ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My heart-felt thanks go to my family and their partners for helping me get through this work. Susie Tucker my mum has been invaluable as have James Tucker, Dr. Robert Tucker and Hannah Tucker in helping me. Hannah’s partner Seb and Dr. Robert’s partner Claudia should also be mentioned as having helped me formulate the present text.
FOREWORD
We need to redo the <BEE> one, the one where some songs are structured according to James’s new da Vinci circle, in which <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.
By now we know we cannot do the Flee one, the one about Flora’s system, for several key parts of that file are in the <BEE> one.
We also can’t do the Flee one because the second collection, the one that comes after it, is awful as a slice of dogfood pie.
It’s expensive to publish so we thought we might as well incorporate the wee one, which means it precedes the <BEE> one and has a look at the net in the imagination of a child in 1989.
We also thought we should follow up the Wee One and the <BEE> one with the ‘c’ one which is my Nash moment, even a First for science.
It will mean that you’re not disappointed when you get to the end, and you find out it might not be mine, but those who got me to redo the wee one, like jumping through the hoop.
We didn’t get as far as doing a new ‘D’ one but it might begin…
*****
“Look Fufie I can fee feep.”
‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world.
There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn. When he opens his eyes he sees cloud-forms floating by outside but the rest of this no, not-so-special-perception is gone.
In the magic compass Autumn is Optimus Prime.
Still there is no such thing as Time.
Autumn is a time when wasps leave fag-burns in the apples, apples with toe-nails embedded in their cores, and the air has a plaintive, melancholic, wistful, elegiac note and tone...
*****
You might see why there is reason to precede the wee one with this scene, because it comes from way back in boyhood too, and also why it might come after the end of the ‘c’ one.
You might also see that we were right not to do the Flee one for she loves me not, is probably swift ensconced and I am but a fat, hairy, middle aged man.
If the Wee One, The Bee One and the ‘C’ One were all I ever did I would be happy with it, happy as Larry.
Anyhow, this is just to say the Flot is the quest; and yet since they found out my little bro had been with the Flee, they have been trying to get me to “give” one of my early love poems to my little bro.
It’s the really beautiful one that contains the line:
“Her breath a poisonous magic.”
My brother doesn’t even want it, has absolutely no concern for poetry whatsoever and they haven’t even asked my permission.
I remember writing in my seven year old book that we are “not allowed to swap.”
So it is that I give you the Wee One, the Bee One and the ‘C’ One.
THE WEE ONE
INTRODUCTION TO THE KID
When
my father
passed in
2014,
a little
book I
had begun in
1989
at seven years old surfaced – my boyhood
Prep.
It had been locked in the attic at
the foot of the fell all
these years, where
it sometimes made the sound of footsteps that could be heard below.
There
are several pieces missing because the original was stolen before I
had typed it up; but
this will do. I can’t seem to tell what it is about but it mentions
the net. Last
time I published it, even though it wasn’t that long ago, the
frame
wasn’t right
– so this second edition should be better. It
needed the little one at the start to give it shape, order and
purpose that for some reason the previous version left out. I
think what it was about was storing the idea of the net in the attic
in writing to
give
the net a
chance
to
grow
all the way round the world. So I thank whomsoever got me to do it
because it meant I was part of that process. Whether I am allowed to
keep it I do not know, but would say what
happened to me happened to me because I was very well hung as a
child.
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
Ah yes now I need to find another piece… the piece that was lacking when I first brought it out. Ah yes I find it – what is it still doing here? It’s been here since Christmas!
[NO NAME]
teacher rite elephant nite
everything lite lesson love
learn tell everyone Esso orange
ADVENTURE IN A CAR
On a Tuesday morning there was a big car in Form 2 and it had flashing lites all over it and then I said it's a magic car and we all got in to hide and it took off in to space and it landed on the moon then just as we were going to explore the moon a gravity force pulled us and the car under the sea and a propeller came out of the back of the car and we crashed on a ship REC and we tried the canons an they were still red hot. Then we went into the cabin and we saw a captain's chest and twenty fighting pirates and we looked out we saw a whirlpool heading straight towards us and since we were under the sea the whirlpool pulled on top of the water. then we were getting bored so we decided we wanted to go to the dinosaur age. we disappeared to a little island we saw Tyrannosaurus rex then we were all back in Form 2.
WEDNESDAY JUNE 28TH
We made sandcastles on the beach
I am going to meet mummy
today we are having exams this week
it is too dear to buy
Sweden China
country tail
tender street
share lies
late dry
weak poor
small prinsesses
countries is
stories tables men pens manes
TUM TUMPTY TUM
Tum tumpty tum
The cat is playing the drum
Four little mice
Are shaking the ground
Dancing merrily around
Tum- tumpty- tum
The cat is playing the drum
Three little mice are dancing
[NO NAME]
In the picture of the airport
I can see... a runway,
two planes, a controwl
tower, a cloud
and the ire ii net.
SEPTEMBER WEDNESDAY 13TH
one day me and Andrew set off on an adventure in a big jungle. We brought a tent a sleeping bag two knives a rope some matches a spear and an axe. We came in a boat we sailed a thousand miles. It took us six days when we landed on the island we were exhausted so we made camp and feel asleep. In my story there were six monkeys a wizard a tiger and an elephant and two snakes. When we awoke we went hunting we brought a spear and the rope. Just as we got out of the tent a snake fell down in front of us. We threw the spear at it he crawled away in pain. When we came back we had killed a tiger. We had seen the wizard yet but when we came back the tent was gone. Remember the wizard. We went out trying to find it AaaaaaaaHH we just feel in an animal trap we threw the rope up some body hang onto it. It was the wizard. We climbed up he invited us to his house. When we got there we saw my tent instead of the sleeping bag. There was lots and lots of chemacals. The wizard said do you like my house. I stole it from some body. It was my tent i said. Then he gave it back to us and we sailed back home and lived happily ever after.
[NO NAME]
There is a waterfall at the back of our house.
I saw a mural in France.
I lost my blue paints.
Ten plus ten equals twenty.
Our housekeeper is called Joyce.
In our new program there is a Vetacore.
A bomp explodes.
I faded my work.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 4TH
My monster is 12 feet tall and 5 foot wide.
He weighs 13 stone he is very good and friendly he is as strong as ten tigers.
He has got five friends and six enemies.
6100000000 years old he is as fast as a cheetah.
He is only a friend of alive trees.
He talks a little bit of English but lots of alien.
He eats hay and straw and rams horns.
He has got 1000 hearts.
He is very well armed he works 12 hours a day.
he works in houses.
his name is Roy the robot.
He sleeps 3 hours from 6 til 8 and he has got 300 gagats.
THE LAZY WIND
One day the wind would not blow.
He said he was too tired so he fell asleep.
All the flowers died down the boats
stayed still, the wind mills stayed still
the trees stopped talking to each other.
Every body grew sick and hungry.
Who is going to wake him up.
I will said the crow. He flew up in the clouds.
Go away said the wind I’ll sleep for weeks.
When the crow came back the world sulked.
I have got an idea said the cunning fox.
Off he went running away. He told
the wind you can stay asleep
we have got some body to replace you.
No I will not stay asleep and he came
rushing towards them. It’s all right everyone
the wind is comming they got a lot happy.
[NO NAME]
I rely like the leaves that fall to the ground
Specele like to push them around
I like the foul moon hai up in the sky
I try to reach it but it’s much too hai
I like the fruits that are on the trees
They fall down with a little breeze.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 13TH
I have a scar+ that is red and black.
I have dirty feet and I'll make
footprints on the floor.
I threw a snowball and it landed
in my brothers face.
I watched a film and a man was
in a snowstorm.
I went outside and it was snow.
Flakes were falling. On Hallowine
wiches makes spells.
My dog did a puddle on my
bedroom floor.
I made a pattern with my spirograph.
GOOD AND EVIL
Last night at 1. oclock I was sitting up in bed and a dark creature grabbed me by my hand and then came three more. i turned the light on and fainted. They were rielly dangerous. Then four good ones came well I think they were good and I hope they were good ones. They attacked the bad ones with whips. We went off in a big vehicle to a Stone Henge where they lived. one of the bad ones pushed a big stone on top of the vehicle. There were 5 of us we all got out but one still got killed. The good ones were strong. We went and attacked them and we killed them all. 16 more of them came and started to throw rocks at us. They captured all of us and they started to fire guns at us until there was only me and one of the good ones left. Then we escaped and ran away. We made camp and went and attacked them. They killed the good one until there was only me left but 1000000000 more of them came and we killed every bad one on earth.
GRAND-DARTH'S SHIP
People wondered why Don had chosen to become
a deep sea diver. There were so many other things
he could've been. Whatever had put such an idea
into his mind? "Who suggested is?" he was
asked. "No-one", Don always replied.
BLEEP AND BOOSTER
One day Booster made a sonic solidifying gun Bleep thorte it was an earth mouse-trap. It is not a mouse trap said Booster it is a sonic solidifying gun. What can it do. It makes things rock hard look it is nothing and he made Bleep's asteroridade hard. Then he got in his space pod. Commander I've found him he is in deadly danger. He is on planet Gelatanus X he heard a voice help Ime sinking just then Bleep got two ray guns and a back pack. He flew down to the planet and started to shoot the monsters away the ray gun was so hot so it made the planet melt.
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 1ST
One day I was walking in the woods and I saw some popple pushing a little boy around. I went up an tried to stop them. They said to him go and get that delicious apple on that spookey tree and he went and got it. Then the ground started to rumble and lots of ghosts came out and grabbed us. The apple rolled down the hill and fell in to a deep river. And the trees came alive and we got sucked underground then Jamie came along. He saw a big hole in the ground. Just then every thing disappeared and all the bad trees turned into apple trees with lots of apples on.
EVERY
We had a snowball fight with the Widgets.
Go and wait with Boris at Ash Rock. –
The rocks fell from the cliff.
Amanda and Rodey built a snow shelter.
Rockets fly with a jet of flame.
A train puffs a cloud of steam.
My dad dug an underground tunnel.
My dad was mentioning something about Christmas.
We are going to do fractions in maths.
I got on a train at the station.
The first one is a boy’s name.
This one is a lady’s name.
This one is the name of a seaside town.
This one is a doctor’s name.
This one is title of a man.
This one is a question mark.
VIKING NAMES
Vikings liked to make up nick-names for people.
here are some I have made up
Christopher leaker. carrie two teeth.
christophere long nails les.
curly wayne.
nodey claire.
Big mouth Tony.
No tooth wayne.
Small guy Stewart.
Give a way Tony.
Mrs parr in her wight car.
Mis
gab and the Vikings.
WHEN I WAS BRAVE
One day I pulled a radiator off the wall and I blamed it on my brother. And I was very scared and then we went to Carlisle to do some shopping. And I got lost and I was too scared to go and ask a police man. But I went and did it. And just then my dad found me. Then we went back home and it was dark upstairs and I had to go and get something. And I was too scared and I found my dad's torch and I went and got it and then the batteries went flat and I carried on and I got it and I gave it to my dad and he said it took you a long time and I laughed. Then we went to school Wayne and I climbed up a tree, and I did not want to but I did.
ADVENTURE ON THE BEACH
One day me and Wayne went camping and we were exploring a beach. We saw two rowing boats. Three men came out with a big chest. It was nearly time to go home. I said lets go and hide and see who they are. and we did. They carried it into a cave then we went back and we went and had a look. But the cave was gone. Wayne said it is dark now lets go back home. Next day we had a look it was still not there. Then we went back.
Just then i stepped on something then we heard a noise. The cave opened we went in and there was no sign of the box. Just then the cave shut and we could not see a thing. The passage way went down a lot further. When we got to the bottom of the cave it was a lot lighter. Then we saw a big box it was two meters long and half a meter high. It was stuck to the ground. We saw a sledge hammer we smashed the box and lots of treasure poured out. We brought the sledge hammer to the other end of the cave and we smashed our way out. There were 10000 pounds all together 5000 each. We got lots and lots of money.
[NO NAME]
Dark brown is the river
Golden is the sand
It flows along forever
With trees on either hand
Green leaves a-floating
Castles of the foam
Boats of mine a-boating
Where we’ll all come home
CREEPING IN THE CELLARS
My mum asked me to go down in the cellars to get some washing. I found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I saw that the stone could fit into a hole in the wall. I turned it and a door opened on the floor. There were some steps going down I started to unwind the ball of string I followed the steps and they lead to a maze. Just then I heard a grunting noise and fell into a hole. It was full of dead skeletons.
THE CREEPY HOUSE
One day I was walking along in the woods. Suddenly I came across a house. It was quite a big house but it was in ruins. I went to envestergate and I heard a howling nose I could not find what was making the nose and i was quite afraid. I went back home and Jamie had come to play. I said come over here. We looked out of the window. I caught a glimpce of the house. he said shall we go and have a look at that house. I said alright then, lets go.
We went down in the woods and explored. Then we saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine. that's what it was coming from. Then I heard my mum calling me. We went back home. my mum had made some cakes. I was delighted. Just then I tripped over and I fell in a cobweb.
[NO NAME]
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves
Hang trembling
The wind passes thru’.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees
Bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
THURSDAY MARCH 1ST
He has spines all over him. He has got a nose like a pig. A name for Henry the Hedgehog is urchin, Mr. Prickels and Hedge pig. An adder came up and attacked Henry the Hedgehog but he curled up in a pile and the adder jumped back. Henry’s defence system was working. Eventually the adder died. Henry eats worms and leaves, he dreams of eating little chickens. All winter he hibernates in a pile of leaves and he is very warm.
NOTE TO READER
I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink this is the point where, upon filling the first, red exercise book that the young poet wrote
2
John Tucker
English
E
on the front of the first book, then, like making an Escherian shape, wrote on the front of the new, empty, red exercise book:
English
John Tucker
Harecroft Hall
1
[NO NAME]
Colour circles red. How many circles?
Colour triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?
MY BICYCLE ACCIDENT
When I was 4 I was on holiday in Sweden. My dad had just bought me a new bike. The new bike was too big for me. I was going down the hill quite fast. The breaks was to pedal backwards but I could not reach the the pedals. Suddenly the bike got faster I had a bad feeling. I did not what to do. I fell head first in a patch of nettles. My mum heard me crying she came. By the time she found me it was ten o’clock. They asked what hapened. I said it was a long story. They said never ride your bike withouta parent.
MY NIGHT TIME ADVENTURE
One night I was lying in bed and I heard a tapping on the window. I thought it was a branch. I said to myself, it's not a windy night. I looked at my watch it was half past 1 pm. Then I decided to get drest I got a ruck-sack put a packed lunch in it a rope, a compass, a touch, a knife, and a map of our county. I went out the front door. I saw my bedroom light still on so I new which window it was. What was it that was making such a racket. I tied the rope to the knife and threw it to the top of the nearest tree to my bedroom I had another look at the window, there was nothing there perhaps it was a branch. O well I said and climbed up the rope. When I got to the top of the tree I still could not see what it was that was making such a nose. Just then i heard a halfdead mouse lying on the windowsill I jumped to the windowsill, climbed down the rope, went in the house and went to my bed.
THE THIEF
Once a woman lost a lovely brooch. She hunted everywhere but could not find it. So she asked the police to send a detective to her house to assist her. The detective climbed the stairs to the room where the brooch had been kept. Soon he came down. I believe the brooch is in the jackdaw's nest in that tall tree," he said. He brought a ladder and climbed the tree. With the brooch safe in his pocket he descended. I knew where to look, because the bird left marks on your dressing table he explained.
THURSDAY MAY 24TH
At midnight I was lying in bed. I could not get to sleep. Just then I heard some body walking very quietly across the stones on are drive. At first I was scared stiff and then I plucked up some courage and crept along the floor to the light switch I turned it on carefully not to make a nose. I got dressed. Then I looked through the window I could not anything because it was too dark. I looked at my watch it was 1:32 AM . I have got lots of time I said to my self I put my shoes on and went downstairs to get some food to eat. When I got downstairs I heard the noise again. I thought to myself, theres something suspicious going on then I heard jogging footsteps coming towards the kitchen. Just then a masked murderer came in through the door with a machine gun i pulled the rug that he was standing on and he fell down on the floor. Then I sprinted up stairs to tell my dad what had happened. At first he did not believe me. Then I said come and see for your self. He got out of bed and got dressed and got the firepoker. He went down stairs with me. We got in the kitchen but he wasn't there. We heard a voice from behind us he said hands up busters turn around dead slowly i grabbed the firepoker turned rond and knocked him out with it. My dad ran to the phone and dialled 999. A minute later the police were here. They came in. We showed them what had happened they said he is very dangerous they also said that his name was called Mike the murderar.
THURSDAY MAY 31ST
When the stork and the fox. were sitting in the house and eating their dinner. The fox could not eat every bit of it because it was on plates. Even though the stalk could not eat it he still was polite. When they finished the stalk asked if he would come to my house for dinner. Verey well said the fox. The very next day he did as the stork said and went to his house for dinner the stork put a very well cooked lunch into two long vases so the stork could get the food but not the fox
WEDNESDAY MAY 30TH
I think that the picture wood be O.K. for 11 – 12 year olds to play in.
Last year they were building a new house near us. I went after school to look at it w/ my little sister. Her name is Emaly. It was very interesting. We saw four builders two were in the house, one climbing up a ladder and the last one was wheeling a wheel barrow. We allso saw lots of bricks and cement. The best thing was the scaffolding. My little sister is quite nautghy. She allso loves climbing things. The first thing she said was 'I am going to climb the scaffolding.” “You mustn't go up there!” I shouted. I am going to go up there. Just then when she got to the top she fell.
She cried “HELP”. There was an enormous thud. I ran as fast as I could home, diled 999 and asked for the Ambulance. They came in a flash and took her to hospital.
BEING IN A HUFF
One Saturday when I was just about to go out
my dad came into the porch where I was
and saw a scribbly picture on the wall
and a black felt tip pen beside it. He said John
why have you drawn on the wall? I said
it wasn’t me it was Hannah. I’ll take ten pounds
out of your pocket money towards some new
wall paper. I ran up stairs and locked myself in my
bed room. In the end he found out it was
Hannah and didn’t take the money away.
[NO NAME]
Wolf to shut
Holiday to wash
Marry to fix
Glass
Child the wind-
Fox blows through
Tooth the trees
Clock the rain
Shoe falls
Against the window
JOHN TUCKER
FORM 3
HARECROFT
ENGLISH
MY BROTHER
He is five years old.
His hair is straight and blond.
He has small blue eyes.
He has got a plump face and a plump nose.
He is terrified of snakes.
He likes to were colourful clothes.
He is very funny some times.
Sometimes he gets into terrible tempers.
He is kind and soft.
His favourite hobby is football.
He does not like playing cricket.
His favourite food is fish and chips.
His favourite couler is Blue.
He can not swim.
He likes traveling.
He likes Jive Bunny music and Star Wars films.
He collects butter flies and Moths.
He is a good climber.
His name is Robert.
He has got a big mouth.
He talks a lot.
He likes making people laugh.
He hates having his photograph
he has got a good imagination.
SMELLS
Why is it that poets tell
So little of the cence of smell?
These are the odours I love well.
The smell of coffee freshly ground
Or rich plum pudding, holly crowend,
Or onions fried and deeply browend
The fragrance of a fumy pipe
The smell of applles, newly ripe
And printers ink on leaden type.
Woods by moonlite in September
Breath most sweet and I remember
Many a smoky camp fire ember
Camphor, turpentine, and tea
The balsom of a Christmas tree
These are whiffs of grammerye
A ship smells best of all to me.
THE MONTHS OF THE YEAR
January brings the snow;
Makes our toes and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen ponds again.
March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil.
April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daisies at our feet.
May brings flocks of pretty lambs,
Skipping by their fleecy dams.
June brings tullips lillies roses;
Fills the childrens hands with posies.
Hot July brings cooling showers,
Straw berries and gilly flowers.
August brings the sheaves of corn,
Then the harvest home is borne.
Warm September brings the fruit,
Sports men then begin to shoot.
Fresh October brings the Peasant,
Then to gather nuts is pleasent.
Dull November brings the blast
Then the leaves are falling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat.
MY DAD
When I see beer it reminds me of my dad when he is drunk and when I see a police man it reminds me of the time my dad lost his drivers license. When I see shoes it reminds me of my dad's smelly feet. My dad is the sort of person who tells you not to put your elbows on the table when he does it himself and my dad tells me not to ride my bike on the garden flowers when once he reversed the car on them. My dad helps me with my prep and most of the time I get it wrong. Sometimes my dad acts as he is three years old but he is really forty-one. When I say “I should play soccer for the England team” he just says “some chance.”
[NO NAME]
If I had a lollipop tree
I'de be as happy as can be.
I' would sit by it all day long
Eating away until there nearly gone
I'de say “that's enough lollies for today
But I'll come back to morrow and eat away.
SIX INCHES HIGH
I was sitting on the sofa drinking lemon-ade when suddenly I felt funny and then I started shrinking and shrinking till I was six inches high. I fell down on the sofa w/ a plod. I climbed down a loose string on to the ground and then started walking across to the chess board I had left lying around. Suddenly I herd something that sounded like me beating up my brother. I looked around me but at first I couldn't see anybody but then I saw a chess pawn hanging w/ all his might on the chess board for he was just about to fall on the ground which was a long way down. He slipped and I ran and caught him, but just then a big rat came running out from under a sofa so I ran w/ the pawn as fast as I could and dived into a mouse hole which the rat couldn't fit in. We couldn't get out because the rat was guarding the hole so we sat down and talked. He said his name was “Humph”. He said he could get me back to my normal size but he would need help from more chess pieces. Humph said “When it is 7. 00, if you sit on the same sofa you shrunk on w/ all the chess pieces you will grow back to your normal size. I looked at my watch. I was 6. 30 and 56 seconds. We didn't have much time so we looked around for something to fight the rat w/. Just then Humph found the perfect thing. An old toothbrush. I got my pen-knife out of my pocket and sharpend the end of the tooth brush w/ no bristles on. Then I cut off all the bristles on the other end and started fighting the rat w/ the toothbrush. The rat was soon dead so we brought the toothbrush and went to look for the other chess pieces. We soon gatherd them all together and told them every thing. It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa. I was the first one up followd by the white pawns then the two queens then the kings then the blakc pawns then the bishop then the rooks and last of all the knits. We counted them all. There was only 31 pieces. There was a little pawn trying to get up on the sofa so I jumped down and lifted him up. I grew back to my normal size but there was no chess pices. I put the rest of the lemonade I had been drinking before in the bin and went to sleep. When I woke up I thought I had been dreaming but then I found the toothbrush and went back to sleep.
APRIL
In April it is the beginning of Spring.
The daffodils are waving their yellow heads in the wind.
In the gardens and in the woods Catkins,
that look like lambs tails are dangling
from the branches on bushes in the hedges.
The days are gradually getting longer.
We have many showers.
It is my birthday in April.
The first of April is called “April Fools day.
We play tricks on people that day.
The buds on trees are swelling and oppening.
The birds are coming back from the hot countries.
THE BIGGEST LIAR IN THE WORLD
A long time ago in Japan, I saw a funny looking man walk out of a big bubbling volcano. He had three eyes but that was the only difference between him and us. He wore a mask that was made from white metal, his sweat-shirt was white, his trousers were white, his high leather boots were black. He had black gloves with spikes sticking out about seven inches but the most peculiar thing about him was that around his shoulder was a big gun. It had all sorts of gizmoes that shoot lasers, fire, water, poison, spoof, bullets, you name it. So I went up to him and asked him “What's your name?” He said “Wotsit”. I asked “where do you come from?” He said “Fingermebobdownthevolcano!” I said “what's the gun for?” He said “first let me tell you a secret.” He said he's the biggest liar in his country. He said once that thousands of little aliens attacked his country, he said that he blew them all away with three blasts of his gun. He also said he was God's messenger and had helped God to make the world and had stayed alive ever since. The real truth is I am the biggest liar...this whole story's codswallop.
