THE
DAWN
Dawn
leaks out, its light slipping
through
the dark fingers of the trees.
If
I bring this to publication,
it
will mean wood.
The
woods are a traditional
testing
ground in literature.
These
days things are wireless.
I
might’ve gone right
when
I asked Paul
what
colour is white?
What
is a while?
Is
this where the truth
flies
or the truth fairy?
In
the past, being the witness
from
The
Lords And The New Creatures
I
might’ve been burned at the stake.
When
you’re gone we hope
the
doors will
open
up enough.
Maybe
we can
do
the new creatures again.
BREAKFAST
Breakfast
today was two fried eggs, sunny side up,
on
toast left to cool slightly so the yellow butter
didn’t
break the surface, with a pink-rimmed cup
containing
black coffee with a lump of brown sugar,
plus
streaky bacon turned in the dark-blue AGA
and
dipped in red sauce, all on a new, milk-white
plate
with green rim, which, when eating was over,
and
I was quench’d and sated, feeling alright,
I
left to soak in soapy bubbles in the kitchen sink.
I
belched quite crudely then, which was my food
popping
up to say ‘hello,’ and drank of my drink,
the
coffee from its pot, coffee which can be renewed,
and,
grateful for plenitude, felt somewhat satisfied,
and
took my leisure to the beautiful world outside.
WHICHAM
VALLEY AS A SCRATCH ON A CD
If a place
is still its own mind,
this one
quietly dreams
and falls
ever further behind.
No, there
is no Tourist sign to tell
how rich in
natural and human history
is this
valley by the oldest fell.
I
heard the
church is built on the foundations
of the
oldest stone built monastery
in
the whole
of our
fair nation.
Black
Combe’s foothill Sea Ness (I hear)
was once
named Seer Ness after
the trance
of a mystic or seer.
Nature’s
scales are all diatonic
and from
all background static depression
here is her
sonic, spiritual tonic.
The beck
runs its hand smooth through
an angel’s
hair in the garden and
assuages
the soul when you’re blue.
On Sunday
the posse of motorbikes
comes for
the valley’s curves,
the flowing
of troughs and spikes.
I could
report on more, much more,
but shall
just impart that down the beach,
waves
still make gentle love to the shore.
POSTCARD
FROM SILECROFT BEACH
The
accents of the waves were Seamus Heaney
the
clouds did not move for hours they hung
like
search-engines in the big glass day I found
pink
in the shadows and splashed and played
in
the shallows the plush, corrugated, velvet
sands
stretched out like a woman's thighs the
kites
in the sky were fishing without capture
or
video games of rapture in the window of
wind
the stone thrown rearranged God I waved
a
wand for the dog to chase the dropped icecream
melted
under the tired, madding, bleached, wide,
English
sun and the man at the van gave the
unlucky
kid another one, a round cone, gratis.
THE
LOCAL TRAIN LINE
You
can go backwards to Christmas on a train
and
often I would, and sometimes doze.
Squirrels
can fly if perceived in the caravan
of
trees sailing past through railway train windows -
windows
that taste like an old copper coin.
I
remember taking the train on schooldays
from
the local village’s request stop station
to
the industrial town they call Barrow-in-Furness,
round
the estuary which Norman Nicholson
mapped
in a poetry that remains matchless.
So
many birds can be observed when on
that
journey, already feeling semi-famous.
The
gentle arrhythmia cajoles you into a lull,
the
sound of the wreckety wreckety wreck.
When
you get on it’s empty, but it is full
at
the end of the journey like a swollen beck.
I
would already smoke pollen at school.
At
the end of the schoolday I would travel back.
Now
as I write I hear the train toot its horn.
I
won’t get on it anymore, not since COVID,
and
since becoming so paranoid within
that
I prefer to not venture all the way outside,
into
the town, that is. So here I remain,
survivor
of a pathetic attempt at suicide.
Tiny
engines may rev up on pellucid glass,
augmenting
the sense of cosiness you feel,
when
heading for school, for an A-level class
about
the meaning of Caliban and Ariel.
The
Sixth Form girls would giggle at me as
I
sat there reading a book of Robert Lowell.
Going
to the private school meant I never
cheered
up and joined in with the human race.
If
there is a difference between being clever
and
having what they call moral compass,
we
should all sit together, and endeavour
to
unite while keeping intact our difference.
The
telegraph poles went flowing past.
Counting
them I never picked a favourite.
I’d
hope for the flow of the day to go fast.
If
the weather was rubbish I’d get used to it.
Achieving
my dream of being the best essayist
was
easier when I put my sober mind to it.
A
boy I was, mewling and puking to school,
feigning
High Indifference when there.
Back
then the currency was in being cool.
Exciting
was the license to scent the air.
The
music I collected was the sacred pool.
I
was in love with a girl with brown hair.
Sometimes
we’d bunk off and go walking
in
a kind of pantheistic or animistic trance,
or
sleep in caves; or stay up talking -
but
never once did she see me dance!
To
Amsterdam and Paris we went gallivanting -
to
see the museums – to not waste the chance.
At
the end of school I went down south
and
broke off the relationship in doing so,
started
to let ecstasy pills into my mouth,
worked
some boring jobs and went with the flow.
The
train was a gullet, gulping back and forth.
Sometimes
we’d travel under a rainbow.
LADY
IN WAITING
Her
watercolours go for the price of the frame.
You
see them sometimes in village halls
where
“painting and pastry” nights are put on.
It
beats stuffing a room with polystyrene.
Her
gardens are rooms in a gallery, (going
by
the notion that Nature is an art exhibition),
and
when I say rooms they have no walls,
and
when I say gallery, it’s the
naked eye.
I
picture walking down the ocular nerve,
or
hand in hand with her down a shoreline,
stopping
to observe, take notes and photographs,
laughing
as if we declared an endless holiday.
And
how could I help it, anywhere I walk?
She
loves
muddy fields and packets of crisps
in
pub gardens and seeing the sheepdog run.
I
take
my
cue from her home-made LSD.
SHE
GOT THERE IN THE END
The
tail end of the node about a mother’s
bond
with her son is at least unfalsifiable…
it
was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all
ran
as fast as we could towards the sofa.
We
found a boxing glove protruding
from
the telly on a mechanical, metal arm.
We
sat there knowing it was not
the
living room but the dying room.
We
didn’t really though, just needed
a
parrot sent to space through the conch…
so
we arrive at the next rung on the ladder.
Proving
the
island
of penguins
with the first verse
of
the first song of your first gig
is
something that made me famous in London,
at
sixteen, and
it was good that I did,
and
we all needed me to do it, but
the
line belongs to the house. So
you
could make me go Anon after all these
years
but that would mean attaining
the
island
of penguins
would become a regrettable event.
That
Captain Marvel is the other side
of
the coin to I. T. is a more original idea.
That
Lucy in the soul w/ demons
might
be an actual substance is another.
She
got there in the end, by aeroplane
to
Finland. Now her luggage is going
round
and round the carousel. She texts
us
updates. We
need more time.
THE
STOCKS IN BROUGHTON SQUARE
No-one
else
here
cares for Norman Nich
though
he might make a garden brick
of
the stocks in Broughton square
made
for ritualistic humiliation…
as
part of a public spectacle, sinners
would
be fastened in and then have
rotten
vegetables hurled
at them.
My
attention drifts to the nearby pub -
the
Manor Arms. My dad would take us
when
they used to do Bocklander sausage
hotdogs.
We’d also be treated to a beer
and
a few games of pool. I seem to
recall
our having a grasp and knowledge
of
the standards of all the local tables,
and
the Manor Arms being the best.
