the page

the turning over

of a steak in the pan.

Give a man freedom

and let him write.

Give him joy in his heart.

Give him blessings.

Give him “the secret

of an inward prayer,

whispered to your soul,

disguised with shadow,”

as was my working

definition for a poem

during one poem at least.

So prolific I have been

yet don’t really like

much that’s come out.

Morsels of death

demean the process

and yet now it’s enchanting.

I love it when you take

a half finished bottle

of something like milk or Pepsi

and empty it into the glass

and the glass is filled

exactly to the brim,

emptying the bottle utterly.

It’s like that because

the alignment is exact.

It’s the same for electricity.

It’s why I should

do the me one.

PART FIVE:

OTHER PREVIOUSLY UN-PUBLISHED POEMS

AN INWARD PRAYER

“The initial task was to widen the area of consciousness” - Allen Ginsberg

Blessed are all these miles of madness

bumbling around us

Blessed is Night w/ its centuries

of bright, burning eyes

Blessed is the secret of an inward prayer,

whispered to your soul,

disguised w/ shadow

Blessed is the joy

when tears break from their blue chains

and shatter from your eyes

Blessed is Brahman

and the holiness of Things

O Brahman! Regard me

w/ mine own eyes!

(Atman is Brahman

as the sun its light

cursed the wiseman to God

w/ his final breath)

Blessed is Buddha & Samadhi & Christ

and blessed am I for blessing them

Blessed is connecting to the

Big White Dream

in moments of vast, empty enlightenment

when suddenly wakened

you open reception

to Dark Dream Radio & the Infinite Broadcast

and blessed are its electric currents

(the channels of rhythmic ecstasy)

for Music, Sex and Idea

are the elements of miracle

& grasping your mind

in instant static pain

the sudden rush of apocalypse

like the visitation of God

or the angel in your eyelid

Blessed is falling through leering madness

& waking again a naked boy

Blessed is the sadness in things

and blessed also its joy

Blessed may be the end at last

under the sea

below the soul

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain)

& blessed is the rain that heaven sends

it is the life for the poems around us

Blessed are the Four Pillars of Time

Milk Water Whisky Wine

milk is the silver semen of birth

water is the heavenly liquor

whisky is embedded in the soul of the poet

& wine swims through the heart of the gods -

O drown me in the heavenly fluids!

Blessed is the poet

struggling through headache

strung out in harmonious rhythm

like a chain of music from star to star,

beating to joy in a New Beat heart

Blessed is sin if it kills Ignorance

Blessed is the redness of blood,

The madness of kissing,

The promise of moments

Blessed is the wavering emergence of Now

The friendliness of meeting a stranger

The strangeness of meeting a friend

Blessed is the promise of words

That someday I may dispose of language

Blessed is peace

as blessed is 'FUCK!'

Blessed is the miracle of life

Atheist and holy in one

Blessed is choice and every decision

And choosing never to choose at all

Blessed is the rapture of the slender moon

And the danger in her wanton thigh

And blessed are we for our daring tongues

For being in love w/ being in love

Blessed is our small advance

beneath an ocean of weeping stars

for time is all that time can prove

Blessed is Discovery, Invocation and the dark

Blessed is pain for it shows you can feel

And blessed is death for it means you’re alive

Blessed is wandering the cruel edge

and seeming a fool in quest for height 

Blessed is the rambling bardic child

Who never strays from his heart

But on vast miniature journeys through space

He arrives at Conclusion

W/out even thinking

Blessed is thought as absence of thought

So in the great, dark Over-soul of night

Above us all and counting time,

That thought behind

The back of your mind…

Let’s just say you looked into my eyes

And saw the scars of dreams had opened

And saw the glimmer of the gates unlocking

And saw the nobleman nod his assent

Tell the master calling for me

The servant shall not be disturbed

He is drowning himself in the laughing sea

And has seen the snake slowly recoiling

And has felt the womb of conception calling

And has found the Sea of Words

No let’s just say

I came and saw

And you almost heard

My soundless word

Blessed is word as absence of word

Last words change all the rest

And last longest,

Last word

Death.

[NO NAME]

through arteries of galaxies

of memories

to galleries where tapestries

of slaughter hang from falling walls

through the purple corridor

a door is ajar

push it open

gently creaking opening afar

then into the

crumbling tumbling temple

fumble through and stumble on

across the stone across the floors

flat like graves

patterned in shadow

onwards upwards

notice the window

above all stained in

glory-orgasm

w/ the cross of Christ

and the face of you

Holy you

like some ragged tearful stranger

bled to the world

just to say

“anyway

- there is no truth

give up now

& turn away”

it's all too late

you must not wait

follow the shadows

into the shade

head up high

up on to the altar

where stands a candle

forged in Rome

find the candle

& follow it upward

& finally then

find the flame.

POEM ON THE TRAIN STATION PLATFORM

Two imperfect strangers, a man and a woman,

stand on opposite train station platforms.

They catch each other's eye then quickly

look away, only to check the station clock...

Instead of trying to make conversation,

they seek distraction from the situation.

Why don't they suddenly just resolve:

hey let's fuck a stranger tonight!?

They wait, besuited slaves with briefcase blues,

screensaver faces and answerphone manners,

in some kind of somnambulist trance,

under the sad, Lucozade lights that glow.

They wait for nothing, for the train,

for the clock that is running round and

round on the stones, for the rain, while

the connection they dream of goes to waste.

WALKING TO ICELAND

I have walked for miles to this straw bed,

seen unafear’d a landscape of cloud

carved into paths and roads, grasses and hills,

by meltwater angels booting their balls

about in sun-drenched meadows

and know of no epithet to place her beauty,

no painted pantheon of seraphim ready -

and so behind your eyes where tears dwell

in sacred rivers flowing up the fell,

and sometimes let go of their tiny blue chains,

and sometimes let go of their dark horse reins,

there should be only falling light plus falling light -

not the night I am clumsy with the knife -

only falling light plus falling light.

From ‘THE BOOK OF WORDS’

Words, words, words. What are words? These are words.

Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive.

Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons.

Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier.

Words are, well, ONLY words.

“MAYFLY” I say the word ‘mayfly,’ phonetically, sounding out its every vowel-sound alphabetically.

The word ‘Entropy’ spelled backwards, i.e. y.p.o.r.t.n.e could frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation, or else have no meaning under the sun in which case I’d say that is Tucker’s constant.

Neil Curry says “if two people can agree on the meaning of a new word, it becomes a real word.”

‘Indwellable’ might mean the opposite of ‘indomitable’ when it comes to the medicine man’s medieval cinema screen empoldered from the harbour in Iceland.

Neil Curry also liked the bit in my essay on Norman Nicholson where I wrote “You can find freedom from accepting limitation.”

Sometimes I drive a stolen, Dream Factory car for whom punctuation is merely brakes, bird with the skin of snaking in the Lakes.

Music, Magic and Mystery make the three M’s of words.

I think I might write A Trance of Stalks by Professor Quentin Ponsonby, when I am bored.

The distractionary may contain the metallurgical origins of birds, whom it seems speak, in gagazookzook and bongateebingbong.

I think poetry is more like Man interpreting God and music more like God interpreting Man.

I like my lines of shining conveyance to be free to connect in all directions.

When two words thought to be mutually exclusive connect in Holy Orbit it forms an Image.

“Noetic” meaning “of the mind” is my new favourite word because its suffix ‘ic’ reminds of Icarus who flew too near the sun.

BEE

I lie back squinting on the front lawn,

my dog-eared folder of documents beside me,

and as I write notice a bumble bee,

how it crosses an ocean of green.

In a land of pollen I too live,

a land of perfumed sunset,

knee-deep in buttercups sometimes,

and watch the bee bumbling,

criss-crossing the lawn in zany patterns,

like it’s playing a computer game.

At this station in love and life

I see it depart in the sentient air.

I almost thought for a moment

that it could go on flying forever.

