The Warehouse

FROM LE POET DE SEPT ANS

On a Tuesday morning in a magic car we crashed on a ship REC and since we were under the sea the whirlpool pulled on top of the water.

it is too dear to buy

Sweden China

country tail

tender street

share lies

late dry

weak poor

small prinsesses

countries is

stories tables men pens manes

I can see... the ire ii net.

We went out trying to find it AaaaaaaaHH we just feel in an animal trap we threw the rope up some body hang onto it. It was the wizard.

In our new program there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

A clock is only as fast as a cheetah.

It’s all right everyone

the wind is comming they got a lot happy.

I have a scar+ that is red and black.

One day Booster made a sonic solidifying gun Bleep thorte it was an earth mouse-trap.

We had a snowball fight with the Widgets.

This one is a question mark.

I saw that the stone could fit into a hole in the wall.

It was full of dead skeletons.

I went to envestergate and I heard a howling nose I could not find what was making the nose and i was quite afraid.

Who has seen the wind?

He has spines all over him. He has got a nose like a pig. A name for Henry the Hedgehog is urchin, Mr. Prickels and Hedge pig.

John Tucker

English

John Tucker

Harecroft Hall

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

When I was 4 I was on holiday in Sweden.

They said never ride your bike withouta parent.

O well I said and climbed up the rope. When I got to the top of the tree I still could not see what it was that was making such a nose.

At first I was scared stiff and then I plucked up some courage and crept along the floor to the light switch I turned it on carefully not to make a nose.

Just then I heard the noise again. Just then a masked murderer came in through the door with a machine gun i grabbed the firepoker turned rond and knocked him out with it.

One Saturday when I was just about to go out

my dad came into the porch where I was

and saw a scribbly picture on the wall

and a black felt tip pen beside it. He said John

why have you drawn on the wall? I said

it wasn’t me it was Hannah. I’ll take ten pounds

out of your pocket money towards some new

wall paper. I ran up stairs and locked myself in my

bed room. In the end he found out it was

Hannah and didn’t take the money away.

Wolf to shut

Holiday to wash

Marry to fix

Glass

Child the wind-

Fox blows through

Tooth the trees

Clock the rain

Shoe falls

Against the window

PUNK DOG

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.

IS THIS BEING BROADCAST?

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle

squawk squawk gaggle gaggle

bongles has still got the stones

squawk squawk gaggle gaggle

bongles has still got the stones

THE ROAD TO HEAVEN BY NOJ AND THE MOB

L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light. There’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode. Sullen silken sulks we drink the same rain spit is clean and so is dirt. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. FUCK the system. Even a dick gets big erections. The sun hanged himself from a length of daisy chain. Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick, clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time. The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might. The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant. The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met. Break bird with the skin of snake. God rushed into the cold cod quick.

THE LOVE SONG OF DAVID BONKY

“Birds are now known to be highly intelligent like dogs and horses.” – Brian O’ Connell

My name is David Bonky,

I'm a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there's a tear up my jacket

and I heard a magic word:

Trans/ philo/ quis/ ation.

I fly through colours and shapes.

Lightspeed is my passport.

The countries are for apes.

A knock-kneed hummingbird table

on which to land and read

does not seem to me to be

such an unreasonable need.

I'll breakfast on snooker colours,

spark a dullard cigarette,

sail the wind of change and

have no room for regret.

On thrashing wings of silence

I keep out of the Sea Ness cave

and fly amazing headspace

right over the illegal rave.

I deem it not unseemly

to do the monkey bars

with my legs into her open

chamber underneath the stars.

Then the change all falls out

of my pockets as I go

to reach the Promised Land

where the gilly flowers grow.

GIRL ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET

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

She parades the black panther's nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

NECKLACE NOOSE

Necklace noose, reckless truce, drooling before

wet, electric eyes. A salmon escaped the

ancient net. A sprightly hypertext sniper

on Piper At The Gates of Dawn accrued

to the procession. The anguila eel is wet.

A purple parrot perched upon the shoulder

of the pirate squawking “don’t tell Moronika.”

A green one was sent to space through the conch.

A Lion Bar was driven through the economy

in a car and a carfume whooshed from

the unicorn’s bottom - who else would

be the one to make such punkish remark

on global warming? And why did the chicken

cross the road if not to break on through to

the Other Side? I am the Burger King,

I can eat anything. Preferably a Double

Whopper with cheese. There are many

more of these anthropomorphisms where

I am from, where the porcelain laptop is

a Mac and there is no music from a black

hole except in colourful essays in detention

where it seems restriction is liberation,

where it seems colour is not quite enough,

but pool is played with a motley array of

song cells gleaned from rat-ridden scenes,

and the cost of imagery seems to be loss,

and the teacher deems my work to be

on the right track to stardom and fame.

THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG CAMDEN TOWN 1998

MURDER IS DEAD

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,

I wish that I had been there,

been there to saaaaaave Jesus,

I'm sure he meant to please us.

Murder is dead,

murder is dead,

murder is dead.

We're young and filled with semen,

we're going to break some hymen,

we'll make the cops turn in their badges,

we're going over all the edges yeah.

Murder is dead,

murder is dead,

murder is dead.

THE SWITCH THROWN

Oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with rain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost the last thing a glass gene.

Don't follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon Sony's only loaded,

is only loaded in my eyes.

Death will come on black,

silky wings but I will not go.

A soul is endless, oceans severed

and keeeeeeeps a perfect O.

Go drink the ocean with your tea

cup, give your heart far out.

If oceans smile with liquid eyes

then they'll give you a shout.

Too drunkenly I sail the water

on Rimbaud's smoking boat.

With whisky gills primed in fire

I sail the waves to Boot.

Maybe all I need is a length

is a length of metal chain.

To choke the tears, to weigh the

blues, to dullen down the pain.

III

VITAL SIGNS

Smile like a smile just to smile,

cast to heaven for a while...

let's rip holes in the boat,

throw the captain overboard,

throw the angels off the bridge,

death comes and stops me getting

bored of life's soul-machine.

What we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs.

Back to Hell to plunder wings,

let the ritual now begin,

come and ride the waiting beast,

ride it gone into the fire,

ride it to the waiting feast,

my baby's waiting to get higher,

to get higher, to get higher...

what we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs,

yeah feel alive with vital signs.

Come again there's much to do,

don't you know that I love you?

SNAKE SNAKE BUTTERFLY

Snake snake butterfly,

lay me dead &

close my eyes.

Angel serpentine,

she waits on

the Other Side.

Give me your alibi;

give me chains

to stop me fly;

give me night to

soothe my blinded eyes:

so I can see the

secrets of the skies.