Certainly,
going to Broughton Square
was
a treat far from being put in the stocks.
In
years to come my dad and I would
joke
about putting politicians in.
Gordon
Brown he called “Gordon Bennet”
and
also “Culpability Brown” after
“Capability
Brown” but inverted so that
the
imputation of something pejorative
lay
with him in an accusatory tone.
He’d
also say though art is above politics,
so
I don’t wish to become entrenched.
Dad
thought the stocks were a good idea
and
we should bring them back for some.
I think people who place others
under
inimical curses or hypnotise them
to do ill in the name of magic
should
be punished; but the stocks in
Broughton
Square are there as a museum
piece now,
a relic from a gone era, not even
behind glass.
They make the town, give it
character
and charm, left over from stories
untold,
when scandal was local and out in
the open,
before the soap opera on the
television.
They say soap operas are designed
to make us feel better about our
lives
by showing us lives even worse
than our own,
and maybe the stocks served that
purpose
in agrarian golden ages of yore,
also
to deter people from crime. To
shame
sinners and give the people their
revenge
without costing lives and within
reason
one would expect is the true
function.
I haven’t researched this on A.
I. but
would imagine the stocks as an
English
invention. We have the world wide
web,
the sandwich, the Beatles,
gravity, evolution,
the toilet and the game of
football to show
for ourselves as well as more and
many
more but there are countries out
there
who would have us put in the
stocks
if it came to a national level.
We are
traditionally a scapegoat, a
country
other countries love to hate,
particularly
Celtic countries, who also hate
each other.
You can imagine how shameful it
would feel to be put in the
stocks
on a rainy day and have rotten
tomatoes
thrown at your rain-strewn face
while
crowds jeer at you, hurling
abuse…
one day Forgiveness may be a
chemical
cure, a fine white powder, and
one would
hope the cure is not with-held
until
the price is right, by its
company.
Come to think of it, I might put
Big Pharma in the stocks if I
could.
WEATHER
REPORT
The
weather’s not too bad today.
Like
a blue powder box
dotted
with white, tufty clouds.
Patches
of sun break through…
there
is no prevailing wind…
The
leaves are still green,
still
clinging on for dear life,
e’
en though it’s now Autumn.
I
but who else could it have been
thought
I saw a droplet of rain
but
that was before and I might be
wrong
– rain might’ve been yesterday.
So
it seems English talk of the weather
is
never without subtext, while
subtext
of English talk about
whatever
is the weather itself.
You
need to be nice to talk
about
the weather, said WH Auden.
He
never had to be Anon.
I
might be going Anon.
SPYING
A WILD DEER IN
THE COMBE
FIELD
I
looked a wild deer in the eye and held
its
gaze while both of us remained motionless.
I
saw it run like mine own desire, unfold
its
leap and bounce and springiness.
I’d
only gone into the garden to smoke
and
saw it grazing, in its own world,
up
by the babbling beck in the back,
contained
in the museum that’s the field.
While
I paused to watch it, it grazed away,
then
noticed me and both of us froze.
While
I was still, the deer looked at me
cautious
of danger one might presuppose -
then
I made a movement and it leaped,
jumped
into orbit, red, running off fast.
I
watched it running all the way, rapt,
and
saw it leap over a fence at the last.
Cloaked
in the aura of special perception,
the
encounter was almost like a visit -
to
see those elegant legs in extension -
as
if the deer were an extension of the poet.
Nibbling
up the beck my mouth is water
and
when I speak it spills on the earth.
I
try not to flaunt my role in Nature.
Down
to the sea I flow without death.
TO
REDEEM A DREAM OF FREEDOM
Once
again it falls on me to be the one to say
that
biding my time from here to eternity
to
see if the lawn has sprung a flower
watch
out for the Honda lawnmower:
for
I mow the grass where the Plough aligns.
I
try to keep to neat, symmetrical lines.
When
the first, fresh, redolent, enervating
scent
of change begins its fermenting
on
the ego-loss breeze it is my duty
to
the Natural World and all her beauty
to
mow the grass – a foot high with neglect,
it
was today, but owing to my respect
it’s
been cut down, mowed over. Well,
I
love the smell of petrol more than the smell
of
a fresh Christmas tree, and to do
something
with my life is also new
reward
in itself. It’s not like I get paid -
but
it redeems a dream of freedom in my head.
Now
when my mother looks out the glass,
she
doesn’t have to look at foot-high grass,
but
sees her plants in all their little pots,
their
little de-institutionalisations and bets,
and
the dog rolls around like he’s found
Paradise
down there on the ground.
0
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
with you
Where
a frond
Of
bracken
Would
do.
BLACK
COMBE
It’s
not so much a stereo, nor television
but
Black Combe is
a rustic alarm clock.
Looking
up from the foot at its striated
way,
you see it dips in the middle like
dad’s
baggy hammock from Afghanistan.
As
a child I had a mythos about tunnels
plunged
in its heart, lined with free beer
dispensers,
fruit machines and burning
torches
which
you could access through a portal
at
the back of the cave on the face of Sea Ness;
but
that’s just children’s talk and more
recently
I trained myself to run to the top!
Up
there you’ll find a cairn and if it’s not
too
misty can see a view of four kingdoms!
The
hue of the heather up there in winter
lends
itself to the naming of the Combe…
and
wherever on its surface area you wander,
be
it alone or not, if you pass a stranger,
you
always acknowledge the stranger.
This
would be the main difference from
the
city, in the rurs
and urbis
debate, for me.
Sometimes,
approaching
the fell from
Millom,
you see the enormous shadow
of
a cloud-scape on the flank of the fell,
and
imagine a bird as
big and
its mating
call.
Sometimes
you drive past the ripped groins
and
note where glaciation has left a mark,
by
dragging rock in its protracted
process.
Always
in the valley down below, the fell
creates
its own weather-system and micro-climate,
which
takes us back to the first words of Anon.
Sometimes
hang-gliders are pterodactyls
that
float over the fell, leaving swift shadows,
as
the tired sun makes its passage home.
WALKING
TO ICELAND
N
is the top of the telegraph pole
standing
leaning in the Combe field.
The
pole itself
was
once a football goal
when
the future was hopeful and unrevealed.
My
brothers fired rifles up one summer.
I
did not participate, hung in the shadows
with
a notebook and an acoustic guitar.
They
turned away to aim for crows!
I
watched them from my leery shadow, here
where
the stars realign, in the day,
and
later maybe we shared a beer…
a
hunter might have a bit less to say.
If
I were charting that bullet, that
trajectory,
I’d write of walking to Iceland
on
a landscape of cloud, but I am not,
and
hope guns rot and all
get banned.
To
topple a pole I imagine you’d need to
smash
the ceramic disk at the top,
but
through what means I do not know
except
corrosion. It’s a new music shop
up
there, where standards fly like flags
and
axioms pertain to the bullet too,
fired
by my brothers in-between fags,
on
a day when the sky was Nirvana-blue.
Now
that love can be our arrow,
it’s
seen in the flowers in the garden outside;
and
even though the days will get narrow,
it’s
safe to say that love has not died.
CUMULO-NIMBUS
HAIR
The powers
that be could be clouds,
passing by
on their sky-blue roads…
today they
are sparse and moving East,
not too
slowly, and not too fast.
It’s warm
outside for Autumn time.
As a child
I thought Autumn Optimus Prime -
that
Transformer from the kids’ cartoon.
I still
think there’s something in
the
personification – a triumphant sense -
for Prime
is the sum of all difference
connected –
that Sigma where everything meets;
and Autumn
is likewise a God in Keats.
