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.
LE LITTLE LAPIN ON LE LAWN
Le little lapin on le lawn,
trembling in the dusky dawn,
forlorn as fallen autumn leaves
is the wave that misbehaves,
it makes you melancholy-mad,
where the wave-forms terminate,
mind the gap, wet, spastic mirrors clap,
you don’t need meaning on a plate,
you’re dying slowly as the light
pours forth from the glowing East,
the sun a hedgehog in the air but
slow and Bible-black the beast,
O little lapin on le lawn,
who sheds a secret tear for us all,
sup the flowers like a cup
before the rusty Autumn falls.
HELIUM
AUBADE
Tit
butter moat brink notes sprinkle
outside
open Darwin window down.
The
pulle
y
s
are not for bullies.
Unbidden
comes the light of day.
Birds
are smuggling supercars
to
an Iranian overlord through Persia
and
over the mnts. Listen.
Tin
is their usual merchandise.
The
sun is a hedgehog’s defensive
needle
spill all over the garden.
I
watch through the old, Victorian,
stained-glass
window on the
creaky
mezzanine. I feel I
should
be smashing a trashcan in
a
back alley full of well-groomed cats,
exalting
the senses this dawn,
propagating
my love of life.
The
numinous, alien spaceship
that
hovered in the East in pre-dawn
dark
has gone, the
image
of the horizon
as
a
petrol-coloured
negative,
and
plasmatoidal
resolution
erupted
but
it’s
more the
mind’s
ear
I am interested in.
Description
is not enough when
birds
play laser-flute in the trees
and
we must
translate
what we
think
into word-combinations
!
The
Age could be one of Re-enchantment,
which
is en echo of
The
Enlightenment
which
itself is the simultaneous
astrological
and sociological de-centering
of
Man – but what do I know?
I
am just a man in the middle of
things.
A
poet stranded in medias
r
es.
The
magic of dawn fades.
FISH
When synapses die, then it’s a case of seeing
if there’s a glint of life left in the eyes of fish being
eaten by the seagulls, then empty Unreality
grows a tint of menace, in all probability -
but not forlorn is this wave where angels descend
and clap at the trains that pass near the end
for I smell the smell of flowers at the kitchen door
as I make myself a tea that’s not against the law
merrily merrily merrily we have run out of cream
to sweeten the humour that has the logic of a dream
as it breaks apart, widening in connection
between the expected and the unexpected direction
musical chairs it isn’t, but it could be a game
remembering now how inside the flame there is no blame
in love that stuck like glue true bubblegum was perceived
until there was nothing to do, so in love we believed
we believed in the sea shore as a kind of horse
where of course waves have sexual intercourse
it hurts to work for sadness, that mother of dreams
whom it seems is beautiful, too beautiful for seams
but beauty bursts forth, with bounteous breasts
that amplify and emolliate sensation’s failing quests
such treasure as this should be sacrosanct in days
when the new contenders have also lost their ways
THAT BLACK NATURAL E
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, unobtrusive, 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)
AURORA FLOREALIS
Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.
To make a flower-press would be womanly.
When our days still ended on cannabis
we would bemoan that flowers were legal.
To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.
I no longer puff the evil weed these days.
It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,
that separates the murk from the excellence.
I would need it to balance out my mind,
one homeostatic device for another one.
Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.
I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,
hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.
I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.
*ketamineguitar*
THE
ROAD
Il
faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes
you’ve just got to hit the road and.
S
tart
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.
My bro says I shouldn’t really be renewing the lost, boyhood album I made with my siblings called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. Still, I have been visited by angels who deem it necessary, maybe the only good thing I ever did.
They pulled into the drive in a car, got out and started looking at a road map.
I went out to help them, to see if they were lost but they weren’t and only wished to take a photograph of the house – my mother’s house.
So I said “okay” and came back in – and that was when I realised they were angels, two angels from a template by Blake. I realised they had come to get me to renew The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob – but where does one begin such an adventure?
Maybe it’s about Backward Liquid Maths?
Maybe it is not safe to say E minus MC squared = only relative zero?
Maybe it’s about being in a state of unself?
Maybe it’s about Divine Technology of the Fifth Dimension?
When I first wrote it as an album of catchy songs, I was a strong believer in God. I liked the definition of God as “thought thinking on itself” and prayed every night. That was before I came under the influence of a powerful intellectual, atheist, who couldn’t tolerate God. Almost out of politeness I said to him “so God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness?” and he said he accepted it. I started to question it myself, to say things like “God is to behead dethrone and become not worship blind in dogmatic slumber.” These days I am not too sure how to leap into it without such beginner’s luck!
For one thing, I feel there are fragments from those old days which may be spared the inevitable waste and sway of Time.
For example, even my babyspeak had some kind of post-Eliotious and counter-poetic ring to it to those that know their 1960’s American verse.
“Look Fufie, I can fee feep!”
It templates over Jim Morrison’s opening line, as if I were born the witness. Consequently I am interested in fossils of art, encryption, antipodes, negatives, blueprints, fingerprints, alkalis, mirror-neurones and other things too.
The way ahead may appear to you to be quite avid. It is replete with busy detail like Outsider Art which is because I became ill.