ONE STEP CLOSER

Sitting on the bench at Silecroft Beach,

I listen to the slap and backwash of waves,

turn my attention to my own breath,

as it goes in and out, like a tide, and meditate.

It’s in with the Fruit Gum out with the Polo

as I sit going solo on this wooden bench.

Perched on the verge of University,

I align my breathing with the sea,

close my eyes, as I breathe in and out,

and think of the crash of waves I hear.

It’s more the out-breath than the in,

and we seem to be in rhythm together,

as all my faculties slow down,

and I surrender to the weather.

I wonder if I will remember this moment,

make a pin-prick in a map of time,

hope to revisit it in future years,

like I did with a Kodak family

happy snap in Portugal as a child -

make a mental mark that you can recall -

will yourself to save and treasure

this moment above all others.

Absurd how you can just do that

while most of your life is like plankton.

I see the way is to eschew the Dude

and to try and become a scholar.

STET

I

If I dare call this

the beginning

of anything at all

then I shall begin

until uncertainty creeps in

the cracks in the walls

& the room spins

to a brand new view

from the window pane

maybe rain pattering

down like a piano-piece

splashing to the ground

gravity found it

(& I’ve been found)

mute, translating thin air

This shall stand alone & dare

dictate its own

time & place

in infinite headspace

“I Am, I Can,”

said the suddenly free man

warned before about

getting a conviction

getting found out,

I am suddenly arrested

now driving

w/ daredevil exhilaration

in an open top car

leaping between seats

in a race to death

w/ my rampant shadow,

inescapably involved w/ the inviting,

pulling fragrance of orgasm,

playing again in chambers of water

& under the bridge w/

the angel’s daughter,

semen spills like silver water,

splashing w/ laughter

in a moonglow chamber,

moon-light veiled to the walls;

I remember

vast imaginary worlds,

as real as

Oh.

You can read in a book

about the Tachyon Particle

firing out the gun

just before you press the trigger.

“Well, you never know,”

they reaffirm

I take responsibility for saying

of course,

as long as rumours

or an insidious virus hasn’t

imbued our brains

w/ dreams & fevers

it proves everything & nothing

to be true;

nothing we may even

think of as true

So butterflies embroider a dance in the sky,

butterflies dance

& multiply

like scattered sunbeams

discovering your eye

There is much to be done,

glorious pyramids built to the sun,

much to be done

It seems

I have forgotten you again,

absent-minded-

what-of-audience

waiting in the rain,

dividing the dancers from the damned,

what of the perpetually

fresh new land,

sparkling clean sugar,

let us go,

let it stand.

II

So tell me what “a life changing experience” is.

You’ve missed it already,

& again & again.

If you’re ready for now,

then I might begin,

Imagined real & dreamt awake,

on the verge of everything,

(I found half-a-butterfly

& a wing.)

III

Vodaphone, alone, in total unknown,

Well maybe Maybelline, I make-believe,

I find you, a million butterfly queens,

I’ll fall into a fever & dream,

seen all the adverts I’ve seen,

Nokia, block her, privately unlock her

maybe we’ll fleetingly meet in the aisle?

Instantly convince me to smile

CCTV & spy cameras in the brain

you need an injection of fear & pain

well, tell me what you mean

by “love” or by “hate”

better get the law to investigate

IV

Trying to translate mute shapes of befuddled colour

in the head, trying to render them in word-forms

is such a frustrating business.

Invocation. I want to want nothing.

Catch a train that carries me always up to date

w/ the moment. I see it fluctuate

& flicker, gone.

To be utterly modern in every way

is the goal, yet to be a mediator through

which the entire history of literature

& criticism finds its newest development.

Finds its development manifested.

It shall never find its resting place, its

dwelling point. Each moment renders anything

fixed obsolete, the fluffy, dissipating

trail of the aeroplane, w/ which you can trace

its current position & its flight path

until the wind fragments its

history. We cannot hope to preserve or cling to

that untenable inconstant dissolution.

V

Here they come, back, the runners,

round the final bend again.

Forward to the place from which they came.

Here they come, the infinite angles of change.

Summing up to circle,

the orbits my pointing finger pins down,

immeasurable orders spin around.

The starting gun still resounds.

Fingerprint dancing pressed under the eyelid.

It’s never the safest way to blank it.

Run for cover as safe as a blanket.

In darkness, your shadow

hidden under your eyelid.

So hug me like a womb, I’ll hide from the world.

(Warwick University, 2002)

WARP RECORDS

The plane exists on 2 dimensions including Time.

The pyramid exists on 4 dimensions, including Time.

To turn a plane into a pyramid is a 1 dimensional step.

Therein discover new dimension of the words

‘1 dimensional,’ meaning stupid – a dimension

which could also be called a separate plane -

and did I mention that I wanted to die?

THE READING

On the train to Simon Pomery’s birthday party in Leeds I wrote in my notebook, all the way there. I wrote the whole alphabet out:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

Then I wrote it out backwards too, unsure which way round I would give it to him as a gift:

ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

Then I went on a bit about ancient alchemy – about how to alchemise the alphabet into something good, transmogrifying lead into gold. I was going to deliver him the excellent news that the word ‘goyt’ is “Celtic thought-patterns meeting and Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.” It was also going to be a reading at the party – but despite all that I had written, in among the radio snippets, phone numbers, loose couplets, the recipe for an opium drink favoured by the Romantics, when it came to pass I had nothing left except

“I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life.”

NOTES

Knives and forks and spoons,

laid out on the table,

are something tactile

to think about.

The train of my thought is the 03. 27,

in one ear and out the other.

I dream of meeting a woman, seeing

co-imaginatively through

some fresh, alien eyes.

If the brain is a tree, rooted

in reality and reaching

for the light, I ask

of pruning its branches.

I hear they are about to discover

a brand, new metal,

that is invisible

and which they can use for spaceships.

It might exist in orbit

round my heart, my

heart so easy to hurt.

The New Co-imagination

could be but my brother and I.

Out in the garden, I ask him

“what is music?” and,

while a warm breeze blows over,

he says “organisation.”

It makes me consider

the whole of the Natural World

as part of the music.

Later when he drives me

to the pub, I tell him

I am warding off

accidents with my eyes

in the passenger seat.

Later still when we make

the ascent up the rear side of the fell,

with some smokes, and

walk past the beck

I tell him it is

a stream of consciousness.

There’s a place en route

where we cup our hands

and sup the good, glad fluid.

It seems to expunge

any sense of evil.

My senses are like trainers,

new, Nike Air trainers,

and I like the word “tick.”

Everything you need

is on tap in this pretty place.

GO MY SONGS!

Go my songs into the ballad-murmuring breeze!

Go and be well-equipped with a

toothbrush in your inside pocket!

Go and be not afear’d of the sounds

of the crowded supermarket aisle -

sprinkled as they are with pheramone sprays!

Go disturb the comfortable

and comfort the disturbed.

Go dislodge the algebra from

the brains of mathematicians

and replace it with timeless

ideas transmitted across Time.

Go melt death and attain perfect listening

and not remove the key from life;

go calibrate the key of telepathic grammar;

go walk down the ocular nerve.

Go escape the shape of the paper -

go from me like newborn

spirits of the dead released.

POINTLESS ACTIVITY

Now that University is long out

I wonder what it is I am to do.

Now that I know, say, The Great

Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia

pertaining to panchronic and

panoramic overview, like

a chronotope turned euchronia,

or else a word-world gone

polysemic with the multifarious

possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy

through whom the esemplastic has fled

away with the quadlibetical -

now that I know the lesson

of post-structuralism is twofold,

meaning a) the condition of being

a text can extend to any object,

any quotidian ephemera and b)

the condition of being a language

unto itself can extend to any

text – I wonder what it is I am

to do. My father, after his PPE degree,

under Karl Popper at the LSE, learning

of things like falsifiability and

of P1 to TT to EE to P2, well,

he turned back to Winnie the Pooh.

AT INSANE MATE

At Insane Mate I lost my queen

whose eyes it seems were Gondwanaland-green.