[NO NAME]
Pod: God morning
Fat Guy: No it isn't
Pod: Why not?
Fat Guy: Because I said not
Pod: But why did you say not.
Fat Guy: I didn't say not, I said no it isn't. so what
I've got something to tell you. Guess what?
Fat Guy: what
Pod: Your...erm, er....a
clot and I'm not.
[NO NAME]
MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,
MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,
HE'S GOT THREE EYES
AND A BIG FAT NOSE
AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED
WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,
HE ONCE TOOK A PILL
THAT MADE HIM ILL
AND EVER SINCE THEN
HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL
Book 4 of the boyhood proof
“THE HORRIBLE HUNTER”
The hunter, a horrible old man,
Is hunting in the forest, every moment he can.
Searching for foxes, with his hunting dogs,
Charging through the dark, dark forest,
Through rivers and through bogs.
Only his prey can see his eyes,
He never looks up to the sky.
He's a finger missing with a scar on his face,
He lives his life in awful disgrace.
His dead prey is hooked onto his jacket,
When he kills it makes an awful racket.
He puts out his snapping snares,
hoping to catch foxes and hares.
He lives in a small, tobacco smelling hut,
Deep in the forest it is put
He's got a small patch of hair,
And a horrible hypnotizing stare.
As a bullet is pulled from his belt,
You're bound to hear an animal's yelp.
A DEADLY CHARM
I am a padlock: who locks up your thoughts,
I am pollution: that blackens yourheart,
I am electricity: fast, furious and frightening,
I am a machine gun: looking for a kill,
I am a politician: dizzy, dazzled and dazed,
I am a radio: that speaks of death,
I am the concrete: that stiffens your body,
I am the computer: that controls the world,
I am dynamite: who always gets his way,
I am a micro-chip: small but clever,
I am a missile: roaring through the air,
I am a rocket: somewhere up there,
I am a drink machine: wasting your money,
I am a digital watch: who but I, is telling
you the time as the hours go by?
[NO NAME]
My cage walls are nearly pressing in at my sides.
There are multi-coloured giants stroking me and treating melike a baby.
There is a deaffening sound of birds humming in a corner.
It turns dark emmediately, by a touch of a button.
All the captured animals around me probably have the same, agonizing feeling as I do.
I feel like running away when people take me out of my cage and cuddle me.
I feel likeI've been imprisoned in a jail for no reason.
I always feel like staring at the masive, multi-coloured men, mechanically moving.
THE BADGER [draft 2]
As soon as I was imprisoned, inside my cage,
A happy feeling vanished from my mind,
It was a feeling of roaming, round the countryside,
Catching my own prey, chasing mice and digging in burrows.
But now I feel like I've been jailed for no reason.
I suppose all the other animals here
have the same agonising feeling that I have.
It seems quite weird, the massive, multi-coloured men,
Making it turn night by a touch of a little white button on a wall.
When all the humans have gone at night,
And the birds have stopped twittering,
I try to escape but I don't think a mouse
Could squeeze through the gaps in the bars.
But one day someone took me away.
He tried to tame me. I didn't want him to
but I gradually became tamer and tamer.
It was a lot better than in the pet shop,
But not as good as the forest.
I doubt anything is as good as the forest.
THE INTERVIEW ON MY MUM
J. What is the most important event that's happened in your life?
M Giving birth to four healthy children.
J. Why is that so important to you?
M I myself came from a family of four children and there was always something going on, so when I came to have children myself, I thought it would be nice to have four.
J. What sort of things went on?
M One thing is that when there are four of you, you always have someone to talk to or play with. I was the oldest and my sister and brother who were very close in age, used to get up to some terrible things like once they made porridge on the floor and once they put crispbread under the rug and walked on it just to hear it go crunch. My grandmother called them 'the termites'.
J. Are your children like your siblings?
M. A little bit. I think if you put four young children together one of them will think of something dreadful to do. My son once tried to teach the cat how to swim in a bucket of water.
THE TYGER
What kind of creature is the Tyger? I think God made the Tyger and ment him to be a normal tiger but the devil caught him and hypnotised him against God. I think the Devil puts him in everyone's dreams. I think he is just an image ment to come at the right time to take control of there brains I think he is a ghost of a normal tiger but the Devil turned him evil. I think the Tyger is an angel of Hell. He is not tangible because it says “what dread grasp? Dare its deadly tendon clasp?” I think it came from Hell by wings because it says, “In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes,” and “On what wings dare he aspire.” I think the Devil stole the minds of all the criminals and made the Tyger from them. I think the Tyger is immortal and turns your dreams to nightmares.
From ‘PAGE 11’
1. Area of whole shape = 80 CM squared
Area of unshaded part = 4 CM squared
Area of shaded part = 76 CM squared
2. Area of whole shape = 72 CM squared
Area of unshaded part = 8 CM squared
Area of shaded part = 64 CM squared
EQUATIONS
(1) 3 a + 4 = 2 a + 8
(2) 4 b + 4 = 1 b + 7
(3) 5 a + 3 = 2 a + 12
(4) 5 b + 1 = 3 b + 11
(5) 7 c + 3 = 3 c + 31
(6) 7 y + 1 = 3 y + 25
(7) 11 c + 9 = 8 c + 24
(8) 7 b + 12 = 1 b + 24
(9) 3 t + 5 = 2 t + 12
(10) 5 b + 10 = 2 b + 19
SYSTEMS 11TH MAY
1. 211
2112 ATTRACTOR
2122
1132
211213
312213
212223
114213
31121314
41122314
31221324
__________
21322314
21322314
WHINNIE'S CHOICE
I'm awake very early but it is light, and very hot outside. I'm seventeen todayand I've been thinking about it all night but decided not to drink the water. I would lose a lot of my friends and relatives and would feel alien. I could jumpoff the Empire State Building for billions of pounds but friends are better than money. Anyway, my grandmother believes in gnomes so she could advise me somehow. I asked her, “Grandma, if there was a spring in the wood with everlasting water in it would you drink it?”
“Whatever made you ask that question?”
“But would you?”
“Well probably and probably not. There are lots of disadvantages and only a few advantages.”
After that I went into my room to think about it. If I did drink it, now would be the best time to do it because I'm at the prime of my life and I have Jesse. I might as well take Tuck's advice because he's drunk the water and experienced it so I don't think I'll drink the water. Anyway I'll go out there and I might change my mind. The spring looked so lovely but something was different. Then I noticed that there was a stone missing from the top. The water looked so delicious and fresh that I walked up to it, took another stone off the top, was just about to drink it when a traveller came.
“Hello,” he said. “Could you please direct me to Treegap?”
“It's just down this road,” I said.
When he had gone I took another stone and again I would have drunk it if it weren't for the toad. He was sitting in the spring bathing. So I thought it over again.it was like a war in my head between Jesse and Tuck, with me not knowing which side to take. Then I thought that God might've tried to stop me and that God had told the traveller and the toad to disturb me when I was going to drink the water. So I've made up my mind. I won't drink the water.
THE BEAST
The Beast was quick as lightning,
Strong as an ox and very frightening,
Cunning as a fox, tough as leather,
Hungry as a hunter and not very clever.
He is as large as life, as swift as a hare,
Keen as mustard, he'll give you a scare,
Don't go near it at half past three,
Because that's the time it will have you for tea.
NIGHT (BEDTIME)
Mum said, “It's time to go to bed,”
I said “C'mon not yet.”
She said “It's half past eleven, dear,
And tomorrow's school don't forget.”
Underneath my pillow was food for a midnight feast,
I can hear an owl hooting and the shuffling of feet,
Making shadows on the wall,
Which is the spookiest of them all.
Dogs barking and dad is snoring,
Lying in bed is very boring,
Thinking of chocolate and soda crème,
Nothing to do except to dream.
MY WORLD
My world would be a chocolate factory in the clouds. It would be completely made of chocolate and if you ate a wall it would just grow back. It is invisible to any other people and only certain people can get there. The weather is always what you want it to be and if you want it to rain, snow or shine it will happen. There is a chocolate fun world as well and it is called Choc World. You can walk all over the clouds and look down at any place in the world and if you want to go there you can just take the Choc-mobile down to earth.
RELIGION
Dear Family,
I hope you are all feeling well. I have got some very bad news to tell you. I may never see you again. I'm very sorry but I've got to go into hiding somewhere where no-one will find me. All of Jesus' followers that are in danger are coming because we could be killed by Saul. I don't want to go, but I have to and I'm not allowedto tell you where so that you're not in danger as well. We have to get together and all go disguised at night time. I have two messengers that I can trust to bring us food and news safely. Just to make you more secure, I'll tell you that I have enough food and a good warm shelter.
Lots of love,
John.
PRIVATE
Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones.
Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones,
bongles has still got the stones.
THE FIRE AND THE SEA
The fire is observed, its hundred tongues, flirting, dancing, entrancing, mesmerising the eye.
The sea is remembered and imagined, its rhythmical engine grinding some one mile or so away down the road.
The fire is hot but the sea casts no heat.
The red and blue thing is a graph with one long line, kinking headward from the heart and its wine, and ending up in the stars.
That’s where the hottest heat burns blue.
It’s not the same in our haunted house, where the fire is nearer red and mother can’t find her other whisk because of the over-friendly ghost.
It’s very thin, that line, kinking headward from the heart and its wine, and ending up in the stars, where the hottest heat burns blue.
(1995, reconstructed)
FRAGMENTS FROM THE ROAD TO HEAVEN BY NOJ AND THE MOB
L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog,
he should be sleeping like a log,
goes round and round chasing his own tail,
only goes upstairs for a trail,
of Maltesers nice round and pale,
we’re on the road to Heaven,
happiness awaits us there, flutter
in the sideways, flutter in the sideways,
bring your brief fling with the politics of flight.
Sullen silken sulks, we drink the same
rain, spit is clean and so is dirt.
Normal is boring. Do it later.
God made speed to save us,
God made hash to help us.
Fuck the system. Even a dick
gets big erections. The sun hanged
himself from a length of daisy chain.
Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.
Clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time.
The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.
The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.
The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.
Break, bird with the skin of snake.
God
rushed into the cold cod quick.
BOOK TWO:
THE <BEE> ONE
FOREWORD
I think looking back to days when my pants and top and leather jacket were often black I had a happy knack with musical concepts in my youth – for instance one was contained in a little poem I wrote called ‘Unplugged In The Blue Room:’
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and so is dirt.
Another was when I came into possession of a Pearl Jam ‘VS’ cassette tape that was cut in the reel. After a delicate operation to reseal the reel it had a small pause in the music, so the ideal was to do away with the small pause, by methods which included sitting in a circle with your friends and rhythmically chanting the mantra “another, another, another f**king joint.”
My mnemonic for the strings became Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. With friends I recorded a little album on binaural earphones, said on the record I would “plug my senses in the mains.” At Warwick University, furthermore, I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons happens to be an actual substance and it got a First, but it got lost, maybe in the void!
My first mobile started to reverberate the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang from home. The air, the telly, the stereo, the laptop, would all start bleeping the monochrome and drone version of ‘William Tell’ then you’d hear my phone go in my pocket. There was also a movement to tattoo someone’s name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, and finally the one that takes the biscuit is when I discovered my brother’s sheet where pictures grew.
The pictures it would seem do depict the lyric to a song I wrote back when I was trying to be Kurt Cobain in Oedipus Wrecks - but still it wasn’t mine because I didn’t lay it down. Anyhow that pretty much sums up what I was doing with my musical youth - and now here I sit ( ) striving not for effect but still struggling to just talk.
After garage and house comes library. Voices could be quavers, could be onjects, could be syllabubbles, could be sonic machinations at the periphery of sound and most importantly could be the colours of the vowels. They ask you to increase your threshold of Negative Capability. Meanwhile there’s something I think I know and shouldn’t impart but it’s because I have a heart; and writing a letter Dear Music could be instructive in mental health in the future; and putting Paradise Lost to music shouldn’t be done unless it’s going to be amazing, so it’s an aesthetic not moral question.
I also remember, when Aphex Twin’s new double album came out around the Millennium, it was comparable to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I failed to make an essay of that moment, while my brother-poet Dedalus was writing of how Autechre is the heir to Wagner in the use of rhythm.
Sometimes, I look back and consider the road of rock n roll cliché as leading only to badness, madness and sadness. I hear the voice of my father saying “it’s alright if you’re especially musically talented but with you it’s just a vapid fashion statement suitable only for the rebellion of youth.” Well, I would say the music world is largely a wankered planetarium of ego – but then again at other times only picking up a guitar and playing a song seems to survive the shipwreck of the soul because songs are Portable.
Music is not just shaken air, entering the Byzantine conduit of the inner ear, rattling tiny bones in there and recognised as sound; it is also penetration of is-ness. It renews sensation’s quest. Meaning in music is solipsistic: it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s three creatures in a cloud-change. The bands I have been in amount to five, like the Glastonburies I have been to, and the number of Lucies it takes to be clinically insane. The first album I wrote was The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob but it was only a family album done by young kids singing of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail and recorded on a ghetto blaster. Then at 15 or 16 Oedipus Wrecks formed and gigged in London and foreshadowed doom. Moving schools I then formed Secret Chord H with the best drummer of his generation Zach Lait. It wasn’t until my Gap Year though that I formed the Flood and we started to properly record, on earphones as I say.
By now I am in Black Hole Myths – an art therapy/ outsider art two-piece with Grant Aspinall. I am past 40 and genuinely don’t know off the top of my head if it’s 42 or 43 because of the way things have gone. This book only contains the lyrics to the recorded material that is available to listen to online. It doesn’t include instrumentals from the various albums – like putting in a note on a musical piece just to represent it – but only the lyrics. It proceeds through the recorded albums with a chapter for each album.
CHAPTER ONE: THE FLOOD
Music went from black and white to colour for me when in my Gap year in Cambridge I formed The Flood who only recorded on binaural earphones. My brothers both assure me that the earphones were my idea to invent in a very prophetic speech I made in the barn in Cumbria before I ever set foot in Cambridge; but I did not implement the idea. I went down south after school and someone else implemented the idea. In around 2000, maybe 2001, we started to record on the earphones. You can hear it to this day as a play-list on Soundcloud. There are only six songs, and only two with a long enough lyric to warrant inclusion in a songbook but I would say it is a fine piece of work. We noticed that even the background static and feedback from an amp, when recorded on the earphones, as in ‘Voodoo Echo,’ makes a tone-poem in a neo-Classical sense.
The overall picture is more of a dark CD, dark in the sense of dark matter. I, who said I would plug my senses in the mains on the album, still hear the dark CD when I put on the dishwasher and the waves are accentuated into words! It can crop up all over the place! The actual play-list itself contains instrumentals such as ‘The Blasts’ and ‘F Sharp Minor’ that I am very pleased to have been a part of. ‘The Blasts’ is a math-rock number which I wrote when living in the shed in the band commune towards the end of my stay. ‘F Sharp Minor’ came together one night previously when we were at Agent G’s house and he h-a-n-d-e-d me a guitar in F sharp minor de-tunings. I think the idea is that when you detune the strings all the way down the streetname for E becomes “F sharp minor.” The guitar part I came up with in that one I would say was as good as the psychedelic guitar solo in the long version of ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors.
We all met when Paul and I were busking in my Gap Year. Mark Velarde, a fellow musician and Beatnik was walking past with Tom and they stopped and asked for a song. I was singing one that went: “I confess my open heart/ is lying with her legs apart.” They invited Paul and I for a beer then we went back to their student digs, for they were at Anglia Polytechnic (APU). That was the start of the scene for me. When in time to come I was kicked out of Paul’s house by his mum, I moved in with the Anglia Polytechnic students, and was sofa-surfing. That was when The Flood formed with Paul and myself, with Niki (or Agent G) who also attended Paul’s and my boarding school and lived in the area, with Tom from APU and Steve too.
I took the name for the band from a quote from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, the first line: “when the idea of the flood had subsided, the rabbit, in among the flowers, said a prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.” There’s also the Biblical event, serotonin disinhibition, proximity to the Pink Floyd, and the fact that there was a literal flood at the foot of the oldest fell where my parents’ house is, where water seeped in from the overflowing beck in the back and turned my dad’s vinyl into an archipelago. When we woke that morning the dog was marooned in his basket and the vinyl scattered all over the floor!
I remember sleeping on sofas a lot, in those nomadic days, the extended Gap Year, not eating very well, deeming pot more important than possessions – and how much I loved my friend Paul who was on bass. If you listen to the Playlist on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page you find one song called ‘Mantra of a Madman’ where Paul and I are singing major harmonies: I inverted the Great “I Can, I Am” from Venice Beach, 1967 into the mantra “I am, I can,” because things had to be back to front for the earphones. You also find that my Floyd was very Freud and we broke the ancient silence.
When Paul and Niki went off to Leeds University and when I went to my own University, Warwick, in 2002, we would all still reconvene in the holidays in Cambridge. Mark Velarde, at some point, dropped out of APU and formed his own band with Jez. When I left Warwick with no degree I went back to live in Cambridge and that was the time of the school – a time when the youth artists commandeered an old, abandoned Primary School due to be torn down as a venue, a reading room, a rehearsal studio, a gallery, and a home. Some said it was like Warhol’s Factory. We, who were listening to the Velvet Underground at 16, and considered ourselves Bohemian aristocracy, loved it. I played an acoustic gig there one night, and the Flood also supported Mark’s band on another occasion.
So there was a period where I lived in the shed in the garden of The Flood’s commune (nicer than you’d have thought) and only down the road the School was going on. This was a time of road trips as well, for I seem to remember we were practising for Berlin. For our band or some of us and Mark’s band Tea With The Behemoth both went to Europe towards the end of the School. We went to Brussels, Paris, Berlin and then at some point The Flood came back via Amsterdam. I was eventually kicked out of the Flood and came home to the north to attend University a second time but still took holidays down there for a while.
I did after I left The Flood continue to have bright ideas for the earphones: one was to incorporate the theme tune from Withnail And I into a jam; another to put words lamenting the cricket being sold to Sky to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’; another was to put words to ‘The Firebird’ by Stravinsky, which seems to be “containment” of Grieg. When I came home circa 2003 or 2004 from Cambridge, where I’d been living in the shed in the commune towards the end, I wrote a poem starting:
The train of my thought is the 19. 30,
in one ear and out the other.
I later found out Syd Barrett himself, when he was going through his mental breakdown at the end of his time in the Pink Floyd, drew a picture of a face with a train going in one ear and out the other. During my time in the Flood in his hometown, he was rumoured to have been seen walking round with a fish strapped to his head. There was a lamp-post called “Reality Check Point,” where one night I spoke to some strangers about the possibility of injecting smack into the Universal Mind through the agency of snowfall.
Our little 6-song album wasn’t supposed to ape or mimic the Floyd: it was nearer the opulent light sabre fizz of Nirvana. It was more about the way distortion is clarity. It was more about catharsis by chaos. Still it was said that in the song ‘F Sharp Minor’ we got the cat from Piper At The Gates of Dawn just right. That means ‘Lucifer Sam’ – that we got the slinky feel of it right on the guitar. The binaural album is best to listen to when high and up loud too. As I say there are only really two lyrics which are as follows...
THE WARNING
“Going to meet with the Otherness,
best go get a party dress,
play a stone, live in the wilderness,
I'm going to beat with the Otherness.
Suddenly their brain is an alien visitation,
suddenly I am the imposter againe,
lying in secret wait of myself,
knife ready to treat the pain.”
HUNGER
I e I e I e have I e I e I e have
I e I e I e have I have Hunger
I'm a sick magnet I e I e I e I'm in want
maybe all I need is a new pair of shades
I'm a craving slave for you
your pleasure's dust your pleasure's just
your pleasure's just your suffering's bait
it's a sucker's fate for you
escape escape escape escape
your home your clothes and all you know
leave no footprint in the snow it's just a photo
escape escape escape your name
your stain your skin your dead routine
for the pristine dream for her
I'm going to get your freshness back
plug my senses in the mains
it's just a bloodrush to my brains
I'm going to get pretty much f***ed up
flee this world on a midnight plane
dance with the aliens and the insane.
CHAPTER TWO: THE FIRST SOLO ALBUM
Well, when I was kicked out of the Flood I came home to the Lakes, fuming, and set myself an ambition of recording three albums like Nick Drake. Many of us back in the Cambridge scene liked Nick Drake – and by that stage there was already one album recorded, the earphone album, which I wasn’t including but which I do now include. I returned to University, my local in the north, Lancaster, had a breakdown but pressed on to finish my degree; and when I had got my First Class Honours degree I was diagnosed mentally ill which is when I got together with a fine musician called Grant Aspinall who helped me make a solo album - something good to look back on. I don’t know what to say when it comes to Grant. At the moment I have the solo album he recorded for me on Soundcloud under the name John F B Tucker but there’s also an album of spoken word pieces called ‘Eternal Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths (which is our band name as a duo) that has been recorded but which isn’t yet online. On the former there are a handful of interesting lyrics; on the latter I only contributed one lyric, a spoken word narrative, while playing guitar, and narrating Grant’s spoken word pieces. So I’m going to give you the lyrics to the solo album first. The album is called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3]. It isn’t actually recorded on earphones but in a more normal studio set up, in a secret location in Disneyland, Paris. Grant was really cool in allowing it to happen – he says things like “it doesn’t matter how old you are unless you’re in a boyband.” Also “you don’t have to be Syd Barrett, anyone can do it.” My mother’s generation, he likes Bob Dylan and the Pink Floyd.
GROG LADETTE IN G
Baby we create the dawn
behind a veil where silence is born
and dawn conspires with the sea
and everything untrue recedes
and down into sleep with no dreams
and all that’s left is you and me
and all that’s left is you and me
no-one knows how to free you
eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou
no one knows how to free you
eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou
horserace books in traffic light
colours through the ancient night
in the end it’s all white
in the end it’s alright
ONTIMEY
If this thing were a woman
I’d be in trouble by now
and if it wasn’t I’d
be in double by now
like a witch she says
take FACE instead of fags
and then I put my
wounds up on bright flags
READING THE LESSON FROM JOHN IN ETON COLLEGE CHAPEL
Once upon a time there was an acid-rainbow
that struggled from a black hole and smashed through a window
of a big cathedral and landed on a page
and rearranged the sermon the vicar was enraged
O but then he found it bore a strange notation
and it was so profound he needed medication
and then the paper bread turned to acid which was nice
and everyone was singing music from a black hole by Jesus Christ
all the congregation gave their neighbours a nudge
and asked if every good boy still deserveth fudge
the wine it came in buckets through the back of the song
and even the vicar too, he started to sing along
3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?
I was at the beach I threw a stone to the sea
to rearrange the day and the deity
no-one was beside me except the pretty dog
oozing and exuding uncomplicated love
voices from the city they were heard between the waves
like lost souls trapped in the cracks between the paves
then I saw the mystery of the single shoe
and knew that it was time to drop a line to you
you were off your face on something by this stage
said there’d been an accident and were hiding in the cage
and Barnes has scored a chicken and blanes is a liquid knife
and wingers are allowed bikes in the afterlife
3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?
