PART
ONE:
DEAR
FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?
THAT’S
IT
E’en
though it’s not Anon
I
see the Flo’ moving on
the
floor
up at mormor’s here
and
find in sharing room to cheer
for
we have written this
new Proust
and
with my hands which
can attest
to
weathers all about my head
that
mean the sharing of the bread
which
have been here
since the start
of
finding
salvation
in
art...
at
the
moment
Flo’s just the noise
of
playing with her baby toys
but
soon she’ll sleep and then wake
and
later eat a fairy cake
and
one day grow to be a mum
but
as
for myself
I cannot come
and
without the ability to ejaculate
I
may have grown a little late
and
can’t continue singing of
women
in the wind with love
so
I should say “That’s All Folks,”
it’s
impossible to mend your broken yolks,
e’
en when you sit with smokes
and
tell your friend some dirty jokes.
AURORA
FLOREALIS REVISITED
Gilly flowers curtsey, not off
the sound-map.
To make a flower-press would be
womanly.
When our days still ended on
cannabis
we would bemoan that flowers were
legal.
To the tune of the wind I sink,
then swim.
I no longer puff the evil weed
these days.
It would be a reward, a kind of
dialysis,
that separates the murk from the
excellence.
I would need it to balance out my
mind,
one homeostatic device for
another one.
Now I worry that I am hurried and
florid.
I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird
toot its long,
hollow horn out on the A595 and
relax.
I hear its wheels go round, that
it’s heavy.
*ketamineguitar*
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.
POLLEN
DOOR
We
all know of Flora’s pretty pretext,
which
I was the one to spot and articulate,
even
though I had never known her kiss,
which
looking back was a mistake,
but
never has it been so well dealt with
as
when at the age of seven, I
separated
the pollen from its name,
for
Jim Morrison has a theory
that
when an object is detached
from
its name, habits and associations
it
is finally free to become endlessly anything
and
when that object is pollen
never
has the theory been so beautifully tested,
never
has summer
love
been so evident,
never
has fresh air been so much the cause.
GOLDFISH
BOWL UPDATE
Mrs.
Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,
the
local, parochial headline wants to read,
and
crossed
the water to the Other Side,
left
behind my almost ascetic greed
so
I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,
knowing
not why the goldfish is dead,
knowing
only that God is good,
hoping
its soul ascends Heavenward,
imagining
the newsflash on the TV,
or
online for anyone at all to see,
but
as the goldfish becomes
history
I
see it could be worse for you and me
for
if it was my brother’s <BEE>
there
would be damage in all Infinity.
FLEE
HAS SEEN A BEE
So,
Flee, you may have seen a bee
but
I don’t want you to see a rat.
It
isn’t right, if it’s according to me,
that
one should have to die like that.
The
bee would sail
across
the ocean
as
you lie back on the sunny green.
It
would be cross-pollinating the garden,
extracting
pollen for the mating queen…
once
my copy of Neil Curry’s volume
started
to smell of redolent perfume
so
I built the Tower in my bedroom.
There
were other books, a few of them
that
also exhibited signs of natural
magic
- for the smell was not a spillage in
my
Gap Year bag,
of
aftershave, but actual
magic.
I hope that when I am gone
someone
reads the Tower as I built it,
tall
and strong, lines left to right,
for
it wasn’t aftershave, I never spilled it,
and
you can take my word as true and quite.
DEAR
FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?
Dear
Fliss or is it Flee?
I
hope you are well-rested, okay, secure of direction, comfortable,
eating well. When I wrote this to you, the one we call H was walking
round, moving from the kitchen to the sitting room where mormor
awaited with
little
baby girl toys. I had just made a few touches to my Morrison mirror,
and got coal in for mormor, after a night with no sleep, only staying
up tending to my soul at a slinky screen. Mud outside was minimal, as
I made my avowal, still victimised so badly I cannot confess to it,
still wishing to be doing nothing else but write poetry. If this
missive ever gets through to you wake me up, for the dawn is strong
with James, and we feel in love despite the gypsies and the
government who loom. By now you might know me as pirate, who wanted
to get that line about the ocean in there but recognised it belonged
in a song, a song I wrote myself, after attaining the face, in about
1998, as if some kind of proof, the result of some bet, the end of
the quest, the treasure chest of dreams. So it being a song I decided
I would no longer mewl and puke to school. Even
though it seemed to land fair and square with me, the line about the
ocean in
the song when I was but
15
or 16 and a new Rimbaud, by now they had me down as Sid Vicious, who
was making something that was ours, though not quite sure if “our-ing
it along” was allowed in the proper vernacular. Voices are not
sweeties. Mormor went for a pee. Suicide is a shelf. I am so sick
with fear I may have a morning beer, even though it’s only 9 AM. I
could pretend it is gravy. Mormor comes in the kitchen, says it might
be too windy to do a barbecue today though she
has it all ready apart from the coal. The carrots and potatoes are
ready. You’re
in the room now, on the way out into the field, a beautiful little
girl, whom I call “madame,” whom it seems is getting ready to go
out into the field, while Seb is running up the fell, and it’s only
9. 30, still breakfast time, time for eggs, eggs not likely to cause
an adverse reaction, but not before you go out into the front garden
for some action, and not before H puts a hat on, and I try to see the
light on a fair, springful day. It’s just a shame I need to read up
on Trump every morning, for it disturbs me, as I try to see the
light, imagining sunlight blowing my hair about, and now you’ve got
your hat on and your wellies and are totally ready and can go out.