But
speaking of weather only shows I am
amicable as
a person. The strawberry jam,
meanwhile,
has all run out on scones;
and so as
if to blunt, yellow crayons
I return to
art at the foot of the fell,
where it
might all be “signed by everwell”
but isn’t,
for that may be too untrue,
and just
for something, anything to do!
If clouds
were really in charge above
they’d
look down on the world of love
and
legalise soft, Moroccan pollen
and make
all kinds of English education
the same
high standard and free
and as they
passed towards the sea,
cancel cuts
to benefits and to the tax
on the
rich…. they’d encourage sex
instead of
war, and keep the room
temperature
in the months of gloom
above a
certain level for people over
a certain
age for free with all their power -
and all
their power would still pass,
as we lay
out on the back lawn’s grass
and watched
them go, wearing ripped genes
adorned
with peace and anarchy signs,
and DM
boots on the red brick road,
away to
dump their wet, rainy load...
with this
idea of State I quite agree;
but it
would be an Impracticable Democracy!
TOASTING
CRUMPETS
Totally
pointless packaging.
Medication
included. Swallow.
Swallow
Amazon whole. You
don’t
need wires in your brain
to
know your dreams are not online.
I
was wasting time with the crumpets -
the
packaging was too tight
to
get one out and I was rough
with
it so the crumpet broke.
Because
of the medication
I
am on for my illness, I can
tend
to see packaging as pointless.
It
brings up fastidious and pedantic
work
for
the hands.
That’s not meant
as
a duplicitous double entendre,
or
embedded definition, just
as itself.
One
day all symbolism shall be
seen
naked. Hello, I am one of
the
doctors that served you
Sertraline
for your depression.
As
you press you compress.
Compress
sans everything.
A
MEMORY STILL THERE
Between
A
Trance Of Stalks
by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby
and
The
Scrotbag Party Manifesto,
there is
a
specific night in my mind. My bros and I
were
having a scrotbag party in the caravan,
when
all of a sudden I got a strange Sixth Sense
that
the dog had run away and was trapped
on
a farmer’s fence barking. I hushed my bros
and
listened and could faintly hear what I thought
was
barking; so we embarked on a mission.
Our
tombstone-shadows stretched out beneath
the
moon as we walked through the church field,
and
got to the adjoining gate, where there’s
a
triangular patch of land not ours. There,
a
terrible goat was tied up, and we could see
its
eyes shine a baleful green colour when
a
car passed,
headlights flick-knifing the darkness.
We
weren’t so sure about the terrible goat,
but
made it past him and got to the farm
where
we found the dog trapped to a fence, barking.
I
was wearing a fur coat and in the pocket
there
was a bottle opener with which I cut
the
dog free. He was hard to be cross with
but
I showed some crossness and we brought him
home,
locked him in the scullery and continued
our
scrotbag party, in the caravan, in the back.
That
meant drinking, smoking, talking, laughing,
playing
guitar and having a good time. Strange,
it
seems to me still, how fertile my Sixth Sense
was,
how I was almost preternaturally right
about
the escaped dog that night, as if we were
connected,
which
I think we somehow were.
PLANTING
A CHERRY TREE WITH MUM
Today
I planted a new cherry tree
with
my mother, dug
a
hole, but not to
receive
my mortal body,
more
to grow in soul,
here
at the foot of the oldest fell.
I
stood on the spade
to
get my weight
to
do the work and
cut
through the grass
which
cuts with a crunch
and
dug a square
and
when the hole was
deep
enough and
all
the loose soil
had
been piled up in the wheel barrow
I
held the tree in place while
my
mother refilled the hole…
then
I filled the watering can while
I
thought “maybe Dave Morley
is
unto water as Einstein
was
unto light,” and watered
the
tree as mother
happy-snapped
me
and
now the photo of me
watering
the newly planted tree
will
go on Facebook which
is
the nearest thing to
a
holiday I have had
since
the fifth Amsterdam trip.
Nothing
else has happened today
that
is more worthy of reporting
than
my planting a tree
with
my mother which
filled
me with satisfaction.
Further
only to report
that
as my mother says life is
not
about being a genius, but
about
hard work, day in
and
day out and poetry
likewise
is not the entrance and exit of life.
TRAIN-RIDE
This
is the walk down through
the
field
to the local village station.
This
is the space where before was a bench
where
I first kissed Stefanie under the stars.
This
is the fragile platform itself
where
before school I would smoke.
This
is the sound of the level crossing
when
the barriers fall to make way for the train.
This
is the headlight of the train
in
the distance
and
getting closer.
This
is me stopping writing a moment
so
I can get aboard the train.
This
is my nervous disposition taking
me
from the countryside to the town.
This
is the view of fields in-between
as
we approach Millom, through
the windows.
This
is the sight of the church spire
and
the crowding of houses in
the
town around.
This
is me walking straight past
a
beautiful woman on my way to CBT.
This
is my getting back from town afterwards
and
moving from the pen to the laptop.
This
is me realising I relish the peace
and
the laptop alike in my preferences.
HIGH
BROW FARM
There’s
no psycho-sensitive
fire
alarm sounding out
at
High brow Farm, full
of fear and doubt
but
the horses listen to the radio
and
the artists say it’s best to aim low.
I
went along with a melody sweet
to
a
fairy-haunted artistic retreat.
The
kettle ascended like a cathedral
choir
to
a silent scream and the host made a fire
whose
faces flickered and lithely
danced
and
left the observer almost entranced…
we
piled on the money when it was roaring
and
through conversation our
spirits were soaring.
We
spoke about the art adorning the walls,
how
one day there well may be stalls
selling
tickets when the place has become
akin
to the Northern
Tate
as a museum!
When
I left I was down
but soon went back
where
names had tastes and Thursday was black
and
loafed in the garden drinking tea
in
the great, amassing shade of a tree.
I
saw lithe
spirits flowing
from right
to
left as I sat there, and O what a sight -
a
vision of Nature, and love
more holistic,
but
I kept it quiet, like
a postmodern
mystic!
A
REALIST VISION OF WINTER
If
winter has her compensations,
they
might be found in the rosy cheek
of
the woman waiting at the station’s
tentative
platform in the week;
in
a layer of frost crisp underfoot;
in
the breath making tortuous, iron
statues
in the emaciated light;
in
the whole gulp of white sun
going
blind behind a thorny tree,
splintering
into a thousand shards
like
a coruscation of divinity;
in
staying in and playing cards
beside
a roaring sitting room fire;
in
chimney smoke against a canvas-sky;
in
a little sprinkling of icing sugar
on
the tops of fells as we drive by…
soup
and hearty stews as well.
If
Christmas has become a mad, red
rush
of consumerism, such detail
cannot
be bought, so I’m not sad -
sad
to see the wintry trees all bare,
sad
the days are dark and short.
There
is no cause for dark despair
when
winter’s visions can’t be bought.
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 ramification
of Kate.
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.
FULCRUM
Floating
in the quiet of a weightless dawn,
the
buzzard is the crux of the flux of time,
the
reason the colour of Cumbria is brown;
and
his mating call is a primal scream;
and
then he swoops, streamlined, down,
far
from the world of pretence and dream,
to
remind that Creation is a dark machine,
to
mug his prey, packed
with dynamism.
He
knows, that is, to obviate not titivate,
sate
his quest for meat, how to fling
to
his bright ring, his peerless orbit,
and
like a balancing act to just hang,
in
the fire-streaked dawn’s young light,
sensing
his prey below, without a pang
of
conscience for the inevitable death of it,
free
as the air in my self-healing lung…
Imagination,
I reckon,
has engendered
this
bird, and that faculty can heal the split
in
the psyche, duality. Unencumbered
the
buzzard is, when he swoops to eat.