IN A FIELD KNEE-DEEP IN GRASS
Lovers and tools are breaking their own rules in the game
mad children play unaware of the guilt and the shame
pirates are looting the world and riding the breeze
angels and thieves are kissing at the tips of the trees
and I’m in bed against you
wouldn’t bet against you
I’m in bed against you
shouldn’t bet against you
if all that I’ve loved is a bunch of telly snow
still you can’t take away the afterglow
Science says don’t touch your dreaming gland
it’s all Thumper to you VS Edward Scissorhands
and I’m in bed against you
I wouldn’t bet against you -
I’m in bed against you
shouldn’t bet against you
and I’m in bed against you
I wouldn’t bet against you
I’m in bed against you
and b equals d
[Note: this song seems to be concerned in part with a tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ that has a pause where cut and stuck together in the reel.]
CHAPTER
THREE:
AGAINST
THE EVIL EMPIRE
If
it seems already that words, written words, are an Evil Empire
compared with the fluency and currency of musical sounds, I think
that part of the point. When
I was
still at Warwick University, and I visited
Devon with my musical friend Mike we saw stickers on telegraph poles
saying “Keep Music Live, Local And Free.” I like to rule my
kingdom with music and
think in music regularly.
That
year in Devon, with Mike, we were back from Glastonbury. He had
smuggled me into Glastonbury, backstage, in a cupboard in his camper
van where I had an empty lemonade bottle to urinate in should I need
to. The queues were long and the weather was hot but getting out of
the van backstage was amazing and the first thing we saw was the lead
singer of The Clash messing around pissing into a didgeridoo. It’s
good to look back on
things like this. Famously all the Glastonburies roll into one ball
when
you’re looking
back with hindsight and I do forget how many I have been to, but some
memories remain prominent.
There
was another year with Agent G where I was calling out ad-libbed
poetry over the bongo drummers at the stone circle. In
fact before
my illness I
was just
the
sort of artist to do
stuff like that: to call
out ad-libbed poetry over the bongo drummers round the fire at
Glastonbury stone circle on an E come up at
nightfall.
You’d suddenly hear someone shout out:
“One
star leads to another star,
but
the gateway drug has to be her bra,
in
the back of the cinema,
when
Star Wars isn’t going far.”
It
might’ve been embarrassing for those with whom I was there, but I
liked to waste poetry on the ego-loss breeze back in the day.
Anyway,
I
think I agree with James Joyce that it isn’t about the words or
music themselves but what lies behind them. That was why it was so
good when we did the song ‘F Sharp Minor’ in The Flood because we
encrypted a node in musical truth without words. With this in mind I
have organised a slim, streamlined pamphlet of miniaturist poems for
the meantime. I already showed you the first one – ‘Unplugged In
The Blue Room’ – but will repeat it for the sake of unity. The
following miniaturist poems are the bits in my poetic
oeuvre
which others have said are the beautiful bits largely because there
is something behind the words. They
would work as defaced bank notes. In fact I’m going to give you the
whole defaced bank note piece that was ideated in the old, abandoned
Primary School in Cambridge, and actualised when I went to Lancaster.
That means the idea was from before my illness and the fulfilment of
it was from after. It
means also that I am showing you some of my undergraduate portfolio
from Lancaster, for the writing of which I was awarded a First by
none other than Paul Farley.
LOST MINIATURE DREAMS
This
text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of
the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts
have been made to order the bank notes but were not always
successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice
or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a
critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are
liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of
exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing
through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text
necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free
that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly
free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and
bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination.
Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a
fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Necklace noose,
reckless truce,
drooling before
wet, electric eyes
My name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
(1998)
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun,
this
is the dead land,
crack
a smile and curse the sun.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but
like butterflies.
Waves
[squiggle]
crossed
the FTSE
[squiggle]
and
the Helter-Skelter
[squiggle]
crashed
in the electric-sea…
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.)
Down
down
down
down
down
deep
blue
below
“eh,
up
mate,”
says
my
mate
and
is
it
safe
to
say
hello?
To plug my senses in the mains
might engage !00% of my brains,
but it’s gone wrong at the plug,
just a dream on a drug.
I
felt a leaf,
I
fell out of life,
probably
no-one else knew.
A trance of stalks walks on stilts
like a stance on talks only to the toilet
then back to bed to rest its head
under
the soft, Pink
Panther blanket.
She blows a poisonous magic
searched the corridor for a
crash had no survivors in Soviet
be weed
Il faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes you’ve just
got to hit the road and
Leaves that played on the surface of the water,
these are the leaves they have in Heaven,
these
are the leaves of love.
Signed by everwell,
she couldn’t hit it sideways
or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman
with the hairgel of Dracula,
Atlantis,
Aquarius, the 60’s.
“Is there anything I can do to help?
Looks like I’m on washing up duty.
It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.
It won’t take long then I’ll be free.”
£34. 84 at the Take-away joint
can get you quite bloated,
not just quench’d and sated;
and by now I sit here wondering
just how much it cost.
My
fingers have crashed,
my
fingers have crashed
and
my mad, crashed
fingers
have connected.
A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in
can lead all the way to the loony bin,
can make you forget how to spell
Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.
The
day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me.
I
remember when banks let pens go free.
Art
gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.
Love
has
gone
veggie for reasons of Disney!
The
future is no longer what it used to be!
I
still crave a greedy DogMuckels when
the
plush seat gets a hard-on at the end.
When
Paul was talking of “McTruth”
I
noticed a swarm of flies in the house.
Nobody
else could even see them but
me.
My
mother calls the
pills I
pop “poetry
buttons”
in motley conglomerations
like
pool balls or songcells and
their
names
should not appear
in poems.
Caroline
is the last yellow crayon.
This
could be the door to telepathy.
My
granny and grand-dad were in the R. A. F.
Under
a blanket in the back of a car -
I
think of it now I’ve got this far.
Alone
in the solipsistic kitchen
whom
it would seem is un-war-ful.
Walking
down to the Irish Sea quite
slowly
to
see if my place in life is lowly
a
dying animal goes much faster.
He
found himself on a plane.
He
found himself on a.
He
found himself on.
He
found himself.
He
found.
P.
If
dog = pi times MC squared
it
is because you wish to think him round
while
O is the key of water shared
when
rolling round on the ground.
O for a Muse of fire that descends
from the brightest Heaven of invention;
Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires
into
the burdened air, breathing.
One
night, Jim
Morrison pointed up
at
the night sky on LSD and said “look!
It’s
the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!”
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil,
it
was was not born under a hill,
it
is the best goal I’ve seen still,
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil.
If
the windows were washed – every one -
we’d
still
see
nothing through them but
the
white mirrors reaffirming the quiet
interior
of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.
Bart
Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d
@
Van Goghian black border sun
heard
James Joyce would just use |||| 4
ROYGBIV
in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile
“I’ve
been writing about bifters.
Hello
my name is Pirripa.
[sound
of sucking in of smoke.)
That’s
my boyfriend.”
Now
we are gathered to appoint the Gods,
now
we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,
now
we are gathered to ordain this dust,
we
are gathered to live and to dream.
If
you believe it, it is there,
naked
under nearer stars,
softly
swashing, backwashing music,
music
in a room with no door.
A
A Yellow
A Yellow Pages
May dawn behead me
A Yellow Pages will suffice
A Yellow Pages will
Farewell my life
A Yellow
A
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,
NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,
H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,
ESA for extra sensory allowance
but I for one still don’t really know
if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.
I
remember happy, sunny days,
days
when we scored some weed and went
out
in the meadows, when Paul
would
turn to me and say
“wear
an emotional condom
before
you fuck my mind, man.”
Wouldn’t
it be pollen
if
Barnes has scored a chicken
and
spring is a red horse?
Enough is the hope the heart
literally needs in order for it to survive
without which it can stop, meaning
Duff,
which is H suspended in deafness
I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea
or stretching honesty is the more easy
an encryption for the future that
ain’t what it used to be but I still
await the future with rapt uncertainty
and
cannot stand the suspense.
We
are the velvet e’s,
we’re
shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,
the
Roman Rd below,
beneath
us as we fly.
[enter
bass organ of ‘The End’]
Butter
is good when you’re a nutter,
but
I can think of something that’s better,
so
had better write her a letter.
Opened unto the gloom under
sliver moon I slide her over.
Semen spills like silver water.
We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.
Forlorn
as fallen autumn leaves,
is
the wave that misbehaves,
goes
out taking E at raves,
and
soon enough no more believes.
One
thing I learned I shouldn’t say too soon,
underneath
this new moon,
but
might instead just impart,
it
is because I have a heart.
What
actually happened was, I ended up robbing a bank, with a banana
smuggled under a tea cloth and a balaclava on my head and face…there
was a get-away car outside, and we went far and to a separate country
too. We started to loan the money out and thus made money off it
which meant we had plenty with which to use for a blank canvas. We
had to be concise, when writing our contract on
the money.
The
police were onto us, so what we did was wait until we had
disseminated our message, and earned more money off the loaning of it
than we stole in the first place, and quietly stormed into the bank
with a banana openly
protruding
from a balaclava in my hand, and h-a-n-d-e-d the money – and the
extra too – back to the bank. The police then let us off the crime
and we went home, knowing our nodes were encrypted.
Of
all the work I had achieved, be it before or after my mental illness,
I still think of the binaural earphone album and the defaced bank
note text as being among
the
best. I think if you remain on the left it’s alright but only when
it’s phoney, for defacing actual bank notes is against the law. I
think if you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone
should get that opportunity should
they choose and
probably for free too. I
think that
is my philosophy and even more so, yours.
CHAPTER
FOUR: THE
NEW DA VINCI CIRCLE
Well,
the next phase of musical
recordings
is the most recent, when Dr. Robert urged me to purchase Ableton Live
and gave me some equipment, a Soundcard and a compressor. He gave me
a crash course in recording which took half an hour and left me to
record in
a home studio set up in the posh, coffee-cake dining room here at
Cumpstones.
A few weeks later I had recorded much of my back catalogue and that
was then structured according to my brother James’s design of the
new da Vinci circle.
James (because he’s a genius) designed the new da Vinci circle as a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 points of difference, namely
@
<BEE> [long squiggle]
Infinity Symbol
This not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by including a long squiggle might even simultaneously situate itself outside of the totalitarian machination of every word, book, sentence, paragraph, letter in every order which a new super-computer can organise.
James had also made another sheet to the <BEE> one that contained Badly Drawn Boy lyrics slightly imperfectly quoted and rendered as an anti-clockwise spiral that looks like a word-sunflower, a sunflower made of words –
sunshine inside of you
old sun warm sun
spreads over you
soliel all over you…
So I turned up to the barn where they were both left to rot; and I read them; and on the second-made document (the <BEE> one) saw only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes! There was no new da Vinci circle! I assumed the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes – which seemed like the international language alphabet laid bare – to be permanently available to sensory perception, and left it alone.
A further visit to the barn proved that it had gone – on that particular sheet, only the <BEE> diagram remained. Then when our father passed, a further visit to the den in the barn was when I discovered the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had bloomed or grown pictures – pictures that seem to depict the lyric to one of my old songs! This came at the end of a long chain of events that increased in numinosity according to the number of items in the series.
James
says to design the sheet where pictures grew took a deft left hand
born of another deft left hand (meaning my mum) and I can believe it.
So
eventually I structured four solo albums according to the new da
Vinci circle.
The
material was well-written but the recordings are not that great: they
are all an unchanging processed beat overlaid
with a couple of guitars and a vocal, leaving a big, bass-shaped
hole. I would say they are quite poor but at the same time they are
part of the new da Vinci circle, and even have things like the sheet
where pictures grew for a cover. So between book, record and
photograph there is a kind of un-categorisable machine going on where
the songs are as much scans or even scones as songs! So
I am going to give you the lyrics to those
four albums, album by album.
CHAPTER
FIVE:
‘THE NEW BEAT’
What
is
the
cover of The
New Beat?
It’s a picture of me looking good at Glastonbury at 16 with Dr.
Calculator Ptom. Dr.
Calculator
Ptom
actually named my second band Oedipus Wrecks, from way before The
Flood, and
we were
quite good – some
of our songs
have been infiltrated into the circle. It’s the same with Secret
Chord H who came after Oedipus Wrecks and only really had one or
two songs:
the
material has
been infiltrated into the new da Vinci circle. A
Secret Chord H number called
‘Dream With Open Eyes’ is
the
first song as a matter of fact. It’s just a shame that the
renditions are not good and the songs not meant for the tron set up.
A tron would be a point of intersection between technology and art or
a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge. ‘Dream
With Open Eyes’ is a good song but with an unchanging processed
beat for a backing and no bass it suffers a bit. I
think this first in the cycle, The
New Beat, is
supposed to showcase me as a new Syd Barrett character and to be fair
I have had issues with drugs, especially
LSD, ecstasy, skunk and amphetamines.
The production, orchestration,
depth and arrangement
is nowhere near Piper
standard but I think the songwriting itself okay.
DREAM WITH OPEN EYES
(by Secret Chord H originally and used as radio jingle circa 1999)
Last night it seemed we couldn't
sleep but maybe I was dreaming.
The world expands inside my
hands it's getting heavy.
Of all the treasures I could
choose I can't seem to decide.
Today the shade was washed
away where I would hide.
Dream with open eyes, come
below and we can fantasise.
Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come
below and we can fantasise.
Last night it seemed we nearly
died but maybe I was dreaming.
It made me feel sooooooooooooo
alive and soooooooo in love.
Dream with open eyes, come
below and we can fantasise.
Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come
below and we can fantasise.
CHOCOLATE DOG
MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,
MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,
HE'S GOT THREE EYES
AND A BIG FAT NOSE
AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED
WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,
HE ONCE TOOK A PILL
THAT MADE HIM ILL
AND EVER SINCE THEN
HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL
(aged 8)
BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE
Such a bad day at the office
down the pub to get pissed
though I can't afford it
we'll never get a pay rise
stay up till sunrise
call in sick in the morning
spend the whole day mourning
underneath the covers
where the fuck is Batman
Sugar Candy Mountain
waiting for some action
heard it brings good fortune
papers want a scandal
tell them the truth
if you can handle
what a fucking headline
where in Hell is Tinkerbell
somewhere alone and dying
dawn calls in sick in the morning
what's the use in trying
don't believe in dying
it's shocking and appalling
it's four o'clock in the morning
and Paradise is boring.
CHIEF OF THE BLACKBIRD SPIES
Well I fell up a sycamore tree
and nearly spilled my glass of wine,
and though nobody came for me
I didn't mind it I felt fine,
for I was trading stories
w/ the chief of the black bird spies
amongst new leaves and old branches
that don't know how to tell lies...
He said to forget the job,
sack the boss, and hang the cage
which containeth all your rage
for but the minimum wage.
I said it's easy for you
in your neighbouring Otherness -
be Nature custodial or frightening? -
to avoid the mad enemy Stress.
He said he finds it fun-loving
to tense-hop all around
for cataclysm is catalyst for the cat
that sat on the map of sound.
Quite soon he spread his wings
until his wings were spread
and flew to Morrisons supermarket
for a tamed and manner'd head.
He’d said he thinks privation
is the mother of imagery,
and inconsiderate violation
at the root of the creation of beauty.
We’d bemoaned a lost society
w/ all its malaise and cheap talk,
its word-ways no better than
cheep cheep squawk squawk.
We’d spoken in no uncertain terms
and out in the great outdoors
where Mother Nature operates
according to her natural laws.
When he left it grew quite quiet
for he was a tremendous talker
and had a way with words
and had said I would go far…
when I left his sycamore tree
I was glad to see my own home
and return to my own kind
near the beach that’s good to roam
but I remembered that black bird
and his eloquent influence
performing from the end of a branch
in ways that just made sense.
SYMMETRY LIPS
Symmetry lips symmetry lips
kiss me quicks need a fix
make me feel natural and real
cuts heal with a plastic seal
I’ve been in your heart and danced in hot rain
I've been in your heart and danced in hot rain
now consciousness is everywhere
now consciousness is sentient air
the sky falls apart into place
I crave to sleep behind your face
everything in its proper place
live where the sky and the river freely give
live
where the sky and the river freely give
AIR RAID SHELTER
(originally recorded on binaural earphones in The Flood but not used for their record)
Air raid shelter, we're in it together,
let's not get entrenched too deeply,
fear and pain's our only motivation,
got to break free from that habit apathy.
Clinging to loveless, sweaty, rubber limbs
won't cure your heart, it's a painful art,
air-raid shelter, we're in it together now,
wrap me away in your wombs and duvets.
See this world from outer space minor,
saaaaaaaaafe distances have found
all our solid, common ground,
echo grammanon habeo amore.
Won't your spaceships come to find me,
pull myself right back to the centre,
attack on all sides, hold you soooooo tight
now that there is noooooo time.
I’m just trying to forget how to smell acid,
and still it seems acid isn’t flaccid,
but I think that you’ll find I still
got there in the end somehow.
THE NEW BEAT
Door the case / fluff the line / feel the last / dull the white / hone the drift / dawn the most / deaf the ear / grope the bread / fee the seat / blue the ticket / dream the lemon / boat the weed / I watched myself today in postures of raw decay because there was nothing else to do / mine the brick / dwarf the vote / peace the bull / D the random / renew the two / widen the road / steal the wings / gate the lane / mean the scene / send the head / rend the Hell / roll the ball / I watched myself today in postures of raw decay because there was nothing else to do / visual radio was on in the car and bike and train and bus and lorry and van / visual radio was on in the boat and tractor and plane and train and truck
(C/
Em/ G/ F/ G/ C)
LUCY IN THE SOUL WITH DEMONS
(warning: contains voices)
I no longer know if Lucy in the soul with demons
even happens to be an actual substance
but I know that acid can alter personality
and when home-made and strong be very scary.
Do not flinch at your own shadow when
you take its dark receipt into the glen
for panic in a wild stallion horse’s eye
can spread like wild-fire across the madding sky
where a digital wind of blue and green
blows in fake and chemical as glycerine
and the derangement of the senses can go
hang
its head in shame, dear Master neo-Rimbaud.
PRIVATE DETECTIVES AND SECRET SPIES
I sleep in a hole for the Hoover tonight
there's always something not quite right
look at a wall it's not too hard to see
all the cracks and flaws beneath the paint
maybe all we need is to decorate the place
private detectives and secret spies
seem to have uncovered all of my lies,
scar sand-birthmarks beneath my skin,
should I sever my face with razor blades
to show you some ugly truth w/in
well maybe I should but I'd prefer to
score your flawless body with sin
like two new humans made for life
with default buttons to wipe any slate clean
and one of them man and one of them wife
in Crufts as it is in the black angel’s death song
A SMALL ADVERT FOR FREE SEX
My name is David Bonky,
I'm a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there's a tear up my jacket
and I heard a different word:
Trans/ philo/ quis/ ation.
I fly through colours and shapes.
Lightspeed is my passport.
The countries are for apes.
A knock-kneed hummingbird
table on which to land and read
does not seem to me to be
such an unreasonable need.
I'll breakfast on snooker colours,
spark a dullard cigarette,
sail the wind of change and
have no room for regret.
I deem it quite Romantic
to go do the monkey bars
with my legs into her open
chamber underneath the stars.
I think love is both the all-
seeing eye and love is blind.
So wear an emotional condom
before you fuck my mind.
For that’s what language is,
the emotional condom of
the world into which we’re
all thrown in search of love.
Soon I must fly on, from
this gnarled treefinger perch,
and heal the glitch in the soul,
and join the Giant Search.
I don’t know what we’re
searching for but it’ll find us first.
Maybe just some peace and
quiet to slake the eternal thirst.
(reconstructed)
THE POWER-BALLAD OF MARTIN VICIOUS
[warning: contains voices]
I can see death and see flippers
coming out of his senses and say
“come closer you f***ing terrorist,
come closer you f***ing terrorist,
come closer you f***ing terrorist.”
It's because I live a life of all time leisure,
all drugs pure and the radiance just right.
I might be wrong but then I might.
Score some dodgy crack and die
here alone with nobody for a name.
I can be Proust and fathom ten
or eleven types of ambiguity and
rue them all cantankerously,
rue them all cantankerously,
rue them all cantankerously.
It's because I live a dream of my still
working, all love pure and trust in the night.
I might be wrong but then I might.
Score some dodgy crack and die
here alone with nobody for a name.
OCEANS SMILE
(originally Oedipus Wrecks)
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)
CHAPTER SIX: ‘SONGS IN G’
This second album in the new da Vinci circle contains only songs in G. It’s not that good, but you have to see the new da Vinci circle as one of the quirks of the net – an un-categorisable machine that includes music, picture and literature.
The cover of ‘Songs in G’ is the melted tape. The tape that had a pause where cut and resealed in the reel was a successful fusion and one of my favourite musical concepts. When it was successfully fused I put it in the oven for a writing experiment. I took it out, and photo’d it and that is the cover. So already the cover is a work of art. Then you’ve got the numbers and two of them are co-authored by my brother James. In fact the one for Flora is “James’s song.” I believe he actually knew her sloppy, angel kiss. She would’ve been the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh in my teenage love poetry, and was – but I never got the girl on that front. I did get other girls but not Flora. That’s why he got to do ‘Flower-press Love Poem Music’. When I say he got to do it, it seemed like I was writing the song, with the guitar in my hand, laying down lyrics, but the music came from James for that one and originally the lyrics were an American guy on live streaming – but I rewrote them.
The song ‘I Knew That She Loved Me,’ meanwhile, was initially written as a poem when I was at Flora’s school (Oundle) and only 16. It lately was put to music to gorgeous, Irish effect and I feel it one of my best numbers.
BONECHINA
Where has all my washing gone?
Maybe it has gone to Heaven!
Mirrors on the street rebound.
Everyone is happy and free.
My dream-meet experiment tended there.
Not the local DogMuckels.
All walks of life were gathered and one.
To wake from the dream is to die.
That’s when you put on your socks.
Unless they’ve gone into the sock void.
Don’t mind me I’m paranoid.
I’ve got some bizarre ideas.
If a clock is only as fast as a cheetah
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel
but I’ll pad downstairs and drink a cup
only at my own slow speed.
FLOWER-PRESS LOVE POEM MUSIC
If a flower-press ending on cannabis
could seem to equal a dialysis
then a love poem hoping to impress Flora
could seem to equal more a motor
but giving up weed in order to be free
I can’t see how this really matters to me
and if it’s a system I just love you still
and love has not gone under the green hill
if all the noise in the world would be quiet
I’d hide in the cupboard during the riot
if systems rule with fear not love
I’d half it and laugh it with an imperfect dove
here I am at the foot of Sea Ness
this anagram of boredom is in a mess
I’m all set up for a walk on the beach
to watch the waves rolling out of my reach
I trust my family and I trust my friends
I hope my dog’s life never quite ends
the kitchen is clean because I cleaned it myself
my father’s philosophy is up on the shelf
if all the greed in the world would go away
I’d still be Bede at the end of the day
if power is wrong at least it’s transient
a birthday came and a birthday went
and this is the me we all want to see
and this is the way I know to be free
and this is the Now that is in Eternity
and this is the leaf that came to the tree
if the wording of this little contract is mine
alas you are not but I’m still feeling fine
I’ve seen the stars that are out tonight
I’ve tried to forget exactly what colour is white
I’m drifting to E on the end of a stick
I’m searching my memory but it’s just a block
if only I could hold you in my arms
I’ve fallen for all your loquacious charms
ICARUS UNBOUND
(a finger-picker in the drone of G)
I really love you my friend Mark,
don’t get me wrong I am not gay,
it’s just a way for me to start,
it’s just something to say…
placing bets on raindrops running
down the opaque window pane,
I have been a melting robot,
then they said I was insane...
there you are across the water,
living on the Isle of Man,
if only my attention-span could
be more like Peter Pan...
you’re the one who taught me de-tunings,
stairs down to The Velvet Underground,
I am the one in love with Flora,
and that fertile map of sound...
you say it’s got too late to make it,
I hear you crawl through new air,
but I was never one to fake it,
I for one don’t really care...
in your room was a very high ceiling
and I remember it was bright,
I can almost taste the loving feeling,
even though now it is Night...
you could not tell if the vocal
in Aphex Twin was a demon
so made us listen to Nick Drake when
on another easy comedown...
lines are blurred in drug-slurred idiom,
lyrical streaks now open up.