Still I remember back in the day: when my dad was away working as a fine art dealer, I spent my days designing tunnels inside the oldest fell, lined with free beer dispensers, fruit machines and burning torches; also cheques addressed to myself for ludicrous amounts; also pen-knives with ludicrous tools.
‘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.
Something about being a Starvationist.
Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.
Then
my seven year old work started to show
early
promise.
Even though I
probably
didn’t
yet know what sex was, I encrypted a scientific node to do with
Gravity, proved the net and cloud existed in the imagination of a
child before their invention, attempted the maths of the new colour
as a cellular mark and
conducted
a proof of “the metamorphose theory” from Jim Morrison’s book
The
Lords And The New Creatures
.
The
work emerged when my dad died in 2014. Dr. Robert, upon tidying up
the attic found a stack of books I had written. He brought them to
me; and I went straight for the two, red, English, exercise books.
One had on the front
2
JOHN
TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
and
another had on the front
ENGLISH
JOHN
TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
Some
choice
fragments
from that
seven
year old book
might
run as follows...
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
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.
Well, one day, I met a big-eared sofa in James’s bedroom (that anagram of boredom) and I said, that evening, at the dinner table too; and then too soon I met something else as well.
My head filled with war one morning in chapel and I collapsed, went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.
Looking back for some kind of sophisticated response I find the final line in my school project on the dinosaurs in Junior Four to be quite inveigling:
“Last Autumn, two biologists announced they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct, stingless bee found in amber.”
Back then, even then, my dream was to be an English teacher who subsidised a writing career by teaching English. I remember writing a letter to a green organisation about our family finding a gannet with a broken wing on Silecroft Beach at a bonfire party; and the green organisation planted a grove of trees for the effort: they were petrol ink purpose for pen ship sail!
Squawk
squawk gaggle gaggle,
bongles
has still got the stones.
The
song in my head as I lay in bed in the boarding school dormitory at
Night
seems
looking back now to have
put
words to the demented goose sounding out at the end of Pink Floyd’s
song ‘Bike.’
Through
the wood.
Running.
Knocking off the fungus. With a hockey stick. Dad and mum were there.
I remember. There was a song going “I’m So Dizzy My Head Is
Spinning” on the radio. I remember it came up in the wood.
When
dad and mum were there. They were singing it. At school.
“
I’ve
written two prose poems mum. One is called ‘The Fire’ and one is
called ‘The Sea.’
They’re
about 4 sides each. I did it voluntarily.”
The latter means there is a difference between humidity and moisture in the air.
That
was when I rounded the gang and said:
“
Right
I’ve got an idea
guys
.
We’ll write an album called
The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
.
James you can be on
Spanish
guitar,
Bob and Hannah on backing vocals and percussion, I’ll be on Casio
keyboard and vocals.”
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!
There’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and so is dirt.
So.
That was it.
That’s
as much as I can remember of the original flourish,
which went on before I had left Prep School. It
was a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, and we
managed
to
redeem
the situation of all evil.
Looking
back now, w
hen
we wrote
The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
,
incorporating a song called ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel,’ it
contained inflections of my father’s LSE degree in philosophy. My
father studied under Karl Popper who, although I have only heard from
dad as opposed to reading myself, came up with the epistemological
methodology of P1 to TT to EE to P2. It was diametrically opposed to
Logical Positivism (apparently) who at the time believed even the
circular argument to trend forwards towards a Bigger Picture that
Popper no longer believed in.
It sounded like a mouthful to me – this P1 to TT to EE to P2 business – so I just used to say ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ instead. It became part of what I could call “an Utilitarian Martianist slowspell.”
Ossie the Dog meanwhile was a daft golden retriever. It seems to template over or be a fossil of that moment in The Lords And The New Creatures when Oswald escapes.
The eponymous song of the album had a catchy melody I can still remember, and it goes well in major harmonies. The lower road is like something from China and the higher road more emotive and anguished and together they are beautiful.
As for the bit about the butterfly, in my memory it was there but even so I shouldn’t say it in full, because there are those that, say, encrypt it in musical truth without words – and I am still not entirely 100% secure that it was on the album – though I think it was. Moreover, it is enough to hear my brother switch a light switch in the night-time now.
As for the old Nirvana barcode, I can tell you where it came from. There was a government-set intelligence test at the computers at Prep School after exams, for the winning of which there was said to be a prize. Wishing to prove myself intelligent, I finished the task first, but was ignored, whereupon I tapped in the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana into the computer’s numb controls. I was a big Nirvana fan. My dad had got me into Nirvana. That was where the figment originated.
Then
a
t
the age of about 14 or 15 I provided a new thing: a booklet of poetry
called “The Fire-Dance.”
I
t
was about being free with Nature and is said to have contained some
timeless lines.
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.
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.
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!
I
imagine
d
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 D
u
ck
Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the
string
s
of the
electric
guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say.
Hey,
my name is David Bonky,
I’m
a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s
a tear up my jacket.
[1998]
One
notebook I wrote for a girl contained the line:
“
The
stars awake to notice love.”
I
sat on the roof of the house where the stars re-align at summer
sunset and wrote poetry, teenage love poetry, for a girl, including
the sentence:
“But all is well if I only think
& sigh of the dreams of dusk
images before I sleep
dancing, escaping memory
they seem to have no cares at all
they seem to know the name of love
they seem to be my sacred friends
ancient messengers, waking at night
but I will forget them and never care
about what I saw in love & alive
What? Oh, I guess it’s love
just us and love forever...”