We walked to the top of the Pompidou

to read JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS,

and in dreams ski down too fast

and get our dreams in plaster cast.

We married already in a pagan way

in a dusky playground scattered with hay

but I went down south to cross the border,

left good love in a state of disorder.

Now love works high up in the Tate,

selling great paintings over a plate….

and if she said she is in love with me

I wouldn’t go taking it personally.

WHEN THE BECK TURNS TO ICE CUBES

On our first night up my dad took me out

In the back and asked me what I could hear,

And I did not know, so he showed me the beck,

Showed me the beck to open my ear,

Showed me the beck to open my ear.

/////////////////

We traced its source up the fell one day,

But found only bog and marsh, no fountain,

And the fell itself I should say by the way

Is twelve feet short of being a mountain,

Is twelve feet short of being a mountain.

/////////////

Down as gravity and katabasis require,

Beckwater travels, always choosing the course

Of least resistance, scentless and cold,

Bold to be long, as long as a horse,

Bold to be long, as long as a horse.

//////////

It's laced with ecstasia, the bright, deadly beck

That flows down from the fell’s striated way,

Underlaid with Technicolour unicorn hooves,

Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me,

Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me.

//////////

Paul Farley would pee in it like a punk,

But I like to stomp in leaking welly boots,

On a trance of green, THC-free stalks,

And let the wet water get in at my roots,

And let the wet water get in at my roots.

//////////

It’s like a long necklace of notes and stones,

Laid over a lucky lady’s milkwhite neck,

And whatever the southerners say of a stream,

It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck,

It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck.

//////////

Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,

It falls two feet into a sound as sweet

As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss

That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street,

That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street.

//////////

It babbles down into a double-barrelled tunnel,

And disappears for a mile or more underground,

And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,

For all the world a round map of sound,

For all the world, a round map of sound.

//////////

Optimus Prime leaves once blocked the tunnel

And water leaked in under the back door

To float a massive, abstract archipelago

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.

//////////

Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,

Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,

And record stores close and folk heroes pass

But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,

And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.

//////////

So it laughs to itself, over what we don’t know,

As it makes that tear-clear journey down,

A fountain pen for all to write with – O! -

And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain,

And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain.

//////////

LITTLE JOHNNY'S AILMENT

Today, probably fallen out of youth,

I g-a-v-e clean away the sheet where

pictures depicting an old song I wrote grew

to my brother who first laid it down.

Today, I also gave clean away my old copy

of The Lords And The New Creatures

to an Asian-extract film student still

young and trendy and took both back.

Today, I asked myself if I was foreknown

for being tinctured by an experiment into the new

colour as a cellular mark on my forearm

back in the bath tub at Prep School.

Today, I asked myself if the very CIA

were listening in to my phonecall away

because I'd spoken against Sept 11th

in 2000 whilst still a schoolboy

and I laughed at how they'd only have heard

stuff like “mate have you got any weed?”

and “does this massage parlour

accept full sexual intercourse?”

(Dova Unit, 2017)

TEXT MESSAGE FROM AN ALIEN

“Apple juice is a fruit juice made by

the maceration and pressing of an apple.

The resulting expelled juice may be

further treated by enzymatic and centrifugal

clarification to remove the starch and pectin,

which holds fine particulate in suspension,

and then pasteurized for packaging

in glass, metal, or aseptic processing

system containers, or further treated by

dehydration processes to a concentrate.”

THE COLOURS OF THE PLASTIC YELLOW SUBS

Acid is not just “a spirit-level for the spirit” but is a personality-altering substance I would advise you never to take.

Alcohol meanwhile is a good friend and a very bad enemy.

As for cigarettes, they lead to cancer so don’t smoke, as Allen Ginsberg said.

As for ecstasy, I remember my last pill – at the Secret Garden Party – had absolutely zero effect on reality in terms of pleasure – it did nothing – and as I waited, all of a sudden skywriting, real skywriting, like a stamp collection of digital squares, also actually physical lanterns came coursing across the night – as if to fulfil that dream I had when watching Apocalypse Now of wanting to write THE HORROR! THE HORROR! across the night sky in purple.

Cocaine is a brief titillation but a highly addictive substance that might leave you feeling really badly like getting some more at dawn while the song that goes “what’s that coming over the hill is it a monster?” is playing – and it will suck your money, take you down, bleed you dry.

Heroin for example is a death sentence.

I would’ve said in the past a healing magic mushroom trip can be a secret garden that makes the walls of the Hotel breathe; but these days I wouldn’t touch anything – not with my mental health issues.

Pollen for a while was different like a sop, like a secret currency in an imaginary world, something natural, something beautiful, but even that I would say only makes you demotivated, prone to casuistry or false reasoning, tangential-minded, and is non-conducive to hard, academic concentration.

Skunk has the naturally occurring anti-psychotic ingredient in hash removed from it and the THC cranked up in extremis.

Speed is the worst drug for the brain and plays havoc with the mood.

There are other drugs I have taken such as the new designer drug 4CMC which almost made me a zombie forever.

THE OSTRANENIE OF THE PROVERBS

You can't have your break bird with the skin of snake

and eat it. You can take a horse to water and drink

the horse. Don't forget if you are getting a puppy

for Christmas, THINK and wear a seatbelt. Drink

driving is for life not just for Christmas. One door

closes, another door parades in dandified attire.

We go a month of Mondays and by the time we

arrive, several weird species of insectivorous spy

crawl out of severed telephone cable. Life is not

just like a box of chocolates. One door closes

another one is a Pullman portal. When in Rome

all roads shit in the woods. The bear is a catholic.

Sticks and stones may break on the beach but

words will never go for a run. By the Combe I

sat down and wept. And did those feet in ancient

times raindown and walk the sun? Never judge

a book by the blurry photograph of James’ sheet

that bloomed or even grew pictures depicting a

lyric from one of my old songs on the front of it.

Never say “almost infinite” for it’s an oxymoron.

Never say peacekeeping missile or War on Terror.

To make the stitches seem invisible saves nine.

FROM ‘THE DRUM’

Break, bird with the skin of snake,

seabird with the skin of dreams and flake,

stand naked on broken school

and have no clue as to who you are,

you and the child brother who weaned you,

who found you, who ran fast away.

Leave no chaos in your wake,

before double French in the middle of break,

while we dream on of chocolate cake,

comparing trainers and their make,

as yet to read “Tyger, Tyger” by Blake,

let alone ship round food for a black

dude on a fast, riot-stolen bike,

as went down in the name of work,

lurk in the trees with your look,

look at the book and deem it a take,

fake be the time on the kitchen clock,

flick the light-switch that won’t lock,

lack the luck for me to give a fuck,

and let it be known you’re a mistake.

FRAGMENTS TO SCATTER IN THE WIND IN THE COMBE FIELD

For money, you cannot ignore them,

the house-pipes glugging a guilty gulp from

a big, culpable jug of the ug of drug or

smuggle or Ugly Truth Revealed Inside.

*

You wish to make words chime like bells,

reverberating up in the fells and strike

a warm, psychic chord, with a word-hoard

that bores The Lord to cease with the cancer.

*

This time, you hope to note the loose,

Betfair jingle of shingle lifted from

the big, flat bird-table when cars arrive in

Cumpstones drive or if they leave.

*

You intend to twice reference the MacBethian

treeline of windmills, with their Mercedez

Benz sign arms revolving out there

on the vertical wall of the Irish Sea.

*

As a fellwalker you smell a free dream on

the breeze wherever you walk in this

bucolic spot, encouraged by the grizzly

drone of the tractor in the background.

*

You love the fresh, redolent, enervating

scent of change fermenting on the ego-loss breeze,

the ferment of music in your head,

the tidal roar of wind in the trees.

*

The edge of The National Park is only

demarcated by traffic lights, on the

bridge over the trout-brown Duddon,

decorated with appropriate faces for the waiting.

*

How the Plough alignment, holy cow,

that goes by the name of “white eyebrow,”

has only worked for a rhythm change in

the White House in my whole lifetime, I do not know.