We must rise,

freedom falling

from our eyes,

unlock doors,

it's a perfect

time to die,

and it's okay

for baby we'll go insane

but don't reach out

too far for the flame.

Snake snake butterfly,

lead me to the

Other Side.

Angel serpentine,

she waits on

the Other Side.

KILL

My eyes sting, my

teeth are bleeding raw,

too much thought

to make me sick.

Stinky clothes and mouth

become my skin and

all these fruits I want

to, I want to kill.

Give my hope,

surrender to the tide,

you can taaaaaake my

remains but I must

go to wash the

poison from

my eyes before,

before, before I kill.

STAIN

I'm the only one left, left to shoot my

own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile

and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.

Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-

waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts

lament. Come on baby, you know it's e-

asy, don't say maybe, let's go crazy. Death

awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give

me kisses. Death awaits to save me. The

ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.

||||.

OH, I GUESS IT'S LOVE

There is no place that tastes so sweet

A soft asylum by the garden's quiet corners

Voices and bells the resting birds

Enhance the warm night's silence

With careless smoky laughter

Solemn prayers in the church's

Hollow sadness solemn forgives

The slow deliverance

All is well & all is strange

The strangest thoughts to have

Soothed my mind, a small oasis

In the dusky realm, gives me

The power to think & dream

Lying under the moon's crazy figure

A blurred statue in the timeless sky

A hazy blanket covers all

Obligations to return inside

To sleep & retire to the oceans

Nothing could caress

My heart so bruised

More delicately than the crazy air

What? Oh, I guess it's love

It has no place in this crazy world

My drowsy head releases hold

Beneath the sky-turn-ocean-grey

A dusk to lose & forget the purpose

For there is no meaning

Behind our eyes so slow so old

What? Oh, I guess it's love

That forges sleep on our fragile minds

The blurred sunset in the crazy silence

Sacrifices all its treasure

To give me power and no direction

To help me lose my careless way

The moon is a pearl with a lazy voice

& it hums to Death's gentle song

The tune that means all is healed

What? Oh, love, it will

Wound me and forgive me

The graveyard is a place of rest

& the church sighs a place of death

A useless womb for priceless dreams

That run in its dizzy realm

Naked-Luxury-Deathly-Trance

But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

Images before I sleep

Dancing, escaping memory

They seem to have no cares at all

They seem to know the name of love

They seem to be my sacred friends

Ancient messengers, waking at night

But I will forget them & never care

About what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it's love

Just us & love, forever...

THE WISH OF NIGHT

(for Natalia)

Madness swirls deep in the heart

A butterfly resides in you

A tragedy of feelings lost

surrenders to the wish of night

& in this world I can't explain

I know exactly where I am

Inside a crevice of desire

In the dreamy air of a lover's scent

Wherever you take me, that's where I'll be

In the weeping skies my mind gives up

& falls into the arms of sleep

I'd fade to know I thought of you

& the world has risen to my hands

& the earth murmurs beneath my feet

& the light of all that's good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams

I guess that I'm afraid to tread

The purple skies for the risk of a word

But at least I'm sure of fear

As she gives me the strength to feel afraid

A whisper fathomed deep in mine

Well I don't even care to cry

& I don't care to face the edge

& plunge into the oceans dead

& the flame of love has lit my candle

& the sky has echoed my desire

& all the air is drawn into my lungs

& I know the secrets of the shade

& I know the wars that come from peace

& I know the mystery of love

& I know the resilience of the soul

& I'm sure that knowing you is true...

SECRETS IN THE MUD

This is the sound of getting totally f***ed

Of wanting more than gets you recklessly wrecked

Of meeting London in the middle of the Lakes

Which is the land of flying fairy cakes

Of Langdale Pikes sticking out at Kings Cross

Of dawn at sunset and of playtime’s loss

This is the mould that we have to yet break

This is the bird with the skin of a snake

And I’ve already gone straight to A and E

Screaming out my ad-libbed hippy poetry

And all is well that means well in the end

And in the end death is an ancient friend

Death is the birthday of infinity now

This is the sound of slaying the Holy Cow

This is the wanton knife that cuts through it all

This is the apple just about to go and fall

This is the time of really radical change

This is the time for behaving very strange

This is the time when the doors are all cleansed

This is the mental hospital gone round the bend

This is the time of life when pens will be gripped

This is the first time that the band ever tripped

This is the acid-casualty that you require

This is lamenting for the wood in the fire

This is the doors film on the suicide watch

This is the back door left for you on the latch

This is the tribe that lies down in the green grass

And lets the only powers that be all pass

This is the staggering breakdown of morality

This is the day that they have let you go free

(1998 reconstructed)

THE QUIRE

The Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory.

Ancient, gold pages break like fine ash.

A shaft of light shifts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who called this dream to wake?

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.

INVINCIBLE LOVERS

I’ll show you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

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

BIRD

Night arrives like a ghost.

The green kingdom around me

opens up to the starlit laughter.

To hover motionlessly o'er the mellow fields

I'm rising through this careless freewill

like a kestrel from its wood.

Busting for love as every being should.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

But nothing too personal.

Because love is life without drugs.

Because drugs are a bet with the mind.

Because the mind is free to connect in all directions.

Because connection is when two words

thought to be mutually exclusive

meet in Holy Orbit and form an Image.

ECHO CHAMBER

In the cotton mist she

came in shining leather.

Time, it swings

on sighs forever.

She touched my shoulder

like a burning prayer

and sighed as all the

sky was severed.

“Full fathom five”

could not be a-

nother number for

Virgil says “there are

tears in things;” and

O is not a ghost-vowel,

no, but U is a ghost-

vowel– when we're

opened unto the

gloom under

sliver moon and

I slide her over.

Semen spills

like silver water.

We're soon enough

in the flotsam ether.

I KNEW THAT SHE LOVED ME

I escaped last night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep

and the stars murmured

their cool ballad

to the approaching sky.

Secrets hung like ghosts

in the corner of my wanton world

all blurred and drugged too deep

and I knew that she loved me

from her invisible motions

and the dagger in her soft reply.

The questions concealed in her eye.

Her smile a luring prison.

Her blink a beautiful danger.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

And I knew that silence

would soon let slip its whisper,

knew that fantasy

had never been so real

and I knew that she loved me

because I knew everything.

I knew.

DREAM WITH OPEN EYES

(a single by Secret Chord H, used as a radio jingle)

Last night it seemed we couldn't

sleep but maybe I was dreaming.

The world expands inside my

hands it's getting heavy.

Of all the treasures I could

choose I can't seem to decide.