I
sometimes wish I had nothing but 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.”
One
night Dr. Calculator Ptom and I boarded a train without knowing where
it was headed in London. We fell asleep and woke in Luton missing a
ticket at dawn.
W
e
were sent back in the
same
direction from which we came by the conductor. I think we slept under
leaves in a suburban wood but that may have been a different time.
He
named my second band “Oedipus Wrecks.”
If
ever I made a mistake in my writing it was when I wrote a line that
now turns out to be traditional but which to me at the time seemed
natural ability, seemed mine own. By now I have encrypted it in a way
that you will get if you know the line, but
which
will
keep
you
guessing
if you don’t.
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.)
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.
I
started a third band called Secret Chord H with the best drummer of
his generation AND a poetry magazine with the best poet of his
generation too. He said he thought I was better but what remains of
those Rimbaudian days?
Opened unto the gloom under
sliver moon I slide her over.
Semen spills like silver water.
We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.
Magic
poisonous a breath her. That would be the opposite of
a
logically-worked-out
system of priorities by which to live and love.
But
at least the evil of a nuclear situation would not hide in a Nintendo
innuendo or “poetic conference”
and
go down as nothing but gorgeous description
–
so the threat is dissolved, revealed to be the redolent perfume of
the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh whom it seems does
not fancy the poet
(alas)
.
Even
if it’s the
only
(good)
one
I do it will
do.
I
t’s
not exactly “perfect” but that’s not such a bad thing. I wait
for voices to interpellate the fractured mirror, for the
interlocutor, who makes it a palimpsest.
All
that it needs is to end on the lyric to ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by
Secret Chord H.
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.
Now
there is only one thing left to do and that is sign it by Einstein’s
value for Light-speed (c) like one of those meta-texts I read in my
dreams at night.
c
AWAY WITH THE FAIRY LIQUID
As if even Natural things are given over once again to a Barthesian world of product placement, it might be instructive to consider the healing of my busted, dusty Hooverbag lungs… once I was away with the Fairy Liquid. I became interested in the switch thrown. There were new maps sprawled on the point of a pin. I hungered after The Snowbell Prize. My brief fling with the politics of flight kept me up all through the Ancient Night. Another high-powered dawn was born but what was the WATTAGE? Well, I felt a leaf, I fell out of life, probably no-one else knew, but then there may be some. I wallowed in my lazy swamp, languishing, lizarding, long. Interstellar Artois was the effect of fat, planetary raindrops beating down on sad, Lucozade lights, lying lambent on the paving stones. DogMuckels was not what it seemed. Quantity Streets were typical of consumer culture. By now, the National Hypochondriac Service have sorted me out. My mood is made stable on a sterilised table. Fakeazade does not come free from the kitchen Tap as yet, but we are working on it. Savlon is wrong. Erase the Dettol. There’s no such thing as cinnamon, but then again that is not strictly true. Well-weird this ward: words woke it: walls broke it: Weirds walk it: or they should, break it open to the light of day, straight away. There’s little to do except listen to the snap, crackle and pop of the cereal, cereal in the morning after a dark night of the soul in winter.
WIRED TEETH
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.
(Kilburn,
1997
)
ON 4CMC
“I've got a new plot,” thought the dullard.
“Literature has started to release serotonin.”
He was on the new designer drug, a cathinone and
NPS called “4CMC” when he dreamed up the plot.
There was an holographic bike out the back
all through the Night. The dark was glittering
with tinsel. Mangled love was the overall effect.
He saw the world through the frame of angel
hair, there were weird, Escherian shapes in
the air, there was light deep inside the dark.
“Yes,” he thought, “Literature. Serotonin.”
For once you remove the inner monologue
you can become an open energy conduit.
Question the comfort and see for yourself.
At times it seems to be all just tall and telepathic
telegraph poles telling you what and what not to do!
READING MATERIAL
If there were paper under my heart there would
be writing on it and at last it would be red
like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst
or nuclear-fall-out-in-reverse-of-dusk, whose
scattered, tattered-knicker clouds conceal
real live U.F.O's, and non-exchangeable
for a bus-ticket when the fiver-river drones.
That page, my wage, an underground organ,
with its meta-fictional shorthand and triplicate,
something like the opposite of a bus ticket,
in taking you on an inward journey forever:
surely it would feel shocked not to be legal tender?
[Silecroft Beach]
INVINCIBLE LOVERS
I’ll tell you how strange and wild
With wanton promise comes she
On an unknown hour
Like an uninvited guest
You’ve somehow brought to bed.
All night we’d
Sit and think of history
As if it hadn’t passed,
The great wars and the ancient peoples
And all the silly fears.
We’d think of how much we’ve changed
And how much we’ve remained the same.
We’d think of moments of mine
We somehow shared and how I longed to live
In circling illumination of all those moments,
Fragments gone.
And softly I wished
To expand history back into the past
And never to move again an inch forwards.
And to run through the memory of Time,
Ancient, timeless galleries.
Often we’d sit and think of speaking
Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.
Always we’d realise we never had
Time enough to waste or spend.
So we gloried in ourselves
Like invincible lovers,
Always boundless in new being.