*

If literature from the city is of alienation

and born from rootedness, it's just repetitive,

the city's the intellectual breeding ground,

and rural life is closer to how we ought live.

*

It's but a myth that countryfolk are dim

just because the rhythm of life is slower,

and that there are tunnels lined with free beer

dispensers, torches and fruit machines in the fell.

*

You reckon the artistic centre of the universe

is ubiquitous, the same ideas available

everywhere on Tap, and a religion can not

be transplanted from its indigenous landscape.

*

The Enlightenment is still the simultaneous

astrological and sociological de-centering

of Man and the White House its child

in terms of both philosophy and build.

*

A bullet to the top of the telegraph pole

standing in the Combe field before the fell  

will only wed you to the mating queen in dreams

and the pole itself is already Robert Lowell.

*

My brother and I mow the grass here

for nothing, for mother, and we share

the workload, dividing the front and back

and it takes a day, still excluding up the beck.

*

Mrs. Bloggins’ Goldfish Has Just Died!

That is the shocking truth revealed inside,

a burlesque newsprint headline, sending

up the parochialism of the same old situation.

*

The Tower is a mad childishing, containing

the fume of the mating queen, a mystery -

and a vanished line: “history is a way of thinking

about history without thinking about history.”

*

I ignored those shoplifters of the world uniting

in a loose, nerveless ballet of looting,

when weird, sudden giants have knocked a new door

that will not lock for all the docs of the law.

*

It is later that we think said WH Auden,

like meaning comes after in riots and art,

like Rimbaud bemoaning the French peasants only

revolting to loot and burn, no coup d'etat.

*

If liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions

and it leads to Hamlet's harmatia irresolution,

pragmatism can be the reactivation

of an attitudinisation in that situation.

ODE TO PAUL

(after Allen Ginsberg)

O Paul, brother-poet, self-avowed gate keeper of language!

While I struggled to recall speaking against September

11^th in 2000, you kept a list of scurrilous phrases,

oxymorons bandied about, like the War on Terror and

the peacekeeping missile – holding them to account!

You said the News less accurate than the Simpsons!

You and I stumbled on the secret key back in the day.

As you later said when we fled the scene of the crime -

“in another world we two could’ve been gay lovers.”

Instead we were what you’d deemed dreamily one day

down at the eclipse of the sun on the road trip “delicate

angst-angels perched on the dome of the world.” We

used to waste – what do you call it again? - poetry on

the holocaust breeze. Which one of us really was it

that first implored the other, the brother poet, to wear

an emotional condom before you fuck my mind, man?

I think it was me, and you treasured it while I forgot,

then you snuck up on me and reapplied it to my mind -

but I might be wrong in that speculation and conjecture.

Already at your request we would hold what you called

“Poetic Conferences” and I for one was enraptured and

enthralled. I loved you and love you still, but as a friend.

It’s just a shame our friendship became a toxic health-risk.

Do you still remember that time on what I have come to

call Lucy in the soul with demons when I pointed up

at the sky as the digital wind blew past and said to you:

“look it’s the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!?”

Now take out your eyes and see in all directions at once!

Soon we were lying beside a dying fire, having had

another, another, another fucking joint and more;

and you were gently fingerpicking the acoustic guitar.

We knew, as you would later say, love under the stars.

We knew the impunity of being true to ourselves was

only the same as being what we dreamed we were.

I sometimes hear you through my pillow, sometimes

lean on your elbow even from here, you are a part

of my mutation, my cave painting, do you understand?

You are still by my side and still my treasured friend

when my mind has to bifurcate and I adopt a new sense

of self in the flux of time – you’re included, you’re in.

You’re here and me as well, you are there for me still.

I can’t believe I helped that guy to get this way, you see?

We use as you say each other’s words in what we say.

Excellent news was our ideal; we were two New Beats.

We carried portable, analogue notebooks like butterfly-

nets trawling the new air for a round map of sound.

We tried to go on the road in England where one is

only ever something like seventy three miles from the sea.

We used to savour, taste, ingurgitate our language.

As I wait for words, and I think “sadness is a dogshit

emotion, sadness is a dogshit emotion, sadness is

a dogshit emotion,” I remember the way we two

would savour it, internalise it, whatever the utterance.

It makes me sick the way my life has gone, for not having

you around anymore, and for being that diagnosed crazy,

the kid who went too far, was sent insane. I am only just

accepting, analysing, examining the possibility that

I really did – as my mother has long since said - fry my

brain – and you were there too. And at other times

what laughters, what demeanours! And now this

is nothing but brain-soup, all skewiff and Amnesiac

is a Radiohead album I got in there, because in the past

we would listen to them which all seems a bit like

liquid narrative momentum has to be married to

existential energy = mc squared. We newly have no contact.

And I can’t cry. Maybe I am having a mild acid flashback.

We can’t just bury it in the sand now that we’re older.

I can’t believe all those years are consigned to the wastepile,

what with our not being in regular contact anymore.

Friends scatter when you’re diagnosed. It’s lonely.

By which I mean my bed. Maybe I mean my bed, that is.

I sit on it tonight with a feeling of fright. There is

no audience. There is no point. There is not even

any point stopping. Other than to gladly get to sleep.

That reminds me of the night of the apocalyptic trip.

I was glad to sleep after the 24 hour nightmare, and

the next day I felt empty, and wonder if have ever since then,

except in glimpses, glimpses of Romance, glimpses

of a purple from blue and red combined feeling,

glimpses of a gaseous drug wafted through the air vent,

glimpses of love like a purple velvet box. I don’t

do drugs anymore, I think them a bore, I think there

nothing more boring than a poet who turns up saying

“I’ve had more drugs than you have had hot dinners;”

and like my dad said drugs are monumentally selfish

and he would’ve had a few landmarks before the Game.

I know, it is crude to call all drugs drugs, without

differentiation of their sliding scale, distinguishing

the spectrum, the plethora, the array – and the

higher up in medicine you get the more you realise

we are MADE of drugs – but still I do not wish to

keep talking about that bad acid trip, or keep any

drug poems in my work. So many years have been

wasted on taking drugs for the sake of wild, literary

experiment when the beck went unexpressed down

to the sea, where we once walked, where you

picked up a pebble and threw it and said “I am

rearranging God,” which I thought quite excellent.

For you were silver-tongued, had a way with words.

I hope you still write, for your style was spare,

was conversational without becoming prosaic, like

the mundane compressed, where I was more opulent

because impressed by Jim Morrison in my quest.

Do you remember that New Beat Manifesto we wrote

in the barn at the foot of the fell, where we expressed

ambitions to “abjure clinging to temporal wealth,

bondage to surface gods of illusion, renounce

worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs

us of our bodies, get sober from the advertising

trance, touch the texture not name side of life?”

By now you will be buying shiny things above the

fireplace for your wife! Whom I have never met!

You used to fall in and out of love all the time,

were quite cult-ish and it was I that said to you

over the phone “it’s time for you to settle down and

marry that woman,” even though I’d never met her,

right before my mature student’s degree, in my

mid-twenties, which was at the end of our run!

I still believe in the psychogeographic derive, I

still go commando, still have cum stains on my jeans.

I no longer call people ‘man’ and ‘dude’ but do feel

free to connect in all directions most of the time.

I remember expressing to you that existentialism

was a child at the pick and mix with a credit card,

that politics was a choice between two plates of

dogshit, that it’s better to have a cup of tea than

it is to kill yourself, that there are more doors in

the brain than atoms in the universe. Our world

arrived at a series of maxims, arrows, aphorisms,

axioms, which are more true the more elegant they

are. They are also better bound to life than listed.

I think you should check out Michael Hofmann b/t/w.

His ideal was poems the shape and texture of bricks.

I’m not going to be the one who said he got it

from Allen Ginsberg, because that is not true.

And do you remember the jobs we used to have to do?

Do you remember working night-shifts in the roofing

tile factory, like the stentorian guts of a monster?

That we called it “noble slavery” what we did?

Will you one day sell my credentials to your daughter?

