SON OF A GUN

SON OF A GUN

A NEW, PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION FROM JOHN TUCKER

COLLECTIONS FROM CHIPMUNKA BY THIS AUTHOR

Soundcloud Rain

The Sunset Child

Breath Trapped In Heaven

Brave New Tense

Yes You May

APOLOGIA

Dr. Bob says I absolutely have to write poetry with what I have been through, and I can handle that, even if it is a dead art form, even if the main focus of my reading has shifted slightly to philosophy over the past year or so. I absolutely must finish off the new Proustian series. My family deem it that what started with Soundcloud Rain, then The Sunset Child, then Breath Trapped In Heaven, then Brave New Tense, then Yes You May – is a new Proustian series – and they wish for me to finish it off before I press ahead with any more philosophy.

My publication history has actually been long and complex. It started on the wrong foot when my dad set me up for revolt with a poetry volume called Rose Petals In The Ashtray. By the time I came round to use it he had died, and I didn’t know what the title was meant to denote; then my computer was crashed on the eve of publication so I snuck downstairs in the night to use my mum’s ancient desktop and throw together some half-remembered scraps. I couldn’t even get the right cover because my computer was crashed. The first poem I put in it I took out a line from in the name of revision and it ruined the phrasing. The second poem I put in it came from before the first one in the initial writing order. The collection was never finalised and I kept amending it even after it was published. I then moved on to Selected Poems 1989 – 2017, which also didn’t work and was also published with Chipmunka. The came Binaural Songbook with someone independent who I never ended up paying and who put the work out as copyright himself. Then I think came Vampires And Zombies with Chipmunka but again I got frustrated and had all three of my Chipmunka books retracted from publication. I would’ve had Binaural Songbook un-published too but couldn’t locate the independent publisher anymore. Knowing someone that can format books for self-publication on Amazon I then brought out a chain of self-publications which were:

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

It was then that I felt I hadn’t properly released anything and needed to turn back to Chipmunka. So I brought out Soundcloud Rain. Soundcloud Rain was a book of rock songs, a rock fantasy if you like, structured on my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle, where <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. I was in short hired as a song writer to provide songs for my brother’s <BEE>. It also contained my piece about falsifying the Nirvana barcode. The book was said to have changed life; also to have made this little spot at the foot of the fell the philosophical centre of Europe. The only problem – or at least one problem - was the About The Author section showed I still didn’t know what I had gone through as a boy.

Then I brought out The Sunset Child, my boyhood book, which worked, back in the day, if inventing the net was the efficacy, but not knowing that, I sold it to you as the real, seven year old homework of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Nevermind.

Then the love poem book Breath Trapped In Heaven said “stop the war,” letting all else but love poetry fall away, so that’s good, but it didn’t end up with a happy family.

Brave New Tense then looked at the condition of water at the foot of the fell in terms of a contract on universal human rights – or something like that. It was about writing off the top of the head to discretely “do the beck” in the back garden here where the Plough alignment is viable. A gorgeous ideal I nicked from my mother, it only meant “Long Foot Disease” in my hands.

It was then that I turned to philosophy under the pen-name Johannes Bergfors and brought out three volumes of a book called Transition To Philosophy. My sister came home and got me thinking poetically again so I did one more book of poetry under my own name: Yes You May. Yes You May was about not using force. I did it with my sister who is born on the 25th May. I think she was trying to say “it’s so bad you’re charging too much.”

And then came Let The Jews Win… which my family were desperate for me not to do. So I was soon persuaded to have it retracted, for multifarious reasons too numerous to mention, meaning for a moment there were only five, five collections from Chipmunka.

The next thing to happen in this story was that I started to amend Transition To Philosophy Volume Two and Volume Three as well and got into such a mess I eventually had them both unpublished. So now what we have is the self-published books on Amazon, which I am disinclined to count, plus the five collections with Chipmunka, plus one volume called Transition To Philosophy under the pen-name Johannes Bergfors.

I would deem it that it all went wrong when I was made to go Anon in Soundcloud Rain. I certainly didn’t want to go Anon nor know that is what the interlocutors were doing if that is what they were doing. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone with it. That was my song writing career! But we don’t need to go through it all again.

To impose some order on this state of chaos, my family deem it that I started again with Soundcloud Rain and the five Chipmunka collections represent a new, Proustian series. When I look back, I say, I messed around with self-publication a bit, but don’t count that, count only the five Chipmunka collections and maybe the spin off work Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors as an anomalous experiment. I had to come on for my first collection after having already discovered the sheet where pictures grew, and looking back that seems insane. The sheet itself already came at the end of a remarkable series of events dating back years.

The best book is Soundcloud Rain where my songs are structured according to my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle and it might be the case that we can’t remake it, and it is especially fast. At least I can say, even if it wasn’t about my genius, even if I wasn’t the star, even if I never get to pursue my own genius again as a result of it, then it is still the case that if <BEE> needs music to survive, it was my music, me that liberated <BEE>.

I also like The Sunset Child, which, amazingly, hadn’t been published yet that late into proceedings, even though I wrote it when I was seven. It’s the one that contains a plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line:

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

I deem it worth keeping even for that, and that I did to mathematics what my brother did to language. Settling on the five collections shouldn’t be hard, then, but I still feel a little bit unfulfilled, still come to the laptop every day hoping to do better, as if to make amends for a wound, maybe a wound that worsens with attention. I do have more adult documentation correlating to the boyhood maths but it’s not published.

And I almost forgot to mention: there are two other things. One is that there are presently about thirty four poems individually published by a magazine called Snakeskin, but they are very old-fashioned and I don’t feel happy with them at all. The other is that I made a digital collection on the website canva.com superimposing miniaturist poems on top of photographs and that being breezy is one thing that actually seems to please me. The series of “digital templates” is published on Write Out Loud, on Facebook and also on my Blogspot page. I use my Blogspot page as a container, a warehouse, a safety net. I don’t honestly know where my writing is going to go from here. Looked at one way, it has thus far been a disaster and a very expensive one too, and should be discontinued. Looked at another way, I still get to produce something valid despite mental illness, which is a chance I deserve. If I had to choose a ‘P’ and stick to it, out of philosophy and poetry, well, it should be poetry, because I made a good start at that, and it was what my degree was in, but recently all my reading has been philosophical… the last time I really enjoyed a work of poetry was The Tumbler by Brossa and also Popular Songs by Simon Pomery. (I also read some Paul Farley recently to keep up to date with my Lancaster University Professor who gave me a First for a portfolio of defaced bank notes; and also Karen Solie’s new work. But the rate and frequency of my poetry reading is lagging far behind what it used to be.)

I hear voices now… something complimentary for a change. They deem the sheet where pictures grew to be called “Foundstein” because to find it you’d need to be Einstein. That was me and surely to God I will be remembered for that.

APOLOGIA IN VERSE

One was enough but I’ve done more

and many more hot on the heels

of achievement, trying to work out

who I am and what it all means.

2025 was a big year for revelations:

I found out I was marked, specifically,

by a failed experiment into

the maths of the new colour…

it means I need to augment my body,

body of work that is, so that

whomsoever it is looking back

can see the light fairly and clearly.

I also found out I may have lent

a little hand in helping invent

the net, at seven, and that my dad

might also have been sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness

from some dead rock star’s mangled book.

This was information I needed

and was absent for most of my life

like the oxygen the soul needs,

like the liberty of the human subject.

So I have had to come back on

and make amends even though

my work was never intended

to be about what you do. It also

dawned on me that my intended,

my evergreen light, my ideal

had even been with my little brother,

when I had left the school, so

for me to have come on, with

a book of love poems for her was wrong.

She may be a new parent by now,

so we needed to have a new pow-wow,

and re-organise the body of work,

with asparagus in Paradise left out.

MY FIRST

(for Dr. Calculator Ptom)

The best one was when I went through

what I went through and

was still homeless on the street.

I had helped invent the net at seven,

been the witness from The Lords And

The New You Know Who at eight,

was marked by a failed experiment

into the maths of the new colour,

attained the face of stars,

which might’ve been scripted in the Bible,

forewarned of September 11th in 2000,

written the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation,

recorded an album on binaural earphones, promising

to plug my senses in the mains,

had an effervescent mobile, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’

through every technological

inlet in the room before it rang,

become mentally ill but still

pushed on to get a First, writing

for example a portfolio of defaced bank notes,

hosted the Plough alignment for

a rhythm change in the White House,

and found myself homeless, sleeping

on a park bench in London, looking

at the satellites mixed with the stars.

There was a fox hunting, looting

bins in the park where my bench was,

so I departed, afraid, and went

to the steps of the local church,

where the last guy before me

had left some cardboard boxes to sleep on,

to have between yourself and the ground…

but it was still so cold, I woke

with a viscid mortar in my throat at dawn,

shivering, penniless and set about

the near impossible task

of getting housed in a

council emergency hostel

and when I was there

after a day of phonecalls

there was a corridor

with a lot of spare rooms

even though the streets

were filling with tramps.

That was when the riots broke out.

I wasn’t aware of them at first,

then someone told me

to leave my room, and I did,

went out onto the street,

saw the shop windows being smashed,

the city looted and burned,

and after a minute, I returned

to my bed to read poetry…

I did not participate in the riot.

But I carried on living

at the fringes of a wasteful society,

cycling around “food”

for a black dude

on a riot-stolen bike.

Eventually, I phoned my dad and said

I missed the air in the north

and asked him if I could come home

and he said it was fine.

And when I came home

my story would continue…

I worked at a numinous,

purple-bleeding screen

in an experiment into post-humanism,

built the Tower as an instrument

of philosophy, conducted

an experiment into a tape

with a pause where cut and re-

sealed in the flimsy reel,

and upon my father’s death

discovered the sheet

where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew.

Then I felt like I was being

just in surrendering the sheet

to my brother who designed it,

who laid it down, felt

like I was all about

democracy and freedom and fairness.

I still didn’t earn a penny

throughout the whole list

(and know I am leaving other bits out

that were also miraculous too)

but at least I had a home

even if it was just my mum’s.