I’m thinking of youth which has now flown
but I’ve still got a little plastic cup.
THE FIRE-DANCE
The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums
where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap
and bells let peace form in blue notes
and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it
and wet let excellence sound out its criticism
and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting
and chloroform in the heart let see
if
only Game Over was seen in nights.
THE GREEN BLUES
I read through the news,
hats off to your blues,
a chimney falls under my head.
I stomach the wood
that tastes very good,
better than Jesus’s bread.
I glow for the coal,
don't bury your soul,
backwards in spire I get high.
I'd go for the house
that's quiet as a mouse
and emblazon my name in the sky.
I'd slip through the skin
of a thesis as thin
as the Rizla it's in and be born.
I'd light it and write it,
I’d burn and unlearn,
I’d even hairdress the dawn.
I'd sip on White Russians,
on white and South African,
and dance to 360 vision.
To take out my eyes and
see in all directions at once
is but one general direction.
SONG OF THE NEON DAWN
X-ray specs don’t lead to sex
and mobile phones don’t have gay undertones
and television is a big decision
and the internet can’t just forget
and laser beams are born in dreams
and digital clocks don’t come in flocks
and Ableton Live is my nine to five
and the latest App is an angel’s lap
and I sing for Kate whose always late
and I write the Night until it’s white
and my vertigo lives down below
and my neon dawn will be reborn
and we’ll renew the morning dew
and Google our senses out there like a tide
and dream of love aloft on wings
and try and forget the nights we cried
and the alphabet is the suicide note
of Nelly the Elephant if you deem it true
and love’s gone veggie over Disney again
and the grass is green and the sky is blue
and E is a bet with the myriad mind
and I’ve seen so much I’ve gone blind
and a poem’s a seat where you sit and eat
and a driverless car has gone quite far
and a use for dust is a beautiful bust
and the wheel of a bike is a map of the Lakes
and a rugby match is quite a catch
and an abandoned band is written in the sand
and a red skin cell is a state of Hell
and sadness seems the mother of dreams
but maybe that’s the other way round
and a flower grows just for your nose
BIRTHDAY OF I. A.
You’re not a knock-kneed hummingbird, / you’re not a birthday of I. A, / and who you are I’ll never know now, / and if I did I’d never say… / I am your med-banging elephantine, / and I cry on the windows of trains, / and maybe all I need’s a length of, / need’s a length of metal chain… / and through it all I wish you rainbows, / made for two and very strange, / and somehow what’s most familiar, / is what really can estrange you, / rearrange and slowly derange you, / oh yes it most definitely can. / So don’t run in the corridor / or you’ll sin in the eyes of Santa / as he watches on.
TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
Another, another, another fucking joint.
[Note:
this song
which was originally a Secret
Chord H B-side
concerns a cassette tape with a pause in the opening number where the
reel is cut and re-sealed]
THE SWITCH THROWN
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)
and blessed is the rain that heaven sends
it is the life for the gilly flowers
some might say
it even falls up
and you’re going to have to think againe
for a clock’s only as fast
as a wounded cheetah
who knows how to
get drunk on cold Wifebeater
but gets drunk instead
on the rhythm and metre
O love thanks
for coming round,
O love cherish
your map of sound,
O love I dreamt that
we were drowned
I made such a mess it’s wasn’t cool
but at least I didn’t
give it away
that music is
the sacred pool
or whatever else I had to say
it’s half past four but then again
the Night is young
the switch is thrown
whatever could
the poor boy mean
he means his heart is yours to own
(N. B. co-authored with my bro Mr. James P D)
SAD HYPOCHONDRIAC
I know she's only a phone call away...
maybe she's got something to say?
Anyway by now her number's probably changed...
seems even numbers can't just stay the same.
You always used to say to me
“to love someone truly is to set them free” -
you always knew better than me
you always knew better than me.
I know she's only a daydream away -
transient rainbow not made to stay -
only made of sunlight and tears! -
beauty like that should last for years.
You always used to say to me
“to love someone truly is to set them free” -
you always knew better than me
you always knew better than me.
I’m just a sad hypochondriac.
Just another shooting rock star in love with the black.
Don’t want to die of a sudden art attack.
I’m just a sad hypochondriac.
I'm just a sad hypochondriac.
I'm just a sad hypochondriac.
I'm just sorry for everything I lack.
I’m just a sad hypochondriac.
WE COULD BE SO HAPPY
(played at a gig on a rooftop in London, the last gig by The Flood)
Serotonin dopamine
no Codeine or Diazepam
I got ruin'd you got wrecked
let's just say yes to each other’s plans
we could be so ha ha ha happy
we could be so ha ha ha happy
Buproprion and Fluoxetine
a toooooooootal loss of all
language-is-thought-control
it's just some sedative we'll
hide away under snow
I wake up dying for some
junk food to save my hole
when all the money has run out
and our housing contract expires
and the pigs come to track us down
the night will be filled with burning fires
the night will be filled with screeching tyres
the night will be filled with burning lyres
we could be so ha ha ha happy
in the future that ain’t what it used to be
on a drug called Strictly Free
on
the loss of the cannabis battery.
WICKER CHAIR
Baby I can see the tree kneel down
in Nick Drake’s de-tunings before you
maybe it’s just the germs accrued
upon the windowpane maybe it’s true
love what’s love halved in chaos
love’s the answer love victorious
love’s the hope the heart literally
needs in order to survive without which
it can stop and I love to be alive
so I thank you for bringing us together
everybody loves you between us is the weather
this fair day stay a while and play
trouble’s all gone away love is the only way
I KNEW THAT SHE LOVED ME
I escaped last night
into a heightened dream
from a dull and longing sleep
and the stars murmured
their cool ballad
to the approaching sky.
Secrets hung like ghosts
in the corner of my wanton world
all blurred and drugged too deep
and I knew that she loved me
from her invisible motions
and the dagger in her soft reply.
The questions concealed in her eye.
Her smile a luring prison.
Her blink a beautiful danger.
Her breath a poisonous magic.
And I knew that silence
would soon let slip its whisper,
knew that fantasy
had never been so real
and I knew that she loved me
because I knew everything.
I knew.
CHAPTER
SEVEN:
‘THE WHITE DOOR’
This is the album with the sheet where pictures grew as a cover and we’ve dealt with this by using the songs that are most dud, null and flat. Never before has flatness been so aesthetically accurate! It all contributes to the kind of multi-media that the new da Vinci circle attains. When I say the songs on this album aren’t that great, the first one for instance I decided to write and record for a mate while he was in the air on a plane – from start to finish – and send to him before he landed! It’s for the old drummer from The Flood. Naturally the song we mean when we say the sheet where pictures grew depicts a lyric is also contained.
The
lyric that the pictures depict goes:
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun,
this
is the dead land,
crack
a smile and curse the sun.
It
was about the sublimation of The
Lords And The New Creatures
into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic first person lyricism or
‘I’. I don’t think the guys that did it understood that, but to
be honest I don’t know who did it, or why, or if it was my brother
and I.
HEARTBOOK
We’ll never take E on a green,
Glastonbury hillside ever again,
never see Love playing through dark,
aviator Ray-Bans after the rain,
we’ll never be young as we once were
and looking back I know it’s all gone,
the real E’s a she and she is not free,
but we can converse while you’re on a plane
flying over the Atlantic ocean
you message me online full of emotion
to say new material has emerged
I tell you you’ve never done anything
which you need to apologise to me for,
you kept me in food when in Berlin
I spent my last money on a whore,
Everything happened back in the day
and we isolate bits to form a narrative,
everything that is except for work,
and we used to say live and let live
flying over the Atlantic ocean
you message me online the ball still in motion
to say new evidence has emerged
If work sets you free I will never feel
freedom not like I did back in the day,
the day we were young, you and me
playing in the band, whatever we used to play,
and only the songs seem to survive,
the poems don’t seem to want to last,
and I’m trying to learn Ableton Live,
and get your message like a blast from the past
flying over the Atlantic ocean
you text me online w/ a true notion
to say unheard music by us has emerged
TRUE LOVE DOT COM
Dead clock plodding play a different song // we're waiting for some action and some change to come along // been waiting all night at true love dot com // you're only just starting to notice the mushrooms are still too strong // dead pedestrians thinking fumes stay in and get fat in your new chat rooms // we chase the wave forms of the dusky dawn w/ black shadow cat-prints going backwards on the lawn // and I confess my open heart is lying w/ her legs apart // and if she said she's in love w/ me I wouldn't go taking it personally // for love has no ego as everybody knows and something inside me she's given me grows // and a playground swing on the vexed edge of life sighs empty and forever and out falls a leaf // and not into love does that green leaf fall where wet Westerly winds swoop and call // we are the glitter on the Christmas trees and not the litter in the filibustering breeze // and the E comedown has no value in maths // and the loonies all walk on the wrong paths // and the grass is green on the Other Side // it pulls the ropes of the evening tide.
THE SUPERSTRING GUITAR
Cool white is the highnote if it's up to me,
cascading down to the deep blue sea -
will blue trousers over the trouser blues
fall down on the Excellent News?
Music penetrates is-ness,
renovates sensation's quest.
Out in the desert the pigeon-stars
ripe w/ new creatures won't bring out the Tsars.
Water splits but the desert's dry.
Stonemouth silence chewing gums by.
Why the high note seems to be white
is the sideways gravity in the smile of night.
The Super String Guitar was electric and was smashed.
Transcendence is the dream of anything squashed.
“You're going to get a dog w/ a laser brain.”
L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.
Impairing the wild pear tree to tears.
Impairing the wild pear tree to pears.
Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.
Phew for a minute there you lost the screen.
E = L to the pregnant snorkel.
E = L to the pregnant snorkel.
L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.
Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.
BAXTER
I love my dog
he’s barking mad
when he wants to smile
he wags his tail
his uncomplicated love
is healing for the soul
he has seventy words
like the book with smell
I wonder what the others are
maybe later I’ll know
mashed potato and stew
and a Pizza Hut
and the waves of the sea
go round and round
swim in mystery
but do not drown
ice cream is nice
on Freedom’s shore
so is sugar and spice
and more and many more
and so it came to pass
that I sat in a room
with the dog by my side
and the music on
and I’ve got the dog blues
yeah I’ve got the dog blues
which only means
I’ve nothing to lose
and the stream of life
flows on and on
and a cup of tea
awaits in the kitchen
and the dream of love
has not quite died
and I feel assured
deep down inside
because I love my dog
he loves me too
what more do I need
don’t need to sniff glue
to feel all high
when I have fresh air
and the Emperor has
abdicated againe
and a nice long sleep
will reunite me
with planet earth
at the end of the day
what more can I say
FAREWELL TO THE SEER OF SEA NESS
Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -
see you later when the future is less.
What will you do about your trance?
Will you send a postcard from France?
I hope that you have a lot of fun…
I hope that you may find someone -
and the scenery streams by the train
and the world is small beneath the plane
Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -
see you in the future when the past is less.
Will the future there be quite cold?
Will you feel sad and feel old?
I hope that your dreams all come true.
I hope that there’s hope for you too -
and the dreams stream beside the car -
and you make it Westwards quite far.
Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -
see you in the light we might bless.
Will the visual radio still swirl?
Will you still blame it on the girl?
I hope that your heart will beat on…
I hope that your hope’s not all gone -
and the freedom you find is the best,
and the beauty you dream is a quest.
Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -
see you in the middle released from the stress.
Will the sound of silence be heard?
Will they hide the mystic bird?
I hope that your love arrows down.
I hope that you don’t hit the brown -
and the light will puncture you
and the good life will still be true.
THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)
[originally Oedipus Wrecks]
I'm the only one left, left to shoot my
own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile
and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.
Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-
waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts
lament. Come on baaaaaaaaaby, you know it's e-
asy, don't say maaaaaaaaaybe, let's go crazy. Death
awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give
me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The
ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.
||||.
[Note:
when years
later I
discovered the James
P D Tucker sheet
where pictures grew, and the pictures seemed to depict the lyric to
one of my old songs, this is the song.]
THAT BLACK NATURAL E
[spoken word narrative for B minor]
Where once I wandered far and wide
on a field-file, a file-field,
a fenceless farm without
security alarm where all hearts bleed
and all arts breed, now Hell
is very quiet, unadvertised.
McBreastmilk,
McBreastmilk,
don’t feed your kids.
Gentle face erasing cream,
smear it in and let it sink
down through the pores of your skin
to erase your deepest down dirt.
O stars the government
that truly speaks for us!
Get an extra kid for free
when you spend 99p.
Freefall 0800 down
your own black hole pupils.
Maybelline you maybe only make-believe
you may be the true mating queen of the hive,
may mad vampires stalk you,
stalking walls walk through
your vagrant dreams.
I see state of head
is more than Head of State.
Monster Munch can
always gobble up your food.
Cancerel can always
sweeten the stewed-
carfume coffee we sip in
this liminal afterlounge.
It’s getting cramped
as a tin of beans in here.
In emergency please
break glass and exit.
Credits at the end of innocence
are falling like numberless lists
of fallen autumn leaves.
Snatched handfuls of light
come to nothing in the dark room.
There must be a use for
this dust amounting.
There’s nothing like digging
a meaningless hole as if to cure the
spiralling lethargy of Hell...
and when I went into the
woods to bury my soul,
all the trees knelt down.
O perpetual orgasm of the sun!
Privation is the mother of imagery.
Prayers, ghosts and
e-mails chatter on
the ego-loss breeze.
The chitchat in the solipsistic
kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.
My new, motley fridge magnet
letters contain no question
mark in the pack but the first
qualification of Modernism
is enquiry and furthermore
wilful ignorance is a sin.
Meanwhile outside the
fallen Autumn leaves
are where bears have
dipped their feet in pots of paint
and danced across the threshold
of the paving stones.
Water clears its throat from the tap.
Gunpowder was only invented
for fireworks and a firework
is a champion sperm nosing up
blind to explode bright and wonderful
deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.
The world is a cool, bejewell'd
marble snug in Holy Orbit
suckling on a mother sun.
Supposedly there is soon
to be New Atlantis on the moon.
The cure for cancer
sustains your heart.
Robbed by a bastard vending machine,
somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper
to cleanse the doors of perception,
a drunkard attacks a wall
on an otherwise empty street,
a policeman forces himself
to come with a gun.
Hey salesman
slow down
with that
fast-food.
I don't mind
waiting here
for a year.
(2002)
WAVETABLE IN C
I remember when my mnemonic for the guitar strings was Even A Dick Gets Big Erections… now I don’t need one, I’ve heard a better one from a fellow autist, high-functioning autist – Even A – no – er - Every Acid Dealer Gets Busted Eventually. At the moment I’m on James’s red electric. I remember when he got it for Christmas and I got an acoustic, a Fender, an expensive one, and I wanted to be Kurt Cobain so I was annoyed that I got an acoustic not an electric. I was upset and offended my parents. And now here I am playing on James’s red electric. As I say my mnemonic used to be Even A Dick Gets Big Erections, but this one’s in C. I’ll leave it up to you to work out what that means. Your guess is as good as mine. It could be for countryside. It could be for court case. It could be for caliphate. It could be for civilisation. It could be for completion of the soul.
NO DEATH ONLY CHANGE
Don’t be afraid/ there is no death only change/ let’s pretend, let’s pretend/ there is no end of play/ tonight, tonight/ I only believe in tonight / so for once/ throw your cares and travel with me/ travel with me/ travel with me/ travel with me/ I for one/ have long gone/ out the door and far away/ down south/ mouth to mouth/ to exhume a brighter day/ live for this/ chance at bliss/ this kiss that wants to form/ on the air/ everywhere/ as the fungus sun beats down/ on the nervous under-town/ planes are the shoes of clowns/ yeah yeah yeah /
THE POSTMODERN ID
I’m thinking about the old days,
how the hippies are not ageless as the sun rays,
I’m thinking about the ideals of 60’s,
and though I don’t believe in pixies
the effect of global warming on the unicorn
succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
the summer rain falls with as many hands,
as there are names for new rock bands...
I’m thinking about the imminent future,
there has to be a place still for Nature,
thinking about the state of poetry,
the young light has dawned on me...
the effect of global warming on the unicorn
succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
the summer rain falls with as many hands,
as there are names for new rock bands.
I’m trying just to think about the present,
and how my life could be so pleasant,
don’t want to be distracted in daydreams,
by a woman as lovely as the sunbeams...
the effect of global warming on the unicorn
succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
the summer rain falls with as many hands,
as there are names for new rock bands.
I’m thinking about the doors of perception,
how literature is beautiful deception,
you might find the bedroom is hidden,
you might find the dawn is unbidden...
the effect of global warming on the unicorn
succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn,
the summer rain falls with as many hands,
as there are names for new rock bands
so try to pass the gravy over
Facebook now and be free.
Don’t know what a Dorian Mode is,
but I know who Toad of Toad Hall is,
and the lady in my life is all missing,
and the music’s only meant for kissing.
DOWN IN THE PATCH WORK QUILT BELOW
I like the light and the flight of arrows
I also love the sound of running water
Down in the patch-work quilt below
Where the river of sadness used to flow
It’s easy to trip up on a daisy
Lazy of us to let it get this way
Down in the patch-work quilt below
Where mad children splash and play
Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi
She might go veggie for reasons of Disney
Down in the patchwork quilt below
Where the ego-loss breeze can freely blow
Heading down to the sea can free you
No-one knows how to free you but meyou
Down in the patch-work quilt below
Where we’ll inevitably have to flow
[N. B. co-authored with a little help from my brother Dr. Robert L G Tucker]
WALKING THE BEAT
(impromptu spoken word piece)
Women can be very beautiful
they can be sharp-elbowed too
they think when we discern their beauty
we are being blinded by love
love is a banana custard to them
man’s highest emotion to me
but single is my jingle these days
I sleep on a single mattress
if I ever do sleep that is
the dog’ll be beside me
he’s a symbol of gravity
and humour and katabasis
it’s been a while since I’ve been in love
and what lovely dresses they can wear in summer
ones with floral patterns on
that come all undone -
it’s winter right now
winter has her compensations
I’m sitting in a coffee-cake dining room
there’s a Christmas tree
adorned with baubles and bright white lights
I suppose they should come down
it’s the 2nd of January
Bertrand Russell’s History of
Western Philosophy is on the table
some chocolate from Finland
some baccy some papers
some of my mother’s driftwood art
Quality Streets which my dad
used to call Quantity Streets
and what else I don’t know
a toothbrush that hasn’t been opened yet
CHAPTER
EIGHT:
‘THE ALARM CLOCK’
This final album in the new da Vinci circle has myself sitting in a room with the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen for a cover. While my dad was dying my screen just bloomed this numinous, purple light. Its colour was co-aligned with mystery, sex, suadade, longing and shame thus to incorporate every vowel-sound into a feeling. I am holding a guitar, my brother James’s red guitar, though Dr. Bob took the photo that forms the cover of the album. The album contains one of my best lyrical pieces – ‘Skunkfoot’ – that reads like a manifesto from my New Beat youth. Indeed there are those from my New Beat youth who would only have kept ‘That Black Natural E’ from the previous album and ‘Skunkfoot’ from this one. I like to think though that the <BEE> thing should contain more information, that it could be about packets of information. It could even be seen as a movie! This then is the final of the four in its cycle. Since the original which is now being remastered, I have had the idea to add a new song on the end, but it’s only an instrumental (‘Black Flake of Infinity’) so you won’t notice unless I tell you.
A POINT FIVE
“I was going to pack it with content… a clock is only as fast as a cheetah. I said that at seven. I got to the end and realised I hadn’t pressed the right buttons on Ableton. You have to press the right buttons in life. That’s more like it. Previously on this program oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain. Also I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. Lucy in the soul w/ demons might happen to be an actual substance. And if a flower-press ending on cannabis could = a dialysis, a love poem hoping to impress Flora could = more a motor. That was it. Then I realised – see I was trying to put Jimi’s amp guitar on the vocal and it was full of feedback, squealing like an electric donkey. Then I realised the vocal hadn’t gone down at all. I’d pressed the wrong buttons. I am hoping I pressed the right buttons this time. You have to press the right buttons. And now we’re going to have a typing solo. I’m noticing the space bar is like the snare drum. I type with two middle fingers you know, like William Carlos Williams.”
TEST MONKEY IN B
We’re aliens looking for life on Mars
aliens trying to make life in jars
aliens homesick for the stars
trying to find home in the all-night bars
in a world with no more la di da’s
the sunset silts its knickers and bras
the night is bright with white guitars
the fat cats smoke their fat cigars
the wall inside is still the Tsar’s
I watch the passing of the cars
I’m through with reading inveterate scars
in a room resounding with loud hurrahs
SKUNKFOOT
(spoken word narrative to go over a drone of E)
Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland. It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows. I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity. Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains. It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real. Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven. The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.
(2002 - 2003)
THE WISH OF NIGHT
Madness swirls deep in the heart
A butterfly resides in you
A tragedy of feelings lost
surrenders to the wish of night
& in this world I can't explain
I know exactly where I am
Inside a crevice of desire
In the dreamy air of a lover's scent
Wherever you take me, that's where I'll be
In the weeping skies my mind gives up
& falls into the arms of sleep
I'd fade to know I thought of you
& the world has risen to my hands
& the earth murmurs beneath my feet
& the light of all that's good is true
if believing is the dawn of dreams
I guess that I'm afraid to tread
The purple skies for the risk of a word
But at least I'm sure of fear
As she gives me the strength to feel afraid
A whisper fathomed deep in mine
Well I don't even care to cry
& I don't care to face the edge
& plunge into the oceans dead
& the flame of love has lit my candle
& the sky has echoed my desire
& all the air is drawn into my lungs
& I know the secrets of the shade
& I know the wars that come from peace
& I know the mystery of love
& I know the resilience of the soul
& I'm sure that knowing you is true...
FIZZY POP
I’m a clown, I’m a clown,
a clown in the circus of death.
I had a mate who sent the words
“Liquid Crystal Meth”
into space, into space,
and I was underneath it,
shower down, shower down,
make me feel alright.
No-one knows, no-one knows
what I went through in life.
The sadness shows, the sadness shows,
the trouble and the strife,
but under the stars, under the stars
I dream of love eternal,
shower down, shower down,
make me feel alright.
Fizzy pop, fizzy pop,
gets drunk in Monopoly Jail,
time goes slow, ever so slow,
as slow as a garden snail,
but ecstasy is a teddy bear
back in the garden of Eden,
I don’t mind, I don’t mind,
if you let me off my chains.
INSTANT TRAVEL
[warning: contains voices]
Not far away in Magic Faraway Land,
there’s poetry written on the bank notes,
sadness gene is smitten with dreaming gland,
the God Particle foreseen in the dust motes...
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,
NHS for Lucy in the soul with demons,
H20 stands for your hypothalamus tattoo,
ESA for Extra Sensory Allowance -
so how about we take a long holiday there?
You buy yourself a ticket with the opposite of bling.
You’ll see through the frame of angel hair,
and might just need a love-song to sing.