And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,
She would turn and smile
As if to boldly offer
‘Come take my hand,
And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'
(1997)
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
SMART-TALK ON HEARTBOOK
[warning: contains voices]
Up all night working the guy who said he would plug his senses in the mains
incoming voices seem to be Smart-talking
Simon says fragmented for reasons of solidarity with the dispossessed of the world
feeling the Age of Communication = the Age of Alienation I am
chivvying words in different orders recalling the machine in Gulliver’s Travels that precedes the computer whom it seems might have destroyed the spirituality of Cabalistic permutation games of heart-purifying nature based on quest not arrival but whom it seems might not
sharing secrets on Facebook as if it were Heartbook
can’t upload spittle to philosophy chatroom
can’t pass the gravy over Facebook enough
started out writing a good book but laptop became huge container for storing the sum of all knowledge
thinking the surface area on which I write being infinite the story is now infinite, the content gone endless
still like Gulliver’s Travels and ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ – goodbye
still think if the windows were washed – every one - I would see nothing, nothing but the white mirrors re-affirming the quiet interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction where I write by night furtive in flight with the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper At The Gates of Dawn
when I look out of the window at dawn I sometimes see Eden, am like Adam walking in a prelapsarian garden with a bagful of names to scatter freely on things
the ingredients of apple juice might make a found poem called ‘Text Message From An Alien’
seems the internet is to writing as photography was to visual art
seems the on/off switch of the laptop is its clitoris
seems the omnijective interface of random access co-imagination is the new, synchronised word
through the rooms people come and go Smart-talking on magic alphabet radio
when I see the sun in the morning I think it is Holy not just a 2 pence piece
the kettle rises to its silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain singing sweet song my one note on hyper-vision this fair dawn
it looks like a good book is on the cards
it looks like Heartbook might’ve fled away with the Smartpoem
it looks like mutation in consciousness, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture without motion bones like sadness gene and dreaming gland and the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland and the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill and we are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land still
was remembering recently the time my friend sent a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH into space, and I was the one underneath it, the one to catch it
think it might be a psycho-technological post-poem pertaining maybe to replace the archaic sense of ‘gay’ gone to apathy, barrage and detachment
reminds me love is a choice of words
was WH Auden that said that not me
I still think love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop
PROSPERO
IN AMSTERDAM
First
time I smoked a bifter
it
was like the sea
was
set alight to
with
petrol
and
burned.
We
were in the den
by
the beck in
the
Combe field
when
we smoked it.
My
bros seemed alright
as
if it were banal,
trite,
not the sheer,
cold
terror I felt.
I
went up
to
the attic to play
guitar,
and still felt
so
paranoid, as the steal
strings
of the guitar
were
strummed
and
the world
went
round
and
round the sun
that
I had to stop.
I
went for a shower
to
wash off the paranoia,
masturbated
in there,
and
orgasm was
so
long, so prolonged
it
changed my perception…
I
was suddenly absolved
in
warm, soapy
bubbles.
Supper
was
called. I went
to
eat spaghetti
bolognese
with my
family.
The threat
of
my parents knowing
diminished
to nothing
around
the table;
I
was sold on the
green
stuff, suddenly.
So
began a Romance
that
I would say
was
a Holy sacrament.
So
began the self-legitimising
pact
of the stoner
circle
too: how
we
smoked to get
sober
from the
advertising
trance.
How
we wished to abjure
temporal
wealth, bondage
to
surface Gods of
illusion;
renounce
worthless
dogma
to
consumerism
that
only robs us
of
our bodies; touch
the
texture not
name
side of li
fe;
turn
life into love.
We
used to discuss
casual,
embedded
drug
references in culture:
Mario
mushrooms
conferring
energy;
Tinkerbell’s
dust
that
makes you fly;
the
field of poppies
in
the Wizard of Oz
that
makes them see
the
Emerald City.
As
I say this
was
part of the
self-legitimising
pact.
By
now I’ve
packed
it in. By now
I
know the brain releases
cannabinoids
naturally
for
moments of
Signification,
like
reaching
the top
of
a mountain; and
if
you flood your brain
with
cannabinoids
un-naturally,
meaning
and
signification
become
aleatory,
become
a mess: there
is
suddenly meaning
at
every point of
intersection
in the
crazy
palimpsest of memory.
Wishing
to still have
a
good short-term
memory,
wishing
to
not break the Hollow
Claw,
wishing to
still
be a poet, I
don’t
wish to
smoke
cannabis anymore.
SKUNKFOOT
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 bird in the wood, it was definitely a horse, 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.
A TRANCE OF STALKS
I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring
suffuse the air and pervade the senses.
An AEIOU bird
toots its hollow horn
outside on the A595.
A celebratory genesis is everywhere.
Mother earth
is giving birth,
menstruating season
and ovulating dawn.
Fresh lovers maunder
hand in hand and
knee-deep in redolent flowers
into shade to take repose
by cool, running waters.
Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.
The blue sky arches and swoons,
I bridle the mind and race apace to the shore
where seabirds scream
from the ragged rocks,
O is it their love-song or elegy?
Waves make gentle love to the shore.
In alchemy a galaxy
of stars exploding
into being above is perceived
as an orgasm, is perceived,
that is, in an erotic sense.