The
days of his prey below are numbered.
He
shows how Creation is no mean feat -
imagined,
not observed or remembered,
he
has bad
manners but is discrete.
THE
EMOTIONAL CONDOM OF THE WORLD
I
heard we grew our great brains by eating meat
and,
needing to spread information about it,
about
farming, hunting, killing, eating things
developed
words for birds that sing with their wings...
now,
the pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, translated
into
words, via the mechanics of meaning, is diluted.
Language
is the emotional condom of the world,
into
which we are all so traumatically hurled.
One
day we may learn to eat language, but for now
I’ll
settle for
the rump of the local farmer’s cow.
RIMBAUD
IN LAKELAND
O
Louise what have I done to your saying!?
I
see there have been people here before me!
Nevertheless,
I hope the following
words
are still mine own:
Blessed
may be the end at last,
under
the sea,
below
the soul,
in
the upside-down
Oceans
above us
(all
that heaven sends is rain).
And
though my dad did I don’t believe in heaven.
Heaven
is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see.
And
once I fell asleep
under
a tree
in
London town.
LIVING
IN THE LAKES
Living
in the Lakes I am often struck
by
the sensation that life
is
going on within the pages
of
The
Lords And The New Creatures.
It
could be just a slant of light
that
gives the game away,
the
remnant evanescence behind the fell
when
the sun has set and the fell darkened.
It’s
either that or Nirvana
Unplugged
In New York.
For
that I think of rivers,
such
as the River Esk to the north.
In
the summertime, we like to go
outdoor
swimming in the Esk.
Today
the weather has cooled
so
it is not a good time to go.
So
I could speak of a “storied” world,
a
mythographic universe intact,
an
infradiegetic existence
saturated
with inter-textuality,
or
I could talk of sheep and cows,
the
way the rain falls at a slant,
the
green-ness of the grass,
and
all of Nature’s abundance.
It
is a pretty place to live,
which
Jim Morrison himself
intended
to visit on one of his trips,
but
never got round to in the end.
The
fell overlooks with its bald,
blank
forehead. Driving from town
it
appears a great, slumbering
diplodocus
come to fat and die
by
the Irish Sea; but nearer
the
foot you see it could be Buddha,
Buddha
levitating. Walking
up
could be Western meditation...
but
if you mention the slow
ascent
up flat, gradual paths,
I
think more of a bullet to the top
of
a telegraph pole, or even the kettle
that
rises to its silent scream,
its
steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s
chain.
No, I have not been up
the
fell for a long time now; so
it’s
like I am growing into one
of
the locals! But to the fleeting,
evanescent
backdrop of dying light
behind
the darkened fell at perfumed sunset
I
often turn, stare until life grows
detached,
naked, until I remember
how
weird everything is, how
mysterious
and magical the universe.
BECK
VARIATION
Standing
in my wellies beside the beck,
I
note its most
mellifluous
applause,
how
it falls two feet
into
a sound as sweet
as
a kettle drum’s metal petals
of
silver bliss that blossom
on
a carnival’s street.
Further
to distil the air in the mind,
I
wait, to obviate not titivate,
and
notice the green kingdom all around.
A
squadron of nettles guards the wild.
It
must be so different from
living
in
Norman Nicholson’s Millom,
down
the end of Rottington Road.
A
lone bird pipes a bar in a tree.
Then
I notice I need to pee.
So
into the heavenly nectar I do.
H20
might stand for Hypothalamus Tattoo.
ON
BEING BILINGUAL IN TERMS OF PLACE
It
isn’t true that I am “in” but
not “of:”
my
father lived in this house as a boy:
his
mother, my English-teaching granny
hailed
from just up the road in Bootle.
But
we did have a house in London
until
I was about seventeen, and I do
speak
in RP, with a southern accent,
so
the locals think I am a southerner.
My
granny did her Oxford thesis on Mr.
Norman
Nicholson, a family friend, concluding
that
he would’ve been even better
had
he gone somewhere, anywhere
like
Wordsworth to the French Revolution,
to
know how very Heaven it was
to
be on the crest of that wave.
Her
dream was to sleep on the supportive
spring
mattress of purple heather
on
the top
of
the fell one midsummer’s night
but
she got waylaid and never made it.
I
imagine a layer of frost crisp underfoot!
And
whether there will be popcorn
in
the cinema, and whether the plush seat
will
get a hard-on at the end, and whether
the
blue whale from the Natural
History
Museum in London will
float
over, eating plankton, mouth wide!
If
rurs
and urbis
are each a language
unto
themselves I am bilingual.
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,
windows
washed
by the mermaids under the waves
until
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.
THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT
OF SEA NESS
Let us have a go then, you and I
-
when we are tired of getting high
-
when the note-well is filled with
stars that swap
places when no-one is looking,
let us kindly lie
down on the top of the oldest
fell,
one midsummer night on the
heather,
and munch our popcorn in front of
the cinema.
Let us travel by xylophone up
there, predictive
text, Robin Hood arrow, fountain
pen,
or even better, to use
imagination,
as the poet must again and again,
let’s travel by bullet up the
top of a
telegraph pole opening piratical
CD shops
at all the local telegraph pole
tops.
Let us bypass normal societal
procedure,
and stay there until we yawn at
the dawn
and emerge from dreams as if from
water,
brush the crumbs of sleep from
our clicked-on
eyes, befuddled, encrusted with
glue…
For up the fell no cars come and
go
with backbeats blaring on the
stereo;
and no go faster stripes of booze
are streaming on the unicorn’s
side.
Ha, let us open a Burger King
joint
at the top, not so much to
reappoint
the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods
whom it seems disintegrate under
their sods,
but to allow a new sense of
archaic gay,
replace that emotion now gone
astray
with gun and bud and band and
butter:
let it be like writing a long
letter
either to or maybe from a higher
self
whose brain sits upon a
Waterstones shelf.
Let us first dare the darkness to
insist
we sip our flasks at night and
get pissed
on firewater whisky – let us
turn
to God and see what we might
learn.
If
dog still
equals pi times mc squared,
because you want to think Him
round,
and
O is still
the key of water, be assured,
and its most soul-assuring sound,
let us babble down in the
morning,
all the way, heeding the warning,
to make as mezzanine our science,
in an increasingly competitive
world…
already the elements have nettle
stings for names.
The deep, green lane leads you
home,
but first you must launch your
song
into the blue ether like a
Timeshare salesman
sizzling the dream of a plate of
roast beef.
Draw on this dystrophy of
darkness
soon coming to your cinema screen
now that we’re at the summit
and can glean
honed alertness, awareness, from
a purpose
achieved over a long afternoon of
walking,
walking side by side and even
talking
on telepathic walkie talkies of
how no,
there’s no such thing as the
Nirvana barcode,
how maybe in very Heaven every
step
we’ve ever taken up the fell
will be kept
in a pile for us to count and
compare -
only to find no statistics up
there!
Ah, I forget if we are up or down
-
let us fetch the wines of the
wise men -
it seems planes are the shoes of
clowns -
but forgetting is part of escape
and return…
there is only loss of self and
recollection,
which templates over life and
writing,
which templates over experience
and data,
which templates over the now and
the after.
Let us phone a supernatural
female deity
on collect call, and find that
she
never hangs up, after a prayer,
let us pray to the closing of the
door,
the ordeal of the seer may well
soon be over,
the on and off at once invention
is far too clever,
let be the beck as it rambles and
falls,
let know the flowing of dry stone
walls,
let over be under and all be at
one,
let the land of flying fairy
cakes be fun.