Also around the time of my dad’s passing

we find I was bequeathed

an heirloom, meaning

the web-book I had written at seven

which had been in hibernation

in the attic all these years…

I also invented and falsified

the Nirvana barcode around this time

so was utterly surrounded

by creative things. I

don’t want to sleep on

the street again, and know

it isn’t right that I had to,

and yet remain very poor.

They say if I was on the left

I would’ve been paid,

but I had no political allegiance…

I drift to the left these days,

but still don’t get refunded.

And surely if someone

started to dole out payments

for attaining the face

they themselves

would become tyrants?

In the middle of the story

for whatever reason there is,

I became acutely mentally unwell

and have been hampered by that

in bringing you the Excellent News.

As I write to you, I think

I have things fixed at last,

where the collections

I published with Chipmunka

as paperback and e-book

even if they are terrible

are also made available

to read for free

on my Blogspot page -

and the other things I wrote

like the philosophy phase

under a nom de plume

can be ignored, as can

the self-publications

from before the collections.

As you can imagine

I don’t want to have gone

through all that and to be Anon,

and it could be a dangerous

decrease in Individuality

if I am forced to

(not to mention

against the law.)

Despite bringing things together

as I have online,

right now the job

isn’t completely done.

There’s not a good-enough book

about it all yet, and

I find that upsetting.

There’s no-one else

who went through

what I went through either,

no-one to really ask for advice.

Some say my best bit was Boot;

where the face was attained,

on a camping trip -

and how in the teenage band Oedipus Wrecks

I wrote the song

with the line

about the ocean

as only I could.

But if I were to start or to restart

with the whole Oedipus

Wrecks set-list, it

would end in tragedy

at my expense.

One reason I want to test

how long I can make a new poem

is that in Russian Formalism they say

literature should elongate

the length and difficulty

of perception as an

aesthetic end

in and of itself.

Mother’s grand-children

are coming up

to stay with us soon,

and I should’ve had

children too. If

it wasn’t for this dreadful

mental illness I might…

if I had stayed with Danielle

when school was out

instead of going down

south to stay with Paul

I would be married

with children by now.

Instead I stay up into the night

like a vampire, in bad,

anti-social, Gap year pattern.

The Gap year pattern

is why they are trying

to axe me, like Syd

Barrett, for I was exiled

from my own Gap year band.

There are two of us here.

Hopefully now that I am not in debt

the books I pay to be published can be better.

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

Only the mental health publisher!

Simon says poetry in England

wears a genteel facade…

what I find hard

to accept is that

poetry is dead,

as Dr. Bob tells me.

Back at the end of my degree

I got an MA place to read

Creative Writing, colouring in,

joining the dots, spot the difference,

but the funding fell through,

I couldn’t raise the funds,

so told them I could only

do it if it was free, which

they couldn’t do, naturally.

That was when I fell

to London, carrying

not enough money to survive

which quickly went on rent

and meant a sudden Lent,

meant, as I say, I was on the street.

I still remember that fox,

in the park in the dark.

The city was his psycho-

geographic playground!

So I suppose there is a difference

between being financially rich

and being rich in soulful terms

and that though I am not

the former I am the latter.

There were holes in the soles

of my shoes where the rain got in.

I actually wore odd shoes

but not knickers on the head for a hat.

THE PLOUGH-SHAPED STAIRS

The Plough-shaped stairs are made of pine,

up we go to the creaky mezzanine,

to gaze out at the garden of Gondwanaland-green

through the Victorian, stained-glass window, then

up another bit to the top of the stairs,

to the landing, where the bedrooms are.

But now it is Night and mum comes

tottering downstairs and goes out,

out into the garden of Gondwanaland-green

and calls me out there to look at the Plough!

It isn’t in the socket, but abstracted,

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

she says “is the North star, and always

points north whatever time of day it is.”

We look at the stars together, without pareidolia,

without imposing order on something

through use, just as innocent spectators.

Then when we come back in, I sit

at the table in the kitchen and mum -

she goes walking up the Plough-shaped stairs.

She is carrying things, water for example.

The Plough-shaped stairs are one of

the house’s best features. She goes

step by step, lifting her little feet,

all the way up, past the creaky mezzanine,

and towards the source of the music, emanating

from her new Smartspeaker in her bedroom.

The music is old but is still relevant.

PRAYER FOR RACHEL

May God bless and keep you always,

radiant angel of fragrance and grace.

May the poet still graffiti your name

on the wall around

the edge of the universe,

e’ en on the keel

of ‘The Drunken Boat’

(to translate ‘The Drunken Boat’

would take talent but

the graffiti on the keel

is for masters.)

It’s the day Samson cut off his hair.

They told him also

if he wants to keep hold of

a teenage love poem for you,

he should un-publish all the philosophy

he brought out under a nom de plume

and write another one for you.

Unsure what to do he or even I

think of how all the CD’s

we bonded over

are now scratched

and live in storage

in boxes in the attic.

May no trouble come your way,

may you see the light of day,

may you let your children play.

May the blues and

the blue cars go away.

I remember handwriting-sex,

unsent letters that went on for whole notebooks,

writing of the smiling light tunnelling

into your owl brown eyes as you read…

I went on big adventures there.

Now you might understand

this may be the last thing

I get to do before I die.

CUMBRIAN AIR

Cumbrian air isn’t

“air hair lair”

but it’s good strong air

that’s hard to tear.

I put some of it

in my pants

and all at once

started to dance.

But silly this seems…

sometimes I hear

gun shots resound

loud and clear,

in Cumbrian air.

It’s good for you

to breathe it in

when the sky is blue.

Beautiful place,

beautiful zone,

Cumbria is,

but I feel alone.

I moan and groan

about nothing at all

until I notice

we won the football.

BLUE POEM NUMBER # 357

My father was an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue.

We still don’t know what it was.

He died without letting us know.

It could’ve been Hitler’s paintings - smuggling

them over the old Berlin Wall, charging

the Germans for their return.

It could’ve been a pollen farm

high in the Moroccan mnts, shipping

tonnes of pollen to the States.

It could’ve been The Lords

And The New Creatures, for he might’ve been

sponsored by some philosophers to provide

the real, human witness.

He took his secrets to his grave,

left behind only a list of French vocab that

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

Now it’s the World Cup.

I remember dad never getting to see

Wayne Rooney become England’s top goalscorer

which he very soon after dad’s death did.

Wayne Rooney was one of dad’s

favourite all-time players.

Now we have Harry Kane, but

without dad I can’t enjoy the match.

Without knowing of his line of work

it’s difficult to repeat the experiment.

I have a killer head ache and so mum

turns up her music even louder.

I loved my dad but we did

even fight physically over his job.

When you fight your dad you always lose.

I was bright at Prep School,

the most expensive Prep School there was, coming

top of English every single term,

but everyone else knew

how their father earned his money,

so I found it hard to get through,

get past a certain stage.

He told me I wasn’t allowed

to deal with it until he was gone,

to blurt family secrets in to the breeze.

He would say I was good at public speaking,

learning a poem and performing it

sometimes in the poet’s accent

in public… that musically

I was only average… that

I never came back from an acid trip

before Sixth Form was even out…

that at bottom I was not truly gay…

that I went wrong with the maths

of the new colour at a very young age.

Sometimes I’d rather walk

round the kitchen table

in a circle for hours than face

any more of my own writing

at the flat, anti-Romantic laptop screen.

But we won the football tonight!

We won, wake up!

Be happy with our nation’s win!

The opposition gave us a good scare!

I imagine part of the deal

was not talking about the deal.

I wonder what restrictions

this imposes on me and

if I already went wrong.

OLD

When I get old I may still want

to write Transition To Philosophy

but for me to leap ahead to that

would be false if I haven’t left school.

By now I face the problem

that my transition to philosophy may be over,

but the gist was we have to die,

atishoo-atishoo-we all fall down.

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the floor up at mormor’s here

and find in sharing room to cheer

for we have written this new Proust

and with my hands which can attest

to weathers all about my head

that mean the sharing of the bread

which have been here since the start

of finding salvation in art...

at the moment Flo’s just the noise

of playing with her baby toys

but soon she’ll sleep and then wake

and later eat a fairy cake

and one day grow to be a mum

but as for myself I cannot come

and without the ability to ejaculate

I may have grown a little late

and can’t continue singing of

women in the wind with love

so I should say “That’s All Folks,”

it’s impossible to mend your broken yolks,

e’ en when you sit with smokes

and tell your friend some dirty jokes.

AURORA FLOREALIS REVISITED

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

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

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

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

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

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

*ketamineguitar*

POLLEN DOOR

We all know of Flora’s pretty pretext,

which I was the one to spot and articulate,

even though I had never known her kiss,

which looking back was a mistake,

but never has it been so well dealt with

as when at the age of seven, I

separated the pollen from its name,

which I would like to do again,

e’ en if it be by quoting myself,

for Jim Morrison has a theory

that when an object is detached

from its name, habits and associations

it is finally free to become endlessly anything

and when that object is pollen

never has the theory been so beautifully tested,

never has summer love been so evident,

never has fresh air been so much the cause,

but it might be for someone younger now.

GOLDFISH BOWL UPDATE

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,

the local, parochial headline wants to read,

and crossed the water to the Other Side,

left behind my almost ascetic greed

so I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,

knowing not why the goldfish is dead,

knowing only that God is good,

hoping its soul ascends Heavenward,

imagining the newsflash on the TV,

or online for anyone at all to see,

but as the goldfish becomes history

I see it could be worse for you and me

for if it was my brother’s <BEE>

there would be damage in all Infinity.

FLEE HAS SEEN A BEE

So, Flee, you may have seen a bee

but I don’t want you to see a rat.

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

that one should have to die like that.

The bee would sail across the ocean

as you lie back on the sunny green.

It would be cross-pollinating the garden,

extracting pollen for the mating queen…

once my copy of Neil Curry’s volume

started to smell of redolent perfume

so I built the Tower in my bedroom.

There were other books, a few of them

that also exhibited signs of natural

magic - for the smell was not a spillage in

my Gap Year bag, of aftershave, but actual

magic. I hope that when I am gone

someone reads the Tower as I built it,

tall and strong, lines left to right,

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

and you can take my word as true and quite.