Love,
John
(who
might soon be snow or under the sleet)
A
CANOROUS CHIME
Someone
gets in the power shower.
It
reminds me I don’t need power.
Flower
power is much better.
Writing
Flora a long love
letter.
You
could even call her “flower.”
Down
at the bottom of the Tower
I
looked up and saw her hair,
it
was dangling down everywhere.
I
climbed up it into her chamber.
She
was locked in by a protector.
He
was a tyrant, I was better,
I
was the one she wanted as lover.
I
took out my sword to free her,
defeated
the tyrant, had a breather,
took
her by the tiny hand and led her
down
the stair, her knight in shining armour.
In
the garden we heard some laughter.
It
might’ve been the film director
saying
this could go on forever,
flowing
like an endless river,
but
what was
needed
more than water
was
to cut her hair a bit shorter,
so
that we did, while a motor
drove
past on an unknown hour.
SIBLINGS
Brothers
are nice and sisters too,
always
there’ll be something to do,
but
they can elongate the queue
to
use in the morning the upstairs loo.
There
are also sibling rivalries,
to
please the parents, and to please
the
beauty queen who brings the bees
down
onto their humble knees.
John
Cleese says it like a brother -
no-one
is any more clever than another -
that
goes between your father and mother -
and
your brother and sister and any other.
It’s
boring not having a family,
and
I do have my brother living with me,
but
sometimes think in a different key
about
what’s likely to never be
and
yet with mother’s new grand children,
at
least she’ll get some satisfaction,
and
we are a tribe bonded in emotion
even
if scattered across the ocean.
I
hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays
on
the piano for them in multiple ways
that
mean the brightening up of days,
like
a way to cure a transient malaise.
Siblings
often squabble and fight
but
judging by mine own, it’s right
that
I would die for each of them tonight,
and
leave them playing in the light.
AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S
LITERATURE
One
day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They
were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were
animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.
“Wouldn’t
it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour
trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”
“They
might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt
below.”
John
was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next
at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.
They
were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was
winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and
the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a
game of football in the field near their house.
They
lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It
was a big, ancient mound of land.
Their
dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed
“Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their
mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly
cleaning or baking.
There
was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a
second like it could’ve gone on forever.
John
suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up
the fell?”
James
said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”
Robert
always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and
Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went
in and asked if they could go on an adventure.
“First
pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and
sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for
them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone
because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they
got in trouble.
“Are
you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.
Ossie
was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever
left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm.
It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run
away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It
meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead
and bring him back.
Seeing
all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child,
especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures
and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field
of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could
shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by
nature.
The
family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep
on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off
to.
“Yes,”
said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”
So
they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.
They
did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane,
taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where
often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to
explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of
taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all
their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a
little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the
large fronds of bracken.
It
was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it
was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After
twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided
against it.
So
they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.
“Watch
out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any
of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the
biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to
himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools,
and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they
all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play
dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.
It
was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were
free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the
bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile
or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from
the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the
summer heat.
They
walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the
bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never
seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall
came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get
her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were
busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.
Then
the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in
the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into
it to cool down on such a hot day.
Ossie
was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be
a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of
going over a bridge.
As
Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted
there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!”
he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.
“We
should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because
he was the eldest.
You
had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to
get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t
matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went
and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and
their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess
what they found?
There
was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the
entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in
the fell.
“Imagine
if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful
with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no
money. It didn’t matter though because as John said
“there’s
no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”
He
himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in
his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from
Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.
They
could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum
used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,”
and it was true, it was.
James
now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew
how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.
“What
could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.
The
mystery was a strange one.
“Maybe
someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.
James
was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to
revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.
They
were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight
leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on
his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess
what he found?
“There’s
a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap
door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the
fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the
jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit
up and the fruit machine made a musical
sound
and it turned
on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at
the back of the cave.
There was a tunnel inside!
John
shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at
least a few feet in front of them.
“Should
we go in?” asked Robert.
They
did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.
“I
dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and
he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what
is done as a Giant Day.
MUM’S
MEASURING STICK
My
mother
took me out
on
a mother-son bonding trip
-
oh, only down the garden,
to
the
veg
patch, where I,
as
if
gallantly,
dug her a trench,
and
after she planted
her
potatoes, raked it over
again
too. Here she comes now
into
the kitchen, saying
“this
dry weather is good
for
the door,” because
the
door
used
to swell,
because it is wooden,
and
offer much
resistance
to
being
closed.
I
am out of
breath
from working. I
left
the
veg patch first, carrying
two
paper packets in for the sitting
room
fire. I
was in hospital
yesterday
or the day before
after
another O. D. and
don’t
feel up to much work.
Still,
when
mother
says
the
dry weather is good for
the
back door, she might mean
working
with soil is good for the soul.
And
she is mostly right.
She
has a lot of magic sayings
hidden
in the treetops, does mum.
You
can drown in a puddle.
Language
is a creature.
Imagination
is a muscle.
In
politics there are no wrongs
or
rights. Just because someone
is
good to you doesn’t mean
they
are right for you. Actions
have
consequences. The brain
only
heals when it’s asleep
and
even nightmares are
healing.
