HOW TO BE FREE AS A NEW BEAT

I KNEW THAT SHE LOVED ME

I escaped last night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep

and the stars murmured

their cool ballad

to the approaching sky.

Secrets hung like ghosts

in the corner of my wanton world

all blurred and drugged too deep

and I knew that she loved me

from her invisible motions

and the dagger in her soft reply.

The questions concealed in her eye.

Her smile a luring prison.

Her blink a beautiful danger.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

And I knew that silence

would soon let slip its whisper,

knew that fantasy

had never been so real

and I knew that she loved me

because I knew everything.

I knew.

LE LITTLE LAPIN ON LE LAWN

Le little lapin on le lawn,

trembling in the dusky dawn,

forlorn as fallen autumn leaves

is the wave that misbehaves,

it makes you melancholy-mad,

where the wave-forms terminate,

mind the gap, wet, spastic mirrors clap,

you don’t need meaning on a plate,

you’re dying slowly as the light

pours forth from the glowing East,

the sun a hedgehog in the air but

slow and Bible-black the beast,

O little lapin on le lawn,

who sheds a secret tear for us all,

sup the flowers like a cup

before the rusty Autumn falls.

HELIUM AUBADE

Tit butter moat brink notes sprinkle

outside open Darwin window down.

The pulleys are not for bullies.

Unbidden comes the light of day.

Birds are smuggling supercars

to an Iranian overlord through Persia

and over the mnts. Listen.

Tin is their usual merchandise.

The sun is a hedgehog’s defensive

needle spill all over the garden.

I watch through the old, Victorian,

stained-glass window on the

creaky mezzanine. I feel I

should be smashing a trashcan in

a back alley full of well-groomed cats,

exalting the senses this dawn,

propagating my love of life.

The numinous, alien spaceship

that hovered in the East in pre-dawn

dark has gone, the image of the horizon

as a petrol-coloured negative,

and plasmatoidal resolution erupted but

it’s more the mind’s ear I am interested in.

Description is not enough when

birds play laser-flute in the trees

and we must translate what we

think into word-combinations!

The Age could be one of Re-enchantment,

which is en echo of The Enlightenment

which itself is the simultaneous

astrological and sociological de-centering

of Man – but what do I know?

I am just a man in the middle of

things. A poet stranded in medias

res. The magic of dawn fades.

FISH

When synapses die, then it’s a case of seeing

if there’s a glint of life left in the eyes of fish being

eaten by the seagulls, then empty Unreality

grows a tint of menace, in all probability -

but not forlorn is this wave where angels descend

and clap at the trains that pass near the end

for I smell the smell of flowers at the kitchen door

as I make myself a tea that’s not against the law

merrily merrily merrily we have run out of cream

to sweeten the humour that has the logic of a dream

as it breaks apart, widening in connection

between the expected and the unexpected direction

musical chairs it isn’t, but it could be a game

remembering now how inside the flame there is no blame

in love that stuck like glue true bubblegum was perceived

until there was nothing to do, so in love we believed

we believed in the sea shore as a kind of horse

where of course waves have sexual intercourse

it hurts to work for sadness, that mother of dreams

whom it seems is beautiful, too beautiful for seams

but beauty bursts forth, with bounteous breasts

that amplify and emolliate sensation’s failing quests

such treasure as this should be sacrosanct in days

when the new contenders have also lost their ways

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unobtrusive, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year.

(2002)

AURORA FLOREALIS

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

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

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

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

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

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

*ketamineguitar*

THE ROAD

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Start learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road.

My bro says I shouldn’t really be renewing the lost, boyhood album I made with my siblings called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. Still, I have been visited by angels who deem it necessary, maybe the only good thing I ever did.

They pulled into the drive in a car, got out and started looking at a road map.

I went out to help them, to see if they were lost but they weren’t and only wished to take a photograph of the house – my mother’s house.

So I said “okay” and came back in – and that was when I realised they were angels, two angels from a template by Blake. I realised they had come to get me to renew The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob – but where does one begin such an adventure?

Maybe it’s about Backward Liquid Maths?

Maybe it is not safe to say E minus MC squared = only relative zero?

Maybe it’s about being in a state of unself?

Maybe it’s about Divine Technology of the Fifth Dimension?

When I first wrote it as an album of catchy songs, I was a strong believer in God. I liked the definition of God as “thought thinking on itself” and prayed every night. That was before I came under the influence of a powerful intellectual, atheist, who couldn’t tolerate God. Almost out of politeness I said to him “so God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness?” and he said he accepted it. I started to question it myself, to say things like “God is to behead dethrone and become not worship blind in dogmatic slumber.” These days I am not too sure how to leap into it without such beginner’s luck!

For one thing, I feel there are fragments from those old days which may be spared the inevitable waste and sway of Time.

For example, even my babyspeak had some kind of post-Eliotious and counter-poetic ring to it to those that know their 1960’s American verse.

“Look Fufie, I can fee feep!”

It templates over Jim Morrison’s opening line, as if I were born the witness. Consequently I am interested in fossils of art, encryption, antipodes, negatives, blueprints, fingerprints, alkalis, mirror-neurones and other things too.

The way ahead may appear to you to be quite avid. It is replete with busy detail like Outsider Art which is because I became ill.