DEAR FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?

Dear Fliss or is it Flee?

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

Love,

John

(who might soon be snow or under the sleet)

A CANOROUS CHIME

Someone gets in the power shower.

It reminds me I don’t need power.

Flower power is much better.

Writing Flora a long love letter.

You could even call her “flower.”

Down at the bottom of the Tower

I looked up and saw her hair,

it was dangling down everywhere.

I climbed up it into her chamber.

She was locked in by a protector.

He was a tyrant, I was better,

I was the one she wanted as lover.

I took out my sword to free her,

defeated the tyrant, had a breather,

took her by the tiny hand and led her

down the stair, her knight in shining armour.

In the garden we heard some laughter.

It might’ve been the film director

saying this could go on forever,

flowing like an endless river,

but what was needed more than water

was to cut her hair a bit shorter,

so that we did, while a motor

drove past on an unknown hour.

SIBLINGS

Brothers are nice and sisters too,

always there’ll be something to do,

but they can elongate the queue

to use in the morning the upstairs loo.

There are also sibling rivalries,

to please the parents, and to please

the beauty queen who brings the bees

down onto their humble knees.

John Cleese says it like a brother -

no-one is any more clever than another -

that goes between your father and mother -

and your brother and sister and any other.

It’s boring not having a family,

and I do have my brother living with me,

but sometimes think in a different key

about what’s likely to never be

and yet with mother’s new grand children,

at least she’ll get some satisfaction,

and we are a tribe bonded in emotion

even if scattered across the ocean.

I hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays

on the piano for them in multiple ways

that mean the brightening up of days,

like a way to cure a transient malaise.

Siblings often squabble and fight

but judging by mine own, it’s right

that I would die for each of them tonight,

and leave them playing in the light.

AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mystery was a strange one.

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

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

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

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

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

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

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

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

MUM’S MEASURING STICK

My mother took me out

on a mother-son bonding trip

- oh, only down the garden,

to the veg patch, where I,

as if gallantly, dug her a trench,

and after she planted

her potatoes, raked it over

again too. Here she comes now

into the kitchen, saying

“this dry weather is good

for the door,” because the door

used to swell, because it is wooden,

and offer much resistance

to being closed. I am out of

breath from working. I left

the veg patch first, carrying

two paper packets in for the sitting

room fire. I was in hospital

yesterday or the day before

after another O. D. and

don’t feel up to much work.

Still, when mother says

the dry weather is good for

the back door, she might mean

working with soil is good for the soul.

And she is mostly right.

She has a lot of magic sayings

hidden in the treetops, does mum.

You can drown in a puddle.

Language is a creature.

Imagination is a muscle.

In politics there are no wrongs

or rights. Just because someone

is good to you doesn’t mean

they are right for you. Actions

have consequences. The brain

only heals when it’s asleep

and even nightmares are

healing. Giving makes

you feel good. Poetry is not

the entrance and exit of life.

Of course she was the one

who made the flower-press ending

on cannabis that might = a dialysis,

and I was the one that made

the love poem for Flora

that might = a motor, and who

spotted the system, beginning

with ‘if.’ That system, I would

think of as my Equilibrium,

but it is on second thoughts mum’s

Equilibrium. I don’t like cooking

vegetables in the kitchen, or digging

in the vegetable patch after all.

So it is that when I sit here ( )

in the kitchen, because it has

a good table, a good chair,

and internet access, writing, and

mum comes in to cook, it augments

any work on Flora’s pretext

if I just write down what she

says, about preparing food.

Now I’ve made mum a coffee

for her flask, from the instant

espresso machine, her second

of the day, and she has gone

back out there, to the vegetable

patch, leaving me indoors.

And the bluebells are out

and some have more bells

than others, but all of them are nice.

And mother comes back in

with some layers of clothes removed.

And the dishwasher is still going

round and round like dreams

in the recycling bin. And mother

goes back out again, back

to the veg patch because

her work is not yet done. And

the dishwasher has stopped revolving.

And the fridge’s drone is heard.

And in the fridge I have a sausage roll.

And the sausage roll comes

from the local butcher and is made

with real, Cumberland sausage.

And out there, the fresh, spring air

sings that love is not dead.

THE FEE

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

but we already D’d that

when we did fliss or is it flee…

other contenders include flot

as in flotsam or flotbeat door

and just plain simple “floss.”

Already having done this,

I think I should let you know

that what I meant by saying

“d/ d/ d/ down”

in the one that falsified the Nirvana barcode

was nothing but the chord

on the guitar fretboard

and moving the D-shape down

a fret though it’s irregular.

There’s also the fee to pay,

which I can cough up for an heirloom.

I used to say fee instead of see

as an infant and it could mix

the verb to see and the verb to feel.

MAKING MY WAY

My mates want to see what I can D

when I’ve made sense of the one

where I am said to havehelpedinventthenet.

I like the way it kicked in

with a story for Andrew

after the vision of the net was had.

Stefanie wants me to D the government science

but it seems too long and

too much like hard work.

Even when I finish it, bring it up,

they say it’s not right to publish,

and so in the end we still deem it that

to be the one to meet the mistake

is a bit shit, but at least

I also discovered the sheet.

I was used for the sheet…

this is why we all agree if I am made

to go Anon something’s gone wrong -

and if the government maths that helped

invent the net left a mark

we all agree something went wrong.

THE GAME OF MONOPOLY

The game of Monopoly has hidden places.

Snakes and ladders isn’t for telepathy.

Dice changes hands to signify power.

The business of democracy is as Marx said.

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

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

the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

My father was sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness.

When I was seven and liked the movie

All Dogs Go To Heaven very much,

I stored the idea of the net in writing

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

I am away for the next two weeks on holiday

so please send your e-mails elsewhere.

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

at cricket, just look at Sachin Tendulkar.

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

threw the whole puffer jacket away.

Then the tear up the front of mine bike -

maths left over from the rules of Monopoly.

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

Moving swiftly on, Rimbaud attained the face.

In 2000 I spoke against September 11th,

wrote the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation, predicted

the hunt for the God Particle from looking

at dust in a late ray of light angling

in, and founded a religion based on the elephant.

Next up, recording on binaural earphones,

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

effervescent mobile reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every

technological inlet in the room before

it rang, hosting the white eyebrow

for a rhythm change in the sea, the tattoo,

hypertext or sensory overlay of a name

on Piper, the purple-bleeding screen,

the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

the tape I cooked in the AGA when

its small pause where cut and resealed

in the reel finally healed and was gone,

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

sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew, brown and blue,

as if the work of Winnie the Pooh.

If these latter things are numbers, I

also invented a new and impossible one:

the Nirvana barcode I made to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode

shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS

Who is in the writing team?

I am for sure. With my massive brain.

But there’s also James, deft

left hand born of another

and who designed the sheet

where pictures grew.

Then there’s Dr. Robert

with his New Beat PHD in English…

he has a family now, three boys

and is married to C.

She herself was a biology PHD.

You’ve also got Hannah…

Hannah hopes the whole thing only

goes on in the happy world of Haribo;

says once you renounce Starbucks

cool, new shit can happen.

She says of my work that wall is shit.

Her daughter is Florence

and her husband is Seb -

who works in design, is Australian

and in many ways is the most interesting.

So that’s the team – but

there’s also my mum.

She made a flower-press ending

on cannabis for my dad; has

also been known to “do the beck”

in her poems by writing,

discretely, off the top of her head.

AFTERWORD FROM ‘TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME THREE’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WITH RIGHTS COME RESPONSIBILITIES

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

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

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

He had left it to brew after hearing his brother for a little while then it was seeing a photo of the richman and the rest of the band that triggered Henry’s reaction off: for the rich man was clasping his jeans in the photo, grinning. He didn’t like the rich man clasping his jeans in the photo, and to be fair hadn’t yet worked out, because nobody had told him, that the old band really had tried to affect his looks. Still: seeing the rich man clasping his jeans as if in mockery triggered an episode of mental illness in Henry which is why he got onto the richman on FB and gave him Hell. Now, after a recent O. D. attempt “Henry” has also lost the ability to ejaculate. He thinks it is the rich man’s influence.

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

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

MATTEO’S APHORISM

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

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

ENOUGH THANK GOD

Again young Madame is with us -

and has taken to me, an ugly brute,

because I played tea set with her, sipping

tea from miniature empty cups.

Little bay Flo’ has no lyrical bedtime

but is tucked up safe and sound now.

This should be her father writing

but alas it is me, occupying the screen.

The day has been a rather hot one,

and I have taken to dad’s old office

because it’s cool and also tidy now.

I picked 8 books off the groaning shelves,

including Quine, which I might like.

When you mix technological advance

with linguistic change what do you get?

You get me sitting here writing,

amazed at the innocence of the children.

It was the first time I played tea set

and I am looking forward to playing

football with the boys on the beach.

SUMMARY ON A SUMMER EVENING

The best bits of my philosophy book were:

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

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

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

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

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

To the one who says

I should be writing

about mind cancer

because my mum is blue

you might find that

even though she is blue

there is still a bed for you

whomsoever you are

whenever you need it

at the foot of Sea Ness.

LOOKING BACK

Looking back, I think how from different

parts of the country, we could be heard

to resound around and me the centre, mixing

megalomania and paranoia like they’re the same…

we gave teamwriting a good go, but

so many hot topics were off the playlist,

the way the living spreadsheet was a monster,

the way the maths of the new colour

could underwrite cancer gnawing

at your genome or was it undermine?

Instead we fell to ideals of family,

ideals like friendship and Night

by which we mean love. We have shared

some cracking meals and cracking times,

and now the younger generation are upon us,

who will hopefully grow up to look back too.

WELCOME

Welcome to life my name is Pain.

I will be your guide to the labyrinth.

I will sharpen your faculties up.

I will tell you what’s going on.

It is not a living room but a dying room.

It is not a TV but a death-box.

This is a message at the womb-door.

This is a warning or disclaimer.

Don’t expect anything good to happen.