Liquid night arrives too soon,
O moon, O beautiful,
sleepless omen moon,
who shines like an
electric coin and seems
to be in love with the sea
or at least her own
shattered reflection:
she scatters her jewellery box all around.
Homework tonight is to remember your dreams.
I
prefer telepathy to 10p.
ERASING
THE DEBT
My
father told me he smuggled fine art,
smuggled
art over the old Berlin Wall,
charged
the Germans for the return of
Russian-plundered,
pastoral paintings,
used
the codename “Blue” and donned
faux
Australian accents for the job, sold
his
business when the Berlin Wall fell -
but
I found out it was pollen he smuggled!
Art
was recourse to euphemism for pollen.
He
had a pollen farm in the Moroccan
mountains,
shipped tonnes of it to the
States.
I remember how much I loved
the
fluffy
stuff,
stuffed
with mascara bruise,
butterfly
wing, peacock feather and
purple,
crushed velvet flare. It was
pollen
that funded my private schooling -
though
dad still kept up the rhetoric, saying
“
the
image more than poetry is the most
international
currency.” Among the doctors,
lawyers
and other high-up professionals
I
therefore did little to better myself,
never
had a family business to take over,
and
set my sights on being a writer.
WHEN THE BECK TURNS TO ICE CUBES
On our first night up my dad took me out
In the back and asked me what I could hear,
And I did not know, so he showed me the beck,
Showed me the beck to open my ear,
Showed me the beck to open my ear.
/////////////////
We traced its source up the fell one day,
But found only bog and marsh, no fountain,
And the fell itself I should say by the way
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain,
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain.
/////////////
Down as gravity and katabasis require,
Beckwater travels, always choosing the course
Of least resistance, scentless and cold,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse.
//////////
It's laced with ecstasia, the bright, deadly beck
That flows down from the fell’s striated way,
Underlaid with Technicolour unicorn hooves,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me.
//////////
Paul Farley would pee in it like a punk,
But I like to stomp in leaking welly boots,
On a trance of green, THC-free stalks,
And let the wet water get in at my roots,
And let the wet water get in at my roots.
//////////
It’s like a long necklace of notes and stones,
Laid over a lucky lady’s milkwhite neck,
And whatever the southerners say of a stream,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck.
//////////
Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,
It falls two feet into a sound as sweet
As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street,
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street.
//////////
It babbles down into a double-barrelled tunnel,
And disappears for a mile or more underground,
And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,
For all the world a round map of sound,
For all the world, a round map of sound.
//////////
Optimus Prime leaves once blocked the tunnel
And water leaked in under the back door
To float a massive, abstract archipelago
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.
//////////
Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,
Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,
And record stores close and folk heroes pass
But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,
And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.
//////////
So it laughs to itself, over what we don’t know,
As it makes that tear-clear journey down,
A fountain pen for all to write with – O! -
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain,
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain.
//////////
SYSTEMS
If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear
not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell
in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here
where the dream of love meets the oldest fell...
to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the
colours of the vowels in English you can
find pasta, tea, air, hair, water, clothes, that your ordinary
speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-
air poem – quick get it down, get it down! -
your notes on hyper-vision dissipate in the air!
What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern
ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?
For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!
For
writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet
or
not
!
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.
M
UM’S
COFFEE BOX
The
lid is on m
um’s
coffee box
and
t
hat
is a good thing seeing
as
coffee goes stale sooooooo quickly -
reacts
to the air; and
she
love
s
our ground coffee to be fresh.
It
loses all its coffee-ness
if
you leave off the lid -
even
for a few seconds.
Everyone
here loves their coffee.
We
have an instant coffee machine.
It
makes espressos: usually
we
make a double and add
warm
milk from the AGA.
Sometimes
I wish to plug
my
senses in the instant espresso
machine.
Sometimes I wish
for
instant travel. Usually though
I’m
content to just have coffee
and
the place where I’m free.
It
is far better than instant
coffee
and Monopoly Jail.
It
is midnight on a warm, summer
night;
and I might have a coffee.
Then
I might have a flashback
to a bad, vampiric, anti-social
Gap Year rhythm, needing
cashback to perpetuate an
adolescent fantasy world.
COTERMINOUS ORBIT
She does not know firking from fire,
logopoeia from logs for the log-box,
Negative Capability from negative equity,
bonmots from pink, French confectionary,
the colours of the vowels from alphabet spaghetti,
the Objective Correlative from ironic self-distance,
sprechstimme from the kettle rising to its
silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban's
leash, my one note on hyper-vision this dawn,
chiasmus from napkin-kissing-gates silting
their electron-haired dandelion-puff,
nano-language from the Nanny State,
hypertext poetry from notes on hyper-vision,
Aurora Florealis from Flora Borealis,
the derangement of the senses to attain
the unknown from the derangement of
the senses to attain the Eartoon, Eartoons
bloomed from barbecued tunes, the anti-
dactylus from the talking pterodactyl, the
psycho-sensitive flower – talkative and invisible-
from the psycho-technological error, but oh my,
pneumatic woman, aren't you a beautiful one?
AT
INSANE MATE
At
Insane Mate I lost my queen
whose
eyes it seems were Gondwanaland-green.