Still I remember back in the day: when my dad was away working as a fine art dealer, I spent my days designing tunnels inside the oldest fell, lined with free beer dispensers, fruit machines and burning torches; also cheques addressed to myself for ludicrous amounts; also pen-knives with ludicrous tools.

‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world. There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn.

Something about being a Starvationist.

Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.

Then my seven year old work started to show early promise. Even though I probably didn’t yet know what sex was, I encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, proved the net and cloud existed in the imagination of a child before their invention, attempted the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark and conducted a proof of “the metamorphose theory” from Jim Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures.

The work emerged when my dad died in 2014. Dr. Robert, upon tidying up the attic found a stack of books I had written. He brought them to me; and I went straight for the two, red, English, exercise books. One had on the front

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and another had on the front

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Some choice fragments from that seven year old book might run as follows...

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

a cloud, two planes,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

In our new program there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

I saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full of dead skeletons.

He has spines all over him.

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers.

It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.

Well, one day, I met a big-eared sofa in James’s bedroom (that anagram of boredom) and I said, that evening, at the dinner table too; and then too soon I met something else as well.

My head filled with war one morning in chapel and I collapsed, went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

Looking back for some kind of sophisticated response I find the final line in my school project on the dinosaurs in Junior Four to be quite inveigling:

“Last Autumn, two biologists announced they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct, stingless bee found in amber.”

Back then, even then, my dream was to be an English teacher who subsidised a writing career by teaching English. I remember writing a letter to a green organisation about our family finding a gannet with a broken wing on Silecroft Beach at a bonfire party; and the green organisation planted a grove of trees for the effort: they were petrol ink purpose for pen ship sail!

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,

bongles has still got the stones.

The song in my head as I lay in bed in the boarding school dormitory at Night seems looking back now to have put words to the demented goose sounding out at the end of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Bike.’

Through the wood. Running. Knocking off the fungus. With a hockey stick. Dad and mum were there. I remember. There was a song going “I’m So Dizzy My Head Is Spinning” on the radio. I remember it came up in the wood. When dad and mum were there. They were singing it. At school.

“I’ve written two prose poems mum. One is called ‘The Fire’ and one is called ‘The Sea.’ They’re about 4 sides each. I did it voluntarily.”

The latter means there is a difference between humidity and moisture in the air.

That was when I rounded the gang and said:

“Right I’ve got an idea guys. We’ll write an album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. James you can be on Spanish guitar, Bob and Hannah on backing vocals and percussion, I’ll be on Casio keyboard and vocals.”

L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog,

he should be sleeping like a log,

goes round and round, chasing

his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail

of Maltesers, nice, round and pale...

“We’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there.”

Flutter in the sideways.

Flutter in the sideways.

Bring your brief fling with the politics of flight!

There’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

So. That was it. That’s as much as I can remember of the original flourish, which went on before I had left Prep School. It was a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, and we managed to redeem the situation of all evil.

Looking back now, when we wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, incorporating a song called ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel,’ it contained inflections of my father’s LSE degree in philosophy. My father studied under Karl Popper who, although I have only heard from dad as opposed to reading myself, came up with the epistemological methodology of P1 to TT to EE to P2. It was diametrically opposed to Logical Positivism (apparently) who at the time believed even the circular argument to trend forwards towards a Bigger Picture that Popper no longer believed in.

It sounded like a mouthful to me – this P1 to TT to EE to P2 business – so I just used to say ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ instead. It became part of what I could call “an Utilitarian Martianist slowspell.”

Ossie the Dog meanwhile was a daft golden retriever. It seems to template over or be a fossil of that moment in The Lords And The New Creatures when Oswald escapes.

The eponymous song of the album had a catchy melody I can still remember, and it goes well in major harmonies. The lower road is like something from China and the higher road more emotive and anguished and together they are beautiful.

As for the bit about the butterfly, in my memory it was there but even so I shouldn’t say it in full, because there are those that, say, encrypt it in musical truth without words – and I am still not entirely 100% secure that it was on the album – though I think it was. Moreover, it is enough to hear my brother switch a light switch in the night-time now.

As for the old Nirvana barcode, I can tell you where it came from. There was a government-set intelligence test at the computers at Prep School after exams, for the winning of which there was said to be a prize. Wishing to prove myself intelligent, I finished the task first, but was ignored, whereupon I tapped in the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana into the computer’s numb controls. I was a big Nirvana fan. My dad had got me into Nirvana. That was where the figment originated.

Then at the age of about 14 or 15 I provided a new thing: a booklet of poetry called “The Fire-Dance.” It was about being free with Nature and is said to have contained some timeless lines.

The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums

where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap

and bells let peace form in blue notes

and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it

and wet let excellence sound out its criticism

and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting

and chloroform in the heart let see

if only Game Over was seen in nights.

The

sun

hanged

himself

from

a

length

of

daisy

chain.

Folder graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. The system works quite well. The grass is always long on the Other Side.

Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.

Clocktick clock not being clocked off by time.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.

Break, bird with the skin of snake.

God rushed into the cold cod quick.

Behold! An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Barnes has scored a chicken

and wingers are allowed bikes!

I imagined a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except a swear word in every box, to go at the end.

Even A Duck Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings of the electric guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say.

Hey, my name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

[1998]

One notebook I wrote for a girl contained the line:

“The stars awake to notice love.”