What happened to our little tribe, our clique?

You know, I’ve read The Symposium, and was going to

say we fell in Platonic love like soul-mates but

Plato’s Symposium is all about homo-erotic love -

and we were never homosexual, we were bicurious

at best, and now I contemplate the glorious unlikelihood

of being something like a black, lesbian, lefthanded

Jewish woman living in isolation at the foot of

the fell, in Cumbria, in the poem, in its voice, for all

the voice in the poem is not necessarily the same

as the name on the front, which we two knew about,

being within, therefore understanding the concepts

of the University courses, as I say, for our being

inside them, working within them, Deconstruction,

postmodernism, Russian Formalism, andcetera.

I wish we could have but one more John and Paul

Poetic Conference before I kick the bucket, more

than I wish we could have another fucking joint,

though back in the day the two meant the same.

These days I take advice from Dr. Bob who contends

that the brain releases cannabinoids naturally for

moments of signification like reaching the top of

a mountain, and to flood your brain un-naturally

makes meaning and signification become aleatory,

a mess. The crazy palimpsest of memory starts to

gain meaning at any random point of intersection.

The joints we used to smoke back in the day would

amount to thousands if not more, and they were

stronger, much stronger, than the joints of the 1960’s.

My dad used to say one of the tragedies of September

11^th was that gorgeous pollen from the Muslim World

was now much harder to obtain, and if there was

some knocking around, he would smoke it still. My

dad rolled the best spliffs I ever smoked bar none.

He was also rather good at arranging a photograph.

He would make us say sex not cheese before the camera.

Sometimes we would be photo’d before a pile of bricks.

He loved bricks, you see – but this should be about

you – or not as the case may be – I mean isn’t it I

that says to write of the living is rather rude? If

sorry weren’t just a game I would say it now.

Still I could not resist writing an Ode to you,

for all the voices told me to, and they know what

is best to do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard any.

I too remember when life was a cold, blank, inscrutable

mirror. I dreamed once of a novel written on shards

of slate in a quarry and when I woke I thought instead

of a poem taking the form of shards of a broken mirror.

I tried to turn to positive-self-messaging, to self-help,

after our friendship, our run, and it worked for a while

but these days don’t “meditate to realise creativity” anymore.

Whatever happened with regard to Drugs Curse Madness

I am still here, keeping up a conversation, thinking

“literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness

alone,” and how not to twist this plain-song into

something clever that it was never planned to be.

Again the point of my poem may be that we never

once got a chance to speak about things that still

should probably by now go left mentioned so

I won’t go opening the wound to see if it has healed.

I will say it has congealed and that I have a plan:

to get through without mentioning certain things

like I were writing love poems for the mating queen

in the flesh in that optimistic, pre-Millennial world,

which all became otiose, obsolete, extraneous at

the falling of the Towers at the heart of paper powers.

Yes, I think I will get a job, to try and park in the

dark, knowing the darkness holds the sentient spark,

the brightest light, as the Romantic cliche goes,

and what I am talking about hopefully no-one knows,

but you, who have read my subsequent e-mails, flowing

straight from the Brain Jewel Centre to your eyes.

O woe is me no longer for I have had it with bandages.

I have had it with the big black man up in the sky.

So there is a fold in the paper, like crossing the Alps.

Actually I don’t even know what Lowell means by

that but know he envisioned some kind of net,

before me, as did Joyce before him, and O, how

easy it would be to open up on something like

over-arching, olfactory rhymes in the concepts

of Ginsberg’s opening two poems, but who would

write poetry about poetry except a dullard, when

birds are singing, and the sun comes out from behind

a cloud, and the cloud was in the same sentence

where I envisioned the net in 1989 and yes they do

think it why we have the cloud today, and what a

glorious day it is too, like Thom Yorke sang in

Lucky, it’s going to be a glorious day, so I just

thought I would say goodbye and also say hey.

After all hey is not a bad thing to say this transient,

this gleaming day. Whenever I started to write this

it’s approaching winter now. Things have transpired.

I have found out. It’s fine I do not mind. You are

a good ‘un because you are a worker, as saith

my mother, whom it would seem. Anyhow, I

don’t blame you or her. But I see why you never

came up fro the alignment with the rest of the band

when my dad was still here. O naughty boy, you

kept that one quiet. Nevermind. Anyhow, as I say

it is later now. I am nursing 1000’s of files. Not

for the first time, I imagined yesterday what it would

be like if poets were transferred like footballers.

“David Morley has moved to Carcanet for 45 million,”

announced the radio. “He will perform every week

unless he is injured. If he is injured he cannot perform.”

That’s my updating of the tradition we find in

the Merseyside Beats of “Top of the Poets.” I love

that. I don’t even think we still have Top of the Pops

let alone Top of the Poets. We would undoubtedly

have been the new Lennon and McCartney if

the world listened to such a plight. Anyhow, I

have been up all night. It’s actually ben years since

I started this poem, which I like. I haven’t even

bothered re-read it. I like poems such as Un

Saison En Enfer, Pearl, The Marriage of Heaven

and Hell, the Four Quartets, The Waste Land,

The Lords And The New Creatures, so many long

ones. I like Paradise Lost as well. In the meantime

some angels fell from the government to help me.

They came to help me organise my work. It’s been

long. The angel-sponsored write-a-thon has gone on.

Now it is a nice enough day, and I wonder what

to say. You were a genius actor back in the day.

By now some have contended my Ginsberg emulation

is cumbersome but I may have said it already. I

do appreciate Ginsberg, knowing where to begin,

that affront, that olfactory over-arching rhyme

of the concepts of his first and second poem without

disclosing what the concepts are. I wish, I wish I

had, I wish I had a way into it all like that, but

by now my University friend has helped me

to organise something or other. I am 12 books

and 12 or maybe more albums in to a failed career.

It’s an Age of Self-publication and I haven’t begun.

This morning things sit pretty on my file. It gets

complicated when half the time you’re trying to make

it as a musician and the other half as a page-bound poet.

I like Charles Simic by the way. He’s an anti-Fascist.

When it comes to the dust that lies at the bottom

of everything, he’s an expert. That seems to be

what we should aim for, low. I don’t even know

if we two shall meet again in thunder, lightning

or pain, but I would imagine not. This new government

by the way, they filled me with a sense of optimism

and camaraderie when they came in. Maybe I

was too right-wing before, but if so, I flipped round

to the left. Nevertheless I would still wish to avoid

becoming Anon. It’s never been a desire of mine

and I don’t think it to do with ego or politics, but

the freedom of the soul to breathe. The spirit

dances to the morning. The soul of the world

needs healing. I am chatting facets and assets

and really have none. There are buried aspects

of reality that need exhuming. I could on for a long

time, soft, strong and everlasting. I was once offered

the idea that my song lyrics are meant for wiping

up semen and I liked that. It’s good to plug a singular

channel. Hofmann had bricks and I once had defaced

bank notes, as an undergraduate vexed by what

we saw on the morning News together. What exciting

New Beat adventures we used to have and to hold.

We took our New Beat notebooks into the sea,

fully clothed, and washed away the stains in seawater.

That was down in Kent but I know most of what

happened went unrecalled. The spirit dances. The

spirit dances to the weather of the soul. The spirit

dances to the drug of memory. The spirit dances.

Acid could be a spirit-level for the spirit. Anyhow,

I grow garrulous as the wife of Bath. It has been

too long so I may need to say so long. “Tucker

has been sold to the Blogspot page for 7 pence!”

the radio announces. “He will play every week

unless he is injured!” Barnes has scored a chicken.

Barnes hasn’t scored a chicken. Has Barnes

scored a chicken? I don’t think so. Anyhow, by

now you know that we love you. You are welcome

here any time. You once said I lived in an amazing

place and I do, but so do you, and the same ideas

are available everywhere, and the artistic centre

of the universe is ubiquitous. Thanks for the prolonged

Gap Year, the memories of which are mottled and

pot-holed. Thanks for being a good friend to me.