We
walked to the top of the Pompidou
to
read JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS,
and
in dreams ski down too fast
and
get our dreams in plaster cast.
We
married already in a pagan way
in
a dusky playground scattered with hay
but
I went down south to cross the border,
left
good love in a state of disorder.
Now
love works high up in the Tate,
selling
great paintings over a plate….
and
if she said she is in love with me
I
wouldn’t go taking it personally.
A FROND OF BRACKEN
[with apologies to Brian Patten]
You ask me for a poem.
I offer you a frond of bracken.
You say that’s not good enough.
You’re not buying it.
I say how mood
Is also a bracken frond
Drooping down and
That is why I chose it –
To represent ‘mood’
This mundane Monday morning.
You’re not buying it.
You want something textual.
I say I plucked it from the fell
Which turns in summer
From russet to green
Like an homicidal machine.
I plucked it at random at dawn.
You’re still not buying it.
I seem to remember a time,
Taking the old bramble road
At the Augustan/ Romantic
Crucifix w/ you
Where a frond
Of bracken
Would do.
GO MY SONGS!
Go my songs into the ballad-murmuring breeze!
Go and be well-equipped with a
toothbrush in your pocket!
Go and be not afear’d of the sounds
of the crowded supermarket aisle -
sprinkled as they are with pheramone sprays!
Go disturb the comfortable
and comfort the disturbed.
Go dislodge the algebra from
the brains of mathematicians
and replace it with timeless
ideas transmitted across Time.
Go melt death and attain perfect listening
and not remove the key from life;
go calibrate the key of telepathic grammar;
go walk down the ocular nerve.
Go escape the shape of the paper -
go and invent loving networks of
trust un-hackable by the C. I. A.
Go upload your dusty, Hooverbag
lungs to the philosophy chat room.
Go take a long packaged holiday
between subject and object, or else
go retain equivalency between
the word ‘rain’ and actual rain -
it makes no difference to me.
Go and be free to connect in
all directions like a chain
of music from star to star.
Go far – go travel by xylophone
to Zanzibar, if in want of a car!
Go and fuse a cassette of Pearl Jam ‘VS’
with a pause in the opening song ‘Go’
where the flimsy reel has been
cut and resealed in a delicate operation!
Go but don’t go back to boarding
school, where the snot amounts.
Go and be free in meadows
without fences where lazy lovers lie.
Go not like astronaut-worms
into the orbits and ears of people
but with some kind of efficacy.
Go and let the shy magician sigh
and smile and exhaust an
inner
poison, go low not high.
PURPLE
Voices also told me to write of the
colour purple. In Steiner homes for autists,
rational but socially inept, the corners
of the rooms are round and purple
because it's less threatening than the geometry
of rightangled corners. My room
turned out a little like that when,
as my dying father lay in the attic,
my screen bloomed a numinous purple
light daubing the walls until the
bedroom, an anagram of boredom,
seemed like a featherlite love poem shop:
a little girl's lava lamp of a room!
Sometimes the seeping foxglove aura
vacillated back and forth between
purple and its normal screen light,
refusing to settle for any long period of time.
My bro said I'd caught some virus;
the computer programmer down the pub
just said dying, and he was right,
for by the time Blue passed away,
Blue being the art-smuggling codename
dad used in his shady occupation,
the computer broke down. R.I.P. data-tree,
and farewell luminous dark of half Denmark!
Now all I can think to say on purple
is this: I would put it in my mouth.
And I would chew on it like a cow
grazes on grass, mulchy and blind.
And I would ingurgitate it fully
not spit it out like a child his dummy.
I would taste it like her name. It's
the colour of mystery and sex and
saudade and longing and shame. And
it's the colour we associate with depth.
When I first looked at the colours of the vowels
I noticed the presence of its absence,
as if you'd expect it there because
it's the colour of deep things.
POINTLESS ACTIVITY
Now that University is long out
I wonder what it is I am to do.
Now that I know, say, The Great
Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia
pertaining to panchronic and
panoramic overview, like
a chronotope turned euchronia,
or else a word-world gone
polysemic with the multifarious
possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy
through whom the esemplastic has fled
away with the quadlibetical -
now that I know the lesson
of post-structuralism is twofold,
meaning a) the condition of being
a text can extend to any object,
any quotidian ephemera and b)
the condition of being a language
unto itself can extend to any
text – I wonder what it is I am
to do. My father, after his PPE degree,
under Karl Popper at the LSE, learning
of things like falsifiability and
of P1 to TT to EE to P2, well,
he
turned back to Winnie the Pooh.
“
MA
GIC
SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS”
A
moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism.
Someone
else can lose your marbles for you.
V
owels
are our souls.
Meaning
in music is
solipsistic,
it
is faces in the fire or
Hamlet’s
3 creatures in a cloud-change.
Life
could be a dull throb of loneliness inside your breast as well as a
colourful spew going on outside the cave-walls of the skull.
If
Liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions and it leads to
Hamlet’s harmatia irresolution, pragmatism may be the reactivation
of an attitudinisation in that situation.
Planes
are the shoes of clowns.
It’s
impossible to make a cowboy film in space. A drum is a dream bigger
than a dream of bounding in huge, magic circles in space.
The
Big Mac, which contains the four basic, caveman cravings of salt,
fat, sugar and protein, could be the heir to the apple of knowledge.