Giving
makes
you
feel good. Poetry
is not
the
entrance and exit of life.
Of
course she was the one
who
made the flower-press ending
on
cannabis that
might = a dialysis,
and
I was the one that made
the
love poem for Flora
that
might = a motor, and who
spotted
the system, beginning
with
‘if.’
That
system, I would
think
of as my Equilibrium,
but
it is on second thoughts mum’s
Equilibrium.
I don’t like cooking
vegetables
in the kitchen, or digging
in
the vegetable patch after
all.
So
it is that when I sit here ( )
in
the kitchen, because
it has
a
good
table, a good chair,
and
internet
access, writing,
and
mum
comes in to cook, it augments
any
work on Flora’s pretext
if
I just write down what she
says,
about preparing food.
Now
I’ve made mum
a coffee
for
her flask, from the instant
espresso
machine, her second
of
the day, and she has gone
back
out there, to the vegetable
patch,
leaving me indoors.
And
the bluebells are out
and
some have more bells
than
others, but all of them are nice.
And
mother comes back in
with
some layers of clothes removed.
And
the dishwasher is still going
round
and round like dreams
in
the recycling bin. And
mother
goes
back out again, back
to
the veg patch because
her
work is not yet done. And
the
dishwasher has stopped revolving.
And
the
fridge’s drone is heard.
And
in the fridge I have a sausage roll.
And
the sausage roll comes
from
the local butcher and is made
with
real, Cumberland sausage.
And
out
there, the
fresh, spring air
sings
that love is not dead.
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.
LOOKING
BACK (LIKE RIMBAUD)
Things
went amiss when I needed to pay to play, needed money to publish. You
should never pay to have your poetry published. But hey, I
might look back at some of what has gone on within the covers of
those myriad pages…
I
falsified the Nirvana barcode in writing.
I
provided songs for my brother’s new da Vinci circle where <BEE>
might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.
I
still held on to my seven year old book where I stored the idea of
the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow round the
world, encrypted a sophisticated scientific notion concerning
Gravity, made a stab at the maths of the new colour, knocked the
battery off the pollen.
I
conferred a Mario mushroom in a love
poem
and allowed them to have that little phase go down as Anon even
though I know I wrote it myself.
I
wrote off the top of my head to discretely “do the beck” in the
back garden where the Plough alignment is viable (which
is a beautiful Ideal I stole from my mother).
I
explored defaced bank notes as a new poetic form.
I
realised
that in
music, back
at the start of my career, I
proved the island
of penguins
with the first verse of the first song of my first gig, and so
came
round to include those lyrics in my literature too, even though by
then it was too late to have started my literary career like that.
Even
though I am skint and was working with a vanity-press I managed to
make things pretty decent, the semblance of a career, right here in
the Age of Self-publication.
I
didn’t do a book with “Anon” on the cover as
yet and
if I did would have to think long and hard about it; but when I was
organising songs for my brother’s <BEE> they made me put my
best bits in, and my vote, and sign my vote Anon.
I
heard it said that the best bits were my brother’s <BEE>, my
own imposition of a + sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a
scar+ that is red and black,” my articulation of Flora’s system,
and no, not the Nirvana barcode.
SIR
GALAHAD ANDCETERA
The
Night is sad, the air is black,
nothing’s
going to bring the
good times back.
Still,
I
beseech thee O One -
what
comportment would you deem fit?
The
Night is black, the air a banner.
You
can’t confute my love for Hannah.
But
she is my sister, O One,
and
it is thee whose affection is
my remit…
When
I die I am supposed to leave behind
something
like the sheet where pictures grew
for
my brother like my dad did for me.
The
equation for the ratio between sunlight falling and Gravity pulling
down on the sheet where pictures grew still eludes me but if it is “c
over G” we are dealing with, I’d say it equates to
backward
f,
forward
f,
equals
running
through…
L
to the pregnant snorkel.
O
is the key of the babbling unicorn.
The
symbol [R] might still represent the stance, the large R, Romantic
stance that Creativity in the synapse gulf is possible, that the
creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
If
mother’s flower-press ending on cannabis
could
be said to = a dialysis,
a
love poem only hoping to impress
poor
Flora still = a motor.
Rah
the sun-god sleeps upstairs.
It
might be a good telepathy-game that, but I don’t know whether I am
doing this for Flora or for Rachel. For all, Flora was the nicest
woman to gawp at, at school, and Rachel, still beautiful herself, the
nicest to talk to.
And
the redolent fume of the mating queen
from
the green pages in the flesh
leads
to a moonlit chamber…
If
Flora was my brother’s ideal,
Rachel
was mine, so it must be
for
Flora that we are doing this.
I
am but Sir Galahad anyway, still bleeding after my tron. My
brother knows what’s gone on. He left two sheets in the barn. One
of them, if I remember, contained a sunflower made of Badly Drawn Boy
lyrics, slightly imperfectly quoted on purpose:
sunshine
inside of you
old
sun warm sun
spreads
over you
soleil
all over you
It’s
a nice song. We notice the sunshine is inside. That it is what is
inside that counts. The next sheet contained what I call the new da
Vinci circle:
@
<BEE> [long
squiggle]
Infinity
symbol
If
I could quote my sister Hannah I would say the new da Vinci circle is
a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4
Points of Difference. For it suggests <BEE> might soon ensue
from @ in the international language alphabet.