Already the yellow DogMuckels M
atop the pole in the industrial
park in town
is the postmodern churchspire, in
the spiritual vacuum,
post-modernism
theme dissolved into message, and
semantics is a road sign not a
place.
Already margins are centres,
centres margins,
surface is depth, and distortion
clarity, and there is a ream of
cheap tea
from Africa in among the
supermarket bargains…
Hell, we’ll have another game
of cards.
We’ll link to the internet in
actual clouds.
Yes chink pelvises like champagne
flutes
atop the fell wearing leather
walking boots.
Sometimes in dreams I find an
organisational system
for the organic whole of the
magnum
opus, that living work of art
I
might call Gondwanaland
yet
which is a living thing, which I
should leave long,
not try and make cohere like
Pound,
but when I wake and press my feet
to the ground,
the Order I dreamed, the scheme,
is gone -
and Truman speakers wake me like
a gong
augmenting the end of ‘The
Lemon Song.’
Who will renew the morning dew
that music has moved the green
grass to?
All the birds have gone south by
now.
I
heard that they sing with their wings.
(2019)
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.
MOTHER’S
WHISPER
Mother’s
whisper in the cinema spreads
to
the whole auditorium. We go
at
Christmas traditionally to see
the
new James Bond or Star Wars -
and
she whispers throughout, until
her
grown
up kids
tell her to be quiet.
“Shut
up, mum,” they might say,
while
mother whispers to herself.
EXCERPT FROM A WORD-SCIENCE
NOTEBOOK FROM SIXTH FORM
“Juvenile dementia” is a term
I invented for a condition that mixes teenage angst and youthful
idealism.
I don’t need to go over it all
again: in Lower Sixth my teenage philosophy in a nutshell was sensus
praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s
Philosophy Dpt. But when you write it down what happens?
Tonight it is your right to judge
by heart alone.
When
I first read
the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and
I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed
like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic
chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it
meant like:
[John
is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].
Lucy
in the soul w/ demons may happen to be an actual substance. Sensation
precedes thought in art. What
colour is white? Smooth and tight! What colour is blue? Be true you!
Waves
[squiggle] crossed the FTSE [squiggle] and the Helter-Skelter
[squiggle] crashed in the electric-sea [squiggle]. Every Atom Ate Our
Eyes. Then
horror-mouth closed in. Now
on the edge I rest my head, feeling feint as “FUCK” touched in
steam on glass and dream a cure for pain. Chain is made from same as
key. Perception is for alchemy. I plunge the needle into the heart of
the
brain.
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).
Words,
words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this
epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the
instinct to survive. Man
is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across
metaphysics and words make connections between first and third
persons. Words
are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in
order to make life easier. Words
are, well, ONLY words.
“Mayfly,”
I say the word
“mayfly”
phonetically
sounding
out its every
vowel
sound alphabetically.
Also
in
Sixth Form, in my word-science notebook I wrote
the word “entropy” backwards and tried to give it meaning:
y.
p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4
Reading
of ancient alchemists in The
Lords And The New You Know Who
by Jim
Morrison I wrote “waves make gentle love to the shore.” Reading
of a schoolboy contemplating getting stoned on milk in Little
Johnny’s Confession
by Brian
Patten I wrote “homework tonight is to remember your dreams.”
The
symbol [R] could still
represent
the stance,
the large-R
Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse
gulf; that the
Creative
spark
is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
When
you renounce the quest for meaning you find it, fall back on
meaning-by-proxy.
Captain
Marvel may be the other side of the coin from I. T.
REBECCA
Rebecca
is sxc, sitting on the Tube…
but
there are farmers getting up at five
and
going out working in the rain
every
day while she totters around
on
high heels in fashion taking cocaine.
It’s
the farmers that we really need -
the
most noble profession unto the Greeks -
but
when Rebecca is slippery and wet
what
Heaven can compare to her granular wear?
PART
TWO:
MICK
IN THE PUB
One
late, lager-soaked afternoon at the pub,
Mick,
named after the Mythical Mickey Bliss,
1930’s
rhyming slang for piss, woke up sober.
He
was in his car, inside the pub, with
a
violent, heart-shaped hole in the wall
behind
him having fallen asleep at the wheel –
so
he got out of the car and went to the bar.
“A
pint of Guinness and a packet of crisps, please,”
he
ordered, and got talking to the barman too,
who,
knowing it was all covered by insurance,
seemed
surprisingly forgiving. In fact
you
could say there was an upbeat feeling
of
camaraderie despite the near-life experience.
Mick
was allowed a tab. Punk was on the
jukebox.
Love
was proven in
a
concrete hive.
Life
was
redeemable, transmogrified into love.
Ladies
were dancing. Beer was spilled.
Musicians
were detained without bail.
For
it was a lock-in the traditional sense.
The
green stem of dawn poked its nose over
the
horizon at the end, when God shrugged.
MICK
SPEAKS
UP
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 internet
in writing
in
the attic to give it a chance to grow
all
the way round the world 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
plate
to soak in water but didn’t.
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.
The
cellular stripe is a line of mathematical code.
Moving
swiftly on, Rimbaud attained the face.
In
2000 I also
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.
Then
we have
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 from
home,
hosting the white eyebrow
for
a rhythm change in the sea, the tattoo,
hypertext
or sensory overlay of a name
on
Piper,
the numinous,
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 flimsy
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. All
told it’s like
the
esemplastic fled away with the quadlibetical.
THE
INADEQUATE TRANSPOSITION
The
house-pipes glugging a guilty gulp
from
a big, culpable jug of the “ug” of “drug”
or
“smuggle”
or Ugly
Truth
Revealed
Inside;
the
loose, Betfair jingle of shingle lifted
from
the big, flat bird-table when
cars
arrive in the drive or if they leave;
the
singing of the upstairs Tap too;
and
the scowl or frown of the downstairs
toilet
flushing and its cistern refilling:
I
imagine these
as parts
of a popular
a song.
I
imagine them transposing a specific hit.
More
than a blank page,
you can get this.
TEA
IN DEPRESSIONVILLE
An
aching, reaching, longing
to
be back in your bed;
a
fatigue deep in your bones;
this
is depression. Depression
is
a physical illness not just
being
in a lugubrious mood.
I’ve
got it, and also hear voices,
have
attempted suicide too.
The
days never start round here.
Medication
is like my bookmark
in
among all this, dividing
time,
at both ends of the day.
It’s
17. 15 and I was asleep
for
most of the day today.
I
just reread Jim Morrison’s
book
The
Lords And The New
Creatures
and wanted to
write
afterwards, but what?
It’s
the same old trouble from
Sixth
Form, not knowing
how
to proceed from it.
Maybe
to sing the song in my
breast,
sounding out the sights
that
have been seen is illegal.
Maybe
it’s been like this since
I
was but an eight year old boy.
THE
STERILISED HOTEL
My
first stay in the acute ward, I ran
away,
across a busy motorway,
up
a serpentine trainline to the station,
and
got on a train that took me to Scotland…
I
thought there’d be a different jurisdiction.
The
cops were swift on my slow
back.
They
found me wandering that other nation,
brought
me back to the border in a van.
I
was ticked off at the door, made
to
surrender possessions, but it went
down
as a sign of my sanity returning.
My
father thought it a funny story at least,
but
it was actually rather sad because now
I’d
be forever in and out of hospital,
the
sterilised Hotel with locks on the doors.
At
least I’ve got a degree since then.