By now you may never see me again, but I thought

to make a mental reminder of the times… the new

‘Howl’ is what I have in mind. I hope you still

have and look after my book of Blake’s Poems

and Prophecies, which I got from my father for

Christmas one year and left down your way. I

was going to ask for it back, seeing as it may

have sentimental value but decided not to. I still

have your book of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I

still wonder of school re-unions to which I never go.

They collaborate into a rolling maul, and cruise

through the houses, through the rooms, collecting

metaphors from the hedgerows. Yes it is getting

towards winter, and my block is going. I remember

listening to the Soft Machine in your room, the

line that says “I don’t need power, I’m only 21!”

It was the same for me, even though we were

post-Millennial people by then, plugging our senses

in the mains, not flower-power generational hippies.

I’ve got some song on Bandcamp and Soundcloud now.

One of them is ‘Alas The Day’ which you used to

like. I remember playing it to you in your pagoda.

There is not a cloud in the sky today, only the cloud.

I wander lonely in the cloud without you, recalling

again the time you said I phoned you after bad acid.

Before we got phones. Appeared like a serpent.

I don’t take any drugs anymore. Only the meds.

My new friend says “what you’ll find is no beds,

no meds,” and he was right. It doesn’t mean I can’t write.

I had a dream b/t/w where Michael Hofmann appeared,

with a guitar, detuned, strumming two chords, singing

a melody over the top, with no words, down

the barn, where James and I once tried to make

a house of dad’s unused house-bricks, no cement.

It’s difficult getting started when someone flies

two planes into the Twin Towers on the day you

forewarned of as a schoolboy. Not to mention

all the green things all over Hamlet’s face. It

would still be nice to provide the world a visionary

and I have the CV for it. What do you do though

when poetry becomes a machine for remembering

to take your medication? Maybe that machine is

the clock. I was a man of action and possibility

back in the day. I think now about the brain’s in-built clock,

the way you can pick up your book the morning after

putting it down and find yourself staring at the exact

word where you left off the night before. The brain

is an amazing thing, the biggest erogenous zone and

we used to say has more doors than there are atoms

in the universe. Through them we walk. Through

them we shake hands. Through them we have this

idea of the “mouth”. Mouth to mouth we communicate.

We go straight for the mouth that is, bypassing

the senses in perception of reality. It’s something

you and I started but which has a long history too.

Anyhow, by now the sky is blue; and my mind is

less obtuse than it sometimes can be. There are

people in this confluence of selves you like and

people you don’t like. I would say the existential

detective case of peeling back layers of falsity to

find nothing, nothing underneath is the same as

the ontological archaeology of selfhood, is the same

as the sense of self as a tumulus or postmodern burial

mound is the same as that Plathian sense of the self

as a multiplicity and that in this day and age when

you go looking for voice as the Holy Grail of writers

you find voices, in the clinical sense, and that culture

has broken apart into plurality, that plurality has

flourished, that margins are centres and centres margins,

that as I say culture is incommensurable islands

of discourse, and that this is what we observed in

our time, and read of in Diet Theory booklets about

the postmodern condition, where surface is depth,

and that you and I between us conjured the best

possible name for a book of philosophy about it all -

when we came up with McTruth And Flies. It

remains yours because you said McTruth before

my brother Dr. Robert and I came up with And Flies.

I would say, to give you a helping hand, that

isomorphic in the imputation of speciousness,

there is ironic equipoise held in their unseemly

collocation – but that is as far as I got with it all.

Amis used to say the devices of postmodernism

were not new in themselves but what was new was

the way they all sprang up at the same time all over

the world. Between me starting this Ode to You

a long time ago and now Martin Amis has died,

crossed the water to the other side. I read most

of his work on top of the course in the end, and

appreciated The Second Plane, where he argues

that no, Washington didn’t wound itself. So

there you go, you have it from the top of the tree.

Now I shall relent for a while, to set you free.

Now I shall return to this Ode to pretty thee.

It may not last because of ongoing workmanship,

but since last updating this little blip, an Order

has taken shape, including songs and poems

all divided out into collections like it were Blake.

Or Ginsberg. Or whatever you want, even Hofmann.

The spirit dances to the music of the heart. I

try and restart if only to elongate the length

and difficulty of perception as an aesthetic end

in and of itself. I feel charged with a responsibility

to do justice to that which has been seen and

foreseen, to endless visions and revisions, by

the highest and most benign authority. We don’t

wish for a return of Augustan values, are more

Romantic than that, but given what I have attested

to I wouldn’t be surprised if angels that work

for the State have had to intervene. It would be

sad if the witness’s best effort were his seven

year old homework from before observations

were made, and at the age of 43, but now I think

I can safely say things have been, or are being

sorted out. I am reminded of something TS Eliot

said about the supervention of novelty upsetting

to pre-existing Order. You were jealous of my course!

I remember when the Cambridge days paused -

when I went off to Warwick and you to Leeds

and you were jealous of my course! I could spot

a villanelle or a pantoum and you liked the way

I suddenly knew about the poetic form. By now

I am thinking of something else again – how Man

should evolve out of racist jokes and replace them

with “farting out of the wrong orifice” for humour

that has antecedents in James Joyce. I think it

happened. So many things I thought came true.

The office block party where every floor was

a decade in music, drugs and fashion was mentioned

in the 2000 conversation in the barn. The binaural

earphones. September 11^th. The Plough alignment.

I even managed the exact wording of my future

tutor-to-be’s un-published scientific paper. He

must’ve been in the water supply what with

working as a scientist in the Lakes when I

was a child. A good writer he is, but alas I have

medication and more and many more to contend

with. The wall of medication VS the wall of voices.

However high my anti-psychotic goes I still

hear voices and I don’t suppose anyone knows

why that is, apart from that it might be but

the wind in the arthritic windows! Anyhow,

as I say, as I address you again this Autumnal

day, I have a file with all the poems and all

the songs in some kind of logical cohesion.

An organic whole, you could call it. Whether

the reality-shaping principle of art comes at the

expense of a chaos that is real I do not know, but

even as I steal myself to write and grit my teeth

you, Paul, still come out of my myriad mouth.

We are spliced! Hence it could be that connection

via phones or online represents a de-radicalisation

of a connection that is real in just being friends.

This meandering of tea, clothes, air, hair, water,

spaghetti, this ordinary speech, may seem mediocre

unto some but you might like it and so might my mum.

I am going for a Miltonian metre and measure.

Whenever I try and contact you these days, a

few days later I hear you, with a silent retort

that lies within my spiritual being. The spirit

dances to the music of imagination. That might be

my favourite embedded definition thus far for

the de-familiarisation of perception. Timeless

ideas are transmitted across time, incredible

hardships muffled by those barely able to hear.

Intelligence distilled into truth is another. I fear

more and many more things than I did years before.

To stamp a template on the witness’s mind is not

my business, nor to posit a tome in a foreseen

human repository’s hand, knowing he will go

through what I went through, while I rest in loam.

This is not a name-dropping game. We came

to come and then we went. Drop what you

are doing and come. Welcome to life my name

is Pain, you have met me again and again in the rain.

It hurts to set you free, sang Jim. Apparently

I became a blur to look at, became kind of dim.

That’s not in the intellectual sense, but in terms

of my visual appearance. Things shift around.

There is great upheaval in my brain. Gondwanaland

plates move with spaghettig bolognese, that

folk song of a recipe passed down through the hands.

Ginsberg would quote Blake around about now,

about who is the bad guy in the film. I imagine

if Molloch, however you spell him, was a Boss

in a poetry computer game, maybe the Doors

computer game, with me as witness being the main

character, the one who acts, who is a puppet on a

string for the sake of the entertainment of those

at home, plugging in, always plugging in, to

some new form of the game. I think a game

is a rehearsal for death, a wide yellow circle

with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference

closing in. I think The Lords And The New Creatures

is also a game. I think it is also a media-compression

experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot,

Californian sun. I even think God is a game that

operates through the mechanism of permutation.