Yeah yeah yeah, our love is the answer,
spinning in a circle around the tired sun,
waiting for the cure or vaccine for cancer,
seeming to be dreaming of the mid-day moon…
POETRY BUTTONS
Smart guitars between the stars
allow the ladies burn their bras
I don’t ask for whom the beck
puts a necklace on her neck
let us have a go then, you and I
when we are tired of getting high
piss on the dawn when dad is dead
poetry buttons are in my head
poetry buttons for endless revisions
and helpless self-derisions
got to keep the quavers at bay
got to make the monster go away
the monster is not me
he lives beneath the deep blue sea
when all the air in outer space
is consumed without a trace
through a prodigious systematised
detuning of the strings we rise
would you compare me to a tramp
now my face is on a stamp
the poet makes himself a tea
now he’s a mystic visionary
poetry buttons for endless revisions
and helpless self-derisions
got to keep the quavers at bay
got to make the monster go away
the monster is not me
he lives beneath the deep blue sea
voices voices everywhere
and yet not a drop to think
think of England when you’re on
drink of physical hyperlink
all the world is on a page
where we spend our petty wage
engage with the dark night of the soul
that dreams in meaning like a troll
poetry buttons for endless revisions
and helpless self-derisions
got to keep the quavers at bay
got to make the monster go away
the monster is not me
he lives beneath the deep blue sea
TEACHER OF MY HEART
I have found you you're the Teacher
of my Heart there's only one one
and though my mind is endless old
my tender heart is foolish young
and my timeless impassion'd battles
of emotion have sooooon begun.
You have lost me in a Teachers
whisky bottle drinking down down
down the shipwreck IS the treasure
harboured in my pirate undertown
where visions of the real Unknown
await us there when we drown.
They have told me it's a T-shirt
that's the body worn by the soul
O to have to discorporate and wash
our eyes in the Fairy Liquid bowl
it's good for you to know a goal
there is no music from a black hole.
THE STAIRCASE
Once upon a time I was spiked
and thought I could fly
jumped right out of a window
and fell through the sky
somehow managed to land
on my smelly size 12 feet
seven stories below on
the heaving city street
now I tour the public schools
giving talks to forewarn
all the youths about drugs
in the world where they’re born
taking LSD can change
your innate personality
take it from me please never
take the drug they call LSD
Splinter was the master of
the Turtles in the kids cartoon
and now he’s dead and he’s gone
beneath the morning moon
and I’m so sad to hear of that
for loss is painful in the heart
so may we all remember
him in our chosen art
Sitting at the back was a
boy whom I instantly knew
would do everything which
I had pleaded with him not to do
puffing on a cigarette
making all the others laugh
maybe he’ll grow up to be
a kind of talking giraffe
When I fell I broke both legs
and did some damage to my spine
but I can walk if only slowly
and am in my headspace fine
I can still sing but not dance
which I never did much anyway
and I sing about health over
wealth at the dawn of this day
WHISPER
(originally by Black Hole Myths when we were still called Funnelspirals)
I wanted to hear musac from a black
hole by Judas Priest but the guys
sent a parrot after a carrot and
through the conch to outer space
singing 'I won't always be an orange
just because you've sectioned me,
no I won't always be on Orange
just because you've sectioned me
but at any given time I'm working
in a crane' and Jesus said 'Syd by Ray
in a way Spiderman's handwriting
has been too obscene, I rake the
blade over the wishbone of my
legs Breakfast All Day/ gay
teachers can still lay eggs and
I won't always be a lemon just
because you've sectioned me,
no I won't always be on Lennon
just because you've session'd me
but at any given time Oedipus
is spying me up in the shower,
why I'll break the speed of speed,
rendered squander never priceless,
I'll never speed againe, at any given
time I'm a rare aquatic insect.'
(Hackney)
CHAPTER
NINE:
THE
EFFERVESCENT MOBILE PHONE
If
James’s <BEE> presents an hypothesis, I have something that
presents a Point of Arrival. This refers
to that
occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of
‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate
barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.
I actually did have a mobile phone that buzzed off before it rang, through every technological inlet in the room, telly, stereo, laptop, air. So I wrote that down – that monochromatic drone – somehow - and it became a song that falsified the Nirvana barcode through bastardisations and mishearings of other people’s songs, that nevertheless worked as a piece of music unto itself, sustaining narrative, meaning and musicality all at once. It has been called as good as Rachmaninov and goes as follows...
CHEESE DREAMS
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Bring bring
bring bring
“Hello?”
Gold member, you're the one,
the one with the heart of gold
Vowels, pure vowels
Immanuel Kant
will come to thee
with immanence
You come home smacked up you come
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah
boom
boom
boom
boom
boom
how did we get down here from flat-top
wide tunnel cities self driving cars
bears in the moon and liquor and drugs
and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars
boom shanka, you're the one,
the one with the sonic boom
knickers knickers faster than lightning
skin up fall out of bed
and did those feet
in ancient times
rain down, rain down,
come on raindown
and walk the sun
fatter, hippier, less well connected
always walk the hallways
down to create my own
and in the meantime
and in the meantime
I'll do the monkey bars with my legs
manic depression has enraptured my name
don't know what I want but I just want shame
don't know what I want but I just won't shave
rainy waif, rain always,
lay back and dream
on a rainy waif
now I know how Kurt Cobain sang
oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang
no more laaaaaaaaaa la's
removal van canes will be turned into furniture
we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir
you never see me dead near an inch of closure
|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings
“and a record made of sound
goes round and round, conveying
music to the speaker through the stylus,”
says the radio as I turn it on.
Well, although there is no
such thing as the Nirvana barcode
it opens up a discussion about
the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how
if barcode is rain barcode is phone...
and at least I have
the grace to come
back and say that the
extinction of consciousness
has no monetary value.
It is past dawn
and I see that
that first mobile
phone
has gone.
(2015)
CHAPTER
TEN:
AGAINST
JEALOUSY
Who
knows why your phone goes like that when it does? Imagine
if it was a present from someone to reward you for helping invent the
net at seven. I don’t wish to enter a trance about my condition or
blow my own trumpet. I wish to upload the songs of the new da Vinci
circle onto Bandcamp as they are structured in this book, but am
reliant on my brother fixing my old computer where the recorded
material is stored. Even
if it isn’t possible to get the albums back online, it’s still
the best book I have done; and I can only blame myself for taking
them down in a fit of vanity. My bro is actually in the kitchen with
me putting tomatoes in a toastie with cheese right
now.
Some people might be jealous of what he has done, or I, but the whole
point is, there is nothing to be jealous of, it’s not a
competition. It’s not about better and worse those vain,
materialistic, Western concepts. It’s not about Darwinian values.
Poetry is the unique expression of the unique individual. If I felt
like I was losing some battle,
some race,
and if I wanted, I could easily go on about some of the things I have
done with
my life:
at 7 I helped invent the net; at 8 took care of The
Lords And The New You Know Who
twice; at 11 went through an experiment into the maths of the new
colour as a cellular mark; at 15 attained the face of stars; at 18 so
many things including speaking against September 11th
in 2000 and writing an English Literature A-level exam marked at
100%. After
school I recorded an album on earphones, hosted the Plough alignment
for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First, built the Tower
out of magical books as an instrument of philosophy, worked at a
numinous purple bleeding screen, continued
an experiment into a tape with a pause where resealed in the reel,
discovered the sheet where pictures grew, falsified the Nirvana
barcode, attained visual radio and more. They have given Nobel Prizes
for less; but the point is I
still don’t know, or, rather, we still don’t know, quite whose
the new da Vinci circle albums are. I (largely) wrote the lyrics,
melodies
and guitar but there is also the structure being James’s to
consider. Not just that but there is an influx of voices in
my system plus the
help of real people involved in my work of late. If the 4 new da
Vinci circle albums go back on my Bandcamp page, because I ostensibly
wrote and recorded the songs, I would still feel happier this time
round calling it by Various Artists. Then we would have a nice
machine, an un-categorisable machine, marrying image, word and sound,
into the co-imaginative
operation
of the new da Vinci circle, online,
and
I think it would advance the cause of the net too. But
after all this, something tells me the dead computer where the songs
are stored might
not be
salvageable,
is forever dead – and that this might make me wretch. Even
if we can’t get the recorded music back, at least I still have a
guitar and a voice and can play the songs. The best ones for a solo
acoustic set up are ‘I Knew That She Loved Me,’ ‘Dream With
Open Eyes,’ ‘Air Raid Shelter,’ ‘Sad Hypochondriac,’ ‘The
Ghosts Lament (The Guzzler Men),’ ‘Oceans Smile,’ and a few
others too. I am often to be found playing a gig to no-one at the
foot of the oldest fell in the night-time, like a black bird
performing from the end of a branch. Sometimes
staying up at night takes me back to my Gap Year, occupying a
haunted, empty warehouse zone of the psyche, trapped in a bad,
anti-social, un-natural,
vampiric sleep pattern, sliding out of responsibility, growing
dangerously detached. I spent the formative years of my life on drugs
and all five minute glimpses of what I wanted to do with my life, for
example be a scholar, were ruined by drug-taking. I became a failed
musician, like Syd Barrett said of himself. Now it is too late to
“make it” for at 42
or 43
I am not likely to be the one to bring the people the new music –
but I gave it a good go back in the day. My day
was a day when CD shops all closed down on the verge of our
potentially making it; my time was a testing and troubled time. It’s
why I hope to put it right and further the cause of the net with this
present experiment. Back
in the days
of The Flood I would write the bulk of the material and go on
missions to get weed but otherwise didn’t pull my weight so it’s
nice to fork out some money to include them in the present textual
flourish. I like now to stand at the foot of the oldest fell on a
summer night when there is still a remnant, fleeting, evocative
evanescence as a backdrop to the darkened fell in the foreground; and
to stare at that patch of sky until it is brought home to me how
weird everything is, how magical and mysterious the universe. I
call it the Silken Veil Effect, that remnant light while the fell has
darkened; and it makes me think of aliens, the magic of the 1980’s,
how life could be a computer program, and as I say I stare at it
until it loses meaning, and life becomes detached, naked,
and
I remember how weird everything
is,
how
magical
and mysterious the
universe.
Now the stars are out – they sleep in the open like Boyscouts. You
see them at the ends of the tree-fingers. The tree-fingers point up
to the stars, the heavens, the firmament. I only absorb so much then
come back to the kitchen. Right now I have two files open – one the
present
songbook,
the other philosophy. It’s
hard to know which one to write in. James has said he’s going to
try and save my hard-drive tonight. Mum’s irate with me for letting
her vegetables burn still. I’m thinking of picking up a guitar and
playing ‘Flower-press Love Poem Music,’ to try and cajole my bro
into doing his magic with the hard-drive
of the dead computer. Ah,
there are other songs, but I might say they got away. So
I go and say “goodnight” to James and he says “come in” and
shows me a
device where he’s captured the
hard-drive, says it works, sends me away to plug in and get busy. I
have teething troubles so seek his help a few more times but am
eventually alone in the solipsistic kitchen of fiction uploading the
songs, at last, four albums onto Bandcamp. It takes two hours. I have
a cup of tea and a Vape pen. The final, finishing touch is to put
“Various Artists” for the band name for
the new da Vinci circle albums.
Then just like that it’s done. My musical career is complete. Now
we just have to wait until someone says the song for Flora was the
best, and was James’s even though he wrote
it through me;
then we’ll have to kick in with the promise that Flora’s pretext
is best when nearing endlessness
so we’ll put all the other countless songs online as well; but I
hope not. I believe in the new da Vinci circle
as
a unit of four. Otherwise it doesn’t feel like we got it done. The
reason it’s so good is that the new da Vinci circle bit is about
dissecting a bar of light. Light knows no jealousy, and we would do
well to copy it. Quite
who is in the band ‘Various Artists’ I am not sure for I hear
soooooo many voices that I don’t even know the identity of, but I’d
say at least my brother and I, and also my mum. So
it is that it’s like a document signed by Einstein’s value for
light-speed, c.
That could be what Professor David Morley means by the prism on the
forest floor. He says we come at words aslant as creative writers.
The band Various Artists could be just me, but the Flood were a bunch
of other guys as well, and Black Hole Myths is a definite duo. I
think I am freer behind the mask, a bit like a timeshare salesman, if
I do use Various Artists as the band name, and I take it back – it
is honest in
that I am not the only one.
It shows humanity too. So often I am there trying to remember a line
and someone else gets in there before me and something that started
as mine becomes ours. So we get the ball wide to the wing – it
becomes a team effort and drags us into dreams as well, where many
texts are stored. Still, I believe the songs I put in to the <BEE>
collective if that’s what is
happening
are good songs. At least some good songs went in from me. I am being
a good comrade. I am showing camaraderie. Mum
can still smell burnt soup – a flower-press ending on cannabis was
her contribution. Also a line or two. “We’re going to be pissed
off for weeks about the burnt smell,” she says. She sends me to
bed. It’s past 3 AM. The house is silent, the road outside empty
of
cars. Soon it will be dawn and I will hear the birds chirruping in
the trees. They’re
mine. Fly left.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN:
A RECAP OF THE BEST BITS SO
FAR
As
requested by James, a recap of my best bits might run as follows…
I
enjoyed the way the earphone album starts, with math-rock written
in the garden shed; and
also that jam in F sharp minor de-tunings,
the latter because we got to encrypt a node in musical truth without
words.
It
was good when on the binaural earphone album I sang:
“Going
to meet with the Otherness,
best
go get a party dress.”
I
also enjoyed including background static and feedback from the amp in
‘Voodoo Echo,’ so in other words not-playing. Of course I still
think it good when on the earphone album I climbed
up and sang:
“I’m
going
to get your freshness back,
plug
my senses in the mains.”
There
is still even
now the
temptation to augment The Flood’s stuff on Soundcloud with a
new solo acoustic album. For
it
was said after the “plug my senses in the mains” episode that (1)
it was a good riposte to Jim Morrison’s The
Lords And The New Creatures
where
he talks of 360 vision; (2)
I should follow up with just myself and an acoustic – but whilst I
may do that, there is a reason why The Flood’s work didn’t move
seamlessly on, and that is my mental illness. It
would be false to get to the end of the new da Vinci circle and go
back and retro-impose a continuity to the Flood from this late
vantage
point in time.
So
it is that our nice machine is still ‘on’
and
I am not harbouring ill feeling unto those that robbed me, or
cursed me, or blamed me, or hypnotised me, or drove me mad, or
operated on me in my sleep, or tried to remove a portion from my
brain, or persecuted me, or made me walk naked in the capital, or
shopped me for the fire-dance, or
dressed me to look like Hitler, nor
dwelling on that side of things.
Nevertheless
if I am to incorporate my brother he will tell you in the Flood I was
robbed: that to invent the binaural earphones was my idea; that they
tried to remove a portion of my brain; that the rich man who popped
up with the earphones was the true thief, who gave the music I wrote
away to another, and swanned off with his inherited wealth; that they
treated me like the drugged up brother in the Russian Roulette scene
in The
Deerhunter;
that they pretended the spliff was my willy without letting me know;
that I was indeed driven nuts by it all whereupon I
was kicked out of the band in a state of disrepair and the
rich man swanned off with his wealth. That is what my brother would
say was the true story of The Flood; and they even had the cheek to
call me an evil Nazi! Me
whose idea it was to invent the earphones!
When
I came home, and embarked on a program of meditation, dreamwork,
detox, reading, self-help and exercise, that was when someone had the
vision to place me under a curse, or worse hypnotise me. I
can’t imagine someone being so vision-flaccid as I call it that
they would dream up an idea like that. This is why there is no
seamless continuity between the Flood and the solo album made with
Grant. That moment, the result of plugging the senses in the mains,
the continuation of it, was all, well, in life not art – all in the
hallucinations I went through on the road to becoming diagnosed
mentally ill. As I say I am not 100% sure of this but I
thiiiiiiiiiink to retro-impose an adjunctivity or continuity to The
Flood from all the way in this present tense where I’ve already
been through the rest of my career would be false.
So
it is that we arrived
at the
solo album Grant recorded for me: I liked making
the
first track because it’s beautiful and the second track, which is a
dark
instrumental, and which Jess, of the Cambridge days, listened to
online and declared “amazing.” It
was also ingenious to get my bank card number into a song as the
chorus and I think I was the first person to do that.
Then
the new da Vinci circle.
On
this, I
liked revamping ‘Air Raid Shelter’. This was initially a song by
The Flood, recorded on earphones, but left off the album. I got the
idea from the air. At the time I was best mates with Paul. I later
found out the actual Beatles themselves had their first rehearsal in
an actual air raid shelter! So I am partial to that song. I remember
one time I played it at Glastonbury stone circle to Agent G and my
second brother Dr. Robert and his mates – they all said I should be
doing music professionally, going on tour andcetera. I think that was
the year I met Thom Yorke in the queue for a burger van, shook his
hand and called him a genius. I think that was also the year I walked
past Kate Moss and Pete Doherty while I was on LSD.
Finally
putting ‘I Knew That She Loved Me’ to music, on Songs In G, was
another breakthrough moment for me, and now when I pick up the guitar
in boredom and project myself into the role of an imaginary
performance, I have an extra song to play. As stated the lyric to
that was written when I was but sweet 16 so it’s been knocking
around a while.
On
the new da Vinci circle albums, I
also liked reworking the old Oedipus Wrecks number ‘The Ghosts
Lament (The Guzzler Men)’ which is the one we mean when we say the
sheet where pictures grew depicted a lyric. For this number, which
has substantially changed since Oedipus Wrecks, I overlaid some
haunting and ethereal synth with just one guitar and one vocal,
removing the beat. It’s one of the strongest numbers I have done.
In
the
new da Vinci circle series
I especially liked the sprechstimme
of ‘That Black Natural E’ and also of ‘Skunkfoot’ which both
rewrote poetry from my Warwick University undergraduate days. Two
of my old cronies from those days which were mainly
Cambridge
days, Mark and Jez, who were in “the other band,” Tea With
The Behemoth, said they would only keep ‘That Black Natural E’
and ‘Skunkfoot’ of all the recent recordings, but then it
wouldn’t be enough for the new da Vinci circle to be real.
Likewise,
there is still
the matter of the
solo acoustic album I could add to this but then we’d have
overstepped the mark. We’d have done it good and yet be facing the
endlessness of it all. That’s why discipline should be upkept in
terms of containment of the new da Vinci circle to four albums,
however crap they are.
The
best thing about the new da Vinci circle series is the sense of
sharing, of being at one with my brother, and my mother is also
involved too. Some of my better pieces had to be h-a-n-d-e-d down to
James, like ‘The Switch Thrown’ for example, but when you’re
together, the sense of collaboration is enough to get high off, and
is better than the awful loneliness I would otherwise feel.
So
it is that I look forward to meeting my friend Grant tomorrow, and
maybe having a jam with him, who has just got back from holiday. We
play to an audience of my mum and Grant’s wife in the sitting room
at the foot of the oldest fell where the stars re-align. One of our
favourites is ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ by David Bowie. We
also like to detune the guitar all the way and go astray, have an
impromptu jam in de-tunings for half an hour, but the women don’t
like it as much.
Grant
will tell you it’s better to show yourself striving for the light
than struggling with the dark. He’ll tell you all sorts. If you
have schizo-affective disorder it means when you’re up it’s
symptoms of psychosis associated with schizophrenia and if you’re
down mood-based symptoms associated with manic depression and
bipolarity. Grant will say open a third category and call it
spirituality.
James
comes down and gets some cereal, cereal. We speak about him and his
writing. It’s not ready to read yet but will be one day. I trust
he’ll be good. When I tell him there is no sweet cereal left, he
says “Special K’s are alright.” In the context of the
conversation about the international language alphabet it seems a
great comment to make. He takes a bowl upstairs and eats of the
Special K.
CHAPTER
TWELVE:
‘ETERNAL FULL MOON’ BY BLACK HOLE MYTHS
This
is a guess that Grant
and I
will organise the already-recorded
album
of spoken
word pieces according to the running
order
we have agreed upon over the phone. This means largely me reciting
Grant’s poetry over music we’ve put together. It means spoken
word, sprechstimme
and twelve-bar
rap
too, with no melodic
singing
from me at all. There is a difference after all between an album and
a collection of songs; and this album as we have agreed upon it is a
proper album, made in a studio, with
a spoken word theme that
binds it together.
Grant’s lyrics are great, and he plays drums
and sings too, also plays bass and makes
videos and paints.
On
the album, which
is made
under
his guidance, he
plays to
what was one of my strengths as a schoolboy – public speaking. I
also do the guitar and there’s an
instrumental
at the end called ‘Seclusion’ which I wrote and played on the
piano. That’s if it all
goes
ahead. It should go ahead because
it’s a fine piece of work.
Just
look at the song where we put Blake to music for example: it could be
the best I’ve done. Grant sent me off to put Blake to music so I
married a guitar part I knew with ‘The Laughing Song’ from Songs
of Innocence And Experience
and it was a perfect match. I
recited the poem over the top, and Grant put down some gorgeous vocal
harmonies and also sang the poem outright too. It’s a fine piece of
work, a
fine collaboration.
So
the only lyric I contributed is from a bipolar song called
‘Hope’ that
works by presenting my
angry,
distorted, dissonant guitar to start with, over
which I read some of
Grant’s
fine
poetry;
and then
it
finds
a second moiety comprised
of
Grant’s
harmonious
guitar
as the piece journeys from tension to resolution. It’s the second
half of the song that I contribute the lyric to. I wrote the lyric in
Grant’s living room.
I’ve
actually been reading about real black holes, but none of it went in.
That’s only
tonight,
a night after a day when Grant came round. We’re still not sure
about the album because a lot of the numbers are integrated into his
solo work, and merely feature me. It’s a puzzle, when you have free
reign on the net, and with self-production, not to repeat things.
Stephen Hawking meanwhile
said
radiation could escape the event horizon of a black hole which seems
an upbeat message but none of our songs are about that. The article I
read was about whether or not the universe is a hologram, a
simulation. “The implications of the holographic theory are murky
at best,” claims the article. It was looking at black holes as
evidence for or against a holographic universe. Their
surface area is 2D but their volume not.
At
the present moment there is a 4-song E. P. version called ‘Eternal
Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths on Grant Aspinall’s Bandcamp page
– but as I say the other four songs of
the eight we
agreed upon are
also integrated into his solo career, and I think he’s lost his
passwords too, so we may never see the full spoken word album as it
should be. Nevertheless
the songs are all online, on Grant’s Bandcamp page, just integrated
into different projects, like ‘Self-Portrait No 357,’ where
you find five songs I am “involved in,” some of which might be
transferred to ‘Eternal Full Moon.’
The
name ‘Eternal Full Moon’ came from Grant, whose vision the album
is. I believe he also made a painting called ‘Eternal Full Moon’
to use for the cover – a massive painting on a massive canvas,
depicting a rainbow coming from a black hole (as in a song lyric I
had written). Grant is a very skilful and accomplished painter who
paints largely the portraits of the faces of the pantheon of rock and
jazz musicians, with the music on and in mind. There is something
synaesthetic going on w/r/t/ his work that I like, and it seems to
blend the emotion of Romanticism with the postmodern readymade (the
latter in the fact that he often
goes
from photos). The painting ‘Eternal Full Moon’ appears to be an
exemplum of what they call “the Eschatological Imagination”
meaning of or relating to the end of the world. Beneath
the rainbow that carries strange notation, you see the sea of the
apocalypse, and remember that music is made of waves; and in that sea
there is an Evian bottle of water floating around, like saying the
apocalypse is man-made, made through Man’s greed, and consumerism.
The
attention to detail on the Evian bottle is nice, because you can even
see the crumples in the plastic. The
moon is also present in the painting, which sees Grant graduate from
the portraits of faces to doing something more abstract. I am happy
to have collaborated with him, and hope that the spoken word album
still comes together, even if I only did one of the lyrics this time
round. As
my mum would say it is a good feeling to be able to share, and Grant
says this album is as much about me as it is him.
HOPE
As I lie around, careless of a map of sound,
I love the lie of the land
where quiet gilly flowers
curtsey like ballerinas.
Streaming is vision.
Bees pollinate the garden,
birds pepper the lawn
where you let your flowery
blouse come all undone,
and a ray of light
soaks us all around.