L
ove
can go veggie for reasons of Disney.
Light-speed
is my passport.
If
acid is the microchip of a peach, the sun is the peachstone of a
black hole.
It
is not true that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary
species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more proof of
something being real
than
saying it was Imagined.
The
constellations only
seem
to
turn
on axis unobserved.
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. When a volume starts to smell of redolent
flowers
or Flora’s
perfume
it could be the word of a dog.
Death’s
breath is a tear of flame with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame.
When
we wake words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds, weighing
them down hopelessly.
It
is possible to harness waves that also passed through the Beats.
Leaves
that played on the surface of the water, these are the leaves they
have in Heaven, these are the leaves of love.
There
are fossils of art as well as fossils of life.
Connection
is Heaven and Heaven connection and there is connection between
Heaven and vision for vision may feel in a state of Heaven and Heaven
only exist in vision.
Semantics is a road sign not a pl
ace.
Meaning
is inherent in something’s exact mode of expression. Meaning is not
a delusion unlike Time. Meaning could be an emotional import given
mere exo-skeleton with wor
ds.
Every
planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means ‘beautiful
face.’
The
names of pharmaceutical medications should probably n
ot
appear in poem
s.
Nature
is the true architecture of State.
If
ever there were a light-speed law of neuroplasticity it
might
only be that “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.”
Cliche
hurts more than truth. Where rain falls, falling reigns. Pictures can
be done without hands. Life is not just about naturally occurring
fossils of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the witness but the live Doors
for everyone else too. Realism ice-skates on the surface of the dust.
Language
can
be
smuggled
out of the unconscious.
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.
H20
might stand for hypothalamus tattoo.
Chewing
gum is bi.
Voices only pathologise what by another name might be onjects,
quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound,
an instrument of wonder.
C
louds
seen through hospital glass only mean that all things must pass.
There
is no such thing as mind cancer.
Th
at
women like Primark is hardly a timeless idea transmitted across Time.
Ecstasy
is a teddy bear back in the garden of Eden.
Autumn
is Optimus Prime
already
in Keats.
Freedom
not poetry is the bike riding itself.
After garage and house comes library.
The
poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the mind, unlooses
the mind of form, method acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain
visual radio
.
I
f
your dad is an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue it can
become a new sense through which you can read of future event
s.
It
is not inconceivable that when we die we can re-access history at any
point, be a real, live Red Indian, or a bird of prey soaring over a
mnt.
Birds
are for flying not
for
special
perception. 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.
The
alphabet could be Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note.
Sometimes
on E it makes you feel like your mouth is full of cold, stunning,
Heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills.
I
f
form is an easel, content is a palette.
The
main difference between the sticks and the city is that in the sticks
you acknowledge the stranger you pass when out there walking.
Creation
is a dark machine.
It’s
impossible to curse the sun.
Acid
is a spirit-level for the spirit.
Without
flaws there can be no opinions, as without imperfection there can be
no taste.
Galloping
water is a cool thing to say.
Things
live inside onions of themselve
s.
Freedom
flies where flags fall.
Heaven
is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see.
Water’s
boiling point is when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the
music
.
Walnut halves look like miniature, shrunken brains.
If
Facebook is evil one reason is that it makes you say things you don’t
mean and freezes them forever.
Your
right to write of who is in the shower ends where another’s naked
body begins.
We
are hiding from
The
Waste Land
in
The
Waste Land
.
I prefer
The
New Family Tao
to the non-fungible token.
The
sound of typing can be used as percussion in non-metred Sound Art.
When Baxter the dog walks on the laptop funny things come out like
the names of glitch electronica numbers.
T
he
powers that be could be clouds
that
wear
DM boots on their red brick road, and ripped genes adorned with peace
and anarchy signs, on their protest march.
A
‘tron’ could be a point of intersection between technology and
art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge.
Objects
can vanish on the periphery of madness when emotions are high.
Reality
is not a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s and nor
were caves alien cinemas in the long distant past.
Waiting
in darkness can be nourishing for the soul, reveal a Technicolour
shoal.
With
drugs you have to realise: wise up or die.
The
world of Stuff and Things is not amenable to the world of
Transcendental Metaphysics.
Time
does not pass but evaporate.
Life
is naturally the opposite of Lord of The Flies because the mystic
character is the one that actually does see things while everyone
else thinks he’s deluded.
Even
a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death.
T
he
exact same words can seem absolutely insane when written down and
confer absolute genius when not written down.
Dream-meets
in the silver forest, ESP and telepathy are more possible with the
net around.
When
it comes to the sheet where pictures grew, they could be “people,”
as we are people too, people who are levelled by the sheet, whose
Equality is enshrined.
If
you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should
have that opportunity if they choose
and
that is my philosophy
.
Credits
at the end of innocence
still
fall
like numberless lists of fallen autumn leaves. To be the first to
coin the word “co-imagination” seems almost sill
y
.
Crocodiles have had Sat Nav for 1000’s of years before our Age.
A
bird is a bird is a bird is a bird. Just because it has been called
naive to perceive of the left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion
to explore doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes good to go down that
path. Just because it was my brother not me that fired bullets to the
top of the telegraph pole doesn’t mean all statements that pertain
to axiomatic truth are his intellectual property. A thesis as thin as
the Rizla it is in can lead all the way to the loony bi
n.