SAFE
FROM HARM
Fleeing
the scene of the smoking crime
my
shadow legs were failing falling
decided
to run forever but fell
the
cops were swift on my slow back
&
slow to follow my swift soul
which
grinning escaped through some hole
&
down a road safe from
Ignorance
perfectly un-noticed and perfect
The
cell was hard like white bone
&
naked like something blind and ugly
I
slumped & swayed in openly stonedness
&
opened my black, silken shirt
“the
silent one” sulking & moaning
in
hooded prayer to an inward God
The
cells were sick & blind
some
people advertised their Ignorance
in
graffiti screaming from the walls
“FUCK
THE PIGS” someone had scratched
I
would have told him to fuck himself
for
what worse is a pig than a sheep?
&
so it appeared that Ignorance wins
only
over Ignorance again
&
I was thankful for this thought
&
thankful that I felt wise
&
winked eye to my mind
thankful
that though I know my judgment
really
judges deeper and wider,
unlike
the pigs and sheep I don’t
insist
my judgement is better
(1999)
HIGH
BROW FARM
REVISITED
There’s
nothing like going round
to
High Brow Farm to drink tea
in
the fairy-haunted garden.
But
to aim low is more the goal
these
days. Art is tending
to
the Low not High end.
Some
people even
contend
my
song lyrics are meant
for
wiping up semen.
At
High Brow Farm we
record
them, our songs,
or
some of them, without rehearsal.
Richly
synaesthetic paintings
of
the portraits of rock and jazz
musicians
overlook from the walls…
they
are painted from photos
with
the music on and
in
mind to paint the very
feel
of the music itself.
Thus,
they mix the postmodern
readymade
with the emotion
of
Romanticism. My friend
who
lives there used to be
a
labourer for a building
firm
and did some work
on
our own house when
I
was but a little boy.
The
steps leading up
through
his garden to the table
round
the back are his own work.
And
how could I forget
those
horses that
listen
to the radio!
I
bet they’re difficult to paint!
THROUGH
THE FRAME OF MUSIC
When
perceived
through the frame of music,
the
horizon is
a drone,
the
apple blossom a dulcimer.
If
the apple blossom made a sound
it
would be tintinnabulation.
Already
the beck’s tumbling
down
a mini waterfall
resembles
a kettle drum’s metal
petals
of silver bliss…
already
the trumpet wears
his
foreskin on the inside.
Already
there
is an upturned canoe for a drum.
Already
there
is a dog for a frontman
and
there are poppadom hi-hats
allowed
in
the raggedy
band.
At
least when I look through them,
they
look really good.
I
DIDN’T KNOW
I
didn’t know I lived in the house
where
the Plough alignment was visible and
viable
I
didn’t know I was marked by a
failed
experiment
into the
maths of the new colour
I
didn’t know I had helped invent the net
as
a seven year old, was kept in the dark
I
didn’t know there was such a vision as
The
Future State that people bought into
I
didn’t know why the riot broke out
and
still remain uncertain about it now
I
didn’t know what my dad’s job was
but
there were options and I was on the case
I
didn’t know I was raped when the Towers still fell
despite
my having spoken against it in 2000
I
didn’t know what the bird in the wood
was
called until very late into the game
I
didn’t know my name was used in the equation
that
helped
invent
the net when I was seven
I
didn’t know because they keep it all hid
from
the kid that did too little to be Nash
END
OF SUMMER BLUES
The
pollen count was knocked unconscious
by
the rain’s many hands this afternoon.
I
- who am but a flower-head flitting capriciously
in
the Allen Ginsberg breeze sometimes
-
heard
it from the
spacious hall
downstairs.
I
thought of a
bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.
The
Western medication had slowed me down.
I
yearned for something to do here in the sticks.
For
katabasis,
humour and gravity it’s good
to
have a dog but we don’t at the moment.
Traditionally
in boyhood
one might design
a
menu for an imaginary pub in such weather.
These
days it would feel
more like a tender
spreadsheet
of
emotion for
an internet cafe.
I
took a sudden interest in the dust that lies
at
the bottom of things, and thought
of my father.
A
GUIDED TOUR OF THE HOUSE
Here
is my bedroom, anagram of boredom.
The
books belong to Dr. Robert
because
it used to be his bedroom.
From
here I can take you on a guided tour.
We
enter at the back, into the scullery,
from
which you can access dad’s office,
or
move through to the spacious kitchen,
painted
a plush, Mediterranean coral.
There
are black, slate flags on the floor;
then
we move through to the carpeted
Hall,
from
which you can access the cloakroom
under
the stairs, the large sitting room,
and
the posh, coffee-cake dining room.
The
stairs are pine,
one
of the house’s main
selling
points
and lead you up via a creaky mezzanine
on
which there is a Victorian, stained-glass window
to
the first floor. To
your right as you
make
it upstairs you find two large bedrooms.
Straight
ahead of you is another.
To
your left is the corridor, off which
you
find a single loo, the shower room,
the
bath room, Hannah’s old bedroom
and
my own bedroom down at the end.
Just
outside my little room you find
the
attic stairs that wind
and lead
you up
to
the third floor, with a large bedroom,
that
used to be my dad’s attic of radio static,
and
which has its own little bathroom.
Moving
through you find the
playroom
where
James and Bob played Lego
except
the Velux has sealed shut by now.
I
used to climb out of it to smoke
on
the slate roof in summer nights
and
maybe write in Doors film weather.
And
last of all is
the
locked attic that
stores
or used to store sacred treasures.
UNDER
A BROKEN SHOWER
Downstairs
again. I cannot escape
what’s
inside just by changing
the
four walls which immure me.
I
look about at what’s on the walls -
a
calendar with local photos,
a
notice board of cork, a chart
depicting
the plants of the meadows,
a
dead telly wearing mum’s funeral hat,
some
of my sister’s art – and I wish
to
have no nastiness inside me.
I
cannot escape into these
indomitable
things. Then I hear
footsteps
upstairs, and doors closing.
Someone
gets in the power shower.
I
know who it is but that would be
telling.
And my Right to write
of
who is in the shower ends
where
another’s naked body begins.
The
thermostat on the shower’s broken,
so
the temperature is always too hot,
too
hot to get in, so we need
to
get a builder in to fix it. That
will
mean taking up the tiles,
and
re-tiling the surface of the interior
afterwards
when the job is done.
I’m
no handy man myself. To me
the
house’s plumbing and electricity
is
more or less magic, more or less
defiant
of the rules of physics.
This
not being able to wash normally
angers
my brother and I, who like
to
get warm in the shower in winter.
DEAR
DAD
If
you didn’t want me to pursue music
you
should’ve told me about the art deal
for
music was escape and release
but
now here I am talking to myself…
I
know my music’s not very good
and
was just a waste of precious time
and
now I sit here wanting more,
still
not knowing what your deal really was.
Now
that it is raining out in the garden,
I
think of putting a stop to all violence.
Lennon
got shot when he sang for peace,
and
I hope the same won’t happen to me.
You
left behind the sheet where pictures
brown
and blue bloomed or grew
which
made me think of the afterlife,
as
a crepuscular, liminal netherworld.
It
is boring talking to myself and so
I
will have to reach an emotional horizon
and
cease this messing around, here
where
I used to design cheques in the kitchen.
You
had much more than me at my age,
two
houses out-right, four children
in
private school, a wife, two cars,
whereas
I have books and a few guitars,
plus
some scratched DVD’s and CD’s
that
go to decay in boxes in the attic
where
we once lay, side by side, you
telling
me the news about your cancer.
When
you were newly gone I ate your
cancer
food, the uncooked jelly, visited
your
grave and welled up and prayed,
wishing
your soul to ascend to Heaven,
that
you would look down on us and smile
on
my books, which happen as they happen,
no
longer consuming all the truth and
butane,
which might go hand in hand.