Today the shade was washed

away where I would hide.

Dream with open eyes, come

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come

below and we can fantasise.

Last night it seemed we nearly

died but maybe I was dreaming.

It made me feel sooooooooooooo

alive and soooooooo in love.

INFANT JAZZ POEM

Sometimes perhaps

down opening quiet

I am drawn down

long and alone

and my friend and

my foe recede

into deep sleep.

Sudden and still

like a dawn behind a

screaming veil

where silence

is born and all that's

loose and tight and

all that's light is light

like first morning

with no night.

And wend my way

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live

the last poet's

last poem.

AN INWARD PRAYER

“The initial task was to widen the area of consciousness” - Allen Ginsberg

Blessed are all these miles of madness

bumbling around us

Blessed is Night w/ its centuries

of bright, burning eyes

Blessed is the secret of an inward prayer,

whispered to your soul,

disguised w/ shadow

Blessed is the joy

when tears break from their blue chains

and shatter from your eyes

Blessed is Brahma

and the holiness of Things

O Brahma! Waste me

w/ mine own eyes!

(Atman is Brahma

as the sun its light

cursed the wiseman to God

w/ his final breath)

Blessed is Buddha & Samadhi & Christ

and blessed am I for blessing them

Blessed is connecting to the

Big White Dream

in moments of vast, empty enlightenment

when suddenly wakened

you open reception

to Dark Dream Radio & the Infinite Broadcast

and blessed are its electric currents

(the channels of rhythmic ecstasy)

for Music , Sex and Idea

are the elements of miracle

& grasping your mind

in instant static pain

the sudden rush of apocalypse

like the visitation of God

or the angel in your eyelid

Blessed is falling through leering madness

& waking again a naked boy

Blessed is the sadness in things

and blessed also its joy

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)

& blessed is the rain that heaven sends

it is the life for the poems around us

Blessed are the Four Pillars of Time

Milk Water Whisky Wine

milk is the silver semen of birth

water is the heavenly liquor

whisky is embedded in the soul of the poet

& wine swims through the heart of the gods -

O drown me in the heavenly fluids!

Blessed is the poet

struggling through headache

strung out in harmonious rhythm

like a chain of music from star to star,

beating to joy in a severed heart

Blessed is sin if it kills Ignorance

Blessed is the redness of blood,

The madness of kissing,

The promise of moments

Blessed is the wavering emergence of Now

The friendliness of meeting a stranger

The strangeness of meeting a friend

Blessed is the promise of words

That someday I may dispose of language

Blessed is peace

as blessed is 'FUCK!'

Blessed is the miracle of life

Atheist and holy in one

Blessed is choice and every decision

And choosing never to choose at all

Blessed is the rapture of the slender moon

And the danger in her wanton thigh

And blessed are we for our daring tongues

For being in love w/ being in love

Blessed is our small advance

beneath an ocean of weeping stars

for time is all that time can prove

Blessed is Discovery, Invocation and the dark

Blessed is pain for it shows you can feel

And blessed is death for it means you’re alive

Blessed is wandering the cruel edge

and seeming a fool in quest for height

Blessed is the rambling bardic child

Who never strays from his heart

But on vast miniature journeys through space

He arrives at Conclusion

W/out even thinking

Blessed is thought as absence of thought

So in the great, dark Over-soul of night

Above us all and counting time,

That thought behind

The back of your mind…

Let’s just say you looked into my eyes

And saw the scars of dreams had opened

And saw the glimmer of the gates unlocking

And saw the shadow of the guard recede

Tell the master calling for me

The servant shall not be disturbed

He is drowning himself in the laughing sea

And has seen the snake slowly recoiling

And has felt the womb of conception calling

And has found the Sea of Words

No let’s just say

I came and saw

And you almost heard

My soundless word

Blessed is word as absence of word

Last words change all the rest

And last longest,

Last word

Death.

(1999)

SHADOW PAGE POEM

Waves [squiggle] cross the FTSE [squiggle] and now the Helter Skelter [squiggle] crashes in the electric-sea [squiggle]. Purple and bruised are those chariot-clouds up there in the appalling Night, Dear Paul, whose turn it will soon be to write in all your spareness in this roadbook. Meanwhile I am teaching English as a foreign language to manage the payment of the electricity bills of the unicorn's eye. I sigh and flow with folds of energy white. I stole the whole show with a remit quite - to wear an emotional condom before you fuck my mind, man, that open door to the light, that phone that is off its trolley... to be near you, is to hear you, is to not fear you, is to revere you, and in my soul I have still become alone as Wally. The finest day that I ever had was when I learned to not be angry with my dad, for I am a poet like he before me, and he believes in me, drinks hippy tea, for me. I say it with scissors, their lips open that always you can be my friend, that you are welcome in my home any time, that tea will be ripening on the electric vine. Through the frame of hair I see and hail a new type of writing and it will not fail, but forlorn as fallen autumn leaves is the wave that forever misbehaves... and when I h-a-n-d it all back to you, these inroads in the roadbook of blue, try and harness the energy of the Helter Skelter, roll with The Great Fuck Rhythm againe, river your senses, re-nerve your God, until all inner badness is long gone.

(Lizard Point, 1999)

[NO NAME]

through arteries of galaxies

of memories

to galleries where tapestries

of slaughter hang from falling walls

through the purple corridor

a door is ajar

push it open

gently creaking opening afar

then into the

crumbling tumbling temple

fumble through and stumble on

across the stone across the floors

flat like graves

patterned in shadow

onwards upwards

notice the window

above all stained in

glory-orgasm

w/ the cross of Christ

and the face of you

Holy you

like some ragged tearful stranger

bled to the world

just to say

“anyway

- there is no truth

give up now

& turn away”

it's all too late

you must not wait

follow the shadows

into the shade

head up high

up on to the altar

where stands a candle

forged in Rome

find the candle

& follow it upward

& finally then

find the flame.

LE LITTLE LAPIN ON LE LAWN

Le little lapin on le lawn,

trembling in the dusky dawn,

forlorn as fallen autumn leaves

is the wave that misbehaves,

it makes you melancholy mad,

where the wave-forms terminate,

mind the gap the mirrors clap,

I'll let you off for running late

and dying slowly as the light

pours forth from the glowing east,

the sun a hedgehog everywhere but

slow and Bible-black the beast,

O little lapin on le lawn,

who sheds a secret tear for us all,

sup the flowers like a cup

before the rusty autumn falls.

A PAINTING OF MY DREAM

The image starts as an amber scarab

(like Jung’s symbol) scuttling still

on a hill of sand or a tumulus, which

means a prehistoric burial mound

in the silken desert full of wounds.