AFTER CBT

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

NO MORE TEA

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

MARCONI ET AL

Playing with the boys today, watching them draw, talking to them while they did, I noticed a few old poems of mine in the pad they were using for their crayons. One of them I am still quite pleased with and is as follows…

but wait!

I put it in the bin!

And have since poured the gone-off milk into the bin on top of it!

All I can remember was that all the lips of midnight

started to whisper -

and I had a vision of a Renaissance in music.

Now I sip cold, blue top milk that hasn’t gone off.

The other people in the writing team, I gather, don’t want this to be any good, and if I do, should discuss what I like about Italians (like Dr. Bob’s partner) and Australians (like Hannah’s partner.)

Radio was invented by an Italian. He was called Marconi and was only 24! Imagine!

By that stage in my life I had not done much, I don’t think. Comparing myself with Marconi, I could rightfully claim I invented some sort of an amp, by which I mean had started experiments on the tape with the pause where resealed in the flimsy reel.

Really though I had helped invent the net at 7 albeit only in a little way, been the witness from Jim Morrison’s book at 8, been marked by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour in puberty, attained the face of stars at 15, spoken against September 11th in 2000, written the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation and that was all before leaving school.

Apart from the seven year old book I still hadn’t much to show for my genius though, if you can call it that by 24. One thing was, I had long since recorded an album or even algorithm on binaural earphones, where I climbed up and said I would plug my senses in the mains. The tape was an ongoing experiment by then too, something physical you could hold that came hand in hand with songs I had written about it, or rather just one song.

In terms of writing I had written much… around the time of the earphone recordings we find a portfolio written to get me into Warwick University that contains ‘Instant Travel.’ That was never returned to the writer, though I got the privileged place. There was also a paper when I got there to Warwick called ‘Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,’ about a road trip with Paul to a festival celebrating the solar eclipse to drop acid, which got lost, then turned into a song at a later stage. I had hundreds of notebooks by the age of 24 too, and many songs that were unrecorded. I think I was still yet to think of myself as the specific witness from a specific book. Now I have several books out and several musical demos (not just binaural.) I suppose that if you had to single out one thing I did, by now it would be becoming the guy to discover the sheet where pictures grew, but it is my brother’s sheet not mine. If you think all this means I am supposed to be a genius scientist, you might be disappointed to learn that my five collections with Chipmunka are mostly all songs and poems – but you might be happier to know that I have been reading and writing philosophy, which could be continuous with science, of late.

Overall though, I still haven’t achieved anything as solid as Marconi inventing radio. They’re not stupid those Italians! Unlike the Australians! Only joking!

Italy has a very matriarchal society, a very relaxed way of life, a very modest mentality, meaning they don’t overdo things. Italian grandparents are said to look healthier than their English counterparts towards old age, and that is partly the weather, partly the relaxed way of life.

I’ve been three times to Italy and still think their food is even better than the French.

Still thinking about Marconi being 24 when he invented the radio, by that stage of my life my mental health troubles started. I was cut down in my prime by an awful disease of consciousness and don’t wish to go there.

If I am supposed to be a scientific genius, I don’t know where the work is, at least haven’t delivered it as of yet. I almost prefer the pictures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that young Matteo drew for me today with his deft left hand.

I am not free, meanwhile, to discuss the failed experiment into the maths of the new colour and why I also cannot say.

I have got a new book of philosophy coming out that proves telepathy real, among other things. It’s called Transition To Philosophy Volume Two. But it’s not something the young boys will read for years if ever.

SLOWING THINGS DOWN

What we seem to be doing is slowing things down. I may have rushed off a few collections, after Soundcloud Rain and also The Sunset Child. Now we are going back a bit, slowing down. I might wait an hour for my next line. Or else go to sleep and wake the next day, guests all gone.

NO WAY THROUGH

My family have done it like this

so that I have to move out

because I can’t get through.

But I can’t move out because

there are people thinking

of having me buried alive.

Hopefully, the police

are still observing me

when I utter those words.

I also can’t move out

because I am a vulnerable adult

and cannot take care of myself.

I can’t sort out my meds,

cook, go shopping, and

I can’t even ejaculate anymore.

KITCHEN MESS

Anyway the kitchen is a mess as is my publication history. The fourth collection of the recent series, Brave New Tense isn’t even for sale on the publisher’s site. There’s a version without a cover on Amazon. Not sure what happened there. That was years ago. I remember paying good money to have it amended – maybe something went wrong?

Now it’s the Transition to Philosophy series. I paid to have Volume Two amended and Volume Three retracted from publication. So far they’ve told me that’s happened but there is no evidence of it yet on the net. So I’m waiting to see what will happen.

NOTE

I’ve been on Amazon to admire my own collections or rather just make sure they are still there… one or two of them say “only a few left in stock.” That means they have been selling and I never saw 1p.

The next day I get an e-mail back from Chipmunka saying it’s all sorted and the new version of Transition To Philosophy Volume Two is out. Now that my philosophy is sorted, I should obey the request to write one about coming out.

I can’t ejaculate. I came down from an O. D. so extreme it was said to be genius that I survived and in doing so lost the ability to ejaculate. So the local lasses still say if I haven’t got the juice for them I am gay, but my mother won’t let me come out.

But to picture my own mum hanging for that is not right. Anyhow, by now it is Night… Hannah and Seb have retired to their dreams. They go tomorrow and I won’t get to see them before they are gone, taking the little one down south.

IN THE MODE OF HOMO-LUDENS

The qwerty keyboard is a water pistol

that gets stocked upon drugs in Bristol

then heads off hitching to the south…

I think I’d put it in my mouth.

I think therefore I try link ink

and drink of my physical hyperlink…

the pink of sunset awaits once more

like the sky is a strip tease by a whore.

Escape Enter Space Return Delete -

there are five seasons on this street.

As I type at this slinky new altar

I think how writing is an inward prayer -

like a hooded prayer to an inward god.

You can disagree and needn’t nod.

Anyway, the day is an altar ablaze

with all the yellow and crayonic rays.

AFTERNOON PAGES

They got back to Bristol did Hannah, Seb and Flo’ and sent a photo to mum on the family Whatsapp site. Flo’ was wearing a red and white dress, pushing her own teddy (like her, a baby girl) in a pram. It’s amazing that a one year old girl already has mothering instincts.

*

What they want from me, it seems, is to un-publish my philosophy, publish the present text herein, which is what they were trying to get me to write when I did Yes You May, and then I will be free to work on philosophy.

But mother say it’s all left up to me – it is my choice what I do.

Reading Spinoza I would prefer to be working on philosophy than on New Beat verse.

*

Mums’ knitting Flo’ a jumper for Flo’s baby teddy, with beautiful little buttons that have ducks on them. She asks if I have any beautiful, little buttons too and I don’t. She meanwhile has a whole collection of buttons. Some have ladybirds on, some ducks and others are otherwise still.

*

So they want me to finish the new Proustian series. They deem it that what started with Soundcloud Rain, then The Sunset Child, then Breath Trapped In Heaven, then Brave New Tense, then Yes You May – is a new Proustian series – and they wish for me to finish it off before I press ahead with any more philosophy.

*

The first thing to consider is why Brave New Tense isn’t being listed on the publisher’s website. I shall write to them to ask why.

*

Spinoza is calling…

my poetry started out alright but became appalling…

I want to get out.

Out there a summer breeze blows.

There is no city of stars.

And how old was man when he learned the stars were just photos?

O, it is only afternoon – already I sense I need a final push from someone else to finish the text. If I simply say “I am gay,” that’s not quite it… more like since my not being able to ejaculate I have been exiled from the verb to love.

But this shouldn’t be too much about me.

This is a family affair.

And Hannah already gave me a final push.

THE ALIGNMENT

Proposition 1

What some call Order in the universe others call God, but they are one and the same.

Explanation

Having attested to the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe, only to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, I asked myself whether the alignment indicated Order or Chaos in the universe. The argument for Order was that the alignment only coincided with a rhythm change in the White House, so backed up that idea that the Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man, and the White House its child in terms of both philosophy and build. It is easy to see how one might consider the alignment indicating Order; but Chaos is a different matter. The argument for Chaos is that the alignment would happen with greater regularity if it were a clocktick universe, rather than simply “when we want it to happen.” Still, the correct endorsement turned out to be Order, for there are cosmological events that only happen once every few thousand years or so. So having determined that the alignment indicates Order in the Universe the next step was to recognise that in this case Order in the Universe is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 2

Metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.

Explanation

The scientific mode or even “tone of mind” would be to call it Order in the universe; and the religious mode or “tone of mind” would be to call it God – and as shown they can be synonymous with one another. Therefore metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet. Q. E. D.

*

Proposition 3

If God is synonymous with Order in the Universe, it follows that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

This view might be trendy at the moment, as scientists at C. E. R. N. hunt for the God Particle, which has been labelled a daft misnomer by others still who tend to believe that God is perfect and matter is error. The belief, though, that God is not extrinsic to matter dates back at least as far as Spinoza, for whom there was no substance that wasn’t part of God. The counter argument is that the alignment is not God itself but a mere example of a state of Order in the universe that is itself not visible and is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 4

If the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.

Explanation

We already know that by definition God is perfect and the alignment does not necessarily let us stare at the perfection that is God but merely signifies the Order in the whole universe at large that is synonymous with God. To stare at the alignment is not to be let down about the perfection of God, but God is more than the alignment itself.

*

Proposition 5

It is not the alignment itself but the Order in the universe which it indicates which is synonymous with God.

Explanation

Here we seem to be slightly tautological. I have been teasing this point out. At the moment of the alignment, which lasted for a good, few nights, there were other things going on in the world of simultaneity, synchronicity and syncretism and these were also connected into the same scope of Order as the alignment. God is the overall picture and the alignment an example by which we can measure the Order.

*

Proposition 6

It is good to get to the root of one’s own beliefs but you must understand the way it seems is that necessarily all belief-systems are woven in to this religious stance by the alignment, even atheism.