I sat on the roof of the house where the stars re-align at summer sunset and wrote poetry, teenage love poetry, for a girl, including the sentence:

“But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

images before I sleep

dancing, escaping memory

they seem to have no cares at all

they seem to know the name of love

they seem to be my sacred friends

ancient messengers, waking at night

but I will forget them and never care

about what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it’s love

just us and love forever...”

I sometimes wish I had nothing but a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:

“The light of all that’s good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams.”

One night Dr. Calculator Ptom and I boarded a train without knowing where it was headed in London. We fell asleep and woke in Luton missing a ticket at dawn. We were sent back in the same direction from which we came by the conductor. I think we slept under leaves in a suburban wood but that may have been a different time. He named my second band “Oedipus Wrecks.”

If ever I made a mistake in my writing it was when I wrote a line that now turns out to be traditional but which to me at the time seemed natural ability, seemed mine own. By now I have encrypted it in a way that you will get if you know the line, but which will keep you guessing if you don’t.

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Soft

and

loose

like

yellow

pencils

scribbling

dreams

as

they

arrive.

I started a third band called Secret Chord H with the best drummer of his generation AND a poetry magazine with the best poet of his generation too. He said he thought I was better but what remains of those Rimbaudian days?

Opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over.

Semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

Magic poisonous a breath her. That would be the opposite of a logically-worked-out system of priorities by which to live and love. But at least the evil of a nuclear situation would not hide in a Nintendo innuendo or “poetic conference” and go down as nothing but gorgeous description – so the threat is dissolved, revealed to be the redolent perfume of the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh whom it seems does not fancy the poet (alas).

Even if it’s the only (good) one I do it will do. It’s not exactly “perfect” but that’s not such a bad thing. I wait for voices to interpellate the fractured mirror, for the interlocutor, who makes it a palimpsest. All that it needs is to end on the lyric to ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by Secret Chord H.

Last night it seemed we couldn't 

sleep but maybe I was dreaming.

The world expands inside my 

hands it's getting heavy.

Of all the treasures I could

choose I can't seem to decide.

Today the shade was washed 

away where I would hide.

Dream with open eyes, come 

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come 

below and we can fantasise.

Last night it seemed we nearly 

died but maybe I was dreaming.

It made me feel sooooooooooooo 

alive and soooooooo in love.

Dream with open eyes, come 

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come 

below and we can fantasise.

Now there is only one thing left to do and that is sign it by Einstein’s value for Light-speed (c) like one of those meta-texts I read in my dreams at night.

c

AWAY WITH THE FAIRY LIQUID

As if even Natural things are given over once again to a Barthesian world of product placement, it might be instructive to consider the healing of my busted, dusty Hooverbag lungs… once I was away with the Fairy Liquid. I became interested in the switch thrown. There were new maps sprawled on the point of a pin. I hungered after The Snowbell Prize. My brief fling with the politics of flight kept me up all through the Ancient Night. Another high-powered dawn was born but what was the WATTAGE? Well, I felt a leaf, I fell out of life, probably no-one else knew, but then there may be some. I wallowed in my lazy swamp, languishing, lizarding, long. Interstellar Artois was the effect of fat, planetary raindrops beating down on sad, Lucozade lights, lying lambent on the paving stones. DogMuckels was not what it seemed. Quantity Streets were typical of consumer culture. By now, the National Hypochondriac Service have sorted me out. My mood is made stable on a sterilised table. Fakeazade does not come free from the kitchen Tap as yet, but we are working on it. Savlon is wrong. Erase the Dettol. There’s no such thing as cinnamon, but then again that is not strictly true. Well-weird this ward: words woke it: walls broke it: Weirds walk it: or they should, break it open to the light of day, straight away. There’s little to do except listen to the snap, crackle and pop of the cereal, cereal in the morning after a dark night of the soul in winter.

WIRED TEETH

I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.

She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

(Kilburn, 1997)

ON 4CMC

“I've got a new plot,” thought the dullard.

“Literature has started to release serotonin.”

He was on the new designer drug, a cathinone and

NPS called “4CMC” when he dreamed up the plot.

There was an holographic bike out the back

all through the Night. The dark was glittering

with tinsel. Mangled love was the overall effect.

He saw the world through the frame of angel

hair, there were weird, Escherian shapes in

the air, there was light deep inside the dark.

“Yes,” he thought, “Literature. Serotonin.”

For once you remove the inner monologue

you can become an open energy conduit.

Question the comfort and see for yourself.

At times it seems to be all just tall and telepathic

telegraph poles telling you what and what not to do!

READING MATERIAL

If there were paper under my heart there would

be writing on it and at last it would be red

like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst

or nuclear-fall-out-in-reverse-of-dusk, whose

scattered, tattered-knicker clouds conceal

real live U.F.O's, and non-exchangeable

for a bus-ticket when the fiver-river drones.

That page, my wage, an underground organ,

with its meta-fictional shorthand and triplicate, 

something like the opposite of a bus ticket,

in taking you on an inward journey forever:

surely it would feel shocked not to be legal tender?