There
were burning candles on top of the box we used as a table, drawn on
the underside of one
of the
pages,
which was placed face
down on the box with burning candles we use as a table.
I
went down to the barn. I read the documents where they were left. On
the Badly Drawn Boy one I was inveigled by
the sunflower pattern.
And yet on the <BEE> one I could not see James’s discrete
system… I could see only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes
containing the whole international language alphabet. One of the
characters was
[backward
f,
forward
f,
equals
running
through.]
So
I left the document alone, thinking James had designed a whole
alphabet in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. But when I
returned to reread it – not in jealousy but admiration – the
tabular arrangement was gone and the <BEE> document remained as
initially designed. I left it alone again, and then, one day, when
our father passed I went down to the barn again and found the first
sheet, the Badly Drawn Boy one, had bloomed or grown pictures.
The
pictures seem to depict the lyric to a song I wrote, called
‘The Ghosts Lament,’ going:
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun.
This
is the dead land.
Crack
a smile and curse the sun.
Still,
back at the age of 15 or 16, when the song was written (in the Lakes)
and performed (in London), the sheet was not my game. My game back
then was the face of stars. I had attained it, yes, that is the word,
with two friends up visiting from London town. I hear of late that I
proved the face of stars with the first verse of the first song of
the first gig, at 15 or 16, in Kentish Town and was beautiful when I
sang. That
was a different song, one called ‘Shallow Oceans.’ I
could
posit
the set-list… the band were called Oedipus Wrecks… but
instead I would prefer to just show you that
first verse in
question…
Oceans
smile with liquid eyes
and
fill themselves with rain.
The
tide goes out and leaves me
lost,
the last thing a glass gene.
Here
I would like to augment the shrunk-down teenage set list with
something Oedipal at the end, something about her, Flora, whom it
would seem I hugged in a boarding school corridor, failing to kiss
her, falling for her enough to write a poem, in
the style of Jim Morrison, but
by now it is my brother James that knew her kiss.
It
was for Flora that James contrasted the flower and the <BEE>.
I
can’t seem to really think
every
time I think of her anymore,
which
might be because
my
brother and I are close.
To
be delivered from writing for
Flora is actually a relief.
We
still don’t know how whomsoever it was knew the lyric to
‘The Ghosts Lament’ or
made the burns. But
we take it that whomsoever knew the lyric and did the burns did it to
unify us, so that we are all one.
You
might need to hear the song to know the rest of the lyric that
was used for the sheet,
which you can on Bandcamp now. Or you can read the Oedipus Wrecks
set-list in a volume called Yes
You May.
I
showed you the lyric to
‘The Ghosts Lament’ as
far as the line “crack a smile and curse the sun.” Then, the
first line of the chorus is “death awaits to fuck me.” Dr.
Calculator Ptom loved it when it got to the chorus. There
was something nuclear going on. “Give me bliss and give me kisses,”
it continued. “Death awaits to save me,” it went. “The ghosts
lament, the ghosts lament.”
Come
on baby,
you
know it’s easy,
don’t
say maybe,
let’s
go crazy.
The
chorus was a step too far for the pictures. They never got as far as
depicting the line “death awaits to fuck me,” but then again did
coincide with my father’s passing.
There
was something vivid, gorgeous and erotic to the depiction of the
death of the sun, almost like it was seen from within the sun itself.
It was almost like a musical orgasm was going on. But at the same
time it was brutalist.
As
for the one that proved the face. I think at the time it was
necessary that I started everything off in that manner, but that the
line about the ocean still belongs to the house – so there is an
argument I should have to be Anon with that particular line.
The
counter argument is that if you take that line away, it would mean I
regretted meeting the face of stars. It would make the attainment of
that vision a regrettable event.
I
know that the rest of my band, whichever band that means, don’t
wish to be Anon and nor do I.
Even
though it is myself, I would say let the young visionary keep the
line, especially considering he was making an effort to read Rimbaud
at the time he wrote it, whom it seems says “the poet makes himself
a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to attain
the unknown.”
The
line about the ocean could even be seen as a translation, into poetry
too.
The
argument for it being an Anon line is that the kids will want to
climb the ladder. In which case I would
prefer to leave it out altogether. It felt like the real me, as easy
as leaves to a tree, when I wrote it.
Leaving
it out would
mean
I need
to redo the song from when I was 15, so that I can still be bonded
with my mates and make it through school. I am 44 if you can believe
it, and we still haven’t made it through school. This time it would
be beneficial to know I helped invent the net at 7.
THE
MYSTIC VISIONARY
(For
Robert)
The
bond between a mother and her son
should
be one of unconditional love,
not
limited by language barriers,
different
appellations for the light.
Under
the moon, I love my mother
as
I loved my father too, whom
it
would seem would deem it jolly good,
the
food we ate in Italy recently.
Orange
is the sun when it sets there too and
then
in the clouds Heaven’s bars
sell
upturned jars of sunset, making
you
claim that even plastic can grow.
The
colour of a red toy car with my
fingerprints
on it could then seem to be “detuned”
like
a guitar string, and counting numbers
seem
steps down into the earth...
I
love the bones my mother grew
inside
her warm womb long ago now,
before
the trauma of birth separated us,
and
I
face
the music, dreaming big.
Wow!