Explanation

In the alignment, we see that atheism and theism lose their polarities. The Order in the universe would be what an atheist makes of it, and even if that is all he believes in, as shown it is synonymous with God, and can be just the same as what a religious person would take from the event. An atheist and a theist can in all likelihood agree, and only agree, on the matter of our Plough alignment. The alignment factors all faiths into its happening, like the goal of syncretism, almost attesting to that notion that Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Rather than different religions connecting though, it is even more startling that religion and science agree, and religion and atheism agree in the event of the alignment.

*

Proposition 7

Because the alignment is about one-ness, it is possible to use it to undermine and undo presupposed binary oppositions in arguments.

Explanation

We have seen how science and religion can be a binary undone, also how even theism and atheism can be undone. This is propitiated by the basic principle that Order in the universe, which can be appreciated by science or atheism too, is synonymous with the idea of God when it comes to the alignment.

*

Proposition 8

If Order in the universe is synonymous with God, we are all one and our differences reconciled.

Explanation

If an atheistic scientist recognises Order in the universe in the event of the alignment, and a Deist believes the alignment a manifestation of God’s work, then they essentially agree on the same thing if it is true that order in the universe is synonymous with God, and are but calling the same thing by two different names.

*

Proposition 9

If the alignment is not God itself but just an example of Order in the universe which is synonymous with God, it may not be the case that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

If the alignment were God manifested, it would be a God of atoms, stars, particles et al, but seeing as the alignment is indicative of a sense of Order in the Universe that stretches beyond the alignment itself, and which we are saying is synonymous with God, God might be the underlying, organisational principle and still retain exemption from the condition of matter.

*

Proposition 10

That Order in the universe and God are two different names for the same thing creates common ground between science and religion, also atheism and religion.

Explanation

This point reiterates previous points. It shows that in practice what science may call Order in the universe, religion may call God, and despite their seeming to not agree, they could be one and the same thing, under different appellations.

*

Proposition 11

It may be magnetism that underlies the variability of belief when it comes to the matter of the alignment.

Explanation

Maybe, we are all but iron filings firked to the moon in the same way and our differences are differences created by language being stubborn and awkward. When I say we all agree that the alignment is the alignment, it makes my home the magnetic, telluric and gravitational foot. It endorses the yellow, McDonalds ‘M’ in the word “them” in the advert. It could be that magnetism unites us where words keep us separated, and the event of the alignment could be an essentially magnetic event in and of itself on a scientific level. So it is that we could be all stardust, all helplessly and involuntarily charged in a magnetic way. Different fields of language, to use David Morley’s phrase, could also be underlined by a common principle when it comes to magnetism. The magnetism of the stars, the magnetism of the oldest rock, could be the same magnetism, and people part of it too.

*

Proposition 12

The alignment and its inherent magnetism has the ability to turn a staunch atheist into an agnostic.

Explanation

It barely needs explaining that the observation of the alignment is so sublime, even terrifying, that it truly becomes a good use of the word “awesome” and has the power to change the polarity or the charge of an atheist into something like an agnostic or even more. Even an atheist who saw it would remark at the stunning sublimity of it, and the coincidence with the rhythm change in the White House too; and it might suddenly strike the atheist that God might really exist after all, because the atheist would glimpse a sense of Order in the universe that he had previously never considered, it being bigger than one man’s brain. The atheist may have empirical science behind him not believing in a man in the clouds, but the same empiricism would lend the atheist towards a more religious or at least agnostic stance if with his own eyes he perceived the Plough alignment.

*

Proposition 13

It does not diminish God to have him equate to Order in the universe, nor muddy up and make dogmatic religion of science to have Order in the universe equate to God.

Explanation

To mention Order in the Universe might make a religious person contemplate nothing but the cold, black, vacuity of space, which is seen as Godless in science, and to mention God to a scientist might have stigma for the scientist too, but truly in the alignment I can see nothing other than the point of Order in the universe becoming synonymous with God. It does not diminish God to call him Order in the Universe for this backdates to the Bible and is not a new, scientific notion at loggerheads with religion but old. Traditionally God created the world from chaos; and therefore my documenting the alignment takes on the role of rewriting Genesis to a partial extent. Still, I can see how a top scientist, wishing to find something out would be frustrated if God was the only answer and he was not allowed to go any further, ask any further questions.

*

Proposition 14

The universe may just be a very elegant place.

Explanation

The universe may be elegant but whether it is designed by God or not we do not know. There are said to be three arguments for God in philosophy: the ontological, the teleological and the cosmological. My argument is that at some level the Order in the Universe which an atheistic scientist believes in is synonymous with God, the same thing but seen through different eyes, expressed with a different name. The scientist and the theist could be working on the same problem, onto the same thing, albeit in different disguises, disguises which are superficial, while underlying it all we find the same magnetism, which also ties in with the same instinct on a human level.

*

Proposition 15

The alignment doesn’t prove God but it does prove Order in the universe.

Explanation

The alignment doesn’t make the Bible stories literal. It doesn’t mean we have captured a square of blue sky and examined it for evidence of God and found it. To those that don’t naturally believe in God it only proves Order in the mechanical operation of the Universe in which man finds himself. It proves also that the sociological and the astrological realms are connected. To some though that is enough for a redefinition of what the word “God” means or should mean. It means, as stated, that there is an Order in the universe that is beyond our control – for surely the alignment was not down to human manipulation of the stars – and that the Order is elegant, and the universe therefore benign. These things that are proven are as stated enough for a God, a redefinition of God, for me, as a personal belief.

*

Proposition 16

If the alignment recurred tomorrow night, without anything significant to coincide with in the socio-political sphere, this argument would not be invalid.

Explanation

This is because what has happened has happened and we cannot change the facts. It may make me look a bit ridiculous if only now I am bringing this paper together and the next day the alignment recurs for nothing special, no good reason, but I would still say Order in the universe is the atheist’s God, and a scientific description – or even equivalent – of a theist’s divinity. It would also surprise me if the alignment did recur tomorrow. But I have become convinced that what astro-physics labels Order in the universe and what Christianity calls the Divine Being represents a false dichotomy. That is the point.

*

Proposition 17

After a while of talking about the alignment directly, one starts to wonder if the whole conversation should be hidden or else abandoned.

Explanation

It seems like wearing clothes out of the shame of one’s body being naked; but in the case of the alignment and talking about it, it is the shame associated with the Sin of Consciousness. So we reach a point where the prelapsarian event of writing, which is freedom, becomes changed. To liken this change of mood and tone of mind to the Fall of Man is another step.

*

Proposition 18

Speaking of the alignment directly might offend like sacrilege or blasphemy.

Explanation

Indeed, this consolidates the sense of the divine nature of this event, this theophany, where it is not just about awe but possibly law too. If it is rude to stare, I was rude. If it is blasphemous or sacrilegious I was that. If God cannot be seen with the naked eye, the work of God can still be seen with the naked eye. Unless that is you deem it the work of, say, cosmic silence, in which case I would reiterate my point about the false dichotomy between God and the idea of Order in the universe.

*

Proposition 19

The alignment is an object of worship that transcends difference and also underlies the variability of religious beliefs.

Explanation

To see the alignment is to be taken in by a religious event. The religion itself, as in what religion you are, does not matter. The alignment makes sense whatever religion you are, whatever colour or creed. It is so sacred that some people, from a distance, without seeing it, hide it under the name “white eyebrow.” It is not inconceivable that it is the main focal point of an international religion all the way round the world. A Rastafarian and a Jew and a Christian could all be equally awe-struck by the alignment, which is almost like saying we are equal in the eyes of God, and almost like the idea that these different faiths share a common perception of God, which I have argued is the same as the idea of Order in the universe.

*

Proposition 20

The alignment is evidence that Nature is the true architecture of State.

Explanation

Indeed, I was just thinking about Wordsworth who sought passage to the divine through the medium of Mother Nature, when I stumbled on this old aphorism, this axiomatic truth. It is the connection between the astrological event of the alignment and the socio-political sphere that makes this axiom ring true to me. Still, it feels right-wing compared with the exploration of the Future State, and maybe therein you have the essential difference between the Right and the Left.

*

Proposition 21

Even though the alignment is only really visible from this private property, we can’t affect it to happen.

Explanation

Indeed its being affected to happen is something beyond my knowledge as well as control. If there is manipulation, I cannot tell who by or where. I cannot tell if the alignment arrives top-down from the State or bottom-up from the farmers who plough the land. It being the Plough alignment, one would presume it might be the farmers… farming was the most noble profession unto the Ancient Greeks. Wordsworth too, who sought the thoughts of the highest man in the words of the common man, thought that the working class, the peasant class, had stronger moral fibre than the higher classes. The alignment also includes the plight of the blacks… I was once thanked for what I did for the blacks, even though I did little except host the alignment. My friends came up from the south after quite a few days of it and attested to it; then we went off on a camping trip in the Lakes and that was the last I saw of the alignment. What would’ve happened had we walked up Black Combe instead of the camping trip I do not know. And ultimately, when it aligns, who else can you thank but God?

*

Proposition 22

God might exist on a mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

Explanation

I confess I read this online somewhere but have long since been interested in the idea that answers to the divine will arrive in maths. My father read Philosophy at the LSE in the 1960’s and went there seeking answers to the divine but found instead the philosophy of science. I have looked into the idea of a number sequence that leads to Heaven in my own writing. Ascending the fell I consider that Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see – for I would seek to know if I have taken more steps up the fell than any other – and reason that I will never find out. But as for the proposition, it is but one of many concepts of God. Aristotle’s God was “thought thinking on itself.” For others God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. For others God is used to fill holes in arguments. For others God is not to worship in blind, dogmatic slumber but to behead, dethrone and become. For others God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. To others we don’t deserve a God, are but monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers. And yet to those who speak against God in such ways, I ask what do you make of the alignment then? It doesn’t strike me as random-ness and chance.

*

Proposition 23

One is free to dismiss anything I say about the alignment because one has the Right to Freedom of Religious Belief.