[Silecroft Beach]

INVINCIBLE LOVERS

I’ll tell you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'

(1997)

SYMMETRY LIPS

Symmetry lips   symmetry lips

kiss me quicks  need a fix

make me feel  natural and real

cuts heal  with a plastic seal

I’ve been in your heart  and danced in hot rain

I've been in your heart  and danced in hot rain

now consciousness  is everywhere

now consciousness  is sentient air

the sky falls  apart into place

I crave to sleep  behind your face

everything in its  proper place

live where the sky  and the river freely give

live where the sky  and the river freely give

SMART-TALK ON HEARTBOOK

[warning: contains voices]

Up all night working the guy who said he would plug his senses in the mains

incoming voices seem to be Smart-talking

Simon says fragmented for reasons of solidarity with the dispossessed of the world

feeling the Age of Communication = the Age of Alienation I am

chivvying words in different orders recalling the machine in Gulliver’s Travels that precedes the computer whom it seems might have destroyed the spirituality of Cabalistic permutation games of heart-purifying nature based on quest not arrival but whom it seems might not

sharing secrets on Facebook as if it were Heartbook

can’t upload spittle to philosophy chatroom

can’t pass the gravy over Facebook enough

started out writing a good book but laptop became huge container for storing the sum of all knowledge

thinking the surface area on which I write being infinite the story is now infinite, the content gone endless

still like Gulliver’s Travels and ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ – goodbye

still think if the windows were washed – every one - I would see nothing, nothing but the white mirrors re-affirming the quiet interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction where I write by night furtive in flight with the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper At The Gates of Dawn

when I look out of the window at dawn I sometimes see Eden, am like Adam walking in a prelapsarian garden with a bagful of names to scatter freely on things

the ingredients of apple juice might make a found poem called ‘Text Message From An Alien’

seems the internet is to writing as photography was to visual art

seems the on/off switch of the laptop is its clitoris

seems the omnijective interface of random access co-imagination is the new, synchronised word

through the rooms people come and go Smart-talking on magic alphabet radio

when I see the sun in the morning I think it is Holy not just a 2 pence piece

the kettle rises to its silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain singing sweet song my one note on hyper-vision this fair dawn

it looks like a good book is on the cards

it looks like Heartbook might’ve fled away with the Smartpoem

it looks like mutation in consciousness, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture without motion bones like sadness gene and dreaming gland and the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland and the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill and we are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land still

was remembering recently the time my friend sent a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH into space, and I was the one underneath it, the one to catch it

think it might be a psycho-technological post-poem pertaining maybe to replace the archaic sense of ‘gay’ gone to apathy, barrage and detachment

reminds me love is a choice of words

was WH Auden that said that not me

I still think love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop

PROSPERO IN AMSTERDAM

First time I smoked a bifter

it was like the sea

was set alight to

with petrol

and burned.

We were in the den

by the beck in

the Combe field

when we smoked it.

My bros seemed alright

as if it were banal,

trite, not the sheer,

cold terror I felt.

I went up

to the attic to play

guitar, and still felt

so paranoid, as the steal

strings of the guitar

were strummed

and the world

went round

and round the sun

that I had to stop.

I went for a shower

to wash off the paranoia,

masturbated in there,

and orgasm was

so long, so prolonged

it changed my perception…

I was suddenly absolved

in warm, soapy

bubbles. Supper

was called. I went

to eat spaghetti

bolognese with my

family. The threat

of my parents knowing

diminished to nothing

around the table;

I was sold on the

green stuff, suddenly.

So began a Romance

that I would say

was a Holy sacrament.

So began the self-legitimising

pact of the stoner

circle too: how

we smoked to get

sober from the

advertising trance.

How we wished to abjure

temporal wealth, bondage

to surface Gods of

illusion; renounce

worthless dogma

to consumerism

that only robs us

of our bodies; touch

the texture not

name side of life;

turn life into love.

We used to discuss

casual, embedded

drug references in culture:

Mario mushrooms

conferring energy;

Tinkerbell’s dust

that makes you fly;

the field of poppies

in the Wizard of Oz

that makes them see

the Emerald City.

As I say this

was part of the

self-legitimising pact.

By now I’ve

packed it in. By now

I know the brain releases

cannabinoids naturally

for moments of

Signification, like

reaching the top

of a mountain; and

if you flood your brain

with cannabinoids

un-naturally, meaning

and signification

become aleatory,

become a mess: there

is suddenly meaning

at every point of

intersection in the

crazy palimpsest of memory.

Wishing to still have

a good short-term

memory, wishing

to not break the Hollow

Claw, wishing to

still be a poet, I

don’t wish to

smoke cannabis anymore.

SKUNKFOOT

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland. It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows. I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity. Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains. It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bird in the wood, it was definitely a horse, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real. Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven. The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

A TRANCE OF STALKS

I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring

suffuse the air and pervade the senses.

An AEIOU bird

toots its hollow horn

outside on the A595.

A celebratory genesis is everywhere.

Mother earth

is giving birth,

menstruating season

and ovulating dawn.

Fresh lovers maunder

hand in hand and

knee-deep in redolent flowers

into shade to take repose

by cool, running waters.

Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.

The blue sky arches and swoons,

I bridle the mind and race apace to the shore

where seabirds scream

from the ragged rocks,

O is it their love-song or elegy?

Waves make gentle love to the shore.

In alchemy a galaxy

of stars exploding

into being above is perceived

as an orgasm, is perceived,

that is, in an erotic sense.

Liquid night arrives too soon,

O moon, O beautiful,

sleepless omen moon,

who shines like an

electric coin and seems

to be in love with the sea

or at least her own

shattered reflection:

she scatters her jewellery box all around.