The image is of Egyptian mystery

and kings and masked gold and

phaerohs and jewels in the night sky

like stars and the red, triangular

sun of the day. The image though

is not the answer. It appears before me

like mandala. It has been said

the apparition of the mandala

symbol in a dream indicates a

spiritual longing for completion,

perfection o the soul. The image

though is not the answer. The form

floats formless from the void. All

is its shape as it appears before me.

Once I traced my footsteps back,

untrampled now that used to be lost,

into the forest in motionless throe

of something or other I had left.

I wanted to challenge the satyr past

the purlieu at the sylvan frieze,

the satyr at the sad Gates of dusk.

Refuse to move, the guards refused,

filled with rancour and drooling lustfully.

For when I went back in the wood,

deeper and deeper and deeper I strode,

and it was like I could not go back

in childhood to fetch that thing I’d left,

it was gone, what was it, for the

life of me I cannot remember.

CREATE THE DAWN

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaby we create the dawn

behind a veil where silence is born

and dawn conspires with the sea

and everything untrue recedes

and all that's left is you and me

No-one knows how to free you

no-one that is except for meyou

I was bitten by sad Lucozade snakes

but they're all gone up here in the Lakes

while I'm pursuing the redolent fume

of the mating queen into this room

Whom it seems is still in bed

whom it seems will give me head

I dress for Camden Town up here

for I don't have any baby fear

and maybe this is the Promised Land

a place to feel her tiny hand

THE MAD DISTRACTIONARY LAUGHS

The “mad distractionary” holds “the metallurgical

origins of birds.” They speak in a language

called “gagazookzook and bongateebingbong.”

It contains “V-A-E-I-O-U-L” as the true spelling

of 'vowel' and “y.p.o.r.t.n.e.” as the opposite

of 'entropy' - as if it could frame the first, un-

formulated spark of appetency in Nothingness

preceding Creation and its dance in and out

of itself! It's kind of written in wrinkly and

crinkly Christmas wrapping paper. In the mad

distractionary “fluvient coinage has gone.”

Words are described in the mad distractionary as

“astronaut-worms entering the orbit of your ear”.

Language as a whole is more “the emotional

condom of the world.” “Indwellable” means

the opposite of “indomitable” when it comes

to houses in the medicine man's medieval

cinema empoldered from the harbour in

Iceland and playing some meaningless film.

Also know: “Music, Magic and Mystery make

the 3 M's of words” and as the mad distractionary

states “Man is words and 'man' is a word

and words draw bridges across metaphysics

and words make connections between the

first and third persons... already incurring a

great bandwagon of falsity we must presume

is not false in order to make life easier. Words

are, well, only words.” So now you know.

TEACHER OF MY HEART

I have found you you're the Teacher

of my Heart there's only one one

and though my mind is endless old

my tender heart is foolish young

and my timeless impassion'd battles

of emotion have sooooon begun.

You have lost me in a Teachers

whisky bottle drinking down down

down the shipwreck IS the treasure

harboured in my pirate undertown

where visions of the real Unknown

await us there when we drown.

They have told me it's a T-shirt

that's the body worn by the soul

O to have to discorporate and wash

our eyes in the Fairy liquid bowl

it's good for you to know a goal

not the heart of a black hole.

AT THE TRAIN STATION

Two perfect strangers, man and woman,

stand on opposite train station platforms.

They catch each other's eye then look

away, only to check the station clock.

Instead of trying to make conversation,

they listen out for the tannoy and its

annoying voice to make an announcement,

for the thin facsimile of music pouring

from the tinny speaker on the platform.

Why don't they suddenly just resolve:

hey let's fuck a stranger tonight! They

wait, besuited slaves with briefcase

blues, under sad Lucozade lamp-posts.

The car, car of crows can be heard, ominous,

at this juncture of missed opportunities;

then rain starts to fall with mini hands

like a piano piece falling to the ground.

It seems the smooth running of social

intercourse depends on the repression of

emotion, on the negation and denial of

one's most primal instincts, sadly. So

the sensuous mode of being has gone

under Gondwanaland. The mad naked

body dancing on a hillside has gone.

What we have left is the image-saturated

world bogging down the unconscious,

preventing an unmediated experience.

What we have left is postmodern ennui.

LOVERS AND FOOLS

Lovers and fools are breaking their own rules in The Game

mad children play unaware of an end to their game

sailors are losing the world and riding the breeze

angels and thieves are kissing at the tips of the trees

say is the waxen candle worthy of the flame?

You answer the doors when love calls you by the name

pirates and whores are opening the chambers of the sea

if you see the key please don't be afraid to be free

policemen and clowns are stuck in dull towns with the vain

saying hello and welcome to life my name is Pain

gypsies and tramps are keeping oil lamps in the dark

through city streets people beat electric and loose dogs bark

say is the waxen candle worthy of the flame?

You answer the doors when love calls you by the name.

WALKING TO ICELAND

I have walked for miles to this straw bed,

have seen unafear'd a landscape of cloud

carved into paths and roads, grasses and hills,

and know of no epithet to place her beauty,

no painted pantheon of seraphims ready...

the patchwork quilt has lain down below

as I passed by meltwater angels booting

their balls about in sundrenched fields,

to get to this glad and supine repose and

lay my tired body down and wait for sleep...

I've been on the road for many a moon,

known that punctuation is merely brakes,

bird with the skin of snaking in the Lakes,

for the stolen, Dream Factory car I drove

over the edge and into the blue ether...

now behind your eyes where tears dwell

in sacred rivers flowing up the oldest fell,

and break forth from their tiny blue chains,

and break forth from their horse reins, I

let go of all my cares and die in music.

HOPE

I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring

suffuse the air and pervade the senses.

An AEIOU bird

toots its hollow horn

outside on the A595.

A celebratory genesis is everywhere.

Mother earth

is giving birth,

menstruating season

and ovulating dawn.

Fresh lovers maunder

hand in hand and

knee-deep in redolent

flowers into shade

to take repose by

cool, running waters.

Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.

The blue sky arches and swoons,

I bridle the mind and race

apace to the shore where

seabirds scream from the ragged rocks,

O is it their love-song or is their elegy?

Waves make gentle love to the shore.

O beautiful sleepless omen moon

who shines like an electric coin

and seems to be in love with the sea

or at least with her own reflection:

she scatters her jewellery box all around.

Homework tonight is

to remember your dreams.

I prefer telepathy to 10p.

I want to solve the curious

cunt-mystery lying wet and

unattended in her knickers, her lap,

come inside her like an explosion of stars.