The
one I did with James, your second
son,
is still the best one I have done,
despite
what happened to you, when
in
a land without a referee to govern.
That’s
because with you gone, your
daughter
Hannah has become the ref,
and
believes said book proves the music
can
be 4D, and is a work of genius.
ANYTHING
CAN COME OUT
Anything
can come out,
even
a talking toilet…
but
I hesitate to probe
the
artistic side of things
in
case it tempts the mental illness.
Instead
I sit and contemplate
unheard
music hidden in the shrubbery
which
is an image from Eliot
whom
it seems, in 2001,
was
decreed a repressed
homosexual
in The
Sun.
Even
the tree outside the window
can
come out as it were
when
observed through
the
aleatory
pattern
of
purple
germs
on the window,
down
the bottom of an
evolutionary
corridor, for
in
Infinity the tarantula
and
the cathedral are one.
Even
the lightbulb above you
can
come out, even
the
drip
in the shower room.
WHEN
When
I read of Descartes on perfection, and turn inward mine own eye to
investigate I glimpse a perfect inner judge whose concerns are
grammatical.
When
I read Saul A. Kripke trying to persuade a sceptic that by “plus”
he doesn’t mean “quus” I think of that time I put a plus sign
for the ‘f’ in my seven year old book in the line:
“I
have a scar+ that is red and black.”
When
I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations
I am reminded of a game I had as a boy where I would, with eyes
closed or under the duvet, lie in bed and forget the room, forget
which way I am lying and where the wall is, drift away from spatial
sense.
FUSSY
ABOUT THE MUSTARD
One
evening, my dad took us all out
to
a posh, French restaurant with grand-dad.
When
the steak arrived, grand-dad
asked
the waiter for some mustard.
When
the waiter brought out some French
mustard,
grand-dad asked for English
mustard.
When the French waiter
apologised
and
said they had no English mustard,
grand-dad
stood up and announced
to
the whole French restaurant loudly
“the
mustard has to be English!
The
mustard has to be English!
The
mustard has to be English!”
until
dad said to him “alright grand-dad,
we
get the idea you can sit down now.”
Grand-dad
lied about his age at fifteen
to
stow away to the second World War
on
the bottom of a sub, then joining
the
Air Force, won the Sword of Honour,
and
became the youngest non-commissioned
officer
in the whole R. A. F. They say
he
was a great man, but he was certainly
fussy
about the mustard that night.
Personally
I can tolerate French
mustard
and
American as well… I am famous
for
having an open mind like that.
I
am always willing to try new things
as
if my life were an experiment
but
into what we do not yet know.
IN-BETWEEN
JOBS
A
kitchen to clean can be a bitch.
Through
cooking we travel the world –
or
at least those that cook do, leaving
me
to clean it up afterwards.
And
what job satisfaction you get
when
it’s done, and what a clean
room
you have to work in now.
The
trick is in keeping it clean.
And
what can I write but vent
my
spleen at a slinky screen, my
mood
made stable on a sterilised table,
all
my rage in the cage for the minimum wage?
The
meds are a wall that the meditators
cannot
break through. In the kitchen
I
sit now and vacillate between files…
the
screen confers a spurious sense
of
creativity. The
cars whoosh
past
– but then there is an abeyance,
and
that I like, a quiet lull between cars.
A
city boy in the sticks I am stuck,
but
I know where to go to muck
in
– the Miners Arms, the heartbeat
of
the village, where I used to drink
port
with the farmers. Once upon a time
I
had no further ambition in life
than
playing an acoustic set down there,
to
an audience of local folk gathered,
but
it hasn’t worked out thus far.
Unemployed,
or in-between jobs, I
think
of my father saying how
“you’ll
never be a bricklayer, John,”
and
recommended a music store.
But
music stores all closed down,
those
fertile years we all got phones,
when
the Towers fell at the gates of dawn,
and
paved the way for the next century.
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.
A
BROKEN CHAPEL
The
Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory...
whomsoever
they’re looking for it’s not me.
Light
shafts in its distilled sleep.
The
dead in tired dance circle the silence,
lingering
fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -
but
wait, who dreamed me awake this time?
It
was me, I'm he who dared disturb.
Not
to renounce the past with rapt amazement
but
to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.
We
have seen this all before, time
tumbling
away into sleep, seen
this
darkness drop and these ruins murmur
and
now we are gathered to appoint the gods
and
now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves
and
now we are gathered to ordain this dust,
we
are gathered to live and to dream.
(1998)
IN
ORDINARY SPEECH
“When
I was seven I wrote a book
that
performed four functions:
to
encrypt a scientific node to do
with
Gravity; to store the idea
of
the internet in writing in the attic
at
the foot of Black Combe so that
it
was possible for the net to
exist
all the way round the world;
to
calibrate an algorithm that
sublimates
letters and numbers
on
a cellular level to see if the
new
colour could be rendered
as
a cellular mark; and to separate
the
object ‘pollen’ from its name.
It
was a book with a heartbeat.
It
had a heartbeat. It made
the
sound of footsteps in the attic.
It’s
been stolen by someone.
It
was in The Dream Suitcase
along
with some other priceless things
like
the sheet where pictures grew
and
the cassette that was cooked
when
its small pause in the song
where
the reel was cut and re-
sealed
healed and was gone.
I
think they were after the sheet
where
pictures grew, but by the time
they
stole The Dream Suitcase, there
was
only my seven year old book in it.
I
still have bits of it typed up -
bits
of it went into a publication -
but
not all of it - and the original,
the
handwritten version with
the
heartbeat, is now gone.”
LOCAL
POET CALLING CARD
The
literature of the city is that of alienation,
the
literature
of rootedness can become repetitive,
and
the city is the intellectual breeding station
but
country life is closer to how we ought to live.
You
have to gain freedom from accepting limitation.
You
have to mow the grass, carry the sieve.
I
read Michael Hofmann here where Norman Nicholson
made
a thing about being intrinsically Conservative.
I
loved what I read, and couldn’t make a decision
between
the two sides, if something had to give.
I
believe we come to art with the presupposition
of
many binary opposites, which all of us have,
and
a good work of art can mean they’re undone,
which
I suppose would put us in the territory of love.
LOOKING
THROUGH THE DIMWIT WINDOW
I live between the letters of the
word OK
but sometimes escape the shape of
the paper.
I look at the dawn now the sky is
grey,
think how I’d be no good as a
rapper.
It’s true that I don’t know
what to do,
yet sometimes conjure a
pleasing number.
I do like the phrase “A. I. am
I. A.”
because it’s redolent of Julius
Caesar,
the moment he says “et tu,
Brute”
which I saw long ago when I was a
nipper.
I
myself could be living in a play
with
a name like John F B Tucker.
It
could be a mini Shakespearean poem, say,
for
which I have to thank my mother
and father.
Now
I am faced with the Big Glass Day,
I
think of sliding through a mirror,
an
alchemy of perception, far
away,
to
bring us ever closer to Nature.
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.
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
ink
droplets
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.
THE
PARSIMONIOUS PALIMPSEST OF
PENTIMENTO
While
the wire
was
like the Weimar,
the
poet made himself
the
centre of a brave, new tense
through
a prodigious
derangement
of
the
Glastonbury fences
containing
his senses…
the
poet extirpates every trace
of
recognition
from
the myriad mind,
unlooses
the mind
of
form, method-acts
every
adjective in ‘Howl’
to
attain visual radio, broadcasting
dreams,
forever.