Homework tonight is to remember your dreams.

I prefer telepathy to 10p.

ERASING THE DEBT

My father told me he smuggled fine art,

smuggled art over the old Berlin Wall,

charged the Germans for the return of

Russian-plundered, pastoral paintings,

used the codename “Blue” and donned

faux Australian accents for the job, sold

his business when the Berlin Wall fell -

but I found out it was pollen he smuggled!

Art was recourse to euphemism for pollen.

He had a pollen farm in the Moroccan

mountains, shipped tonnes of it to the

States. I remember how much I loved

the fluffy stuff, stuffed with mascara bruise,

butterfly wing, peacock feather and

purple, crushed velvet flare. It was

pollen that funded my private schooling -

though dad still kept up the rhetoric, saying

“the image more than poetry is the most

international currency.” Among the doctors,

lawyers and other high-up professionals

I therefore did little to better myself,

never had a family business to take over,

and set my sights on being a writer.

WHEN THE BECK TURNS TO ICE CUBES

On our first night up my dad took me out

In the back and asked me what I could hear,

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

Showed me the beck to open my ear,

Showed me the beck to open my ear.

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

We traced its source up the fell one day,

But found only bog and marsh, no fountain,

And the fell itself I should say by the way

Is twelve feet short of being a mountain,

Is twelve feet short of being a mountain.

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

Down as gravity and katabasis require,

Beckwater travels, always choosing the course

Of least resistance, scentless and cold,

Bold to be long, as long as a horse,

Bold to be long, as long as a horse.

//////////

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

That flows down from the fell’s striated way,

Underlaid with Technicolour unicorn hooves,

Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me,

Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me.

//////////

Paul Farley would pee in it like a punk,

But I like to stomp in leaking welly boots,

On a trance of green, THC-free stalks,

And let the wet water get in at my roots,

And let the wet water get in at my roots.

//////////

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

Laid over a lucky lady’s milkwhite neck,

And whatever the southerners say of a stream,

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

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

//////////

Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,

It falls two feet into a sound as sweet

As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss

That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street,

That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street.

//////////

It babbles down into a double-barrelled tunnel,

And disappears for a mile or more underground,

And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,

For all the world a round map of sound,

For all the world, a round map of sound.

//////////

Optimus Prime leaves once blocked the tunnel

And water leaked in under the back door

To float a massive, abstract archipelago

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.

//////////

Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,

Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,

And record stores close and folk heroes pass

But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,

And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.

//////////

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

As it makes that tear-clear journey down,

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

And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain,

And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain.

//////////

SYSTEMS

If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear

not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell

in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here

where the dream of love meets the oldest fell...

to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the

colours of the vowels in English you can

find pasta, tea, air, hair, water, clothes, that your ordinary

speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-

air poem – quick get it down, get it down! -

your notes on hyper-vision dissipate in the air!

What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern

ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?

For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!

For writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet or not!

HOPE

As I lie around careless of a map of sound

I love the lie of the land

where quiet gilly flowers

curtsey like ballerinas.

Streaming is vision.

Bees pollinate the garden,

birds pepper the lawn

where you let your flowery

blouse come all undone,

and a ray of light

soaks us all around.

The sky is a blouse of blue

hanging on the line.

Harmony thrums and

the sentient air is everywhere.

I lie back without a care,

sunlight blowing my hair about,

without a grey shade of doubt,

and deem it lazy of us

to let it get this way,

a day of careless play,

a carelessly radiant day,

all my troubles float away.

MUM’S COFFEE BOX

The lid is on mum’s coffee box and

that is a good thing seeing

as coffee goes stale sooooooo quickly -

reacts to the air; and she

loves our ground coffee to be fresh.

It loses all its coffee-ness

if you leave off the lid -

even for a few seconds.

Everyone here loves their coffee.

We have an instant coffee machine.

It makes espressos: usually

we make a double and add

warm milk from the AGA.

Sometimes I wish to plug

my senses in the instant espresso

machine. Sometimes I wish

for instant travel. Usually though

I’m content to just have coffee

and the place where I’m free.

It is far better than instant

coffee and Monopoly Jail.

It is midnight on a warm, summer

night; and I might have a coffee.

Then I might have a flashback

to a bad, vampiric, anti-social

Gap Year rhythm, needing

cashback to perpetuate an

adolescent fantasy world.

COTERMINOUS ORBIT

She does not know firking from fire,

logopoeia from logs for the log-box,

Negative Capability from negative equity,

bonmots from pink, French confectionary,

the colours of the vowels from alphabet spaghetti,

the Objective Correlative from ironic self-distance,

sprechstimme from the kettle rising to its

silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban's

leash, my one note on hyper-vision this dawn,

chiasmus from napkin-kissing-gates silting

their electron-haired dandelion-puff,

nano-language from the Nanny State,

hypertext poetry from notes on hyper-vision,

Aurora Florealis from Flora Borealis,

the derangement of the senses to attain

the unknown from the derangement of

the senses to attain the Eartoon, Eartoons 

bloomed from barbecued tunes, the anti-

dactylus from the talking pterodactyl, the 

psycho-sensitive flower – talkative and invisible-

from the psycho-technological error, but oh my,

pneumatic woman, aren't you a beautiful one?