PHILOSOPHY CHAT BARN

In the year 2000 my father started to give out small bits of Moroccan pollen to his children to smoke in our den in the barn at the foot of the oldest fell. I opened up, got what I called “the talks,” started imparting axioms as if I were Blake. A list of some of them might run as follows:

- A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.

- Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.

- Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

- Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

- The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.

- Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.

- The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment which is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.

- The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

- The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.

- The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

- When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

- When you lose your concentration you die.

- Your ordinary speech is surreal enough to qualify as ad-libbed poetry.

- There are too many words in the world.

- Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

- The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.

- You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.

- All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.

- Without difference no contradistinction.

- Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

There was also some speech made by myself that could be categorised as of a prophetic character. My brother James, on hearing my axioms said something along the lines of “John you only speak mumbo jumbo. Why don’t you tell me instead what you think of the film Fight Club.”

I said “I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th and I don’t think it a good idea but someone might.”

There was further prophetic speech made by my self. For example I said:

“I look into the dust in that late ray and wonder if one day they will discover something called the God Particle – like God is not extrinsic to matter. I’d like to write a book called The Scientific Papers classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception. It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and a landscape, maybe in India, and I think it impossible to supplant a religion from its indigenous landscape.”

In terms of literary ambitions I said I’d like to replace the archaic sense of the word ‘gay,’ and also find an aesthetic system like the colours of the vowels in English. There were, furthermore, inventions delimited. I said

“I think it would be good if someone invented a word-chord piano, a drug called Strictly Free that is and makes you strictly free to consume, a virtual death machine, a red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball, an holographic horsecock wheeled into the PM’s bedroom, an invisible square of air called MOSAIC BY DARTH VADER stroked on television.”

I got to the end of my speech and said I also think dad’s art smuggling business was recourse to euphemism, that when he says art he means pollen, that he had a pollen farm way up high in the Moroccan mnts. Nothing could be further from the truth and I would hazard a guess that my prescience of September 11th – and other things such as my future University tutor’s unpublished book in name and concept – was possible because if your father is an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue, it can qualify as a new sense through which you can read of future events.

BT TALK TOGETHER

If Freedom and peace of mind

are what you're after you've

made the right choice

with BT Talk Together

with an unlimited number

of local evening and weekend

phonecalls if sorrow

sighs upon your shoulder

find yourself another lover

manoeuvre over backyard fences

angel where do you hide tonight?

I'll make maps of the stars

to find you the soft caressing

breeze to guide you if

you can be in my dream

can I be in yours too?

(co-author’d with Paul Inman)

BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE

Such a bad day at the office

down the pub to get pissed

though I can't afford it

we'll never get a pay rise

stay up till sunrise

call in sick in the morning

spend the whole day mourning

underneath the covers

where the heck is Batman

Sugar Candy Mountain

waiting for some action

heard it brings good fortune

papers want a scandal

tell them the truth

if you can handle

what a deadly headline

where in Hell is Tinkerbell

somewhere alone and dying

dawn calls in sick in the morning

what's the use in trying

don't believe in dying

it's shocking and appalling

it's four o'clock in the morning

and Paradise is boring.

HOLE THROUGH WHICH I SEE THE FUTURE MOTLEY

I sleep in a hole for the Hoover tonight

there's always something not quite right

look at a wall it's not too hard to see

all the cracks and flaws beneath the paint

maybe all we need is to decorate the place

private detectives and secret spies

seem to have uncovered all of my lies,

scars and birthmarks beneath my skin,

should I sever my face with razor blades

to show you some ugly truth w/in

well maybe I should but I'd prefer to

score your flawless body with sin

like two new humans made for life

with default buttons to wipe any slate clean

and grumbling thunder and lightning

daggering down in the God Simulation

in a metal box in a big thunderstorm

is the place for me it could be nice and warm

the world falls past the windowpane

and I think I’m falling in love againe

under the pillow I keep a brown envelope

of spices and hope that we will elope

I drink to the neo London skyline

and toilets that flush with dry, white wine

and stuff too complicated to mention

over the head of Mr. Jackie Treehorn

the root of the creation of beauty is violation

in Crufts as it is in the black angel’s deathsong

SAD HYPOCHONDRIAC

I know she's only ½ a phone call away...

maybe she's got something to say?

Anyway by now her number's probably changed...

seems even numbers can't just stay the same.

You always used to say to me

“to love someone truly is to set them free” -

you always knew better than me

w/ all the senseless dreams I have to see.

I know she's only a daydream away -

transient rainbow not made to stay -

only made of sunlight and tears! -

beauty like that should last for years.

You always used to say to me

“to love someone truly is to set them free” -

you always knew better than me

w/ all the senseless dreams I have to see.

I'm just a sad hypochondriac.

I've got two pens one is red one is black

for all I'm sorry for both the wings I lack.

THE FORMAL HEART

Jerry Springer has gone to rot, breeding

cameramen that descend like vultures, flying

down to a rotten corpse in the desert, feasting

on the soft, gone eyes of the only deadman.

Breakfast telly kept us well-fed, covering

the comedown w/ warm blankets of snow, feeding

little children their pocketful of horrorism, making

the News less accurate than the Simpsons.

It did not surprise me, coming to my feelers

around the Millennium, chatting in the barn,

but I tempered my juvenile dementia as the

war leaked in from the east like a dawn. And

when we were children, exploring New York

my father took me up to the restaurant at the top.

John, John, he said, hold my hand. And

up we went in a lift. In America there you feel

downtrodden. I read the Sports Pages and reckon

winter has her compensations like the red

on the cheek of the girl on the train station

platform. For the fag-end of winter will burn

and then spring is a red horse, and Barnes

has scored a chicken, and Barnes has scored

a liquid noose, and Barnes is a member of society.

The ecstasy pill's gone under the green hill.

The pollen has gone under Gondwanaland.

Sadness gene is equated w/ dreaming gland

and mutation in consciousness itself w/ truth-

too-simple-to-understand like these are my own

gesture-w/out-motion-bones collected from the shore.

I would be glad of another breath of ganja.

(Cambridge 2001, reconstructed)

INSTANT TRAVEL

Sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day

when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara.

On arrival at my destination I am tired, like the sun,

bleached and wide and madding, is tired of shining, and

checking my book for the time find none elapsed.

The ruck-sac of identity is a sense of destiny on

my back. The road works on the way reverberate like

Satan’s sex life or drum and bass. The new air

is a song we have to sing and full of acrid weed.

120 years ago the world was a much stranger place.

Now I have severed my connections, my bridges burned.

Along the lines of The Drunken Boat I drift free,

slide out of responsibility, grow dangerously detached.