I can’t believe the things I’ve
touched
with my own fingers but
my
fingers
have crashed, I type, and my
mad,
crashed fingers have connected.
WOMAN
IN WHITE
Agonising
woman, dancing in white,
your
short dress hugs your figure tight.
It’s
only a photo, only a still,
but
still how
you
are dressed to kill.
I’ve
never seen love from this angle before,
totally
useless, but
the thing
we adore.
I
see you among the adverts there
online,
tossing your blonde hair
in
a leonine way, and want to know
who
you are and in what show.
Of
course if I click on you I fall
for
the adverts and so instead I stall
at
you, the bait, to suck us all in,
with
a promise of wanton-ness and sin.
I
don’t wish to be re-directed
feeling
as badly as if I am rejected,
I
wish to know more of your eloquent shapes,
for
in my mind your beauty shapes apes.
You
dance in a sensuous graffiti of
blind
white light, proving only love,
but
all we can see is a split-second
caught
on
a
camera
whose lens can distort.
Distortion
is
clarity with a guitar
that
stretches between star and star,
but
not with your body, for it is clear
that
I would love to hold you near.
I’ve
seen you in yellow and in red,
but
white is best, like words unsaid.
Come
closer, please do, for I am alone
without
any use for my mobile phone.
CLUTCHY
I
have never espied you, down on my bended
knee,
through an illicit keyhole, changing
into
your swimming costume but imagine
it
is more exquisite than the colours of the vowels.
Even
I would deem it that my mates are getting
me
to do an Anon book so that my songbook
can
remain mine own, and who after all am I?
Anon
is the author of the earliest English poem.
Anon
is in love with a woman called Flora
whom
it would seem doesn’t fancy the horseman,
might’ve
done, but only in another world,
of
which we dream, in the twilight of souls.
O
Flora, you love me not, and after all
you
deserve someone better than myself,
and
wouldn’t like to see my naked body at all,
because
you’d be disgusted, but I can tell
you
are the optimum, the golden mean,
the
tops of telegraph poles and mountains,
the
evergreen light, the transcendent signifier,
the
unobtainable, metaphysical objective too.
Sometimes
I used to sit in my cosy, amphetamine-
induced
hollow, writing you flea-bitten haircuts,
but
I never got one back and eventually
got
the idea you were not to be mine.
The
fittest bird to gawp at at school, you
remained
out of my league, with your beauty
astounding
all of us, though I can’t honestly
say
we ever had a long enough conversation -
long
enough to get to know each other well,
tell
whether or not we had shared values,
which
they do say is necessary for love –
at
least people in the older generation do.
FLAGRANT
RAPSCALLION
I
Apple
blossom cheek
breath
of wine
plates
or confetti
he
sips on disturbed
Nile
insect
spaghetti
II
While
that may be the ABC of aesthetics,
what
I’m getting at is that
if
an hour-glass ending
on
a piece of bliss
could
= a dialysis a love poem
only
hoping to impress her = a motor.
III
If
I could sip from your eyes I would
and
taste your name. Eyes of
deep
undersea green, we
would skinny dip and fish
in
them, drag out numberplates,
mangled
car doors, crumbs.
The
pretext is yours
and
it is also my mum’s.
IV
If
this were a fairy story
there’d
be no happy ending.
No
sumptuous consummation
will
wait for the poet
at
the end of a plot.
I
think of a chain of music from star to star,
but
therein am starting
to
quote my old self again.
V
I’ve
already lost my father
who
was an international art smuggler
nicknamed
Blue or so he said -
though
once upon a time
I
thought art was recourse
to
euphemism for pollen.
The
people from the future,
they
don’t want his business to end.
VI
It’s
good when the daffs come out in spring,
like
yellow trumpets, broadcasting
their
excellent news.
Excellent
News was the ideal
in
my New Beat youth, b/t/w/.
I
was nomadic in those days.
VII
Before
the daffs come out,
we
have snowdrops like
pure,
white flames
in
the heart for love.
The
long, dark tunnel
of
winter awaits us now.
VIII
I
sip tea, I sip tea,
unsweetened
it’s
enough
for me.
I’ve
got a lot of washing up to do.
I
tried to meditate today.
Come.
It’s
good to get the washing
up
done, because it is good
to
make a clean space
for
yourself before
you
write – mess leaks in
to
the brain when
you
are in a messy room.
Now
it’s done I can make a sandwich -
cheese,
ham, lettuce, on special brown bread…
it
has no added sugar unlike white.
At
the moment I am leaving
the
washing up to dry, but
soon
will put it all away.
Then
I can say “hey,
I
pulled my weight today.”
So
that I do, and that’s true…
I
do a little bit more at my screen,
getting
pithy about Place and Nature
then
go outside to collect wood.
Sometimes
I look at Nature and see
invisible
sheet music flowing right to left.
If
you like I’ll mention some scattered perceptions of the Lakes.
The
fell from town,
when
you’re driving towards it,
seems
a great, slumbering
diplodocus,
come
to
fat and die by
the
Irish Sea; but
nearer
the foot
you
can see it is
more
Buddha levitating.
And
when 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, rising
to
its silent scream,
its
steam Ariel returning
on
Caliban’s chain.
Floating
in the quiet
of
a weightless dawn,
the
buzzard is the crux
of
the flux of time,
and
all of Creation
his
dark machine.