AT INSANE MATE

At Insane Mate I lost my queen

whose eyes it seems were Gondwanaland-green.

We walked to the top of the Pompidou

to read JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS,

and in dreams ski down too fast

and get our dreams in plaster cast.

We married already in a pagan way

in a dusky playground scattered with hay

but I went down south to cross the border,

left good love in a state of disorder.

Now love works high up in the Tate,

selling great paintings over a plate….

and if she said she is in love with me

I wouldn’t go taking it personally.

A FROND OF BRACKEN

[with apologies to Brian Patten]

You ask me for a poem.

I offer you a frond of bracken.

You say that’s not good enough.

You’re not buying it.

I say how mood

Is also a bracken frond

Drooping down and

That is why I chose it –

To represent ‘mood’

This mundane Monday morning.

You’re not buying it.

You want something textual.

I say I plucked it from the fell

Which turns in summer

From russet to green

Like an homicidal machine.

I plucked it at random at dawn.

You’re still not buying it.

I seem to remember a time,

Taking the old bramble road

At the Augustan/ Romantic

Crucifix w/ you

Where a frond

Of bracken

Would do.

GO MY SONGS!

Go my songs into the ballad-murmuring breeze!

Go and be well-equipped with a

toothbrush in your pocket!

Go and be not afear’d of the sounds

of the crowded supermarket aisle -

sprinkled as they are with pheramone sprays!

Go disturb the comfortable

and comfort the disturbed.

Go dislodge the algebra from

the brains of mathematicians

and replace it with timeless

ideas transmitted across Time.

Go melt death and attain perfect listening

and not remove the key from life;

go calibrate the key of telepathic grammar;

go walk down the ocular nerve.

Go escape the shape of the paper -

go and invent loving networks of

trust un-hackable by the C. I. A.

Go upload your dusty, Hooverbag

lungs to the philosophy chat room.

Go take a long packaged holiday

between subject and object, or else

go retain equivalency between

the word ‘rain’ and actual rain -

it makes no difference to me.

Go and be free to connect in

all directions like a chain

of music from star to star.

Go far – go travel by xylophone

to Zanzibar, if in want of a car!

Go and fuse a cassette of Pearl Jam ‘VS’

with a pause in the opening song ‘Go’

where the flimsy reel has been

cut and resealed in a delicate operation!

Go but don’t go back to boarding

school, where the snot amounts.

Go and be free in meadows

without fences where lazy lovers lie.

Go not like astronaut-worms

into the orbits and ears of people

but with some kind of efficacy.

Go and let the shy magician sigh

and smile and exhaust an

inner poison, go low not high.

PURPLE

Voices also told me to write of the

colour purple. In Steiner homes for autists,

rational but socially inept, the corners

of the rooms are round and purple

because it's less threatening than the geometry

of rightangled corners. My room

turned out a little like that when,

as my dying father lay in the attic,

my screen bloomed a numinous purple

light daubing the walls until the

bedroom, an anagram of boredom,

seemed like a featherlite love poem shop:

a little girl's lava lamp of a room!

Sometimes the seeping foxglove aura

vacillated back and forth between

purple and its normal screen light,

refusing to settle for any long period of time.

My bro said I'd caught some virus;

the computer programmer down the pub

just said dying, and he was right,

for by the time Blue passed away,

Blue being the art-smuggling codename

dad used in his shady occupation,

the computer broke down. R.I.P. data-tree,

and farewell luminous dark of half Denmark!

Now all I can think to say on purple

is this: I would put it in my mouth.

And I would chew on it like a cow

grazes on grass, mulchy and blind.

And I would ingurgitate it fully

not spit it out like a child his dummy.

I would taste it like her name. It's

the colour of mystery and sex and

saudade and longing and shame. And

it's the colour we associate with depth.

When I first looked at the colours of the vowels

I noticed the presence of its absence,

as if you'd expect it there because

it's the colour of deep things.

POINTLESS ACTIVITY

Now that University is long out

I wonder what it is I am to do.

Now that I know, say, The Great

Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia

pertaining to panchronic and

panoramic overview, like

a chronotope turned euchronia,

or else a word-world gone

polysemic with the multifarious

possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy

through whom the esemplastic has fled

away with the quadlibetical -

now that I know the lesson

of post-structuralism is twofold,

meaning a) the condition of being

a text can extend to any object,

any quotidian ephemera and b)

the condition of being a language

unto itself can extend to any

text – I wonder what it is I am

to do. My father, after his PPE degree,

under Karl Popper at the LSE, learning

of things like falsifiability and

of P1 to TT to EE to P2, well,

he turned back to Winnie the Pooh.