When God is a game, the birds that take apart

a gun in the tree outside the mental hospital window

could be a part of the game, a constituent entity.

I would say that night we took LSD was a shame.

I wish we hadn’t and I think you think the same.

I was talking beforehand, fluent in philosophy,

fluent in poetry, and afterwards just felt blank.

Felt unreal. And I think we were spiked by someone

that saw us coming. That white powder we were

supposed to rub into our gums. It took me decades

to find out that is not how you take it. That is how

to give someone else a bad time. So I think they

made us do that, knowing we were going to procure

some LSD so that we would start to have an epic

nervous breakdown in the middle of the trip. I felt

unreal after it. At least you had already left school!

I was still stranded mid-A-levels and it changed me.

I was no longer a beacon of hope and intellectualism.

But with all this talk of god being a game, I feel

I am coming back round. There had to be everything

in order for there to be anything at all, I feel. So.

Drugs are bad. I am sad. Thinking of the time

I lost the plot and was violent to my dad. Through

whom I learned so much. He believed in me.

He is gone. Everyone in our gang had a gone dad.

I think of my dad, and did you know Beavis

was an high-functioning autist, and did you know

Pooh Bear is undying, and under the low-hanging

sensational star of evening I actually think of you,

who was in love with the feeling from Day One?

I am starting to see this one will never be done.

Whomsoever broke my mind was most unkind.

The brain can self-heal, you know. The brain is

therefore not a computer, because it can. My dad,

he prescribed a routine of self-help, positive

self-messaging, replacing with happy memories,

getting up with the sun, logging on the brain, with

fruit before any nicotine, and said if I keep reading

and reading and reading I will eventually win,

or at least something good will happen to me then.

This table where I write a fable. All of a sudden

Cain pulled out a gun and killed Abel, now

that’s a story. Labour and Tory were in purgatory.

A bimbo in limbo is a waif in a safe. I never came

to much, feel I have had an unlucky life. I never

was dealt a good hand, you understand. My hand

is underwater now. It’s a good job it doesn’t need

to breathe. If I could pull it out with a clasp of water,

it would all spill. My brother, Dr. Robert, wants

me to end some great piece of important literature

with the words “all of a sudden the metal thing

fell down,” but I rather felt that was my idea first.

Some things are vaguely familiar when you fry

your brain, and you find out you’re right. It

was the same for when The Towers came down.

It took me years and a course of medication and

a diagnosis to even remember that Millennial conversation

in the barn with my brothers where it was foreseen.

I lived in a leaf, in a dream. I never went far,

never travelled that much, nor got a license

to drive a car. I am skint, single, unemployed,

mentally ill, car-less, medicated, living with mum.

Books are my passion now, and they are on screen.

I don’t do drugs because they make you obscene.

It just shows what a poor model for sanity Jim

Morrison was and before him Kurt Cobain whom

it would seem lived like an experiment too. I have

lived like an experiment, man, unloosed the mind

of form, method-acted every adjective in ‘Howl’

and attained visual radio broadcasting dreams,

dreams that billow like a weeping willow in the wind,

and swirl in purple, digital swathes about the head,

the had of the deranged seer, who cannot rightly

note much but colourful smoke, I mean that is what

I thought it was, colourful smoke, then visual

radio, then something digital, then came Lockdown.

With Lockdown came sobriety and everything

returned to the boring smell of water, isness, status

life detail from creative non-fiction, the daily

soap opera, quotidian consciousness, the goldfish

bowl of reality. Star Trek is just Neighbours in space.

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

Anyhow, by now I don’t eve watch telly, let alone

smoke and I hardly ever drink, less than one pint

per week, and it’s not like I occupy a library either,

I mean I do still read, but not so voraciously

as during my mature student degree, and we see

that I am trying to get the best out of me, and

feel a tear un-cryably sad for some lost, little

girl that I never had, and for the loss of my youth,

the old days, when we spoke of McTruth. You

should do one called McTruth And Flies. I would

if it were entirely mine own, but alas, it is yours.

By now the angels above me on CCTV have

promised that if I can bring things to a close

they will keep me out of harm’s way, treat me

kindly, allow me peace and quiet like a retired hobbit

come back to the Shire after an epic quest. So

it is that with sooooooo much more to say, or

is it nothing at all, but tea, meandering tea,

I remark at the beautiful shape and order

of it all, and turn in my badge, and abjure

and let better people continue, knowing as I do

as little as Hamlet in flames and before it becomes

an office job, nothing known, that is, except that

when it came to you, my friendship was true, and we

had a good run of it, running through the woods,

or walking through the fields, poets and equals,

friends whatever the weather, forever and ever amen.

TRON

RADIOHEAD GOING ELECTRONICA RECORDING THROUGH STATE OF THE ART BINAURAL EARPHONES SINGING “PLUG MY SENSES IN THE MAINS” DETUNING STRINGS ALL THE WAY DOWN UNTIL TAKING E BECOMES TAKING F SHARP MINOR STRANGE ATTRACTORS FROM CHAOS THEORY CD SHOPS CLOSING EVERYONE GETTING MOBILE PHONES FRACTAL PATTERNS OF SALVIA DIVINORUM THE NEW APHEX TWIN ALBUM THE END OF THE MOVIE PI SMOKING SO MUCH GREEN GM SKUNK IN 2001 ALL CAME TO SITUATE THEMSELVES ON THE SAME LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: GROUND ZERO: WHOM IT SEEMS IS LONG IN THE PAST BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR FROM WHICH NO SONIC MACHINATION ESCAPES.

SAME DIFFERENCE

When my old road trip buddy Paul

first mentioned the neologism McTruth,

I saw a black, avaricious

anarchy of menacing,

dog-shit-sucking, fucking

flies swarming in the kitchen,

having engorged themselves

on shit, come to seek sugar

spilled on surfaces, and

everywhere their zany,

computer game zigzags

cursing the kitchen air,

their drum n bass rhythm,

their coupling in copulation –

which reminded me that Nature is

not always an art exhibition,

but can be a great, dark

disobedience of death,

an immunity to Reason...

and yet I can report from

the bottom of my heart that

nobody else could see them but me.

I was alone with their visitation,

hideously and pitifully alone.

A STILL FROM THE VIRTUAL DEATH MACHINE

Life is a mid-death crisis.

Life is a dress-rehearsal for death.

Life is a dull throb of loneliness

in your breast, as well as

a colourful spew going

on outside the cave walls of the skull.

Life is shit then you die.

Life is a sentence down here on this

prisoner planet, society bounding

in circles round the sun,

never getting any closer.

Life could be but a memory

as Nick Drake once sang.

Life, which we still don’t know

much about, might’ve

originated under the sea.

Without going down

the K-hole entirely, starting

every sentence the same,

life should be alchemised as love.

Life should be easier for us all.

MORNING PAGES

The day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me!

I remember banks where pens were free!

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi!

Love goes veggie for reasons of Disney!

but not to the future do I cast my glance therein.

I crick my neck yet again, then pace

in a circle around the table, watching

for imaginary snakes outside on the patio…

I count things too, sometimes to

music looping round in my head but

the poet’s point is it’s nearly springtime again.

With a blunt yellow crayon I doodle.

Caroline is the last yellow crayon!

For after that what else is there?

“I don’t know” is the honest answer.

I must keep off my computer.

I must keep off my computer.

I must keep off my computer -

maybe The Doors chant room is visible

in Bart Simpson’s black board?

I sit down and leave the bathroom -

for things haven’t got this way -

and feel negative about the day ahead.

Nothing too Doorsian is going on

in terms of smuggling black, liquid Night by Mars,

nor the darkness holding a Holy glow...

but when I go to sleep it is blackest Night.

Hi my name is Jason Bourne, not sure if you know.

The country of my origin is uncertain.

Inwardly I wander to find out truth,

who I am and where I am from and

in what world and time I’ve arrived.

As I write my last yellow crayon snaps.

I get another one out of the droning fridge.

I must not look within as if into a well.

My wallet is yellow on the kitchen table.