Explanation

It scarcely needs me saying that I am guessing with all this, for academia proceeds by guesswork. It is not intended as a dogmatic creed. It is not intended to be stamped on the hearts and minds of humanity. Should you disagree with my thinking on my feet in such a way you are free to form your own opinions. For example one of our nearest neighbours lives at Fell Brow which is further up the fell and looks out from it rather than up at it, and the person from Fell Brow dismisses the validity of the alignment because it can’t be seen to come together from his house. I can only report from the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot, where the Plough alignment is uniquely viable and visible. You find the footpath up the fell begins here on our land, in the Combe field which is a museum of a field, retaining a furrowed, rippled look from old-fashioned ploughing technology of agrarian golden ages of yore. It is in that field where the alignment really works best in terms of visibility.

*

Proposition 24

You cannot separate a religion from its indigenous landscape.

Explanation

Indeed one of my favourite novels from when I was growing up, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, seems to posit a religion in a different place from where it arose, and the difficulties inherent in that. Clearly though, what they mean when they say you cannot remove a religion from its indigenous landscape comes clear to you at the alignment. The alignment makes it all make sense, the indigenous wisdom of the saying. It’s the first time you see the landscape in a religious light. It connects the stars and the farm land.

*

Proposition 25

At the alignment the main event was in the White House.

Explanation

My father didn’t even acknowledge the alignment, preferring to stay indoors and watch the inaugural speech of Mr. Obama whom they called “the poet” on telly. For dad that was the main event and anything in the cosmicomic sphere was trivial compared with it. I remember in 1997 when we still had a second house in London, he told me there was probably going to be a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, and he was right. He would’ve said the poet’s democratic election was the main event and not the Plough alignment. Still there were people I knew among my southern friends, musicians mainly, that foresaw the stars coming into alignment before they foresaw the democratic election of the poet. I suppose as momentum gathered they became one and the same goal. I suppose the alignment showed that America is still the policeman of the world, but derives its Enlightenment values from Britain.

*

Proposition 26

There is a seer’s trance associated with the oldest fell.

Explanation

The foothill of Black Combe, Sea Ness, was once upon a time, according to a white witch who proof-read for Norman Nicholson, named Seer Ness after a seer and his trance. Someone said the seer was St. Patrick but it hasn’t been confirmed. I am now known as a seer by the locals… I envisioned the net and was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures too as a boy, attained the face of stars in adolescence, foresaw the future on many fronts in 2000, including forewarning of September 11th, attested to the white eyebrow in 2008 and even more recently attained visual radio in the perceptual kingdom of the individual. What place there is for a visionary in modern society is not known, in terms of whether a visionary is still needed or not, only that you shouldn’t expect to be paid for your visionary activity. It might be the case that my geographical position is what accounts for a history of visionary activity, such as the idea that September 11th had to go through me as a schoolboy because I live in the house where the Plough alignment is uniquely viable.

*

Proposition 27

The Plough can come back to confirm the geometry and the dimensions without actually aligning.

Explanation

Indeed, the Plough has been back to confirm the geometry and dimensions, but hovered above the socket, without actually being plugged in. I captured it also on my new Smartphone, in a state of partial but not complete alignment. We can do this again, and it likely will happen again but whether or not it will be in my lifetime I do not know. There may need to be a great event in the socio-political sphere. It may need to be a coincidence, in the truest sense of two incidents coinciding. You notice last time it coincided with an American political event… it is not certain whether or not it can coincide with an English political event. So far it has only been a partial alignment for various events in England.

*

Proposition 28

Out of many things, the alignment is said to be the only one that augurs well for good sanity.

Explanation

This one isn’t my own proposition, but is the comment of Mr. Mark Velarde to a long paragraph I sent him containing some information about what I had been through. I hesitate to replicate it herein because I might wish to employ encryption, delight in a wilful opacity. Still, it warrants noting that the Plough alignment does augur well for good sanity, unlike, say, much of the other things I got up to and went through in my life. If I told you what they were it might cause problems.

THE TIGER AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Something stopped me from turning the situation to my advantage.

I had helped invent the net at seven, been the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures at eight, been marked by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour at eleven, attained the face of stars which might’ve been scripted in the Bible at about fifteen. At eighteen I wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%, also forewarned of September 11^th to the day. There were other prophecies too including the God Particle and the Plough alignment.

After school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying I’d plug my senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, spotted a hypertext of my name on Piper, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and even discovered the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew.

But in the middle of all that I was cursed by a hypnotist and also became mentally ill. My guess is that if anyone else ever attains the things I did, there will again be a reason why they cannot turn the situation to their advantage.

The reason may be democracy in theory but in practice might manifest as something else like being cursed or becoming mentally ill.

I’ve got umpteen books out there and none of them represent a win. They’re all terrible in fact, the sort of self or vanity-press-published work that only devalues one’s name. In the meantime having been through all this my little brother who did not go through any of it is more likely to be remembered as a genius, because he said <BEE> might come after @ in the international language alphabet, because he got the girl (Flora, then and for a time) and because he designed the sheet where pictures depicting my own song lyric grew.

I think my mistake was in presuming that things would work out alright for me because of what I’d been through, but maybe it wasn’t a mistake, and things might still work out alright.

I just find it interesting that at the exact age where I’d be expected to make a lasting paper, that was when my world collapsed, when I was cursed by a hypnotist, and when I fell ill too.

I suppose that if I was ever thinking of turning some of those things I went through to my own advantage it would only be fair if I was struck down in my prime; but I didn’t honestly have a plan.

I had written a few papers, one containing ‘Instant Travel’ that got me into Warwick, one called ‘Lucy in the Soul With Demons’ that I wrote when I was there… they were highly regarded but didn’t survive… and there was the earphone album too which did survive but wasn’t very good.

I moved University from Warwick to Lancaster with big ideas for further papers; and I produced them, by now mentally ill, including a dissertation on Dave Morley and a poem portfolio that took the form of defaced banknotes. My illness had started by then but it wasn’t until I had just got my degree that I was formally diagnosed upon realising I was the witness back in boyhood, which will make it harder to be believed.

The best of the books is said to be Soundcloud Rain where some of my songs are structured according to my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle.

It isn’t about me; I am not the star; and I wasn’t the genius in that book – so obviously I find it hard to accept that it’s any good, especially considering I had to pay for it to be published. I did however manage to convert a few of the papers I mentioned into songs so they are more portable.

I was big into portability back in the day.

My mother would see all this as a rewrite of The Tiger That Came To Tea who even drank the taps dry; but I was also the chosen child from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

At some point I started to hear voices. I was still at Warwick when I heard my first. Then there was a party thrown by Simon Pomery which he hushed in order that everyone could hear the same voice, so that was another. Then when I went to Lancaster there was an implosion, too many voices to count. That was my first episode, which included a disappearing bandage. I went to hospital for a real headwound and the nurse put a square, white bandage on. I went to touch it to see if it was paddy and it was; then I went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The nurse had to put a second bandage on. I was made to sleep in the psychiatric ward, then, and the next day shipped off to the acute ward – not just normal mental hospital but one for more acute cases. I escaped, ran away, made it to Scotland but was caught by the cops and taken back. My escape was looked upon as a sign of my sanity returning and my dad thought it funny but it was all actually rather a sad story because now I would be forever in and out of mental hospital.

After that first admission I went back to Lancaster to finish my degree. I got a First, but as I say, almost immediately afterwards was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

Of what remains from before that, there is little evidence of a beautiful mind – there is the binaural earphone album where I said I’d plug my senses in the mains and the seven year old book where the idea of the net was stored in the attic in writing – then you could say a few other songs and poems – but not much, not nearly enough to be qualified as up there with Nash.

More recently writing has turned into 1000 semi-recursive files at a laptop screen, a virtual Brainforest, an inchoate morass, a teeming data-tree. There still hasn’t been a win with a book, and by now it might be down to my younger brother, who did not do any of those things, to provide it.

I wish him all the luck in the world, all the happiness he can get.

I say there are no good books yet from me, but I am slowly starting to change my mood and mindset and see my brother’s right you know: Soundcloud Rain is quite good. It’s got all my ecstasy induced science from University turned into music, powered by <BEE> and including photographs too. What a machine! I really must stop being rude about it, being an ingrate. At least James thinks I was the genius in that one even if I think it was him. What’s difficult is being Anon for the sake of your little brother’s genius, and sometimes I have blips but most of the time allow it. It’s not like anyone doesn’t know they are my songs: everyone knows they are mine.

If I have a decision to make it’s that I need to pick a P and stick to it, be it poetry or philosophy. I think I am going to choose poetry, because I can’t do both and have made a good start at poetry. I think I am going to un-publish Transition To Philosophy Volume Two and abandon philosophical enquiries.

THE SUNSET CAFE

At the Sunset cafe down the beach

you watch the waves roll out of reach…

you see the sea’s heaving, maternal bosom

and meditate on your recycled breath.

The coffee arrives, not strong enough

for mother who needs a second shot;

then the cooked breakfast is for kings, containing

every snooker ball colour somehow.

People down there in the sentient air

say they’ll keep their witness sinless.

You hear their talk reverberate around

amidst the alliterative and trivial

taking of toast and tea and sit

in front of the wide windows, watching.

The streamlined design of the place

allows for optimum beach-observation,

feels like something from the future,

washed by the mermaids under the waves

until it is smooth like a pebble in among

the natural art exhibition of the shoreline.

It’s trips like this that tip you back

into poesis when you have to choose

between poetry and philosophy and stick to it.

Even when you are really stuck,

literally pinned to the spot, by a

monthly anti-psychotic injection,

the movement to the shoreline brings good fortune,

to see the beach abounding with dogs,

to smell the good, clean, sea-salty air,

to be among the lovers of nature and the outdoors,

to sit in the Sunset cafe and drift,

on an afternoon approaching autumn.

A CROSSROADS

My great, dusty, epic, philosophical tome

has come together

but I should ignore it…

at the moment there is

a file called ‘Philos Volume Two...’

that’s where it is -

but I must choose -

choose between philosophy

and fewer words.

All the signals in the world

are saying to go with the latter.

So a decision is made.

It’s all been done

so I can’t go against

the one with the gun.

The one with the gun is the song

we mean when we say

the sheet where pictures grew

depicted a lyric.

New voices, though, announce as I write

that apart from the philosophy

it’s all a bunch of shite.