“MAGIC SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS”

A moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism. Someone else can lose your marbles for you. Vowels are our souls. Meaning in music is solipsistic, it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s 3 creatures in a cloud-change. Life could be a dull throb of loneliness inside your breast as well as a colourful spew going on outside the cave-walls of the skull. If Liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions and it leads to Hamlet’s harmatia irresolution, pragmatism may be the reactivation of an attitudinisation in that situation. Planes are the shoes of clowns. It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space. A drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in huge, magic circles in space. The Big Mac, which contains the four basic, caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein, could be the heir to the apple of knowledge. Love can go veggie for reasons of Disney. Light-speed is my passport. If acid is the microchip of a peach, the sun is the peachstone of a black hole. It is not true that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more proof of something being real than saying it was Imagined. The constellations only seem to turn on axis unobserved. A trance of stalks walks on stilts like a stance on talks only to the toilet then back to bed to rest its head under the soft, Pink Panther blanket. When a volume starts to smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume it could be the word of a dog. Death’s breath is a tear of flame with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame. When we wake words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds, weighing them down hopelessly. It is possible to harness waves that also passed through the Beats. Leaves that played on the surface of the water, these are the leaves they have in Heaven, these are the leaves of love. There are fossils of art as well as fossils of life. Connection is Heaven and Heaven connection and there is connection between Heaven and vision for vision may feel in a state of Heaven and Heaven only exist in vision. Semantics is a road sign not a place. Meaning is inherent in something’s exact mode of expression. Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time. Meaning could be an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words. Every planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means ‘beautiful face.’ The names of pharmaceutical medications should probably not appear in poems. Nature is the true architecture of State. If ever there were a light-speed law of neuroplasticity it might only be that “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.” Cliche hurts more than truth. Where rain falls, falling reigns. Pictures can be done without hands. Life is not just about naturally occurring fossils of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the witness but the live Doors for everyone else too. Realism ice-skates on the surface of the dust. Language can be smuggled out of the unconscious. Enough is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop, meaning Duff which is H suspended in deafness. H20 might stand for hypothalamus tattoo. Chewing gum is bi. Voices only pathologise what by another name might be onjects, quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound, an instrument of wonder. Clouds seen through hospital glass only mean that all things must pass. There is no such thing as mind cancer. That women like Primark is hardly a timeless idea transmitted across Time. Ecstasy is a teddy bear back in the garden of Eden. Autumn is Optimus Prime already in Keats. Freedom not poetry is the bike riding itself. After garage and house comes library. The poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the mind, unlooses the mind of form, method acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio. If your dad is an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue it can become a new sense through which you can read of future events. It is not inconceivable that when we die we can re-access history at any point, be a real, live Red Indian, or a bird of prey soaring over a mnt. Birds are for flying not for special perception. The effect of global warming on the unicorn succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn. The summer rain falls with as many hands as there are names for new rock bands. The alphabet could be Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note. Sometimes on E it makes you feel like your mouth is full of cold, stunning, Heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills. If form is an easel, content is a palette. The main difference between the sticks and the city is that in the sticks you acknowledge the stranger you pass when out there walking. Creation is a dark machine. It’s impossible to curse the sun. Acid is a spirit-level for the spirit. Without flaws there can be no opinions, as without imperfection there can be no taste. Galloping water is a cool thing to say. Things live inside onions of themselves. Freedom flies where flags fall. Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see. Water’s boiling point is when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the music. Walnut halves look like miniature, shrunken brains. If Facebook is evil one reason is that it makes you say things you don’t mean and freezes them forever. Your right to write of who is in the shower ends where another’s naked body begins. We are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land. I prefer The New Family Tao to the non-fungible token. The sound of typing can be used as percussion in non-metred Sound Art. When Baxter the dog walks on the laptop funny things come out like the names of glitch electronica numbers. The powers that be could be clouds that wear DM boots on their red brick road, and ripped genes adorned with peace and anarchy signs, on their protest march. A ‘tron’ could be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge. Objects can vanish on the periphery of madness when emotions are high. Reality is not a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s and nor were caves alien cinemas in the long distant past. Waiting in darkness can be nourishing for the soul, reveal a Technicolour shoal. With drugs you have to realise: wise up or die. The world of Stuff and Things is not amenable to the world of Transcendental Metaphysics. Time does not pass but evaporate. Life is naturally the opposite of Lord of The Flies because the mystic character is the one that actually does see things while everyone else thinks he’s deluded. Even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death. The exact same words can seem absolutely insane when written down and confer absolute genius when not written down. Dream-meets in the silver forest, ESP and telepathy are more possible with the net around. When it comes to the sheet where pictures grew, they could be “people,” as we are people too, people who are levelled by the sheet, whose Equality is enshrined. If you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should have that opportunity if they choose and that is my philosophy. Credits at the end of innocence still fall like numberless lists of fallen autumn leaves. To be the first to coin the word “co-imagination” seems almost silly. Crocodiles have had Sat Nav for 1000’s of years before our Age. A bird is a bird is a bird is a bird. Just because it has been called naive to perceive of the left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes good to go down that path. Just because it was my brother not me that fired bullets to the top of the telegraph pole doesn’t mean all statements that pertain to axiomatic truth are his intellectual property. A thesis as thin as the Rizla it is in can lead all the way to the loony bin. Water has no more memory than it has smell. It is better to hide from the wind than it is to perform open heart surgery. When I say apples “occupy” a bowl on the table, I don’t mean they are a bunch of Nazis. It would be unwise to use the same shapes as a previous writer like, for example, Jim Morrison, if your creative writing teacher says it would be unwise to. If “Philosophy is a sterile subject” (as my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom contends) poetry is probably by default more alive. If Flora was in nets, I’d be Barnes in the game. Nirvana did the sheet where pictures, pictures depicting my own song lyric grew, so that’s why people like it when I say it still belongs to my brother (who laid it down). The healing and fusing of the cassette with a pause in the song where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel in a delicate operation could be down to faith more than doubt. Two photos on the blog, one for the ear, one for the eye, might still seem unfair. When you get invaded by madness and hear so many voices there can seem nothing going on in your own head but straw. If you did help invent the net you shouldn’t have to pay for publication. Words appear to come out weird sometimes. Glastonbury should be free and life like that all the time. Some voices take a few moments to decode after their initial shocking impact. If I said I went to the Louvres travelling by drug-hoover, it might just seem like piss. The crawl of the Doorsian poet through modes of perception trying to find something that underlies their variability leads to water. Maybe living here at the foot of the oldest rock I was never supposed to find out about the future that ain’t what it used to be. Cutlass maths is what I call the ruthless revisionist cut of William Carlos Williams. We live in an Age of sending without form. Drains can sing with Irish folk songs, about dreams that never die. There are dreams that never die. Love is a dream that never dies. Even the meme has split in two, and that was the new “uncuttable” once upon a time. There is breath in a death. It is not necessarily a disease to not be able to cry at funerals. The traffic lights of tears can be all dark green at times. The impassable gulf between first and third persons has been decreed metaphysics. The automated conveyor belt of poesis influences the voice to be a confluence of forces through voices even when I try and drive a straight line towards anywhere that may be light. We are all in one bed in Amsterdam. The light is a prism. Through the Hume people come and go, Smart-talking of Ted Hughes’s Crow. Life is fast, London brutal, travelling scary. Her wetness is so. Angels can be as frightening as demons.