On arrival at my destination I am often thirsty and

while my eye imbibes the blue sky like a drink,

I sip on water at the green gorgeous oasis in the

desert where the emerald princess gloats over

all the slaves she has commandeered to serve her.

And like in a film most of it is spilled or spat out.

For all the feast and waste are next door neighbours.

Like the pleasure and pain areas in the brain. In whom

there are more doors than atoms in the universe.

(Cambridge 2001, reconstructed)

HYPERTEXT AT THE GATES OF DAWN

Science has told us that most of the stars

you gaze at tonight are not really there

but illusions of the light that takes so long

to reach the beams of our glistening eyes

that for centuries after the star has died,

it still appears to be hanging there,

like a little, glimmering, crystal tear,

in love w/ the dark, as bright and beautiful

as it would be if it was really there.

(Cambridge 2001, reconstructed)

THE WARNING

(a song in E minor by The Flood, recorded through binaural earphones)

Going to meet with the Otherness,

best go get a new party dress,

play a stone, live in the wilderness,

I'm going to beat with the otherness.

Suddenly their brain is an alien visitation,

suddenly I am the imposter againe,

lying in secret wait of myself,

knife ready to treat the pain.

Now that the Lock Up's a giant brain,

and the earphones are down on the floor,

now that we're sadder, older but no wiser,

let's throw paint at an unhinged door.

The bird in the wood it was definitely a horse,

with solar spike I use the Force,

with R2D2 to cleanse my doors,

I'm just trying to win my Star Wars.

TRUE LOVE DOT COM

Dead clock plodding play a different song // we're waiting for some action and some change to come along // been waiting all night at true love dot com // you're only just starting to notice the mushrooms are still too strong // dead pedestrians thinking in fumes stay in and get fat in your new chat rooms // we chase the wave forms of the dusky dawn w/ black shadow cat-prints going backwards on the lawn // and I confess my open heart is lying w/ her legs apart // and if she said she's in love w/ me I wouldn't go taking it personally // for love has no ego as everybody knows and something inside me she's given me grows // and a playground swing on the vexed edge of life sighs empty and forever and out falls a leaf // and not into love does that green leaf fall where wet Westerly winds swoop and call // we are the glitter on the Christmas trees and not the litter in the filibustering breeze // and the comedown has no value in maths // and the loonies all walk on the wrong paths // and the grass is green on the Other Side // it pulls the ropes of the tide.

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide

on a field-file, a file-field,

a fenceless farm without

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk,

feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped as a

tin of beans in here.

In emergency please

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging

a meaningless hole as if to cure the

spiralling lethargy of Hell.

And when I went into the

woods to bury my soul,

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun!

Down down down down

down deep blue below

“eh up mate” says my mate

and is it safe to say “hello?”

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and

e-mails chatter on

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question

mark in the pack the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the

fallen Autumn leaves

are where bears have

dipped their feet in pots of paint

and danced across the threshold

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman

slow down

with that

fast-food.

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year.

THE FUN POLICE

The Fun Police came through the bedroom wall,

said 'no gaseous music down the hall!'

My purple patch was decidedly blue,

I said 'we're not allowed to mix with you'.

Soon water went for a naked prance,

it was then that Legolas started to dance.

They'll cuff you up in the radio station,

put the microchip of peach into the open.

Noughts and crosses quelled by The Fun Police,

they said 'take off your snakeskin jacket please' -

I said 'I'm going to win the Snowbell Prize',

joking and smoking in their growing eyes.

Effort is inversely proportional to success

so the Fun Police cried and just said “YES!”

and we beat them on the head w/ a beastful flower

and introduced them to the transience of power.

For all that we've lost in order that we gain

we don't need power to concentrate pain,

we can trust others to lose our marbles for us,

our memories included, and for it they'll adore us.

They'll work for us, the Fun Police, on the run,

and share with us their holidays in the sun.

We'll get them to obey our every hyperlink,

and know a man who can, and offer them a drink.

RECONSTRUCTING THE SCORE

Portability is the Apotheosis of Form.

It's not impossible to write an anti-poem.

In the new field of Instant Travel

telescopes are just left to unravel.

Sadness gene and dreaming gland

have long gone under Gondwanaland.

All things must be returned to earth,

surrendered like a rented thing to death.

Mutation in consciousness won't know

if the brain is on a shelf for now.

Truth too simple to understand

may underwrite the name of a land.

Lucy in the soul with demons

still happens to be an actual substance.

Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud,

a rainbow smashed a railway train window.

A baby cannot trip without memories -

I remember every atom ate our eyes.

Our eyes are ingrown in the ocean's

bellyful of wine and forgotten emotions.

Down in the seabed-orchard, down,

there are mermaids prone in the under-town.

There’s new, angelic music inborn

in the inner ear we can hear at dawn.

Those whom the Gods wish to drive mad

are sent music in their heads.

Madness is not something to be

Romanticised as a return to Purity.

Freedom not poetry is the lone bike

riding itself around the town on tick.

Monopoly money properly should

get us all wine and get us all bread.

I put my wounds up on bright flags,

throw notebooks out in black bin bags.

To plug my senses in the mains

might engage !00 % of my brains.

An album by The Flood recorded

through binaural earphones is on soundcloud.

O is the key of water and its soul-

assuring sound, even in rock n roll.

AIR RAID SHELTER

(a song in A minor by The Flood, recorded on binaural earphones)

Air raid shelter, we're in it together,

let's not get entrenched too deeply,

fear and pain's our only motivation,

got to break free from that habit apathy.

Clinging to loveless, sweaty, rubber limbs

won't cure your heart, it's a painful art,

air-raid shelter, we're in it together now,

wrap me away in your wombs and duvets.

See this world from outer space minor,

saaaaaaaaafe distances have found

all our solid, common ground,

echo grammanon habeo amore.

Won't your spaceships come to find me,

pull myself right back to the centre,

attack on all sides, hold you soooooo tight

now that there is noooooo time.

SYMMETRY LIPS

Symmetry lips symmetry lips

kiss me quicks need a fix

make me feel natural and real

cuts heal with a plastic seal

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

now consciousness is everywhere

now consciousness is sentient air

the sky falls apart into place

I crave to sleep behind your face

everything in its proper place

live where the sky and the river freely give

live where the sky and the river freely give.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR

(a song in B by The Flood, recorded on binaural earphones)

Love your neighbour until your girl gets home

don’t flee the town in your neighbour's clothes

love your neighbour in her underwear

I wonder what goes on under there

and repent for all the money you spent.

Love your neighbour when you're all alone

I left my message on your answerphone

love your neighbour with her tricks and lies

ask no questions hear no lies

and repent for all the money you spent.