The sky is a blouse of blue
hanging on the line.
Harmony thrums and
the sentient air is everywhere.
I lie back without a care,
sunlight blowing my hair about,
without a grey shade of doubt,
and deem it lazy of us
to let it get this way,
a day of careless play,
a carelessly radiant day,
all my troubles float away.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN:
‘UNPLUGGED AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS’
Have
I not done enough already?
And
if so what of my solo acoustic album ‘Unplugged At The Foot of Sea
Ness?’
I
can know where it goes in the book but not where it goes online…
there seem to
be three
options. (1)
If
I augment the new da Vinci four on Bandcamp I spoil the fact of there
being four. (2)
If
I go for the same Soundcloud page where my solo album that Grant made
for me is, it’s not ideal and
messes up the chronology.
(3)
If
I go for the other, empty Soundcloud page, that puts it in a loop
with The Flood, then I no longer succeeded the Flood with what I did
with James.
So
it is that I might need to leave it out!
I
would say the best place to leave it online of the three options is
Bandcamp, and that by not calling it “Various Artists” I am
showing people that it’s a different thing.
So
there we were only a minute ago with everything in the right place,
and now I’ve gone and put Unplugged
At The Foot of Sea Ness
on the end of the new da Vinci circle four on Bandcamp.
In
a way, I think it might be alright if I do that, now that the 4 are
“Various Artists,” and this new one is just me and a guitar. As I
have stated, after the “plug my senses in the mains” episode in
The Flood it was said that I should do an album of just myself and a
steal
string acoustic guitar
and now I have. I
feel it is better placed on Bandcamp than in the loop with the Flood
stuff on Soundcloud, because if it was in the loop on Soundcloud I
wouldn’t have followed up the Flood with <BEE>. This way, at
least I got to follow up <BEE> with an actual album, because
the ongoing spoken word album with Grant might never materialise.
THE
NEW SNOWMAN
We
are the velvet e’s,
we’re
shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,
the
valley road below,
beneath
us as we fly.
We
are the velvet e’s,
we’re
shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,
the
valley road below,
beneath
us as we fly.
Blissful
Lovingness is
where
all religions meet.
On
the corner of the street.
I
am the Burger King,
I
can eat anything.
Especially
a Double
Whopper
with cheese -
and
in reality the killer
stayed
up
all night.
STAVING
OFF THE WASTED
YOUTH
Please
wait while you are on hold,
your
secret world will not be sold,
and
while you work out what’s gone on,
we’ll
treat you to a song.
A
cow has sat upon the throne,
and
said
to travel by Smartphone,
for
all connection should
be long,
and
the
maths
you do is
not wrong.
Thank
you for waiting while I love you,
thank
you for searching for the truth,
there’s
only
one
God above you,
w/
medicine for a wasted
youth.
You’ve
been placed in a long queue,
but
everyone’s in love with you,
procrastinate
and find your crest,
I
think your love is best.
The
mashed potato that you ate
could
sell for millions in the Tate,
and
London renews sensation’s quest,
to
put your
mind at rest…
Thank
you for waiting while I love you,
thank
you for searching for the truth,
there’s
only
one
God above you,
w/
medicine for a broken tooth.
ECSTASIA
Ecstasia,
it
will find you,
ecstasia
will track you down,
wearing
your bro’s blue T-shirt,
somewhere
in a different town…
a
comedown can be difficult,
a
comedown can really hurt,
but
it’s going to be easier
in
your
brother’s blue
T-shirt.
Love,
it
will
wound you
then
forgive you all the same,
and
one day death will find you,
and
nobody
is to blame...
I’m
waiting at the foot of Black Combe,
I’m
waiting for
my true love,
and
E has no value in
maths
when
you come down from a Dove…
FULHAM
F. C.
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the best
we
are the best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the fucking best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the best
we
are the best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the fucking best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the best
we
are the best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the fucking best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the best
we
are the best
Fuck
you fuck you
we
are the best
we
are the fucking best
FABLE
How
much is that druggie in the window,
he’s
washing off Steve’s holographic beard,
in
the totally powerless shower,
he’s
making me feel pretty weird,
blah
blah black sheep
have
you any wool?
Yes
Sir, yes Sir,
ten
fucking kilos…
How
much is that druggie in the window,
I
think he’s gone beyond the pale,
they
made him a living art installation,
and
he wishes he’d stuck to the ale,
blah
blah black sheep
have
you any wool?
Yes
Sir, yes Sir,
ten
fucking kilos…
How much is that druggie in the window,
the vision I had has grown dim,
I can particle accelerate Nothingness,
but I can’t write a poem like Jim,
blah blah black sheep,
have you any wool?
Yes Sir, yes Sir,
ten fucking kilos.
HEY
MAN HEY
Hey
man hey what do you
have
to say about today?
These
new pube-shaving,
lecky-saving
times?
The
air seems slightly strange
to
me in all honesty,
but
I’m just a guy
that
plays hide and seek with rhymes.
I
lost my teddy in the void
when
I was paranoid,
now
all I am is all I owe...
at
least I dared to dream
unlike
a mechanoid
of
love the likes of
which
we still don’t know…
Well
scream is bad,
when
you go
quite mad
and
you lose your dad
and
the magpie
gets down
into
your bones…
and
you can’t come down
from
the under-town
like
a decaying clown
and
you know the truth
which
nobody owns.
So
you must obey the dust
in
which you trust
and
which lies at
the
bottom of everything
and
bore the Lord
with
your secret chord
and
your word-hoard
knowing
not just what
tomorrow
will bring.
LIQUID
MIRROR
The
night is alright under the electric light
and
I am thinking of you
how
we used to love each other
black
and blue forever
and ever
how
I used to watch over you
while
you slept and when
you
wept and
when
we leaped and love was fire
now
the light comes fair and even
hyperlink
to very Heaven
just
like it
was when love
was open
and
it is still full
of hoping
full
of groping full of dreams
love
has not gone stolen
pollen
lustful
London
lips
are swollen
and
liquid mirrors still run to the sea
where
the fish swim without insanity
even
though they have fucked eyes
we
already went there,
we
already did that
sometimes
you’re a willing dupe
and
sometimes a doormat
PHET ACCOMPLIS
Love, love, good for the brain,
the more you eat them,
the more you go insane.
Love, love, good for the heart,
the more you eat them,
the more you break apart.
They’re dissipating energy
with spiralling entropy,
falsifying vision with
indoctrinated feelings,
colouring perception
with vague mysticism,
you’ve been plugged in
to the mental health system.
Love, love, good for the brain,
the more you eat them,
the more you go insane.
Love, love, good for the heart,
the more you eat them,
the miracle will start.
They’re dissipating energy
with spiralling entropy,
falsifying vision with
indoctrinated feelings,
colouring perception
with vague mysticism,
you’ve been plugged in
to
the mental health system.
HIGH,
HOW
ARE YOU?
Oh
high,
how are you? I’m high and
I’m
new.
Oh
high,
how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.
Here
you come with your candle eyes
and
your big horizon and your higher skies
here
you come with a beautiful
smile
I’m
going to talk to you for a little while
oh
high,
how are you? I’m high and
I’m new.
Oh
high,
how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.
Here
you are with your hopeful stance
and
your lucky star and your backward glance
here
you are in the eye of my mind
let’s
hope we don’t go completely blind
oh
high,
how are you? I’m high and
I’m new.
Oh
high,
how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.
There
you go, with you angel tear,
and
your brand new car getting into gear,
there
you go, with your perfect skin,
can’t
wait until you come back again
oh
high,
how are you? I’m high, and I’m new.
Oh
high,
how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.
[reconstructed]
SNOWFLAKE
SONG
Snowflakes
are falling to the ground,
that’s
why the door-mouse makes no sound,
I
could sing in an imaginary tongue,
but
I find Klingon is best for song...
then
it’s up to birds to saaaaaaaaaay,
“hope
you have another blinding day.”
There
are no footprints out
there yet,
but
I might go out and lose a bet.
Sometimes
I
dream
of mapless space,
a
little
place
without X tattooed on its face.
So
then it’s
up to you
to saaaaaaay
“hope
you have another blinding day…”
snowfall
was
injecting smack
into
the
Universal Mind a while back,
and
now I’ve nothing left but tea
still
I think you’ll find it’s well enough for me...
so
now it’s up to me to saaaaaaaaay
“hope
you have another blinding day.”
I COME FROM THE JUNGLE
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I am a giraffe, I am not Bungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle,
I am a giraffe, I am not Bungle,
I come from the jungle,
I come from the jungle.
EVEN A DREAMWOMAN GETS BEAUTIFUL ELECTRICITY
A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in
can lead all the way to the loony bin
and make you forget just how to spell
Winnie the Pooh and get unwell...
but even a dreamwoman
gets beautiful electricity -
come with me, come with me.
The way she hugs my myriad mind
I’m flying through colour but colourblind,
I wish to escape the shape of the paper,
I wish to taste the waste of a flower...
for even a dreamwoman
gets beautiful electricity -
come with me, come with me.
Come with me love away from the violence,
I don’t want to take a vow of silence,
don’t want to have to conceal this feeling,
for feelings are not meant for concealing...
and even a dreamwoman
gets beautiful electricity -
come with me, come with me.
BARNESIE
Barnes’s goal against Brazil
it is the best I have seen still
it was not born under the hill
Barnes’s goal against Brazil
Barnes’s horse got on the course
they said to have more intercourse
so Barnes’s horse flew to the sun
when it got back it was no done
Barnes’s name is not in vain
for I’m the one who gets the blame
inside the flame when the game
has gone insane and is quite lame
Barnes’s nose I don’t suppose
objects to the way her garden grows
and the redolent rose strikes a pose
for the garden hose that no-one knows
Barnes’s wait is just for Kate
whom it would seem is Head of State
went on a date with a mate
and came back home so very late
CHRYSALIS
DAYBED MUSING
If
you said to me
I
would’ve fancied you
had
you not let it be known
that
you want to eat my bones
then
I’d say back to you
girl
I don’t want to eat your bones
but
of course all the while
I
want to eat your bones
but
I’ve not thought it through
for
if I’ve eaten your bones
yummy
as they may be
then
I can’t make love to you
but
if I suddenly said
and
this is coming from me
I
don’t want to eat your bones
it
would be the saddest thing
so
what I really mean
is
you are in my heart
you
are in my dreams
where
there are no bones
pulchritudinous
sylph
you’re
the reason to hope
like
a primrose in Hell
through
whom I would traipse
just
to hold you again
in
my slender long arms
quench
these insatiable
fire
alarms
and
that’s when we’d kiss
that’s
when we’d glow
that’s
when we’d shine
that’s
when we’d know
HOW TO BREAK THE LIGHT SPEED LAW OF NEUROPLASTICITY
You're The Juggernaut that's what you are
walk like an Egyptian and wriggle your little wing
like a winged chainsaw flying up in the cloud
swoop down and seal my soul and everything
For I'm the witness of this scene
I've read the pages of orange and green
I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean
otherwise I'll offend the mating queen
On Grand-darth's Ship I went off a-sailing
suffice to say your horror-packet is served
and when I get back I think I'll give you a ring
for it's the least that you my demon have deserved
For I'm the witness of this scene
I've read the pages of orange and green
I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean
otherwise I'll offend the mating queen
and when you score such a radical goal
it stays with you in your open, Holy soul
and you get no money and get no headlines too
but you've done what someone's just got to do
TEAR-JERKING
SENTIMENTAL ENDING SCENE
The
friends I’ve made
I’d
like to keep
and
brush their hair when
we
get to sleep
I
think this illness
is
a monster
chill
with the stillness
and
love yr brother
the
severed notebook
went
on for ages
with
no connection
in
all its severed pages
I
hate these voices
these
infernal voices
I
made my choices
they
were not James Joyce’s
now
I want to stay free
I
want to stay me
I
stay calm
in
all uncertainty
and
I want to stay cool
and
not be the fool
who
was the Smartest
kid
in school
O
crossroads of
all
inward spiral
I
hope your smile
does
not go viral
the
severed
notebook
itches
with skunkosis
in
my back pocket
pre-diagnosis
and
I now look back on
youth
that’s flown
over
the houses
into
the unknown
today
it’s snowing
there
is no knowing
if
the creative
juices
are flowing
and
I want to stay free
and
I want to stay me
and
I want to stay calm
in
all uncertainty
yes
I want to stay clear
as
a morning beer
now
that you know
I’m
the ancient seer
and
I live for you
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN:
SELF-REFLECTION
THUS FAR
Without
the <BEE> albums my songbook
would be obscurantist and neo-phobic, making me look like a cultural
heathen, a remnant,
unoriginal hippy
lost
in
the modern, Digital Age; and with the <BEE> albums
you might even be forgiven for thinking it is (at
least in part) my
brother James’s book. It does contain the collaboration of the new
da Vinci circle, but it is largely
my
musical journey that is depicted, in my words and music. Still, the
only original idea as such in the whole book appears to be my brother
James’s idea: that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the
international language alphabet. So
it’s
as if I was, for those four new da Vinci circle albums at
least,
loaned my brother’s guitar to see what I would do with it. I think
it at the moment the best book I have done, proceeding as it does
chapter by chapter through the albums I have made that are available
to listen to online, which
lends the book a sense of order, a sense of organisation that I
greatly appreciate. If I had done this and only this I would be
happy… one of my old friends, Dr. Calculator Ptom, said of my
writing “it should’ve just been one book about the band.”
Although I haven’t included much of the material from the band he
himself named – Oedipus Wrecks – because it’s not recorded –
this would be the book in question, if I had to have done only one.
My sister thinks music can be 4D, and prefers song lyrics to the
monopolisation of indigenous wisdom in regimented metres. Indeed, my
other brother Dr. Robert (who
is the truly musical one in the family) says
my lyrics are “meant for wiping up semen” and that “art is
tending to the Low not High end these days.” So
it is that on a sunny morning in Cumbria I feel okay about this
venture. I am not claiming to be the new Bob Dylan or John Lennon,
though I know someone in the music world (Mike
Eccleshall) that
once declared me better than both and the most aloof artist since
Nick Drake; I am just setting my lands in order. It is good to sing,
masculine even, in the Oral Tradition of the bardic child. I am of
the school that says if you belt it out loud enough nobody will care
if you can’t really sing. My guitar meanwhile is quite good but
they come much better still. I would say the higher you climb in the
branches of the tree of academia, researching the maths for the new
colour as a cellular mark et al, the more you appreciate music, that
universal language, and the less you appreciate academia. Now I would
appreciate input from my bro who I
think is
asleep upstairs, so I can only ad-lib in impromptu fashion while I
wait. Now he comes downstairs as if he heard me think! “Thinking?”
he asks as
he steps in the room;
then we
speak about the new, glass chopping board I got for mum – that has
four bees on it. He asks what I did with the old one, but already I
notice that if I try and record everything of our one minute dialogue
of only a moment ago, most of it got away! So now he goes back
upstairs to his bedroom, and now I think of putting the sausages on,
because as
James pointed out they
go past their sell-by-date soon. Well,
we have been called Shaggy and Scoob before, and often talk about
food. So I put the sausages in the AGA and realise this book is a
correction on a former songbook called Soundcloud
Rain
that went wrong at some point; for after all Mrs. Zadie Smith says us
writers write to correct previous work. Jim Morrison pictured a wall
with a scratch on it and said we try to perfect the wall with further
scratches. While
the sausages sizzle, I reflect on what it means when your work is not
your own. One’s work should always be one’s own, not a Communist
ego-loss experiment, a poetry hive-mind or an omnijective interface
of random access co-imagination. But what when you hear voices? What
when you collaborate? What when other people are trying to use you?
What when your brother and mother want it to be one pool? What
I don’t like, is
when
I can’t
get away from influence. I believe in individual genius, and I
believe in my own individual genius too. As I have said I don’t
feel like going on about it, but am someone who helped invent the net
at 7, took care of The
Lords And The New Creatures
twice at 8, was marked by an experiment into the maths of the new
colour as a cellular mark at 11, attained the face of stars at 15,
forewarned of September 11th
at 18, in 2000, and also at 18 among other things got 100% in an
English Literature A-level examination essay. You also know what I
went on to do after leaving school, including
recording
on earphones, hosting the Plough alignment, getting a renegade First
despite mental illness, working at the purple screen, building the
Tower, conducting the experiment into the tape with a pause,
discovering the sheet where pictures grew, falsifying
the Nirvana barcode, attaining visual radio broadcasting dreams,
and all of it was not for a penny. I think if I was a neutral and
someone described someone like that to me I would believe he
was a genius,
and now the sausages are sizzling and I gather the CV is why they had
to do <BEE> through me, and so on
top of it all, I came out as a fifth rate musician who was completely
misguided in going into music. So:
that’s why the book is alright: it’s not high and mighty,
elitist, exclusive. It’s something any old person can do, and do at
least as well as me. It’s egalitarian,
it’s Amateur,
it’s Hobbyist, it’s D. I. Y. It
neglects to turn any situation in my CV to my own personal advantage.
So I eat a cooked breakfast and settle on this; and
afterwards make mum her morning coffee as I do every day. She wants
James to turn the AGA down a bit because it’s so hot; so I
go
upstairs, see that he’s eaten the full English breakfast I made
him, tell him she wants him to turn down the AGA; and he asks why I
can’t do it; so supposing it will make no difference if it is me, I
turn it down, turning the notch slightly, a CM, clockwise, which
might suffice as a whole plot where I am coming from. As my dead dad
used to say when he was a kid: “I’ll do it my lone.” So I did
it my lone and now here I am, thinking of investing some money into
publishing the present text. I
rather think it would make me happier. The
Flood meanwhile – now that they know it was me that had the idea to
invent the binaural earphones – don’t even wish for me to be the
“seer” associated with the
foothill of Black Combe, Sea
Ness. The locals up here know me as the seer. I was walking past a
house once
and
there were two people in the front garden; and as I walked past, one
of them said to the other “that’s the one that’s the seer.”
Why The Flood would want to take this away from me as well I have no
idea. But
I have thought of something else to say. It is about the barn
conversation where I for one first mentioned the earphones.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN:
THE
PROPHET AND THE LOSS
I
have
recently
had the revelation that upon leaving school I was raped. If
you speak against September 11th
in 2000 and it still goes ahead you were raped. So that is my
revelation: I evolved, and was raped. So now I would like to take you
through the speech in the barn, which has been reconstructed.
Yes,
in
the year 2000, in the old smoking den in the barn, I was
making pretty speeches, and some present there remember that I
actually founded
a new religion, in ordinary speech which to recapture is difficult,
but I can break it down. There were inventions, prophecies, ambitions
and aphorisms, all
mixed together in fluent speech but which can be categorised now.
First let me reconsider
the
inventions. A
virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the
edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what
it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A
red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic
horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom of
a corrupt politician.
An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked
on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick
instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the
oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics
inside them so that you can record on them. What’s wrong with these
is that they are not real!
To
recapture the prophetic aspect (an
aperture on
rapture) is another challenge but I was basically saying: “I
look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that
they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that
will prove God non-extrinsic to matter. It would be good to see an
alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a rhythm
change in
the White House,
maybe in India. I
think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the
Twin Towers on September 11th
and I don’t that a good idea but it might happen. Meanwhile,
I would like to write a book, maybe a
Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers,
classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art
and science as a single discussion of perception. It would also
be good if there were a party in an office
block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor
represents a decade in music, fashion and substances. I
myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might
if he were a musician. I would say that smells from tellies would
also be possible one day too.
I think what we might see is an Age called
the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment. I
do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we
have a new Millennium.”
Ambitions were also laid down. To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced. To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly. To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition. To invent the post-poem is another ambition. To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else. To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London. To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion. I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer. If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass. To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old. To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal. To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.
Then fourthly there were the maxims and arrows that came hand in hand with ordinary speech. A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand. Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema. Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts. The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation. Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation. The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man. The opposite of something is the pre-requisite. The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution. The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph. When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy. When you lose your concentration you die. Your ordinary speech is surreal enough. There are too many words in the world. Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan. The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous. You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love. All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun. Without difference no contradistinction. Everyone is my brother and I love them. The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance. There is no more mapless space.
There
was also the seemingly
minor
matter of dad’s art dealing
business.
I was saying
it was code or recourse to euphemism for a pollen
smuggling
business based in
Morocco.
He told us he was an art dealer nicknamed Blue that charged the
Germans for the return
of
their Russian-plundered pastoral paintings, but I started to
entertain that it was a lie to protect his family. Still to this day
I don’t
really know
the full story!
Anyhow,
I was also
saying
Jesus was a proto-hippy-stoner-poet, who would’ve smoked pot in our
day and age. I was going on about how I liked they way a sprinkling
of Tinkerbell’s magic dust makes them fly in Peter Pan, how a Mario
mushroom confers energy, how they fall asleep in a poppy field in The
Wizard of Oz to attain the Emerald City. It was a good conversation,
where I also pointed out the four of us are named after the Doors
apart from when they had a girl of course, and how we are born in a
season each, going Spring Autumn Winter Summer and how we march right
left right left in the hands. Of course there are four compass points
too, seasons, legs of a horse, wheels of a car, sides of a table, and
even dimensions in the mapping of spacetime in Einstein. My speeches
for there were probably a few were often punctuated by the word
“revolve!” which meant we had to revolve whatever we were smoking
round the circle. If I had written it down it would be
like
notes on hyper-vision.
Fear
is an epiphany of Hell in the self. Philosophy is a self-contained
language corresponding to nothing real in life. Existentialism is a
child at the pick and mix with a credit card. Politics is a choice
between two plates of dogshit. It is better to have a cup of tea than
it is to kill yourself. Portability
is the new apotheosis of Form. I. T. might stand
for Instant Travel too. All things must be returned to earth,
surrendered like a rented thing to death.
The
speech would have sufficed as a written text, or the start of one,
had I written it down. That’s not just the cannabis making it seem
better than it was. Indeed, it was like wasting a good book on the
air; and there were so many things in it that started to come true –
like the earphones, The
Scientific Papers,
the office block party, the God Particle hunt andcetera. It was as if
the rape was going on on all fronts. It starts without cognition,
just a burning psychosis in the brain when the Towers fell, that I
tried to douse with whisky. You then have to try and translate the
mute, befuddled shapes of the preverbal into words; to acknowledge
the stranger; to negotiate peace terms with the unruly unconscious.
At the time there was a war of misplaced revenge and ego-parade waged
against the wrong country, and Paul kept a list of scurrilous
oxymorons bandied about on the News, like the War on Terror and the
peace-keeping missile, to hold the authorities to account. I was in a
daze, and we were still trying to make it work as a band, a band that
recorded on earphones. Now that people know me they think I am more a
Nash character.
It’s
a good job I kept writing, if it lead me to the truth. Very
often writers don’t know why they write until it gets to the end.
To heal the soul of the world is as good an efficacy as any. If it’s
true I had the idea to invent the earphones as my brothers assure me,
I was raped on that front as well, and even the old band would agree
with that. What a time to be young while all that was going on,
the Age of Terror, the war of misplaced revenge and ego-parade. And
in among it all Prof. Morley took The
Scientific Papers
which I was going to write, even with a near-verbatim classification.
It’s literally the case that almost everything in the barn
conversation became part of my being raped after September 11th
still came true. It’s
taken me a long time to see it as well. At first there is no
cognition, just a sensation of burning psychosis in the brain. Yes,
I
was downing whisky to douse the flames in my Gap Year when I was
living at Paul’s house, so bad was the psychosis, and one might
imagine that it was what rape feels like. That is, I think it makes
sense if I was raped, and if that was the gateway to mental health
troubles that I would go on to experience. We
have to eventually translate that pre-verbal thought-pattern into
words. We
have to acknowledge the stranger, negotiate peace terms with the
unruly unconscious, before healing can begin.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN:
THE NEO FLOOD ALBUM
So,
now all that remains to be done is drink herbal tea compress
sans sugar,
read philosophy and cogitate on finishing off The Flood. That is, it
strikes me that we could add a new album by The Flood to the mixture.