Van Gogh liked the colour black because

it reminded him of our inevitable end,

the way even a game of cards foreshadows death.

The car is harmless as a door mouse.

The Yew Tree, traditionally a Satanic

symbol, guarding the closed gate, probes

its roots down, looking for the Sahara Desert’s sand.

One equals nought point nine recurring.

The books I have brought out are amazing.

Life is not a mathematical negation of itself.

Already this deep into the actual night,

I stand up again, and live my life.

Barnes has scored a chicken.

I still listen to my CD collection.

Time does not evaporate, but pass.

Nothingness plus Nothingness

does not equal Nothingness.

It is only now and now and now that the general

“machine for remembering to take medication”

works and I go and fetch my pills.

I wash them down with a house-brick.

There is something pestilent about remaining

pure in a storm of voices, driving

a straight line, cutting the middleman out.

It’s not that I wish to create something

without the help of voices, the new

A. I, a succubus swooping down,

the State, my brother, my mother, it’s just that

I like co-imagination to be random access.

Naturally, it being night-time now,

I should say that if the windows were washed,

we’d see nothing through them

except the white mirrors reaffirming

the quiet interior of the kitchen,

painted a plush, Mediterranean coral.

Nothing is lost between thought and expression.

The moment my mother’s beck

hits the Irish Sea is not the same

as the moment I relent and incorporate a voice.

They’re never at hand when you need them -

like drug dealers on street corners

giving out free opportunities for vice.

The art on the wall is not indomitable.

Around about now one star

leads to another star, unto those

at Glastonbury stone circle, dancing

as they come down from an E.

I’d even say my feet touch the ceiling,

that I don’t wish to be a being of pure feeling,

but you’d easily be convinced by that.

If I am from Japan I might be Peter Pan.

The alphabet dances to the music of the spirit-level.

A dead telly wrapped in cling-film

can pass as an actual film in the gallery.

Robots have taken over from love.

Silence comes from a record player.

The fire beside me is entrancing.

Bracken sprouts from my mouth.

I am showing you an I. D. card made of water.

There are customs on the conscious/ unconscious border.

Each hand-clap I hear is not an App.

The second hand stops -

meadows maketh man -

art comes from without -

the books on the shelf are for sale -

there is much food in the house -

I don’t wish to start again -

the condition of tea is scintillating enough…

I took a real camera to sleep’s crumbling

biscuit shore and brought back stills

smuggled out of the unconscious,

and h-a-n-d-e-d them to my mother.

She said she couldn’t see them properly

because her last pair of glasses was broken

and stylus is broken like the first stylus

and blackbird has spoken uncrackable code.

I described the pictures to her

because she couldn’t see them.

A selfie tells a thousand birds.

She said to use them as backgrounds

for poems, NFT haiku, so

I looked in my stash of defaced

bank notes, Punk Koans and the like

and purged them of light-fingered-ness

and copy and pasted the words on top

and then removed the photos themselves.

This left only words, so mum

who does not need glasses for her ears

could hear instead of see my work,

which she said in the end was good.

Then a tractor overtook a car.

FACEBOOK POEM

Bands I liked in my youth include

The Smashing Pumpkins

Bush

Hole

Radiohead

Nirvana

Pearl Jam

Soundgarden

Silverchair

Rage Against The Machine

The Doors

STARING AT THE LIGHTSHADE

My stuff is crying.

Activity: tea.

You have to turn inward

to be a philosopher.

“We knew it would seem

like a hoax but

still exist in meaning.”

Sorry for the angst.

I like the yellow

M in ‘home.’

p is b at 19. 16 dot co dot UK.

Go nestle up, go now.

Go nestle up, 268, war, bliss.

In the year 4025,

I see maths in the lightshade,

haven’t G.

4025 whispers

of inactivity.

H W 5 M B @ W A

2025 V

Gnostic

4025 is 2058

G H and L

minus 25 to the power of 181

HWY one Y9 5. 3 %

Dead 5 ½

4025 I over J. X.

in over a

2. 5 ! over !

T. S. Eliot of GAMES

gingerbread

John Money 28. 365 mg 53. 39

Hype

hypno-

hypnagogic

HW31 75 point three point nine over 9

HWY LOVE V. 6. 3 %

3, 4, 5,

5, 9, 8, 7,

9 HWY MONEY 78. 65 7th

YA . 95 NOT / 73

HWY ONE

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

JARF/ JERT/ BERT/ HEART

Here in 4035,

NOB 56. y. 69. STEWART

4035 over / a synapse

Go naturally 58. 8 say because I dot.

49

8/ m

9/ my.

It changes so fast,

the writing,

in hypervision,

the tables turned,

and a bedroom light is a

mathematical proof enough.

Giant P is 439 + BAND over 39%.

WARTER, WARTER,

Mary wary way was love point D.

I can only quote snippets and chips.

Flora ultra Syd was

9. 5 and 7. 5 BOX.

HWY was 39 point JOB DONE.

Hyde high one, chance Cartesian whisper.

Type HWY love only 58% move.

Hyper-love YA it’s a gone 58%.

c b d 7 points to 6 binge.

Mary, C. B. 5,

light-speed wake done.

Hyde one over 9. 8.

Hyde Park is a place in Leeds.

2 over 7 over 3 over d. d.

3 point 2 point 5 over 5 over 30x.

Now I turn out the light,

otherwise I’d still be there reading,

reading the patterns on the paper lampshade,

turned into an ecstatic medley of maths.

FRIDAY 13TH REVISITED

I have a scar+ that is the new colour.

I wear it outside in the winter months.

When I am getting coal

for my mother, who is old

and feels the cold,

I wrap it round my neck.

It keeps me protected.

Without it I would feel the chill.

When I come back inside,

after going out there, for whatever

reason it is, I take it off.

I hang it up on the hook.

There is stays, hanging,

in among the coats, until

I need it to go outside again.

SONG

NHS, it’s good to plug in,

the science works, so let me begin…

I went from reading the lesson from John

at the Carol Service in Eton College Chapel

to living in Sheltered Accommodation

and eating at the soup kitchen.

From top to bottom I fell,

in a katabatic direction,

looking for Rock Bottom.

The poet extirpates every trace

of recognition from the myriad mind,

unlooses the mind of form,

method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’

to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.

And the NHS, which I heard called

“The National Hypochondriac Service,”

and “a religion substitute for the atheist

left,” has been there for me.

Now I am back in my mum’s

million pound house at the foot

of the fell, but we have no money.

We survive off State benefits.

We can’t afford to heat the house

at the fag-end of winter, and

there are no jobs for miles, not

that I can even work what with

Stress being an enemy of my mental illness.

Relying as I do on the NHS,

on State benefits too, I think

to explore the left is to explore

a beautiful, compassionate emotion.

EIGHTEEN QUESTIONS

Why must I sleep through the day?

Because you stayed up through the night.

Why have I got nothing to say?

Because your mind isn’t right.

What of Barnes has scored a chicken?

It’s something to say but not true.

Is it time to knock the battery off the pollen?

That’s something for a child to do.

Can’t I think of something worth saying?

You’ve a list of things that have been said before.

Should I not know before I start playing?

Maybe but there is no fixed law.

If I stop what exactly will happen?

You’ll get restless and start again.

Is it just then a nervous affliction?

Maybe all I need is a length of metal chain.

But what exactly does that mean?

It means whatever you make of it.

Do you think Flora was the undying One?

Maybe but you might have idealised it.

Does I. T. stand for Captain Marvel?

No, but I can see where you’re going with that.

Should I let my myriad mind unravel?

It might be fine in your guarded habitat.

Is Lucy in the soul with demons an actual substance?

That is something I do not know.

And what of the clock unto State science?

It’s not something to outright say.

And what of the dotty clouds floating by?

The way they change is like incipient species in Darwin.

And what about my brother’s <BEE>?

You shouldn’t say but still get it in.

And what when there’s no more to be said?

There’s always more to not say.

And what about when you’re too exhausted?

Then you must try and sleep through the day.