Love your neighbour when you even can't

like your Uncle Artie loves your Aunt

love your neighbour with her earphones on

love your neighbour with her belt all gone

and repent for all the money you spent.

Love your neighbour with her Rizla walls

love fresh happiness at waterfalls

love a flash-disk full of old-school music

love the covert dreamer's magic

and repent for all the money you spent

HUNGER

(a song in E flat by The Flood, recorded w/ binaural earphones)

I e I e I e have I e I e I e have

I e I e I e have I have Hunger

I'm a sick magnet I e I e I e I'm in want

maybe all I need is a new pair of shades

I'm a craving slave for you

your pleasure's dust your pleasure's just

your pleasure's just your suffering's bait

it's a sucker's fate for you

escape escape escape escape

your home your clothes and all you know

leave no footprint in the snow it's just a photo

escape escape escape your name

your stain your skin your dead routine

for the pristine dream for her

I'm going to get your freshness back

plug my senses in the mains

it's just a bloodrush to my brains

I'm going to get pretty much f***ed up

flee this world on a midnight plane

dance with the aliens and the insane.

WE COULD BE SO HAPPY

Serotonin dopamine

no Codeine or Diazepam

I got ruin'd you got wrecked

let's just say yes to each other’s plans

we could be so ha ha ha happy

Buproprion and Fluoxetine

a toooooooootal loss of all

language-is-thought-control

it's just some sedative we'll

hide away under snow

I wake up dying for some

junk food to save my hole

when all the money has run out

and our housing contract expires

and the pigs come to track us down

the night will be filled with burning fires

the night will be filled with screeching tyres

the night will be filled with burning lyres

we could be so ha ha ha happy

in the Future State of Poetry

on a drug called Strictly Free

on the loss of the cannabis battery.

BINAURAL EARPHONE MEDLEY

(some lesser known numbers by The Flood, recorded through binaural earphones)

Mumrah Greenback Skeletor Shredder Texas Pete Mr. Burns Deceptecons Vader Vader they were all there they were all there // you're playing you're messing you're fucking w/ the real // away away away away in farthest Spain, log on your brain, execute the plane // free the sparrows from the hedgerows nests and cages dissipating off to Africa calm equator sleep in frozen rock wake in sunburn I am the wind-cry robed in shadow // drug me sideways, drug me sideways, drug me north and south, drug me east and west, drug me all around, drug me sideways, // space is big and the edge is the middle and the middle is the edge and John is gone and he left his pink pyjamas on // apple juice apple juice and sweet little pretty pink things apple juice apple juice and sweet little pretty pink things.

CHIEF OF THE BLACKBIRD SPIES

Well I fell up a sycamore tree

and nearly spilled my glass of wine,

and though nobody came for me

I didn't mind it I felt fine,

for I was trading stories

w/ the chief of the black bird spies

amongst new leaves and old branches

that don't know how to tell lies...

He said to forget the job,

sack the boss, and hang the cage

which containeth all your rage

for but the minimum wage.

I said it's easy for you

in your neighbouring Otherness -

be Nature custodial or frightening? -

to avoid the mad enemy Stress.

He said he finds it fun-loving

to tense-hop all around

for cataclysm is catalyst for the cat

that sat on the map of sound.

Quite soon he spread his wings

until his wings were spread

and flew to Morrisons supermarket

for a tamed and manner'd head.

I think we're agreed privation

is the mother of imagery,

and inconsiderate violation

at the root of the creation of beauty.

We bemoaned a lost society

w/ all its malaise and cheap talk,

its word-ways no better than

cheep cheep squawk squawk.

HAIRDRESS THE DAWN

Life is in bubbles flung out of the Tate

knife is in trouble with lucky young Kate

burn and unlearn when she comes round

soon to discern blue sky is on sound

and selling yellow crayons to the market's invisible hand

to underwrite the name of Gondwanaland

I too have explored the shapes of sadness

heartbreaking dawn on the verge of soft madness

a game is a wide, yellow circle with death

the pinpoint centre and selling liquid crystal meth

the circumference is closing in maybe forever

but life does not ask us to be too clever

it asks of us only to attend at the dawn

while someone in a far off room is born

for the very bone-marrow of beauty is to be

now and here and real and feeling free

and freedom flies like an invisible flag

and means that the traveller need carry no bag

and birds are for flying not for special perception

and pepper the bedroom with their machine gun

THE PHILOLOGY OF PROF. JOHN SCHAD

(who would have us write an academic essay as if getting gradually more drunk)

Language speaks man. It’s full of fossils,

coins, corruptions, ossifications; dead metaphors

that the brain is built of; ghost-vowels, consonantal

masses; kaleidoscopes of colour; word-shades,

word-frequencies. It’s worth billions of pounds.

Words like soul, truth, consciousness, love,

infinity, they were sacrosanct to the Romantics;

but are they simply differences in sound

combined with homogenised differences in idea?

Words like taste, intelligence, class, time, take

them off the menu too, for vowels are our souls,

for language speaks man, who is words.

READING MATERIAL

If there were paper under my heart there would

be writing on it and maybe it would be red

like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst

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

scattered, tattered- knicker clouds conceal

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

for a raffle ticket when the fiver-river drones.

That page, my wage, an underground organ,

with its meta-fictional shorthand and triplicate,

something like the opposite of a bus ticket,

taking you on an inward journey - I'd ask her:

surely it would feel shocked not to be legal tender?

[Silecroft Beach]

TORN 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.

WHICHAM VALLEY AS A SCRATCH ON A CD

If a place truly is its own mind,

this one quietly dreams

and falls ever further behind.

There's no Tourist sign to tell

how rich in natural and human history

is this valley by the oldest fell.

The church is built on the foundations

of the oldest stone built monastery

in this back lawn of a Nation.

On Sunday the nook of motorbikes

come for the valley's curves,

the free-flow of troughs and spikes.

Nature's scales are diatonic

and from all background static depression

here is her sonic, spiritual tonic.

The foothill Sea Ness I hear

from a white witch, who proofread for

Norman Nicholson was once 'Seer'.

I've seen some things in my time,

the gearbox of a driverless car,

culminating in the preternatural sublime.

The place is the consolation of the bucolic,

its lure telluric but not atavistic,

its Bede demiurgic, its justice noetic.

THE INDIVISIBLE KING

(a psychtrance number)

Who do you think’s the indivisible king?