Agent G and Tom from the band have okayed it for me to organise a new
Flood album. I
have the material recorded, or at least some material recorded, but
where would it fit in? I think it should go on the empty Soundcloud
page so that it is in a loop with the first Flood album and
the songs of Mark’s new outfit Candyblasta.
Then it’s like there is an on and an off function; because this
second moiety is not
recorded
on binaural earphones.
After
all some thought our experiment would result in a new creature. They
didn’t know I had already “done” The
Lords And The New Creatures
when I was 8. The first was a breakfast of every snooker ball colour
in James Joyce’s bedroom. The second was a living spreadsheet: a
flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff splurged on top
in an un-naturally regimented fashion in
the lining of a jacket.
I disposed of the latter on account of it being hideous; but that is
something like what the guys thought we’d end up with in the Flood,
either that or the air swarming with visual radio which I have also
known.
So
it is that I upload a second album or even “play-list” by The
Flood onto the empty Soundcloud page so that it is in a loop with the
binaural earphone stuff. O is the key of the babbling unicorn. Back
in the day we started the O language, which was putting O’s on the
ends of all words. You can double your vocabulary with but a single
letter that way! So it is that things end up alright. Whatever
I say in this book, I
love my friends from the band and the other band and without them I
would be a fresh vegetable. I recently
took
an O. D. the
likes of which it was genius to survive and
during
that
suicide attempt, my
friends
visited me in voices which can be real people, and without them there
I would indeed be a fresh vegetable of the dusky dawn. So
I
hope to still be on good terms with them whatever has been said in
this book, for we were the only guys in town who were listening to
The
Velvet Underground at 16. We were bohemian aristocrats, Beatniks,
renegades, wild-cards. I still remember, for example, when we played
‘Come To Daddy’ by The Aphex Twin on the organic instruments, as
two bands become one, in
the studio room upstairs at
the abandoned
primary School
in Cambridge. I was on the drums and they were walking across the
floor so
hard I was hitting them.
I was said to be a badass guitarist and a force of nature on the
drums by
Agent G later, but
what I was most after was attaining lyrics that could work as poetry.
Early on in Oedipus Wrecks where I wrote “oceans smile with liquid
eyes and fill themselves with rain,” I was said to have attained
poetry. It’s great when someone says your lyrics are like poetry. I
would say the best lyricists include Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan,
Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Nick
Cave,
Thom Yorke, Tricky, Billy Corgan, Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and
probably a handful of others, maybe
even Noel Gallagher unto
some people.
If
I have attained poetry in my lyrics herein I would consider that a
success.
In
short, I don’t wish this to be an invidious thing. I wish to still
consider my old friends real friends. Alright, there were certain
hometruths my awesome
brother
needed to point out to me – for example I had forgotten it was my
idea to invent the earphones – but at the same time I don’t want
to fall out with everyone. Music is supposed to unite us. It is a
time of war in the world at the moment, in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip
and it leaks into the head from afar, so there’s that to consider.
We
had a pact back in the day that if any of us made it they would take
the others along with them. When I went back to University at
Lancaster, Mark, who had dropped out of APU to pursue music, and
Jez with whom he shared a tremendous creative empathy
kind of made it with a new outfit called Candyblasta. Rather than
give you a long poem on their sound it would be better to give you an
hyperlink. The point is we should still have to honour the pact,
which was sealed with drinking Guinness in a Cambridge bar
originally, and Mark’s idea. Please let us lot not start fighting
or else what hope is there for world peace? Musicians traditionally
fall out with each other, over matters of
ego
and intellectual property and we did, but let this be a setting
straight of the record. Let beer be free in the future, let music be
4D, let souls be not forgotten, let the soul of the world be healed.
The
new Flood album is called ‘Wishlist’ because I wish we were still
together as a band and making music at the Lock Up in the dead of
night, the vampire hours, on that old industrial estate, smoking
skunk, detuning strings, operating earphones with mics in that
record. So
it is that I leave you now with the lyrics to the new Flood album.
They are all numbers from The Flood’s original days apart from one
or
two which
are
“about” The Flood. There
is an instrumental on it in a de-tuning which I wrote back in the
day. I’d say it’s quite strong but that may be the acid talking!
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR
(recorded on binaural earphones in The Flood but not used on their album)
Love your neighbour till your girl gets home
I’m fleeing the town in my neighbour's clothes
love your neighbour in her underwear
I wonder what goes on under there
and you’d better repent
for all the money you spent
now you’re dove has been sent
Love your neighbour when you're all alone
I left my message on your answerphone
love your neighbour with her tricks and lies
ask no questions hear no flies
and you’d better repent
for all the money you spent
now you’re dove has been sent
Love your neighbour till the war is gone
I think they think that’s not fair on John
love your neighbour when the war is over
treat your neighbour like your long lost lover
and you’d better repent
for all the money you spent
now you’re dove has been sent
ALAS THE DAY
Alas the daaaaaaaaay doesn’t matter anyway
for there is a Night and heartbeats are bold
and hold me tight and Night is blessed
and filled with questions can not guess
what will happen next O maybe death
then of course we’ll lie under fertile loam
but for now we’re miles away from home
O electric street I’m feeling New Beat
I feel the heat within my sensory atrophy
so many things are all happening at once
the infinite cocks are fucking the infinite cunts
then of course we’ll know who sees something strange
and he will know when it’s time for a sea-change
MOVING ON
When you record on earphones and say you’ll plug your senses in the mains they become aliens, aliens from Hollywood films, like the Fifth Element where there is a blue alien that can sing in two notes at once.
When I hear the sound I think of Jess and her impeccable taste in musical tunes.
I’ve got a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face of stars, to be enraptured and enthralled, will still write the line I wrote at the time and like I did too think it is his own.
My father knew the line and sometimes I think of him – he hasn’t gone so far – is only up the way – lying underground.
When I was a boy and we first moved up he took me out the back and asked what I could hear and I said I didn’t know so he said it’s the beck.
SPACE IS BIG
Space is big
space is big
space is big
space is big
space is big
space is big
space is big
space is big
and the edge
is the middle
and the middle
is the edge
is the middle
is the middle
is the edge
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
John is gone
and he left
his pink pyjamas
pink pyjamas
pink pyjamas
and he left
his pink pyjamas
they were on
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
find a bridge
or we’ll never
live forever
live forever
or we’ll never
live forever
live forever
SNAKE
BLUES
Amen/
hello
let’s
go for a ride
do
you believe in life before death?
Amen/
hello
let’s
go for a ride
do
you believe in life before death?
Red
is the guitar
green
is the grass
grey
is the sky
don’t
say goodbye!
SOMETHING
LIKE A SONNET
If
Freedom and Peace of Mind are what you’re after / you’ve made the
right choice with BT Talk Together / with an unlimited number/ of
local evening and weekend phonecalls / if sorrow sighs upon your
shoulder/ find yourself another lover/ manoeuvre over backyard
fences/ angel where do you hid tonight?/ I’ll make maps of the
stars to find you/ soft caressing breeze to guide you/ if you can be
in my dream/ can I be in yours too? / get rid of/ ad hoc/ remembering
when we wandered round Amsterdam making up poetry about neon
chameleons on the spot/ random dime/ random time/ don’t pour Pepsi
on the bright equipment/ don’t piss on the cloakroom floor/ don’t
fly with only a dream contraption/ don’t keep wanting more and
more/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother/ I’m too loud and I woke
my mother/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother/ I’m too loud and I
woke my mother.
(co-authored
with Paul)
ALAN THE BAT
Sullen,
silken sulks,
we
drink the same rain,
spit
is clean
and
so is dirt.
*
Another,
another,
another
fucking joint.
*
Even
a duck gets big erections.
*
Lucy
in the soul w/ demons
might
happen to be a substance.
*
To
plug my senses
in
the mains
might
utilise
!00%
of my brains
but
it’s all gone
wrong
at the plug,
just
a dream on
an
ancient drug.
*
Di
di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Di
di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
bring
bring
bring
bring
“hello?
Hi
dad!
I’m
fine!”
*
Here
I am as I write by night
furtive
in flight
with
the sprightly
hypertext-sniper
on
Piper At The
Gates
of Dawn.
*
And
the sheet
where
pictures
brown
and blue
simply
grew
was
Winnie the Pooh.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN:
DREAMWORK
NOTATION
Last
night in dreams I started writing a song with the line:
“I
was walking through the clouds.”
The
rest of the dream was an option for a second line. There were many
options. I went back to University where the whole campus was out and
crowded around and was offering help with options. Some
of them came in the form of drugs. Some were written on the
whiteboard. Whenever I chose an option, continued the song, everyone
would find out. In
another scene one of dad’s poet friends articulated two floating
balls as the correct option. There were many scenes, bulging with
options, bulging with medication, bulging with resolution in the
dream. It was while I was singing that song in my dreams, a song
which definitely elongated enough to be sung, that I felt free in
dreamland. I did you know used to be a dreamworker, and a meditator,
and an athlete, and a poet, and a scholar, and a self-helper, and a
large scale reader, and more and many more. Dreamwork is great. Did
you know we still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals
from ancestors that had to rehearse for the real live situation? Did
you know in dreams there is no context? Did you know we are dreaming
all the time except in sleep without sensory stimulus?
You
can teach yourself to lucid dream and then take a further step
towards a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment didn’t tend to
McDonalds though,
but
Heaven or the idea of Heaven where people took particles of dirt like
drugs and got
high off psychoactive dirt and chanted
the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in
effect.”
You
can also learn to smuggle language out of the unconscious. I
sometimes wonder if my best work is as Prof. David Morley says “lost
on the shores of sleep.” The song in my dream last night, trailing
its bulging offering of options for continuation, made
me feel free and famous at once, like I was a star in the realm of
dreams, like everyone knew me and knew my story, like I was a quiet
household name, as familiar as dreams.
What
happened last night was that I took a strong sleeping pill and
started to write while it was having an effect of my brother and of
<BEE>, very badly I think. I eventually got my anger off my
chest and went to sleep and had one of those medicated dreams, full
of homeostatic chemicals. I didn’t wake up until the evening and it
is evening still. It was only a few hours ago that I woke and can
only exclaim that I love my brother dearly, and that what I wrote
yesterday was writing through the medium of the sleeping pill. We’re
still
Shaggy
and Scoob, James and I, and talk a lot about food. I wish I could
flesh out the song in question too, now that it seems writ and
rehearsed in dreams. In
fact I spend an evening writing a song for Hannah’s little ‘un,
who is due to come here tomorrow for the first time.
GO
WITH THE FLO’
I
was walking through the clouds,
with
a song
against my ear,
and
when I made it through the crowds,
there
was reason
enough to cheer,
‘cause
you were coming home,
yeah
you were coming home,
and
I just want say “hey! Go with the flo’!”
for
you are such a beautiful one,
as
beautiful as the English sun,
which
so often tries to hide,
and
we
love you deep inside.
You’re
coming with your mum and dad,
protected
by a red guitar,
and
though you’re uncle has gone mad,
you’re
still
going
to be a star,
‘cause
you are coming home,
yeah
you are coming home,
and
I just want to say “hey! Go with the flo’!”
for
you are such a beautiful one,
as
beautiful as the English sun,
which
so often tries to hide,
and
we
love you deep inside.
INTERMISSION
Now
I’m supposed to write a song for my mother. At
least voices say that so I think of how much I love her, how she
wants to move, how she slogged her guts out in care to keep the
house, and maybe a few things I might mention at her funeral too.
You
remember when I helped invent the net,
but
not Jim Morrison’s book which I’ll never forget...
No
that is awful. My mother probably thinks my song for baby Florence is
awful too
so
I am going to do another. I have a piece of music, a chord
progression and melody, unused.
SONG
FOR FLO’
It’s
funny writing for you before we have met
but
I’m the uncle that taught your mum the alphabet
now
she types much faster than I ever could do
and
she’s gifted the world with a beauty like you
it’s
a celebration just to have you around
it’s
a time for listening to The Velvet Underground
it’s
a time
for breaking into spontaneous song
welcome
to the family which is where you belong
soon
you’ll be walking and will make them proud
like
I was once walking up on a cloud
and
you’ll know the meaning of the verb to love
like
I know it too with my excellent bruv
it’s
a day of happiness to first have you here
it’s
a day for cheering and for drinking beer
it’s
a day for playing with the toys on the floor
and
for going with the flow as before
-
but
voices don’t want me to carry on. They want me to do something
different. What do they want? I
can’t quite hear. Muffled word-chords in the mind’s ear. I shall
obey them for now.
FURTHER
LISTENING
To
listen to The Flood, visit rhythm
guitarist Tom
Woodhall’s page on Soundcloud.
To
listen to my first solo album, ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’
[Demo 3], visit John F B Tucker’s Soundcloud page.
To
listen to the four albums of the new da Vinci circle, visit John F B
Tucker on Bandcamp.
To
listen to material by Black Hole Myths and
other collaborations with
Grant,
visit Grant Aspinall on Bandcamp.
To
listen to ‘Unplugged At The Foot of Sea Ness’ visit John F B
Tucker on Bandcamp.
To
listen to ‘Wishlist’ by The Flood, visit John F B Tucker’s
other Soundcloud page.
BOOK
THREE
THE
‘C’ ONE
PRELUDE
I
was thrown blind into the world of science. Science
knows, but also loves. John also loves. John loves science and all
his friends and family. Hey, I once wrote the word “entropy”
backwards with a dot between each letter if that means anything to
you. Personally I am yet to find a meaning for it but have traipsed
all the way back to the first, unformulated spark of appetence in
Nothingness preceding Creation to try and give it meaning. No such
thing as far as I can tell. No, there is no “entropy backwards.”
Nothing for the term to name. That
might even be Tucker’s constant!
Should you need to see some numbers at this stage of the day already, I would only suggest the equation for hanging your coat on the primary school wall:
+ x ½ = -
Is there any more basic way of expressing not only that energy is lost in transfer but that positive and negative form a cohesive unity?
Anyhow, my latest epiphany is that the substance crinoline can be grown; or at least maybe, maybe crinoline can be synthesised in evolution. It is a revelation derived from reading my father’s last notebook. I understood, or entertained, reading it, that crinoline was a part of the material of a kind of “living spreadsheet” I discovered in my early boyhood, around the time of the dawn of the world wide web. I was only 8 and it was already Observation number two.
They were days of acid-rain which you don’t hear of so much anymore but which reminds me of a stance I have: I believe it specious that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more ultimate proof of something being real than saying it was imagined.
That’s not to say the living spreadsheet was not real: it was a fully “reified” and tactile object which I did not keep on account of it looking grim; but thinking I know now after all these years what the material was, I thought it a duty to science, to Man, to bring the revelation to the written word.
My life has actually been full of events of scientific interest which warrant narrative. Not all of them are as disgusting as the living spreadsheet I assure you, which should’ve been left to soak in water, but wasn’t. I do intend to take you on a crash course through the main moves I made to show you how I must’ve been crying out for the condition of science from a young age, to dignify things.
OUTLINE
OF LIFE EVENTS THAT LEAD TO THE CONDITION OF SCIENCE
Although
I have said it all before I will say it all again, and there is good
reason to say it here and now and real and feeling – to
talk about my life - even
if it seems quite tiresome in terms of the narrative unto the reader.
Well, as you by now know if you have read my CV: when
I
was only
seven,
and
liked the film All
Dogs Go To Heaven,
I
scribed a little
book
that
performed
at
least four
scientific functions: it
encrypted
a scientific notion concerning Gravity, storing
the idea of the net in
writing in the attic to
give it a chance to grow around the world;
calibrated
an algorithm that sublimates
numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour, I
think, could be rendered as a cellular mark; and
separated
the object ‘pollen’ from its name - and I did not consciously
know,
even though it was writ with my own right hand.
Some might say that’s already enough or too much. Then at eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand… if one was the breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the latter was the plastic spreadsheet. If I had to conjure an “abstract” out of being the one to make those Observations I would simply say in talking about The Lords And The New You Know Who by Jim Morrison coming true something “kinetic” becomes something “static.” It’s the same as John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment when we watch the Action Replay. We know the ball is going in. Something kinetic becomes something static.
Yes, by the age of eleven I was “incrementally” marked by the maths of the new colour on the hand even though it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. My siblings and I wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. We sang of the dog going round and round chasing own tail!
Leaving Prep School, I soon enough came into possession of a cassette cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and an ideal to do away with the pause. That was one experiment back then. It being Pearl Jam ‘VS’ I suppose the experiment was in organising a poetry machine in perpetual motion. At fifteen I formed a second band called Oedipus Wrecks. My mnemonic for the strings was indeed Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. I also led two friends to the face of stars. We were three gathered in the name that Night so it could be something from the Bible but there are other options including collective hallucination, including a vision scripted in The Lords And The New You Know Who. By now I had started reading it.
I formed Secret Chord H and an Anon love poetry magazine while still at school, sweet sixteen. Then at eighteen years old in the year 2000, and not unlike Democritus of the Ancient Greeks, I foresaw the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in. I was a fully tuned-in prophet on other fronts too, even savant but have learned I cannot necessarily say what I want. I admit that I did entertain the idea that the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison might have to become the missing link to the super-human corridor in evolution – but it may not be my own thesis.
I envisioned our Plough alignment happening, but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my back garden. I set aside an ideal for a book called The Scientific Papers about it all that would be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” Among the prophecies I spouted many ideas for inventions, many aphorisms, many artistic ambitions. That year I wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.
My fourth band The Flood recorded an album or even algorithm on binaural earphones… the earphones were my idea to invent, back in the den in the barn, which was never mentioned once during the band because it wasn’t me that implemented it. Already some of these things seem scientific, these motifs, this Excellent News. When writing a portfolio for Warwick University, furthermore, I entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, that Portability might be the apotheosis of form…
The Towers came down, appalling us all or at least my friend Paul. I did feel the psychosis in my brain burn and burn. Still, I had little recollection of the barn where I had foreseen and spoken against it to the day using my own brain; and was persuaded at length, against my own instincts, to continue playing in the binaural earphone band.
Attending Warwick University, in 2002, I found my teacher, Professor David Morley, whom it would seem was a reasonable man, had just brought out The Scientific Papers and with an almost-verbatim classification to mine own. When it happens in sheep it is called morphic resonance and when it happens in academia it is uncanny imbrocation.
My first mobile, it reverberated the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons even happens to be an actual substance. With no degree, I returned to the band in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge and promised on the binaural album recorded on earphones I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”
Leaving the band, I coined the neologism “co-imagination,” before attending a second university, Lancaster, where I got a First despite mental illness. My dissertation was on the scientist-poet David Morley. I attested to our Holy Cow, the white eyebrow, the alignment of the Plough, the Plough honed in to align for a beautiful rhythm change in the White House around that time.
I attended the Secret Garden party after and found real skywriting; gravitated down south, attesting to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. I found my name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, as if some sensory overlay had grown as naturally as grass.
Returning north again, I built The Tower out of books I had gained that seemed to exhibit signs of natural magic, like one emanating the redolent smell of perfume, and another that seemed to have lost a line. I worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into post-humanism. I found the tape I mentioned to be a successful fusion and listening in to the suggestion of the wind cooked it in the dark blue AGA’s top oven.
When my dad died, and the purple-bleeding screen in the same instant, I discovered the sheet where pictures brown and blue simply bloomed or maybe grew. It could be portentous of the end of the chip. That was also when my boyhood book emerged which only now do I start to understand in terms of long storage. Then it was time to falsify the Nirvana barcode, and nor did I forget to extirpate every trace of recognition from the mind, unloose the mind of form, method-act every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.
Throughout
that sequence of events I found it impossible to gain even 1p and my
friends on both the right and the left deem it that that is not fair;
but
it is
not my business to complain about money. It’s
part of the reason we are thinking of selling. Sometimes we deem it
fair if I get to keep the air. Up
here the air is very clear, I mean fresh, for it is the light that is
clear; but down in the town of my birth the air is not so good.
It
eventually
became time to publish books; but
for
some
strange, unknown reason my computer was broken on the night before I
was due to publish
my first collection: Rose
Petals In The Ashtray.
So I had to go downstairs in
the night-time and
use my mother’s ancient PC; so the first collection became
half-remembered scraps instead of what I had. I
got the name Rose
Petals In The Ashtray
from
my dying
dad
and
didn’t know its meaning; so it was about innocence – but it was
terrible what
came out.
In
the version that went out there, there was a line missing from the
first poem in the name of revision that made a good poem bad; then
the second poem came from before it in the initial writing order. In
the end it irritated rather than pleased me to have it out there,
so
soon
enough I
had
it un-published, so there isn’t really a start to
my much-anticipated career.
Some further books were brought out especially in self-publishing on Amazon but they were building on nothing, no starting point, and only saw me messing it up further.
Binaural Songbook
57 Paintings For Art Therapy
The Field of Rock N Roll Science
John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem
Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy
The New Beat
The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn
Word For Stained Glass Windows
154 Shakespearean Sonnets
In time to come I started again with the publisher Chipmunka when some succubus swooped down and got me to arrange my songs in a book called Soundcloud Rain, dressing me up to look like Beethoven, when really I am not that musical as evinced by actually listening to the recorded material which you can on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.
After Soundcloud Rain came my boyhood proof, The Sunset Child. Then I got to bring out Breath Trapped In Heaven, which was strictly all love poems; and I felt it could’ve been miles better as a book but it did at least strive to stop the war. There was still proper no start to the career, no first collection to be a foundational level in an eventual Collected Works, which probably won’t come out by now, which seems a waste of the face of stars, and all those other things I got up to.
Then came Brave New Tense which only loaned a word from my mother – who can write off the top of her head in a way that quietly, discretely Taps the beck in the back. In Brave New Tense there was a bit of that going on, as if to bypass a need for a tract on Universal Human Rights.
SCIENCE SAYS
Science STILL says to only keep my falsification of the Nirvana barcode and my brother’s notion about <BEE>. The <BEE> thing is not mine; it is my brother James’s design, meaning:
@
<BEE> [long squiggle]
Infinity Symbol
The new da Vinci circle as I have posited it is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. It not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by incorporating a long squiggle, hopefully and ideally escapes “every word in every order” as a new super-computer can by no doubt organise.
I think it a brilliant piece of work.
As for my own situation, the so-called Nirvana barcode refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.
|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings
It seemed a brilliant moment when I came up with that, but when I showed it to my mother she said “there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode. It is but a trick of grief.”
So it was falsified in a very natural way, seen through as a fallacy.
I intended it as a mathematical conclusion to all that I had been through from the start of my life form helping invent the net at seven all the way up to the point of discovering the sheet where pictures grew in 2014.
I also hoped that in extending the line as I have above, it would “template over” The Lords And The New Creatures, suffice as a symbol of having “done” it.
I eventually wrote it out by hand and got my mother to photograph it burning on the sitting room fire out here at reality’s starry faultline. The photograph of the sheet I wrote out, burning on the fire, as taken by my mother, represents the latest in a long chain of attempts to falsify the Nirvana barcode.
It became smoke filing out of the chimney, and the smoke dissipated into the north wind, that great dissemination device.
A NOTE ON MY FIRST NUMBER
The encrypted node in the boyhood work, meanwhile, was that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break Light-speed a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah.
I see now that it was probably, probably government scientists who, for the sake of long storage, when the idea of the net needed storing in writing, got me to begin encrypting that with a text called
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
and to continue with a second text called
ENGLISH
JOHN TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
“but then again who knows.”