There
are benefits living here, like
once
I encountered a rare, red kite,
which
sat resting on a fence post, waiting
for
me like a warning or a reward.
Sometimes
Nature is custodial;
and
at other times, frightening, otherworldly…
in
me, Nature is a great
art exhibition,
but
it can also be an immunity to Reason.
Some
think of the future a lot,
and
how there should still be
a
place for Nature in that future,
to
go exploring
just to look at trees,
which
like
crows,
dogs and
horses
are Man’s friends.
Nature
is the true architecture of State, at
least
unto some, while others would take a less staid and Conservative
attitude.
Here
we find mood as bracken frond.
We
find dry stone walls creeping
in
to the writing even of city folk, visiting.
I
think writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug
called “Strictly Free.” I think the Beautometer would be a good
invention for fell walkers. I
sometimes think of Heaven as a pile of statistics when I ascend the
fell – that I will one day find out the exact number of steps I
have taken up it and whether I held the record.
The
powers that be could be clouds
rowing
overhead
on
their sky blue roads.
And
everything
in Nature is
only
semi-state: even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline.
Well,
nothing
has changed to the map
apart
from the wind-farm beyond
the lap
of
the tide, revolving
its Mercedez Benz arms
to
make electricity for
the
farms -
and
also the cafe down the beach -
since
Norman Nicholson neglected to preach. -
Changes
to the place
have been the net,
global
warming let’s not forget,
the
advent of the mobile phone
and
increased
opportunities
for vice in town.
But
who needs vice when literature is intoxicant enough?
Here,
we
find the beck is a fountain pen.
I
sometimes stand by the beck, listening
in.
(Dr.
Bob says only those with their feet firmly planted can fly.)
I
would be wearing my wellies, listening
to
its most mellifluous applause,
the
way she 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.
Literature
from the city is of alienation,
literature
of rootedness repetitive,
and
the city is the intellectual breeding station,
but
countrylife closer how we ought live.
I
The
reason my new work is not Anon is that I believe a writer has a right
to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close
ranks against you.
The
earliest-written English poems, however, are attributed to Anon, the
earliest recorded line being:
“Well-wrought
this wall: Weirds broke it.”
Weirds
could be weather-systems.
Combining
the fact that the earliest subject is ruin’d architecture and the
earliest recipe known to man is for beer, as discovered by monks,
could make a poem’s definition “a statue of alcohol.”
The
A595 is the main road connecting
the
nuclear sub factory in Barrow and
Sellafield
up the coast. On Sunday
the
posse of motorbikes come
to
this bucolic valley because the road
has
something in the golden sector #
to
do with its bends, its elegant curvature.
I
went walking up the rearside of the fell,
and
some one or two hundred yards in,
up
the path and away from the A595,
encountered
a rare, red kite
with
dawn-charred chest, resting
on
the fence-post, waiting
for
me like a warning or reward…
II
Here
from this seat now
I
look about the kitchen, painted
a
plush, Mediterranean coral,
at
the indomitable things on the walls,
the
notice board of cork,
the
dead telly wearing
mother’s
funeral hat,
the
calendar with local photos,
the
chart depicting the plants of the
Meadows,
the clock, my sister’s art…
It’s
a country farmhouse kitchen
with
an AGA, where most of the cooking
is
home-made, not from packets.
We
have no neighbourhood or amenities
and
country life can be quite dull,
but
recently I felt elated
for
capturing a partial alignment
of
the Plough and oldest fell
on
my new Smartphone.
I. T. might stand for Instant
Travel too,
NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/
Demons,
H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,
ESA for
extra sensory allowance
but I for
one still don’t really know
if Lucy
even happens to be an actual substance.
III
It’s
a myth that countryfolk are stupid
just
because the rhythm of life is slower.
The
region is an actual religion.
It’s
why my dad didn’t take too kindly to racism.
I
was amazed the kite didn’t fly away,
as
I stood there gazing upon it.
It’s
as close to a bird of prey
as
I have ever got out in the wild.
Apparently,
the Vikings named the hills and the Celts named the valleys… this
should be easy to remember because you can picture a Viking being
able to see the mountains from the sea as they travel across; and the
Celts likewise lived in among the valleys so it would be natural they
named them.
Obviate
not titivate, sate
your
quest for meat and fling
to
your bright
ring, your
peerless
orbit, your wheel
of
hunting,
out-stretch
wings
to be
engorged
on air’s
ranting,
rock-strong
sockets
braced against crushing,
uprushing
rivers and sail.
Eventually,
it did fly away,
but
not until I made the decision
to
continue my walk, to leave
the
moment, the spot where I stood.
Seeing
its wings unfold,
seeing
it fly away, I took a left
up
the rear side of the fell, following
the
path beside the beck
and
– still not knowing
what
the bird was, only storing
an
image of it in my brain -
reached
the cairn at the top.
Down
down
down
down
down
deep
blue
below
“eh
up,
mate,”
says
my
mate
and
is
it
safe
to
say
hello?
When
I got down again,
and
back to my home on
this
side of the fell, I
looked
the bird up in a book,
and
found it was a red kite.
For
some reason I thought
I
had found the golden eagle…
there
was a rumour that a pair of them
had
moved into the area.
So
I was actually disappointed
to
find the bird was a rare, red kite,
which
it certainly, judging
by
the book of birds, was.