DOWNLOADING
THE LOWDOWN OF
DOWNTIME
The
children
of our friends are waking,
growing
up to do the <BEE> one,
the
one where <BEE> might soon ensue from @
in
the international language alphabet…
it’s
not my idea (though the subject of a book of
mine)
but
is the idea of my brother. It
could
be the only original idea
in
the whole of my writing life.
That
“I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too”
and
that “Lucy in the soul w/ demons
might
happen to be an actual substance”
were
both my ideas around University time
-
but
the former could belong to Captain Marvel
and
the latter is clever
word-play.
So
it is that despite what I’ve been through,
for
which you’d need to see my CV,
it
is to my brother that we look,
in
terms of the future of homo-sapiens.
So
it
is he won’t let me do the one on “the bet”
that
I might regret and so it is I regret
dissing
<BEE> in a fit of confusion.
Soon
it may be the case that standard English
is
perceived as Classical music or Chaucer.
LONDON
FLASHBACK
London
is a craven haven for corrupting taste.
Police
motorbikes were being chased by the waste.
I
spent a year down there after my degree -
even
slept rough – but didn’t feel that free.
The
riots were lootings: Christmas on earth
didn’t
follow on in the town of my birth.
I
busked for next to nothing, saw old friends
but
abandoned ship – my each adventure tends
to
me crawling home, puking, apologising profusely
to
inward grace – senses broken loosely -
and
now I sit sipping tea at the foot of the fell,
in
a large country house not ready to sell.
There’s
a beck in the back and we’re agreed
I
am even allowed to write of it if I need -
no
Poetry Police who have never read any
poetry
will stop me, although not for a penny
I
have worked for them… and I cast my mind back
to
the daughters of London. The Plough and Black
Combe
had aligned by the time I went down.
I
lived in the East, it was like an undertown.
I
drifted and loafed and smoked too much.
A
Londoner by birth, I still am one as such -
but
no longer hang with the cutting edge crowd -
I
guess they wander lonely inside the cloud!
And
no I didn’t pull when I was on holiday,
except
a gay experience, though I walked away...
and
soon had a dream bigger than a dream,
for
which the gnomic nomenclature is “drum,”
characterised
by cosmic freedom, bounding
in
circles in space. Already daggers of lightning
in
the storm were part of a God Simulation;
and
I woke feeling cleansed, with re-aligned perception.
Still,
back to the sticks, I came by rattling train
unsure
if I will ever make it down there again.
SUNSET
TO THE WEST
I
was swimming in the Irish Sea
at
sunset with my mother,
watched
from the stony beach
by
my poor, dying father
when
I realised
my
place is in life is lowly.
I
was languishing
in
salty expiation
as
a laughter of seagulls flew past
wearing
shark mask replicas
when
I realised
my
place in life is lowly.
I
turned my body away
from
the beach towards
the
peach-stone of
a
black hole, being slowly
sucked
into the sea’s
watercress
hives and drowned
and
realised my place in life is lowly… and
the
setting sun is bought and sold
and
silting gold, leaking
out
in all directions
like
MC squared =
FLUVIENT
COINAGE
Sonnest
abraddio grample and bricken
gontocker
blonky and wellity white
postico
flostico flipstick and fleving
fluvient
coinage has gone againe
driptheria
drearier than a tree-drum
do-lang
and blang-gast gustopong coo
sloo
flicking flostico flostico flagrant
masticko
mecklebot plastic and plee
flestico
follerdong farmerly fillegist
fillegist
farmerly follerdong flunk
collerdon
gollerdon gumian grey
ollerpoller
sollerdoller follycog nonk.
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*
QUIETA
Now
everyone else is asleep
and
you are still up, having fun
like
the midnight sun
is
a musical orgasm.
You
turned the Lakes into the future state
or
tried to through the snooker cue.
Trying
a Google search in the air,
you
find there is no-one there.
It’s
not about rats playing
games
with your eyes,
nor
skywriting at
the
Secret Garden Party
for
your stuff is found
betwixt
the dove and the Duff,
or
was that the
duster?
You
would need to be on the Right
to
come out with what it is all about,
but
don’t, preferring to leave it open.
Your
verse was good
when
it lead
us
through the wood
but
that was before.
You
should quit
before
you spoil it.
Otherwise
you’ll be
in
a bare knuckle fight.
It
should be alright.
As
long as you stay up all night,
doing
what you want
you’ve
won the war.
THE
SEED OF THE POEM
Your
brother has just
been
down to the kitchen.
He
suggested you get some
of
that delicious Fazer
chocolate
from
Finland which
you’re
not allowed to
have
on this dire
diabetes
diet… so
you
get some from the
posh,
coffee-cake dining room.
It
becomes a metaphor
for
writing when you are
supposed
to not write.
So
he planted a seed.
He
planted a poem-seed.
The
seed consciousness of the poem
being
your brother’s makes
it
a special poem which
should
be nurtured
and
received well.
Eating
the chocolate
was
something illicit
like
an electrifying affair
or
a one night stand
with
a married, gypsy woman.
So
there’s another sense
of
what the chocolate symbolises.
It
was absolutely delicious.
It
was ‘in’ and ‘of’ itself.
The
poem chugs on,
as
dawn’s first bird
pipes
up like a miracle.
You
think what your
brother
was
trying to say in this poem
is
that you
shouldn’t write -
or
at least that you
are
prone
to
dubious moral hygiene,
like
when you
went off down south
on
a mad, Rimbaudian escapade
dead
against computers,
ecstasy
and porn, as if
part
of a New Lakes, Slow
Art,
eco-poetic sensibility
and
soon allowed ALL
your
guitar strings
to
be detuned at once.
There
was a similar laxity,
a
similar crumbling of innate moral values
in
the detuning of strings
and
the taking of E
in
the year the Towers came down
which
like Thales himself
you
had predicted to the day.
You
think your brother,
in
this poem which you are
starting
to wish you hadn’t written,
was
also trying to say
a
poem’s seed consciousness
can
lie with someone
other
than the poet.
And
how could you renounce
literature
for the world,
to
plunge into the maelstrom
as
Henry Milker remarked
of
Rimbaud when you have
all
this freedom, all
this
spare time continuum
and
nothing to do but read and write?
The
“helium aubade”
is
a type of poem you invented
for
the dawn after
the
dark night of the soul
when
you’ve been up all night…
the
“shadow page poem”
is
a type of poem you invented
for
writing outside in darkness
when
you can’t see the page
and
are on drugs
on
a road trip.
There
are things you’ve not done too
like
make a page’s turning
into
the turning over
of
a steak -
or
structure a poem
on
an airport or the Premier League -
or
write what a lion would say
if
a lion could talk -
or
show us a house brick
from
each brain hemisphere contrasted.
You
haven’t done Bart
Simpson’s
suicide note.
But
none of these things
are
what you really want
and
you feel inside [ ]
like
you’re yet to start.
Your
Norman Nich
is
better than your Michael Hofmann.
Your
garden brick
better
than your left-wing implication.
This
is not to say
you
are right or left,
for
you have no allegiance,
and
it’s only your own opinion.
The
brain paths are fixed.
The
sun is rising.
That
feeling of the end of Fascism
can
be elongated, almost
like
it ties in with a sense
of
being unburdened by guilt,
or
set free from suffering.
Your
brother has done
well
in this poem,
which
he planted,
and
which you have cared for.
You’re
reminded of that dream you had
when
in arduous poetic training
of
flying to the Isle of Man
to
pick up a new collection
the
shape of a remote
control
and made of chocolate
from
a white garden table…
ah,
poet, your dreams
are
recorded in your dreamwork
diary,
though your CD’s
are
scratched in the attic
in
boxes going to decay.
Your
brother did especially
well
in the poem he planted
for
staying in bed
while
you wrote it.