The split was not even but asymmetrical like one was on and one was off. It was like spotting the flaw in Einstein. It was like saying if you write Einstein backwards it implies the breaking of light speed. It was even like saying even if we invent a time machine that can equal light speed we can only go back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet.
At some point, after the Einsteinian bit, a + sign was put in for the F of ‘scarf’ in the line
“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”
Then there was a discussion of the struggle between ‘Good and Evil’ in a piece where
“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”
In other words the first person pronoun and the time 1 o’clock were being contrasted.
It is not clear if the splitting of the two books happened next, for the number 2 in the sequence, but I think so. In terms of the number three, there was also my maths book where in among the numbers you find a three line poem going
Colour circles red. How many circles?
Colour triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?
To read it all you’d only need to go and get a copy of what by now I know helped invent the net but which at the time of publication I did not know helped invent the net. It’s called The Sunset Child. People have said the best one in it is called ‘My Dad.’
It ascends, counting up, through other numbers - 4 is a bike crash in Sweden, when I am but 4 years old. 5 is my brother Dr. Robert’s age when I was writing. 6 is a psychedelic story about drinking some lemonade and shrinking until I am but 6 inches tall. In that piece I also look at my watch.
So there is a variety of ways to incorporate a number in the numerical ascent, including ages, times of day, inches, dates, and more.
It strikes me that I might as well run you through regional variations in Korean cuisine, or describe a river’s journey through varying and variegated ages of rock. The way I left it, calibrating an algorithm that sublimates numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour could be attained in a cellular way, it was just about counting...
sometimes I wonder if I can check my own biology – in terms of how much I grew or did not grow – to assess whether the encrypted node in the boyhood book is true or not. You only need to go on Youtube and find a video to find out that gravity, in having no motion, can not be said to break the speed of light, only warp and bend the fabric of spacetime. If it didn’t grow I would say the encrypted notion was wrong; if the mark was not the new colour I would say the experiment into the maths of the new colour failed.
The truth is it did grow but not a great deal: I went from being very well hung by nature to not so big by nurture; and the mark didn’t turn out the new colour in the end; and semen spills like silver water; and still, the internet works.
THE LIVING SPREADSHEET
At eight years old, then, I made the two Observations, one a breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the other the living spreadsheet.
W/r/t the latter, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”
It could be described as a flat, plastic rectangle with a un-naturally regimented pattern of black stuff splurged on top.
I left the room to see if it would still be there when I went back; and it was; and so I decided to put the whole jacket in the bin.
I heard later, years later, it was called “Grand-darth’s Ship” and took its Taxonomic Genus from one of my own seven year old poems.
As stated I gather from dad’s last notebook that the plastic material might have been crinoline. Crinoline might have been the missing ingredient – the key part of the jigsaw, my knowing of which has propitiated that I bring the discovery to the realm of readership.
How dad knew when he’d never seen it I don’t know but I believe him – it makes sense – as if he got it from grand-dad.
The poem Grand-darth’s Ship was about how my grand-dad Don became a deep-sea diver. For a start, he actually fought against the Nazis and secondly he didn’t become a deep-sea diver in reality – he became an Officer in the R. A. F. So it just grew, evolved, this living spreadsheet, which was not an animal that reminds of wealth, but of grand-dad’s generation and the horror of war.
My best guess is that it was to do with “Symbiotic Homeostasis.” That means there was such a juxtaposition going on between Good and Evil that Nature acted with an homeostatic reaction. So we are talking about kinesis – but how crinoline became part of that kinesis I do not know. If you read my boyhood book, The Sunset Child, it contains the poem “Grand-darth’s Ship” within a long sequence where there are at least four scientific functions, interwoven, while I am one of four children, who are born in a season each, going right left right left in the hands. The material was never tested but it could’ve been something my father passed on to me, the living spreadsheet; and he in turn might’ve got the word “crinoline” from grand-dad – but that I don’t know.
It could be that my own knowledge of my own seven year old writing, my own memory of it, the human experience of writing it, was annexed into what became reified. That it was a literal invention that came from my mind but wasn’t “an illusion” or “hallucination” – still I don’t know this. I remember that the crinoline bit, that flat bed, was almost see-through and the size of a credit card except without rounded corners. The un-natural pattern of that rotten black stuff on top was what horrified me the most. It was regimented.
Here you might ship in knowledge of poetic form. How the theme “a clock is only as fast as a cheetah” even rhymes with “poetic metre.” There seemed a great variety in my boyhood book, between poems that were neat and others done in a rush. Why it happened to me I don’t know but it might’ve been my dad’s business.
They say this is what I should’ve been writing about when I was writing teenage love poetry inspired by Jim Morrison – but it’s better late than never eh?
They also say you shouldn’t write about things you cannot renew; but I think in this case the synthesis of crinoline might be renewed even if not by me.
I also think if you can trust my sensory perception it shows that science is the key to a world of possibility. To possibilities opening up. It shows what can be done and that is surely inspiring. I am not trying to bring down the government or start a Revolution, only report accurately on what has been seen, sound out the realm of the senses. If new possibilities arise that is surely a good thing and should not be squashed or censored.
Actually, I take it back: I have no way of knowing the plastic spreadsheet was the substance crinoline. I just hoped that when I read my dad’s notebook, there were answers. He left a list of French vocab that was a code encrypting the whole of the story. In a section entitled “Five Shapes” his vocab list included the English and French for crinoline. So it’s not just that I have no way of knowing now but that he didn’t either. So I have to shoulder the blame or even accept the praise for disposing of that revolting thing.
I’M FINE
“I’m fine,” I say all the time and you wouldn’t know what I mean.
I mean I was visibly marked on the hand by the experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark when I was about 11.
I took a long thin stripe up the underside, and that is what I mean when I say I’m fine.
It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end.
We still see that it is possible to effect your own evolution.
You could even call it self-evolution.
This one might imagine comes from within as opposed to adaptation to the environment. It might be what Darwin would focus on in my situation, nevertheless: The Theory of Self-Evolution. And if I were a shapeshifter, Protean, a changeling, I would also try and be the Darwin of light, where maybe Morley is the Einstein of water.
THE
RED AND BLUE THING
Between
the tincture and The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
there was a prose poem, or even dyad of prose poems called ‘The
Fire’ and ‘The Sea’. I was thus quite old when I “did the red
and blue thing” and now through reading gather that it was yet
another example of imbrocation with a scientist poet called David
Morley, which I would see more of the older I got.
‘The
Fire’ was a description of the sitting room fire, its 100 tongues
that danced and entranced, here where the stars realign. It was
observed; whereas ‘The Sea’ was remembered and imagined. It’s
interesting though because there is a difference between humidity and
moisture in the air; and the hottest star heat burns blue; and the
red and blue thing as they call it, which Michael
Hofmann
writes of in a poem called ‘Entr’ acte’ could be but a graph
with one long line kinking headward from the heart and ending in the
stars.
So
that was something I
did
between the tincture and the first album; and back then I was a
garden brick expert – my garden bricks, attention to detail in
grammar and spelling too, and
general keen-ness at English saw
me top of the form at English every term at school. And then years
later, as I say, I found out at University that Professor David
Morley had done the “red and blue thing” through the elements in
just the same way, when he was studying acid rain’s effect on Lake
Windemere up in the Lakes where I lived as a child.
PHILOSOPHY
FOR CHILDREN
Il
faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes
you’ve just got to hit
the road and.
Start
learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from
some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass
the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of
the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul
and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the
speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees,
birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a
smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.
The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…
Teacher
rite elephant nite
everything
lite lesson love
learn
tell everyone Esso orange.
2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1
In
the picture of the airport
I
can see… a runway,
a
cloud, two planes,
a
control tower
and
the ire ii net.
In
our new program there is a Vetacore.
A
bomp explodes.
I
faded my work.
I
found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I
saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full
of dead skeletons.
He
has spines all over him.
Colour
circles red. How many circles?
Colour
triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour
oblongs orange. How many triangles?
Hot
July brings cooling showers,
straw
berries and gilly flowers.
It
was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards
the sofa.
MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,
MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,
HE'S GOT THREE EYES
AND A BIG FAT NOSE
AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED
WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,
HE ONCE TOOK A PILL
THAT MADE HIM ILL
AND EVER SINCE THEN
HE'S
BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.
Squawk
squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Folder
graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us,
God made hash to help us. The
system works quite well. The
grass is always long on the Other Side.
The
fire-dance dwelled in electric drums
where
ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap
and
bells let peace form in blue notes
and
peered at deer in the wood and ate of it
and
wet let excellence sound out its criticism
and
dawn let sting its unsheathed sting
and
chloroform in the heart let see
if
only Game Over was seen in nights.
The
sun
hanged
himself
from
a
length
of
daisy
chain.
Clocktick
clock being clocked off by clocktick.
Clocktick
clock not being clocked off by Time.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.
Break,
bird with the skin of snake.
God
rushed into the cold cod quick.
Behold!
An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!
Barnes
has scored a chicken
and
wingers are allowed bikes!
Maybe
a
tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except
a swear word in every box, to
go at the end?
Even
A Duck
Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings
of the electric
guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say,
but
my mother has changed it now.
Hey, my name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...
I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.
She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.
She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.
She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.
She slides the stick of it out of the pack.
She puts the stick of it into her mouth.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She puts the packet back in her bag.
She swings the bag about a little bit.
She walks past a little pub long shut.
She might go check out a flower shop.
She loves to chew and to suck the taste.
She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.
I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.
A glance
A blink
A fault in the stars
Her mascara slips into pools of black
A chance
A second
of Infinity
She flutters her eyelids
like spring’s first butterfly
The stars awake to notice love
she waits with open arms.
Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:
The light of all that’s good is true
if believing is the dawn of dreams.
Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Soft
and
loose
like
yellow
pencils
scribbling
dreams
as
they
arrive.
Semen spills like silver water.
Don’t escape at night
into a heightened dream
from a dull and longing sleep
gone where the stars murmur
their cool ballad
to the approaching sky
if it only means that
her breath a poisonous magic.
Sometimes perhaps
down opening quiet
I am drawn down
long and alone and
my friend and my foe
recede into deep sleep
sudden and still
like a dawn behind
a screaming veil
where silence is born
and all that’s loose and tight
and all that’s light is light
like first morning
with no night
and wend my way
so slow to Freedom
and soft Infancy-lunacy
with harp-sure eyes
so I can live
the last poet’s
last poem.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but like butterflies.
My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?
Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.
When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:
[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].
Blessed may be the end at last,
under the sea,
below the soul,
in the upside-down
Oceans above us
(all that Heaven sends is rain).
V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the streetname for E becomes F sharp minor!
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
ENGLISH
JOHN TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.
Last night it seemed we couldn't
sleep but maybe I was dreaming.
The world expands inside my
hands it's getting heavy.
Of all the treasures I could
choose I can't seem to decide.
Today the shade was washed
away where I would hide.
Dream with open eyes, come
below and we can fantasise.
Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come
below and we can fantasise.
Last night it seemed we nearly
died but maybe I was dreaming.
It made me feel sooooooooooooo
alive and soooooooo in love.
Dream with open eyes, come
below and we can fantasise.
Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come
below
and we can fantasise.
FURTHERING
THE ROAD
In this system E = peace. Starting with L to the Pregnant Snorkel, E = peace. We could likewise start with, say, L to the stare of 3 o’ clock twice, and O needn’t be Ossie the dog, going round and round chasing his own tail, for there are many senses of O. For example O is the key of the babbling unicorn. As for V, we could have the peace sign made with the fingers, or V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings. The reason I have chosen ‘love’ for this Utilitarian Martianist slowspell is that love is as WH Auden says “a choice of words.” So many problems in philosophy and life alike are down to communication as Wittgenstein said; which is why it is good to further focus on language-use. Love is grouped with language not God.
If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,
L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.
So it is that even while we make our dreams plain in English, we also arrive at Backward Liquid Maths, where E minus MC squared = only relative 0.
That isn’t the end of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob either, for it surely goes on and on.
I would say that God is a game, and that a game is based on permutation, or at least can be, and that a permutation game can be a rehearsal for death. I would also say The Lords And The New Creatures is a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I would also say it is a media compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun, maybe to expose the germs of dictatorship on all hands. It churns up evidence through the operation of a game. It tests the place where evolution is controlled, monopolised. It asks if he who controls the media controls evolution too. It is a good test.
If God is a game what are the rules? Some say God is vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Some say God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Some contend God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become. Dedalus says ultimately we all have the same definition of God.
Going empirically from personal experience I can say that praying before an LSD trip will mean a safer trip than if you don’t pray even if there is no God. So God could be a placebo. Still, I don’t wish to go on about God too much.
I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with Satan for so long before we recognise he is evil. He also builds up through pages and pages of poetry to a moment of terse concision:
“She plucked. She ate.”
In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven. He is like one of God’s security guards! Traditionally it is the Muslim faith where we find the warrior-poet, so Milton might be suggesting “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”
I am also interested in God Simulations. Before The Lords And The New You Know Who seemed to get real, there was a lightning storm in France so epic, sublime and prolonged it was a God Simulation – it was Nature herself tearing up the rule book to let the games commence.
I have a theory that posits a Logical Bond between Narrative and Naturalistic Observationism. It says that James Joyce saw new creatures too, wrote Ulysses, which then becomes the reason Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood; and Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain then becomes the reason Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert on acid who we know is not flaccid; and Jim Morrison then writing The Lords And The New Creatures becomes the reason I encountered not one but two specimens. I call this chain the chain of Dark Evolution that as I say posits a Logical Bond between Narrative and Naturalistic Observationism. Part of me thinks as Bertrand Russell contended it is better to offer a scientific theory than not even if it is wrong; and part of me thinks even if a scientific theory is right it is not always best to say – but I have said it now.
Would it be evil to still write of those long distant faded childhood memories? I once had the breakthrough that it happened to me because Morrison wrote “a creature waits out the war” in The Lords And The New Creatures and my father sold his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall; but more recently I have come to entertain that the art dealing story was a lie – that dad was actually positively sponsored to use me as a witness when I was 8.
This doesn’t seem The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob where there is as yet all too little mention of sex. Martin Amis says a single pixel of sex is ineffable, impervious to the workings of the pen.
Life is the opposite way round from Lord of the Flies. In Lord of the Flies the mystic character is Simon who says “the beast is us” and therefore falsifies it but in life the mystic character is the one who genuinely encounters things.
Voices
have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar. I showed you the
cream of my early years as a truce, with my old band included, with
the Jewish philosophers on the intercom, even though that incurred
repeat prescriptions between the lines. I say this but still don’t
know if my own excellence is singular, selfish and driven or if it is
to be shared and democratic.
If
Forgiveness were a fine white powder, a chemical cure, they might
with-hold the cure until the price is right but seeing as it is not I
am prepared to try and forgive the guy that cursed or worse
hypnotised me during my undergraduate degree.
I
used to say the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the
dialectic of sickness and recovery, the language of sterile
medicalese, that one’s illness is more congenial than one’s
health unto those that are in charge of one’s health, for monetary
reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies that can with-hold a cure until
the price is right, but now I see the illness is not a conspiracy.
In
my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head
wound. The nurse in A and E put a bandage on. I went to touch the
bandage to see if it was paddy and it was. I went to touch it a
second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air
while I sat still in a chair. The nurse had to put a second bandage
on. I was not just put in mental hospital but the acute ward. This
was in the middle of my undergraduate degree. This is my story. I
have been on heavy, neuroleptic, soporific, homeostatic medication
ever since and had several hospital admissions. When I went back to
University after that initial admission I got the highest First in
the year and was a beautiful mind.
I
wrote sooooooo many pieces, defaced bank notes, creative non fiction,
rap, and one piece was about how there is no such thing as mind
cancer. Hobbes and Descartes sit on diametrically opposite sides of
the spectrum when it comes to the nature of the human mind: for
Hobbes the mind was just a part of the body but for Descartes the
mind was separate from the physical
world. When I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in
his mind, and using at as ontological proof of God, and I turn inward
my eye to investigate, I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose
concerns seem to be grammatical.
You
could say that because there is no such thing as mind cancer the mind
is definitely separate from the material world but it could just as
easily be the case that there is no mind cancer because there is
nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the
synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.
The
universe is indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec
of dust in the cosmic order. Life is essentially meaningless.
The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
may be about Energy as much as Faith. In fact I may have lost my
faith although have blips in each direction. Some contend the idea of
it is a pseudo-efficient, government-sponsored idiocy, others that it
could unite us all. It was never supposed to be a post-Einsteinian
comedy, nor about Backward Liquid Maths or Miltonian theology. I
suppose it was more about Mr. Bean. The original was a bunch of young
kids, the oldest of whom was 12, singing about the dog going round
and round chasing his own tail.
During
my degree it was proposed that we scrap Trident and use the resources
to explore space more instead;
but without Trident we could be
held
to ransom by someone like Iran. The
nuclear submarine factory is only down the road in Barrow-in-Furness.
I
had better stop doing this or else I’ll get screwed up.
VOICES
“We
still think they are waiting for your mum to die then will try and do
to you what they did to the guys in the movie Snatch.”
“That’s
why it doesn’t matter what you do with your songs and trons.”
Voices
can come from outside, that is they can be real people.
They
can close distance.
Very
soft and very clear, very near but very far, sang Jim Morrison.
Sometimes
they
can come at a rate and frequency of 10 per minute, at other times
slow down.
I’ve
heard Harry Potter, Penelope Cruz, A. I. and the Prime Minister among
a local network.
I
guess it’s what you get when the sheet where pictures grew depicts
the lyric to one of your own songs.
I
guess it’s what you get when you record on earphones and say you’ll
plug your senses in the mains.
If
the word “voices” is too clinical or pathological you could call
them onjects, quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the
periphery of sound.
I
once coined the word “co-imagination” as in to
be diagonalised by omnijective
interface of random access co-imagination.
One’s
book should be one’s own, not a poetry hive-mind, Communist
ego-loss experiment or omnijective interface of random access
co-imagination.
Jim
Morrison wrote “the music and voices are all around us,” and
reading it as a teenager you can’t even begin to imagine what
hearing voices would be like.
Later
when you start you get convinced some magical transformation has
occurred, even a miracle, that must be reported on scientifically, or
danced to, or answered.
They
usually leave no forwarding address and stamped envelope!
HANNAH
Do
you know what traditionally comes after The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob?
Hannah,
the blonde palindrome from the 25th
of May!
She
recently became a mother and looks beautiful too.
She
was 3 when I taught her the alphabet (forwards.)
She
was 7 when we got together and wrote The
Road To Heaven by Noj And the Mob.
Even
in my own little boy book, my seven year old text, ‘Hannah’ is a
code for the new colour.
She
is radiant and lets all the trouble and strife sail over her head.
If
she is cross with you she will not show it, but my mum can tell when
it is the case.
I
used to smuggle her in my bed at night when we were children, to play
‘I Spy’ in the dark, and also “spider, spider, on your back,
which finger did that?”
At
a certain age we had to stop.
She
says “when you give up on Starbucks cool new shit can happen.”
She
says she keeps expecting something magical to happen when the four us
get together for I don’t know if I told you or not but we are born
in a season each, going Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer and right left
right left in the handedness, which we don’t think a Swastika, more
fair as fair can be.
One
Christmas we each got a DVD of the film Inception
from one of the other of us.
There
were four copies of the film stacked on the table at the end of the
day.
It’s
just the sort of film we all used to like, being about dreams.
VOICES
PART TWO
Sometimes
they like to consider themselves wheat.
Personally
I don’t see how a man’s individual magnum opus that contains
information about his experiment into the maths of the new colour as
a cellular mark can be Anon – but I still hear voices and the
voices are asking me to tee up further voices with what I say.
They
are being very quiet today.
Jim
Morrison wished to hear “the scream of the butterfly” which
strikes me as good juxtaposition.
Syd
Barrett, on The
Madcap Laughs,
said he wanted to “hair” as opposed to hear.
They
can seem proleptic at times, seem to be able to read your writing
mind.
Dr.
Bob had a cut-up experiment at London University which engendered the
phrase “magic alphabet radio.”
I
guess it’s what you get if you’re in a band called Secret Chord
H, who sing a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes.’
NEW
INFORMATION
I
have only just seen something and it has blown my mind. You know how
I told you of the procession of events: first the breakfast of every
snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, then the plastic
spreadsheet, with its myriad black eyes on top, then the tear up the
front? It is all contained in the first three lines of The
New Creatures:
Snakeskin
jacket
Indian
eyes
brilliant
hair
he
moves in disturbed
Nile
insect
air
That
was indeed the procession of events. It is all contained! What I mean
is if ever there was any doubt that I was the witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures
when I was 8, that doubt is no more. I would say I was 100%
definitely the witness from Morrison’s book.
It
was at the same time that I was also making that paper for the
government to
give the internet room to grow.
The government and the Doors don’t traditionally get on which is
why you couldn’t write it, this story. It does remain to be seen
whether or not the next thing in my timeline – the face of stars –
was also scripted by Jim Morrison in The
Lords And The New You Know Who.
I
guess Morrison’s book is a good test – that it probes away at
places where hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution
– that it seeks to expose the germs of dictatorship on the hands of
those that dictate what is possible and what is allowed. It is a
media-compression experiment that works through the operation of a
game, churning up evidence. A permutation game is a rehearsal for
death, as I have no doubt said.
If
there were some philosophers sponsoring my dad to provide the kid
witness, specifically from Morrison’s book, they would be delighted
with the results. It may be at the same time that I was the third
specimen myself, and that I am the only one left.
I
feel like I never made that connection more clearly as the present
moment, that connection between Morrison’s text and my own
experiences. Yes, I do need to record my experiences in literature
for the future of humanity. Your
average Joe Bloggs down the pub would surely agree that if you are
put in my position you would need to leave behind a record of it.
Yet
to still be talking about the wood in 2025 could seem unto some as
being an evil thing. So I ask what is the witness supposed to do
about being the witness and what is the witness supposed to write
about if not the wood? The witness is skint, single, mentally ill,
medicated, unemployed, car-less, living in the sticks with his mother
and brother. The witness didn’t even really confirm that he was the
witness from Morrison’s book specifically until quite late. There
was no talk of it in boyhood. The witness thinks his dad named his
sons after the Doors without telling their mother, their poor,
Finnish mother, who didn’t even know the Doors were American until
recently.
The
witness contemplates whether or not this having the role of being the
witness thrust upon him so young is why he was later cursed or worse
hypnotised during his undergraduate degree. The
witness insufflates his Vape pen and sips his unsweetened and tepid
tea, remembering that bit in The
New Creatures
where Morrison says “and not for a penny will I spare any time for
you ghost-children down there in the frightening world,” as if
Morrison
was scripting the operation to go on not for a penny; and the witness
wonders if this is why he couldn’t gain with anything he ever did,
having done a lot with his life and art alike. This would be old
news.
AURORA
FLOREALIS
If
mother’s
flower-press ending on cannabis
could
= a dialysis, a
love
poem only hoping to impress
poor
Flora could = a motor
but
seeing as I no longer puff weed
nor
am in love with her anymore
I
can’t see how this
is
of any interest to me -
so
I am putting it out there,
this
pretext to teenage love poetry,
almost
like furniture on E-bay
in
case you want to
take
it
up
as your cause -
but
don’t be surprised
if
she, being the mating queen
from
the green pages in the flesh,
doesn’t
even answer you
on
Facebook when you try
to
befriend her, smitten
and
in empty warehouse
zones
of the psyche.
*ketamineguitar*
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
He
found himself on a plane.
He
found himself on a.
He
found himself on.
He
found himself.
He
found.
P.