That
afternoon, I got a phonecall
from
my ex gf on my mobile.
I
told her: “I’ve just seen a rare bird.”
I
also told her I had given up cannabis;
asked
her if she still smoked;
but
what she said and what she was doing
when
she said it, I shall not say.
Simon
says the River Goyt
might
become the Styx in Heaven.
I
say the rhythm of the River Goyt
beats
blood to my head like a cold muscle.
The
word ‘goyt’ might actually be Celtic thought-patterns meeting
Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.
Back
then I liked music by people such as: Boards of Canada, Squarepusher,
Aphex Twin and Autechre. I also still liked some guitar music by
people like Hella and Shellac, and my favourite act of
all were
Radiohead, ever since they filled the hole left behind by Nirvana.
All
of it was better to listen to when high.
Dr.
Robert says: “the brain actually releases cannabinoids naturally
for moments of signification like reaching the top of a mountain. If
you flood your brain with cannabinoids un-naturally, meaning and
signification become aleatory, a mess. There is suddenly meaning at
any point of intersection in the crazy palimpsest of memory.”
Kurt
Cobain sings:
“my
heart is broke,
but
I have some glue,
help
me inhale,
I’ll
mend it with you,
we’ll
float around,
hang
out on clouds,
then
we’ll come down,
have
a hangover.”
I
Now
we’re just enjoying the peace on a calm, autumnal Sunday.
It’s
a time for expanding your threshold of Negative Capability… I am
also taking care of my mother, who injured her arm on holiday. It’s
her birthday today, so I gave her a book, and like every other day
made her a fire and made her a morning coffee.
We
need to get some new Vape juice
because
there is only one bottle left.
Tesco
is going to be closed for a few weeks
after
today so we should stock up.
Apparently
they are going
to
redo the fruit and veg section
so
that the fruit and veg is stored
in
a series of closed compartments.
Now
for the
E as I
try and summon up a purpose for this. It is healing, of the self and
the soul of the world. It is truce between old friends fallen out
like
fools.
It is air for
the tortured soul to breathe. It
is an experiment into more advanced modes of being.
II
Sensation
precedes
thought in art,
chain
is made from same as key,
waves
make gentle
love
to the shore,
homework
tonight is
to
remember your dreams,
and
this we know,
there
is no ‘we,’
I
am the third person
immaculate,
free…
you
know the routine
by
now, the score,
and
more and many more,
but
let’s not dwell
on
school-made things
when
outside birds
sing
with their wings
and
freedom flies
and
freedom flows
and
the music never stops.
PETRA
HYDRA DEUTEMOL
As
you may know by now,
O
some one foot wedge of air away man,
Dear,
gentle reader,
I
took an O. D. the likes of which
it
was said to be genius to survive
but
coming back down
had
lost the ability to ejaculate.
Never
again will I know a woman,
her
containing elasticity
and
texture, her granular wear -
and
I am as yet to properly cry…
there
followed another
O.
D. attempt where I
got
even closer to death
and
I think damaged my brain.
I
don’t want to sound like Sylvia Plath
who
was an egoist, so unlikely
to
last as a major poet,
so
I keep my misery literature
heaped
up in a separate file,
ready
for when the day comes -
but
I just thought you
should
know all the same.
I
used to be dead
against
poets on medication
because
a poet is a translator
of
feelings and the feelings
you
get on chemicals
are
fake – but now
I
have no other option
except
to join in with them.
Cannabis
was exempt
in
the old creed because
I
thought it was organic
and
therefore God’s work and
I
thought Jesus would smoke it
if
he were alive today – and
then
other drugs started to be allowed -
like
ecstasy for example.
The
brain is a
physico-chemical
factory
full
of messages being sent,
signals
and bikes,
overflowing,
overloaded,
all
through the night.
Each
chemical enacts
its
own
physical poem on the body.
Truth
is one is made
of
drugs.
And
to call all drugs “drugs”
represents
a dangerous
narcotisation
of the truth…
Reading
of how a chemical enacts a poem,
and
also of a schoolboy, contemplating
getting
stoned on milk
once
upon a
time
I
dreamed up
the
notion of top-down drug
called
Strictly
Free
that
does what it says
on
the tin, is and makes
you
“strictly free” to consume.
It
is but
the
narcotisation of air
in-between
spliffs.
Naturally,
I don’t do that
any
more; but there was
e’
en relatively recently
a
time of communion
with
someone that knows magic,
which
I can’t claim to know myself.
And
then, if you can get sorted out
with
noxious toxins of
deleterious
self-derision,
if
you know the right person,
as
in have a friend, and
are
signed off work, and
on
benefits with mental illness,
The
Lakes becomes Paradise
just
for a little glimpse
before
it all caves in on you.
Like
not knowing a woman,
I
might not know chemical heaven ever
again.
We
were fiends, my friend
and
I, but killing ourselves really.
When
my mother passes away,
I
wonder what I am to do, whether
I
move in with my
friend,
or
head
down south to Londinium.
My
mother keeps saying
when
she dies this house
is
going to be sold…
I
might need to have a few drinks.
And
I wonder if beer enacts
its
own physical poem
on
the body, and I think
so
and I wonder
of coffee too.
Beer
is a depressant,
that
numbs the pain
and
even instant
coffee
is
still
said
to be a drug.