HYPERTEXT

No fear, lost lover,

Science has the answer,

all wrapped up in its

rubber-gloved hand

and they’re soon

abolishing altogether

sadness gene and

dreaming gland -

for Science has told us

many of the stars

you gaze at tonight

are not really there

but illusions of the

light that takes so long

to reach the beams

of our glistening eyes

that for centuries

after the star has died

it still appears to

be hanging there,

a little, glimmering

crystal tear, in

love with the dark,

as bright and beautiful

as it would be if

it were really there.

THE READING

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

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

Then I went on a bit about ancient alchemy – about how to alchemise the alphabet into something good, transmogrifying lead into gold. It was going to be a reading at the party – but despite all that I had written, when it came to pass I had nothing left except

“I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life.”

THE WAKE UP CALL

It has taken sooooooo long for me to see

that this has been just a heightened dream;

that you shouldn’t take your whole life

to click awake on a gone Paradise;

that there’s something Oedipal going on

that I have tried and failed to lick;

that a rose would smell as sweet if it

were called barmy as the army of

the new England cricket captain…

by now I see you and I may never be;

that I may never wear your sucrose garment;

that I must abjure nursing the suffering

of my ideals and get pragmatic; that

a poet is about as welcome on a creative

writing course as a cow in the Dairy

Farm’s Head Office; and yet that it’s all

good and I needn’t renew my taste for

waste ahead of fresh, minty, Colgate

toothpaste. In my dream I dreamed

that we would be the new Adam and

Eve in the prelapsarian garden with

a bag of Names to scatter freely on things.

INFANT JAZZ POEM

Sometimes perhaps 

down opening quiet

I am drawn down 

long and alone

and my friend and 

my foe recede 

into deep sleep

sudden and still 

like a dawn behind a 

screaming veil 

where silence

is born and all that's 

loose and tight and 

all that's light is light 

like first morning 

with no night

and wend my way 

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy 

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live 

the last poet's 

last poem.

CHEESE DREAMS

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one with the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels 

Immanuel Kant

will come to thee 

with immanence

You come home smacked up you come

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

boom

boom

boom

boom

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self driving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one with the sonic boom

knickers knickers faster than lightning

skin up fall out of bed

and did those feet

in ancient times

rain down, rain down,

come on raindown

and walk the sun

fatter, hippier, less well connected

always walk the hallways

down to create my own

and in the meantime

and in the meantime

I'll do the monkey bars with my legs

manic depression has enraptured my name

don't know what I want but I just want shame

don't know what I want but I just won't shave

rainy waif, rain always,

lay back and dream

on a rainy waif

now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

no more laaaaaaaaaa la's

removal van canes will be turned into furniture

we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir

you never see me dead near an inch of closure

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

“and a record made of sound

goes round and round, conveying

music to the speaker through the stylus,”

says the radio as I turn it on.

Well, although there is no

such thing as the Nirvana barcode

it opens up a discussion about

the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how

if barcode is rain barcode is phone...

and at least I have

the grace to come

back and say that the

extinction of consciousness

has no monetary value.

It is past dawn

and I see that

that first mobile

phone has gone.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The poems ‘Invincible Lovers,’ ‘I Knew That She Loved Me’ and ‘Infant Jazz Poem’ were originally written for an Anon magazine which a friend and I established at Oundle School. The poem ‘Purple’ was originally published by the reputable online webzine Snakeskin. The book is supposed to replace and correct my now-retracted first collection, Rose Petals In The Ashtray, whom it seems was only a first draft in the end. I got that name from my dying father who meant it to denote something specific and which I did not understand. Since then obsolete poems have fallen away and some new ones have been added. Thanks to everyone that helped me with the collection. I was told that if I didn’t fix and amend and improve and ameliorate and correct the retracted Rose Petals In The Ashtray, they would still always start my eventual Collected Works like that even if against my wishes.