I wonder what

Marcel Proust would do...

Marcel Proust

used to lie

in his bed wailing…

I suppose my Odette Symbol is Flora…

Flora who it turns out

went with my younger brother…

I suppose I need to waft

into abstract realms of fantasy,

employ elaborate sub-clauses

and get stuck in

the trap of memory,

that hive, whose mating

queen can never leave,

if I want to be like Proust.

It’s not what I want,

but what I do want I do not know.

As the lead singer

of Bush once sang

I can become

“lonely without my impediments.”

Let’s go to the Essential Festival

again, years ago, by

train, and score some

pot and smoke it and

fall asleep in the field.

The children of my friends

will do such things

and I am trapped

in terminal Hobbyism, moaning.

Let’s say the best of my

books is Transition To Philosophy,

which looks

at the question of essence.

Let’s suppose I do

get to do another,

be it by Johannes Bergfors

or John F B Tucker…

it’s already done;

and at risk of sounding

like a headless chicken,

friends with whom I went

to the Essential Music Festival

down in Brighton decades ago

whisper in the wind that they

wish for me to put my

thoughts of poetry away

and pursue the philosophy.

I could call it

My Pet Dodo

as opposed to

Further Philosophical Enquiries.

But wait the air

says to not go ahead with it!

Cumbrian air is home-made and strong,

the type you want when writing a song,

not too short, not too long,

Cumbrian air is home-made and strong.

It seems to me

I am only free

to pursue philosophy

if it’s about <BEE>

whom it seems might

come after @

in the international

language alphabet….

I don’t have a problem with that.

Still, my dusty tome can wait.

This crossroads

is peopled by ghosts.

I eat a peach that’s sopping wet,

forget the very alphabet,

then return to the tome

and work on it a little bit…

it is not right

that I should be doing both

and that both are shite.

The alphabet dances before my eyes

in a distant depth of sunset skies

but the rag descends

full of Romantic illusions

and covers up my face.

The <BEE> needs

the music to live

which is why I needn’t

bother with the tome.

I was chosen

for my music

to liberate the <BEE>.

I never knew

until this moment

how sweet life is,

how good that book,

how surely I must

pursue the poesis

and not give up

on this endless quest.

Life is sweet,

e’ en though we

are out of the World Cup.

<BEE> needs music

to survive and I

was the one

to provide it.

I am only just starting to notice

the <BEE> book really was good,

and I needn’t do any more

though the text elongates.

Voices can attest

that <BEE> works best

when your brain is fried.

It’s the most Rimbaudian thing.

Now the soundwaves

leak out from mum’s room,

clapping like an audience with applause.

There is no applause for me,

though I seek approval,

but mum’s music

might be enough.

“Sending out an S. O. S.”

sing the Police.

A car goes past.

I close the door to block the music.

Flies buzz about my head

in B flat minor I think I read.

We are not dead

but born again,

in thunder, lightning and far-away Spain.

Going, going, going gone -

sold to the remade poet songwriter John.

I love my brother

but who would know?

Who would hear me

going so slow?

Who would read?

I hope there is someone

even if I can count

the audience

on the sun!

And what will I do

when I’ve burned every bridge

and can’t come back

from the loneliest edge?

I feel down on myself tonight -

and my answer to everything is to write.

I go outside to stare

at my favourite patch of sky.

When my mother dies,

my brother and I

must be close… I see

dusk’s mountain ranges migrate so slowly.

My favourite patch of sky

b/t/w/ is to the left

of the fell at Nightfall

from the foot.

It always looks eerie

up that way, when

the fell has darkened

in the foreground but

there is still remnant, evacuating light

in the sky behind and above it.

The northern light is very clear.

I am reminded in saying that,

if you can believe it,

that the second fridge is full of beer.

I talk to my mum -

about many things -

she says to pursue the poetry

and not the philosophy.

Mum’s always right.

She’s knitting Flo’s baby doll some garments.

She’s good with babies.

She absolutely loves them.

I myself love women.

I see their faces and figures

on online pages and want

to sleep with them, which

is to want something

I cannot have, and as a result

of anejaculation will never

know a woman again,

never the soft, granular wear,

the containing elasticity and texture,

and as yet it is something

for which I have not wept

but moved in to the realm

of gayness instead,

which my mother

cannot really tolerate.

And as you can see

my own family

have been treating me

like a toilet ever since

I wrote a song for Flo’.

DENOUEMENT

So it was that I discovered

someone posing as my best mate

had been trying to give me a Hitler moustache

as far back as my health kick when I was young

and for that I hope he goes to prison

for it would be an unconscionable crime

and then I was cursed by a hypnotist

and became schizoid.

A RECURRING DECIMAL IN THE NIGHT-TIME

He’ll flit about a little bit, going

from this thing to that… he might

put the music on, then the telly,

open a book to read and sit

down to play piano instead.

Then he’ll see the fireface moon.

He’ll see it through the window, burning.

He’ll go outside to look at it

but come back in before eye contact,

put the kettle on, sit down to write.

He’s absolutely all over the place.

At least he’s brought some alright books out.

Now he sits in a time after sunset, drinking

coffee in the middle of the night.

The coffee is strong but the Night stronger.

The Night is long but his life is longer.

Even a tree that is out of sight

might bend to the tune of the night-wind.

Then just like that a stray cat

out of nowhere fast turns up, sitting

on the ledge outside the window, meowing,

drawn to the kitchen’s midnight light.

Should we let it in or should we not?

As we pursue a recurring decimal

made of nothing but black and white

words on paper, the cat that sat

on the matt is on the window ledge

one minute then the next minute is not.

It has gone off looking for comfort.

It is something we cannot articulate.

Its timing was utterly perfect.

HENRY CONTINUED

Back to the continuing story of Henry… they even said it all went wrong (his band did) when he didn’t say thank you at the end of it. He came home to the Lakes, exiled from his band, fuming, unaware what had been going on and embarked on a program, quasi-religious, of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading, exercise and all the self-help techniques he could glean. That was when he was placed under a curse by a hypnotist. It was as if the world was saying “no,” right at the moment Henry was about to score a valid goal. To be fair he didn’t have an evil plan. It was just that he was getting to the age where he might provide a paper, or attempt to score a goal, or start a literary career. He had helped invent the net at seven, been the witness from The Lords and The New Creatures at eight, been marked by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour in puberty, attained the face of stars, predicted September 11th with exactitude in 2000 and written the highest marked A-level exam essay in the country. He might’ve thought he was on course for a Nobel Prize, but the world had different notions. To be fair Henry didn’t have any plan at all. His Millennial idea for a book was The Scientific Papers: “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” But back when Henry had got to Warwick University in 2002 he found his tutor David Morley had just brought out the exact thing: a book called The Scientific Papers – classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” The teacher had the extra word “writing” from Henry’s own ideal. So Henry had tried to recalibrate his goal. He was torn between Einstein’s Unified Field Theory and defaced bank notes. So he didn’t really have much of a plan but when he went home after not finishing University, and afterwards being in the band some more, (for the band were from his gap year haunt of Cambridge) – he embarked on this quasi-religious self-help program. He wanted only to realise his creativity. It wasn’t a bad ambition but the world said no, and I for one find it interesting that the world did say no to him. It could’ve been that he was up against a democratic balancing out mechanism, but if that was the theory, in practice it manifested as his being cursed by a hypnotist. He was just about to go to a second university, his local, Lancaster. When we look into it we may see that if he helped invent the net he may have too much power if he wins, converts it into a paper; that The Lords And The New Creatures experiment bearing attestations would go against hidden parts of government; that the maths of the new colour experiment could offend the Chinese for example; that if he were to start earning money off the face of stars he would be a tyrant; so already with the few things he had done before leaving school there was enough for the world to say no to him and his dream of being a writer.

Since being cursed by a hypnotist and going schizo with it, Henry carried on delivering the goods for instance, he hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, also discovered the sheet where pictures grew (among many other things) but he never won with the book. He thinks it means there is a democratic, balancing out mechanism that stops him winning and I think he is right and has in that capacity seen the light. It might also have been that the world was keeping him waiting until he was sure, for at the time he first became ill, nothing had been confirmed. He wouldn’t have been able to write, say, of helping invent the net, of being the witness, of the maths of the new colour, even if he had wanted to. Still, at the moment he chose to realise his creativity, back then, even if he was just building up to it, he was cursed by a hypnotist, as if the world was saying no to his decision – and as I have said he didn’t have anything evil planned as such, nor any plan at all. He still doesn’t have a plan. He persuades himself the books he brought out are okay but still feels the world is saying no, even more so than before, before his fall into mental illness.

But now I see it differently. I see his fall into illness a result of his not even being able to write about his experiences. Being silenced by circumstance. As I said he wouldn’t even have been able to write of it all if he wanted to, partly because his seven year old web-book had to be locked in the attic, so he wasn’t privy to it, partly because his dad’s business precluded conversation… so in reaching an age where he was to flourish, but not having the tools with which to do so, and thus being forced to remain silent or get it all wrong, that may have triggered mental illness in Henry. It certainly is a fascinating case even to this day. It may be that even if he writes a list of the big, symbolic miracles he has been involved in, it would still be against the law unless it were woven into a fiction, consigned to mythology. That could be where we get slaying the dragon from – consigning a list of miracles to mythology because it’s been such a beast that it would be unfair and undemocratic to preserve it in face value terms.

It strikes me now that the balancing out, democratising “mechanism” that stopped Henry turning the situation to his advantage is the law. It might’ve been against the law for him to sing of what was in his breast, to sound out the sights that have been seen. That must be awful, for a young man, trying to realise his creativity. Meanwhile his contemporaries and brother-poets are making it work. So it is that the best stuff remains underground, that most genius remains obtuse, that the predominant culture is toxic, that English poetry only wears a genteel facade, that Henry isn’t even allowed to write about the wonderful things he does. He may not have come to terms with his own past yet, may have been desperately trying to work things out, and yet that may have been on the wrong side of the law, or at least pertaining to being something illegal at the end of the day. Let’s look into it: a paper on how you helped invent the net. A paper on being the witness from Jim Morrison. A paper on the maths of the new colour. A paper on the face of stars. A paper on the conversation in the barn in 2000 where you spoke against September 11th and more. All achieved in the style of the highest marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the country. But by now the Towers have fallen and you too have recorded an album on binaural earphones, promising to plug your senses in the mains. By now you have left University without a degree despite promising papers on Instant Travel, also Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. No, that paper was never going to happen, because as I say, Henry hadn’t yet confirmed the boyhood experiences as real. But still to have really done all that and to make a paper that means you win, gain an advantage over someone else, whatever the topic may be, may well be against what the world itself wants. I wish I could be there, in the days preceding the curse of the hypnotist, to warn him, and to fill him in on his life experiences of early boyhood, and to highlight what if anything is positive in his writing and to generally help out.