Water
has no more memory than it has smell.
It
is better to hide from the wind than it is to perform open heart
surger
y.
When
I say apples “occupy” a bowl on the table, I don’t mean they
are a bunch of Nazis.
It
would be unwise to use the same shapes as a previous writer like, for
example, Jim Morrison, if your creative writing teacher says it would
be unwise to.
If
“
Philosophy
is
a
sterile
subject”
(as
my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom contends)
poetry
is
probably
by
default more
alive.
If
Flora was in nets, I’d be Barnes in the game.
Nirvana
did the sheet where pictures, pictures depicting my own song lyric
grew, so that’s why people like it when I say it still belongs to
my
brother
(who
laid it down)
.
The
healing and fusing of the cassette with a pause in the song where cut
and resealed in the flimsy reel in a delicate operation could be down
to faith more than doubt. Two photos on the blog, one for the e
ar
,
one for the e
ye
,
might still seem
un
fair.
When
you get invaded by madness and hear so many voices there can seem
nothing going on in your own head but straw.
If
you did help invent the net you shouldn’t have to pay for
publication.
Words
appear
to
come out
weird
sometimes. Glastonbury should be free and
life
like
that all the time.
S
ome
voices take a few moments to decode after their initial shocking
impact.
I
f
I said I went to the Louvres travelling by drug-hoover, it might just
seem like piss. The crawl of the Doorsian poet through modes of
perception trying to find something that underlies
their
variability
leads
to water
.
Ma
ybe
l
iving
here at the foot of the oldest rock I was never supposed to find out
about the future that ain’t what it used to be.
C
utlass
maths is what I call the ruthless revisionist cut of William Carlos
Williams. We live in an Age of sending without form.
Drains
can sing with Irish folk songs, about dreams that never die. There
are dreams that never die.
L
ove
is a dream that never dies. Even the meme has split in two, and that
was the new “uncuttable” once upon a time.
T
here
is breath in a death. It is not necessarily a disease to not be able
to cry at funerals. The traffic lights of tears can be all dark green
at times.
T
he
impassable gulf between first and third persons has been decreed
metaphysics. The automated conveyor belt of poesis influences the
voice to be a confluence of forces through voices even when I try and
drive a straight line towards anywhere that may be light. We are all
in one bed in Amsterdam.
T
he
light is a prism.
Through
the Hume people come and go, Smart-talking of Ted Hughes’s Crow.
Life
is fast, London brutal, travelling scary. Her wetness is so.
Angels
can be as frightening as demons.
HYPERTEXT
No fear, lost lover,
Science has the answer,
all wrapped up in its
rubber-gloved hand
and they’re soon
abolishing altogether
sadness gene and
dreaming gland -
for Science has told us
many of the stars
you gaze at tonight
are not really there
but illusions of the
light that takes so long
to reach the beams
of our glistening eyes
that for centuries
after the star has died
it still appears to
be hanging there,
a little, glimmering
crystal tear, in
love with the dark,
as bright and beautiful
as it would be if
it
were really there.
THE
READING
On
the train to Simon Pomery’s birthday party in Leeds I wrote in my
notebook, all the way there. I wrote the whole alphabet out:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Then
I went on a bit about ancient alchemy – about how to
alchemise the alphabet into something good, transmogrifying lead into
gold. It was going to be a reading at the party – but despite
all that I had written, when it came to pass I had nothing left
except
“
I
felt a leaf,
I
fell out of life.”
THE WAKE UP CALL
It has taken sooooooo long for me to see
that this has been just a heightened dream;
that you shouldn’t take your whole life
to click awake on a gone Paradise;
that there’s something Oedipal going on
that I have tried and failed to lick;
that a rose would smell as sweet if it
were called barmy as the army of
the new England cricket captain…
by now I see you and I may never be;
that I may never wear your sucrose garment;
that I must abjure nursing the suffering
of my ideals and get pragmatic; that
a poet is about as welcome on a creative
writing course as a cow in the Dairy
Farm’s Head Office; and yet that it’s all
good and I needn’t renew my taste for
waste ahead of fresh, minty, Colgate
toothpaste. In my dream I dreamed
that we would be the new Adam and
Eve in the prelapsarian garden with
a bag of Names to scatter freely on things.
INFANT JAZZ POEM
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.
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The
poems ‘Invincible Lover
s
,’
‘I Knew That She Loved Me’ and ‘Infant Jazz Poem’ were
originally written for an Anon magazine which a friend and I
established at Oundle School. The
poem
‘Purple’ was originally published by
the
reputable
online webzine
Snakeskin
.
The
book
is supposed to replace and correct
my
now-
retracted
first collection,
Rose
Petals In The Ashtray
,
whom it seems was only a first draft
in
the end
.
I got that name from my dying father who meant it to denote something
specific and which I did not understand. Since then obsolete poems
have fallen away and
some
new ones have been added. Thanks to everyone that helped me with the
collection.
I
was told that if I didn’t fix and amend
and
improve and ameliorate and correct
th
e
retracted
Rose
Petals In The Ashtray
,
they would
still
always
start my eventual
Collected
Works
like that even if against my wishes.