I
was going to say mother’s
homegrown
tomatoes also
enact
a physical poem
and
they might but then
I
also remembered
even
water
leaves
its own
indelible
stain on the hypothalamus.
So
everything chemical
conducts
a physical poem.
And
acid (which is flung
from
the sun) is fungal.
That’s
the one where poetry
is
most evident. Or I suppose
you
could say ecstasy too,
which
is not psychoactive
but
emotional. Soooooo
you
could say they are
but
different types of poet.
Here
I search for correlation
between
drugs taken and
poets
read but find nothing.
I
think maybe Milton is smack,
but
that’s just rubbish.
The
open freedom of this
game
shrinks back down
to
a narrowing of possibilities.
I
suppose acid would be an Imagist
and
ecstasy would be a Romantic.
I
suppose we’re looking at
a
words as drugs analogy.
Have
you ever ingurgitated, say,
the
word “infradiegetic?”
It’s
not actually a nice word.
It’s
a posh, technical term
from
the corner of the library.
Here
I would like to mindfully
consume
another, like
words
are astronauts
entering
the ear’s orbit,
and
one delicious one
is
the word “noetic.”
It
simply means “of the mind.”
Another
is “abeyance.”
It
means “a temporary absence of change.”
Another
is “propitious.”
I’m
sure you can work that one out,
or
if not
you
can’t look it up
with
the help of your A. I. co-pilot.
And
all along, you find
I
am
under the chemical cosh -
am
consuming meds at a rate of knots -
and
trying
not to write
merely
empty medicine packets.
For
writing can become a machine
for
remembering to take your meds;
and
the most progressive doctors
say
medicine is a waste of packaging;
and
that means they can reach you
in
your lonely solipsism
and
teach you better ways
to
think about
yourself.
THE
SONG
Sooooooooooo
in the end the guys want me to rewrite the one about the time we
smoked a joint, Dr. Calculator Ptom and I, before the rugby match.
I
was playing full-back.
The
ball went up high in the air and I was underneath it.
I
was underneath it and dropped the ball.
It
wasn’t like me at all.
I
dropped it because I was still so befuddled from the joint.
The
dads on the touchline were tutting, asking who was this inept player.
It
was me; and my dad was also there.
He
was embarrassed by me that day
because
he was captain of rugby at his own school
and
in every way the star player of the team.
So
the lesson is not to get high before the Game.
Suddenly
I remember that God
is a game, that the game is based on permutation, that even
a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death. That
The
Lords And The New You Know Who
is also a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre
and the circumference closing in. Yet
this is not a media-compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a
hot, Californian sun. This
is not to say “he who controls the media controls evolution.”
This is not about chance collocations churning up evidence through
the operation of a game.
I
seem to remember we lost the match.
I
seem to remember I was dropped from the team.
HAIRVENT
I
love my mum sometimes.
I
love her always actually.
Sometimes
we get frustrated
but
today was a special day.
She
said “Nirvana would
do
one called ‘Hairvent.’”
I
absolutely cannot wait.
To
listen to it, or to fuck it up,
that
is the question. To
listen
to it, or to fuck it up,
that
is the question. Over
and
out, testing testing 123.
Over
and out, testing testing
123.
Welcome to my presence
and
its intensity. I need
to
let some pressure out.
SALAD
DRESSING
Yesterday
we had a warm salad with roasted beetroot.
Today
we went down the Sunset Cafe at the beach.
I
had a ham sandwich and mum had a quiche.
Her
quiche came with salad with mustard dressing.
When
we came home we walked into the kitchen.
There
was still some salad left from yesterday.
The
flies might’ve been at it but it’s still edible.
I
might polish off yesterday’s salad later on.
Now
it seems to be a time of peace and quiet.
The
day has drifted free of the ice berg like an island.
The
raft has drifted free of the medical gaze.
I
open a pocket of sanity with Negative Capability.
Occasionally
cars whoosh past but not often.
Most
of all, the voices have gone away for now.
Now
the plot is that I have eaten the salad in question.
It
is later and the day is still bright and sunny.
To
what horizon of significance does this tend?
Nothing
but the piping up of the drone of the fridge.
Nothing
but the wind in the bright grass outside.
Nothing
but the slant of light in the kitchen.
Nothing
but a state of mindful awareness I enter.
Nothing
but my mother sneezing upstairs.
Let’s
hope she’s not getting ill all over again.
She
already had to endure a course of antibiotics.
Now
through the thump and dump of meds I see.
Now
my heart is a dumping ground for spare medication.
Now
her sneezing fit has been passed down to me.
I
sit downstairs at a lonely vigil at the kitchen window.
Sometimes
the wind throttles the arthritic window.
Now
we have peace and quiet elongating.
Now
I eat an extremely hot chilli which I like.
I
like it because the pleasure and pain areas of the brain
are
right next door to each other, which explains a lot.
I
still have to wash the hotness down with milk.
In
the morning I crash my face into water.
It’s
a tried and trusted method all round the world.
Now
I drink tea and my mouth is still scorched.
It’s
the feeling of turning off an annoying Youtube video.
It’s
an abeyance in which the soul can languish.
It’s
a soft, putrefied armchair of lethargy for the soul.
It’s
a mirror that is blank to all that is before it.
PART
TWO
MICHAEL
ROWED THE BOAT ASHORE
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
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.
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.
PART
THREE
THE
THROATS OF GLOATING TOADS
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.
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?