NATURE

I feel like writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug called “Strictly Free,” that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free,” to consume. Here, Nature is the true architecture of State. Mood is a bracken frond drooping down. The beck in the back is a fountain pen. And the powers that be could be clouds, rowing overhead on sky blue roads.

THE ICE QUEEN

Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons might happen to be an actual substance. Nothing can grow under her rule. She is a humourless ice-queen. She can alter personality. But in the question of whether or not “Lucy in the soul w/ demons” happens to be an actual substance, I would urge one to not know either way. That would be to exercise what Keats called “Negative Capability” which he said accounted for Shakespeare’s genius: “the ability to exist in uncertainties and doubts without an irritable clinging after fact and reason.” I loved it when as a teenager I found my second hand copy of Keats’s Letters fell open on that page and the quote about Negative Capability was underlined in pencil. Shakespeare’s genius was also in dissimulating the semblance of inevitability in both plot and rhyme scheme. Not only that but before Shakespeare, tragedy meant the collusion of outward forces. Shakespeare changed that to the collusion of inward forces, and gave man a new level of introspection, foreshadowing more the way things would go in the future.

SPRING

Barnes has scored a chicken.

But every time I confute it,

it grows back, like a tree into which

you have carved your name, healing.

It wasn’t Barnes, wasn’t a chicken

and wasn’t a goal. So Barnes

hasn’t really scored a chicken.

But then you need a proposition.

And “Barnes has scored a chicken”

grows back. Because it is about spring,

renewal, rebirth, growth. So

you have to prove it wrong again.

It could be that the proposition

is right in terms of recourse

to euphemism and wrong

in terms of factual data. Every time

I prove it wrong it grows back,

but that may have all changed now.

This might’ve been an epitaph.

PEACE, LOVE AND MUSIC

It strikes me now, because voices have told me, that when my brother designed the sheet where pictures grew, he expected the pictures to be pink flowers for Flora. But they turned out to be figures depicting the lyric to a really heavy rock song by myself. When I ask why this is I don’t know except that in reading the two sheets he left, before the blossoming took place, I became part of the experiment – that the experiment was changed by observation.

I can’t have violence done unto my brother as he can’t have violence done unto me. This we should be agreed upon. As the old philosopher Dr. Tom once said, one should use one’s time at the cryptic crossroad to denounce violence. It would be false to say we are sinless but when we react it should be without violence, calmly.

SIPPING WATER

When the possibilities of consumerism

are retracted, contract,

there is an opening of a moment

of awareness and clarity,

a delightful moment where you

sip water instead, because

all the consumer goods have run out,

all the creature comforts.

It is then that you might reflect

on Infinity, or living in the moment,

living as if this one moment

will last forevermore.

A SCENE IN THE KITCHEN

What mum wants to know is why I don’t want to go with this text…

why, furthermore, do I believe there is no such thing as female genius if it is the case that without females we wouldn’t have spines?

Well, it seems a loose coalition of the unwilling. Which is not what I want.

But, (my mum continues), it’s the way out of the trap your so-called friends are setting for you. It’s a way to be free.

I might want to give it a go then if it is the portal to my continued freedom.

We’re in the kitchen (again) where a pheasant soup is brewing. We had pheasant tonight, and it’s exciting to make a change on the usual chicken we have. James didn’t want any because it had pheasant in and is fussy.

All it takes to ensure my continued freedom is the pheasant in the pan over there.

As for female genius, it was part of the creed we developed at Habs when we were teenagers. Dr. Calculator Ptom was the one that said there is no such thing as female genius. I trusted his judgement because he is smarter than me.

The guys that discovered the DNA helix couldn’t have done it without the work of a female scientist called Rosalind Franklin, who never got any credit for her work.

An intelligent female friend (Rachel) says PJ Harvey is the best (and Courtney Love concurs).

Martin Amis was in favour of “gynocracy” – rule by females – said the men had had their chance and made a mess up of it and it was time females took control.

A female voice now sounds out: “the point is if you’ve been cursed by a hypnotist and have lost the ability to ejaculate your work is always going to be crap.”

My point is that I could still get together some good work… I have several files open, and only one can go forwards, be the chosen one… but have to keep pleasing others.

A female voice interjects: “now we know you attempted the maths of the new colour as a boy, we think you’re Nash but haven’t got anything to show for it except your seven year old homework!”

I’ve got a file called ‘The Silentist’ which is what I would pursue if I were doing an MA… it’s all science-poetry and follows on from my dissertation on the gyp scientist-poet David Morley. Why am I not working on that?

I also have a really big book of philosophy, provisionally called ‘Where You At, John?’ which contains enough science and maths to satisfy that requirement. Why am I not working on that?

Last night there was a new permutation of things, starting with the old Oedipus Wrecks gig from Camden Town, then entering “calculator tomb.” Why am I not working on that?

Why is it that there are soooooooooo many good books on my laptop and yet I have failed to get a single good one out there?

Could it be mental illness? Could it be the fact that I was cursed by a hypnotist? Could it be that the people around me are trying to sabotage my work? Could it be that the voices are sadistic and trying to “etch” me? Could it be forces behind the screen?

But you look at numbers like the purple bleeding screen, the earphone album, the effervescent mobile, the melted cassette, the Tower, the tattoo on Piper, even the Nirvana barcode, and these would seem to represent a top talent at the top of his form and game…

And in the meantime these people I am trying to please, who get me to write such utter garbage as contained herein, keep getting me to withdraw things like Transition To Philosophy Volume Two – where I proved telepathy to be real with Dr. Calculator Ptom – from publication. And I am left with something like this instead!

I’m very strongly over-medicated and of nice disposition too, so I can’t help myself in these situations, and between the lines watch out for repeat prescriptions because I am heavily under the chemical cosh.

But then I suppose it’s not too bad, even a scrapbook that Hitler would’ve burned so that’s a bonus.

It’s my mum that needs me here to mess about in the kitchen while she cooks…

and by the way the publisher sorted it out so that Brave New Tense was properly on sale, and also, as I requested in the end, they withdrew Transition to Philosophy Volume Two from publication… my mum said it was wrong of me to use a nom de plume all of a sudden and nothing good lay in that direction. So now there’s only one Transition to Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors, plus the five collections by John Tucker.

As soon as you write something it is data and that is what we learned from the seven year old book that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic. Already in 1989 that was the case, and the cloud was mentioned before the ire ii net, and we think that the ire ii net of which I had a vision in 1989 is the same as the net we know today.

I go outside: see that my favourite patch of sky is grey.

It’s a poetic line that.

Even to have a favourite patch of sky is poetic.

The days are getting shorter.

I remember the end of The Lords And The New Creatures from when I first read it still. Sometimes any old utterance is secretly charged and woven into it, a sensory overlay on top of it almost.

That’s what I was trying to do with Breath Trapped In Heaven – provide templates for the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh (the green pages means The New Creatures by Jim Morrison.)

So when I say “the days are getting shorter,” it’s like when Morrison says “Deceit smiles/ incredible hardships are suffered by those barely able to endure.”

I have suffered in my life too.

Sartre never knew a day of despair.

Now mum comes in the kitchen, complains that I didn’t put the evening’s dish away in the fridge, because I was so busy writing I didn’t hear her request a while back; then she gets my medication ready for my next week (that means divvying it out into a plastic box divided into days like multiplication tables.)

I think of far-fetched fading warehouses, and chemists, abandoned, and the 1980’s for some reason. The Google search engine of my mind is probing.

I guess in living without life, in not being able to ejaculate, I don’t have what it takes anymore.

I did once have an idea for a book called The Abdication… someone who wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation in 2000 reached the top of the Literature tree and abdicated. His life story was fascinating. It was mine. It was me. I abdicated like a Deus of Chaos on a burning throne. All I needed for this to happen was to smoke a spliff of skunk and the branches of the brain’s tree would receive electric tingles elongating outwards towards the treefinger tips.

Now I have started a course of anti-depressants… it’s the first time I have had serotonin-disinhibiting medication. Maybe there is still some serotonin left in my brain from the E-taking days?

Then you get that it’s my family who want me to D and the guy who gave me a Hitler moustache who is the one trying to save me!

My bro comes in the kitchen… making a cheese toastie… the voices say if they had left it up to me to write as I chose, we would’ve been nuked, presumably because of the maths of the new colour. This is partly why they don’t want me redoing what is done; and they don’t think I have yet known freedom after the one I did with the government at seven. They say what I should be doing is renewing the new creatures themselves, but I don’t know how. It wasn’t my work to start with.

DELICIOUS SOUP

Mum makes the best soup.

I sip it with my spoon and remark

to her on how tasty it is.

It is hot having been cooking

at boiling temperature for ages.

Now she wants to put lentils in

to bulk it up a bit because

(she says) it is too thin.

We both get a bowl before

the lentils are added. She

is having a cheese toastie with it,

but not I. It might be

the case that I have seconds soon.

What bothers me most

is the backlog of messy plates,

pots and pans to wash up.

It takes away from my

creative time. It eats in

to the holiday I allow myself.

LOOKING BACK (2)

Looking back it was all a bunch of crap apart from my brother’s notion about <BEE> and I did the same to maths as he did to language when I wrote

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

with a + sign for an F. Looking back we also have the sheet. At least my brother does. And at least I still have some songs too. The songs that survived are good ones. Now I can put this on my blog and go to sleep, for tomorrow is a new day.