His name is writ on a butterfly wing

A fireface moon and a frozen rock sun

Collide in a dream and the dyes start to run

But Hamlet’s been cursed by a shaman with spells

And does not know and words can be cells

You are who you love and not who you are

So set the controls for the prettiest star

The wings of a butterfly will bear my weight

One can be savage and one can be great

My temple is simple it’s inside your brow

Each day is a new religion now

To sleep on the ceiling w/ feelings of love

Or sleep on the feeling w/ star-tracks above

Say is the wick worthy of the flame

And as play dies and becomes the Game

Is ecstasy mc squared or a dove

Is numbness to love just as painful as love

And while I’m uttering crushed butterflies

If you ask no questions you’ll hear no lies

LOVE ON SICKNESS BENEFITS

You'll bet I say this to all the fit girls

but I look at you and see only purple, silken swirls

I'd buy you troves of redolent flowers

the useless proof of a thousand hours

get out of my head, get into my bed, (baby)

To word/ hope/ dream you is not enough

you hit me w/ the pollen it has to be the real stuff

I'd sip from your eyes and taste your very name

like mother's home-made strawberry jam

get out of my head, get into my bed, [baby]

and we can chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots

I see that your eyes are under-sea green

and dream I'm on some yellow submarine

get out of my head, get into my bed, [baby]

If love on sickness benefits can be done

it requires I imagine more imagination

and while I heard a poem is the opposite of bling

I don't need power just reasons to sing

get out of my head, get into my bed, [baby]

PRANK SUICIDE NOTE FOR A MELTING SNOWMAN

A Yellow

A Yellow Pages

A toilet to flush the soul

A Yellow pages will suffice

A toilet to flush the soul down

A Yellow Pages will suffice as a

I never got to invent the colours of the

I never got to invent the colours of the vowels

A Yellow Pages will suffice as a snowman's prank suicide

A Yellow Pages will suffice as a snowman's prank suicide note

H20 may well stand for hypothalamus tattoo forever

May dawn's sun blades behead me like a guillotine

A Yellow Pages will suffice as a snowman's

I dream of release into seamless peace

I cannot wait for sleep w/ no dreams

A Yellow Pages will suffice

A Yellow Pages will

A Yellow Pages

A Yellow

THE GREEN BLUES

(with apologies to David Morley)

I read through the news,

hats off to your blues,

a chimney falls under my head.

I stomach the wood

that tastes very good,

like mopping up gravy with bread.

I glow for the coal,

don't bury your soul,

backwards in spire I get high.

I'd change for the house

that's quiet as a mouse

and emblazon my name in the sky.

I'd slip through the skin

of a thesis as thin

as the Rizla it's in and be born.

I'd burn and unlearn

what names people darn,

with tyger-tongue scream of the dawn.

I'd sip on White Russians,

on white and South African,

and amble to 360 vision.

To take out my eyes and

see in all directions at once

is but one general direction.

WHISPER

I wanted to hear musac from a black

hole by Judas Priest but the guys

sent a parrot after a carrot and

through the conch to outer space

singing 'I won't always be an orange

just because you've sectioned me,

no I won't always be on Orange

just because you've sectioned me

but at any given time I'm working

in a crane' and Jesus said 'Syd by Ray

in a way Spiderman's handwriting

has been too obscene, I rake the

blade over the wishbone of my

legs Breakfast All Day/ gay

teachers can still lay eggs and

I won't always be a lemon just

because you've sectioned me,

no I won't always be on Lennon

just because you've session'd me

but at any given time Oedipus

is spying me up in the shower,

why I'll break the speed of speed,

rendered squander never priceless,

I'll never speed againe, at any given

time I'm a rare aquatic insect.'

(Hackney)

BOOM BOOM BOOM

Boom boom boom well this is not a room

bigger than a room we're going to have a drum

boom boom boom no this is not a dream

bigger than a dream we're going to have drum

we're bounding in magic circles in space

where the face of stars was off of his face

we’ll call it the moon and if we die soon

movements in the air will leave a sparkly trace

and glow in the dark stars on the ceiling

soon to be coming to your cinema screen

move to the music, that air full of feeling,

accentuated by the mad, happening scene

stop that messing around and get into line

maths without answers is like me over you

monopoly money should work on white wine

underneath the dome of unbroken blue

(Hackney)

SCISSORBIRD SPEAK

A scissor bird is spitting out nouns

it knows that planes are the shoes of clowns

I fly The Plough like a kid's red kite

and an elephant's passport is just the night

pen wine fate heaven fix alive more free you gun

O you locked me away last time

as if straight C were a nursery crime

but I'll tell you more of the Future State

It'll know a crumbling statue of Kate

when mine wait eleven sticks drive warm E through fun

a Telephant equates to an Elephone

with signal in this deep underground zone

by now you're just putting anything in

like sprinklings of dirt in a Rizla skin

Zen line mate Devon flicks hive law tree true sun

(Hackney)

SLEEPING POLICEMEN

Biscuits and mild madras curries

bananas and nutbars and Paracetemol -

these things are nice as Spice Girls

they don't do the devil's work on your soul -

maybe now that you're crazy you

can look back and blame your own dog -

but through you we thawed all Antarctica

money and mirror and addled the Pope -

your dad was a fine art smuggler but

you like a burglar decided it was dope -

maybe now that you're ready you can

look back and sanctify dreams -

you knew only to be new only to

get through and talk of true loooove -

detuning all your guitar strings like they

were heart strings you swallowed a dove -

maybe now that you're horny you can

look forwards and get where you're at -

you knew only to be new only to

get through and talk of true loooove.

(Hackney)

CALCULATOR DAWN

Tit butter moat brink notes sprinkle

outside open Darwin window down.

The pulleys are not for bullies.

Unbidden comes the light of dawn.

Birds are smuggling supercars

to an Iranian overlord through

Persia and over the mountains.

Shush. Listen. Tin is their usual

merchandise. Fridja's steamers are

going on sale in the unbroken blue.

The sun is a hedgehog's defensive

needle spill all over the garden.

I watch through the old, Victorian,

stained glass window on the creaky

mezzanine. I feel I should be smashing

a trashcan in a back alley full of cats.

THE TRITE MACHINE

If the flower-press ending on cannabis = dialysis

and the love poem hoping to impress Flora = motor

A. E. I. O. U. to the leaves you can leave on all the

trees in the winter, vowels pure vowels, Immanuel

Kant will come to thee with immanence. I see

her face too soon on Facebook, marshmallow

lambs of snow saying sex not cheese to the camera,

rosy cheeks putting Italy holy, other, non-key

sirens speaking ill migglior fabbro in the background,

life a bit of bread too beautiful bare, wear a veil.

*ketamineguitar*

ICE CREAM VAN

Here comes the ice cream van

so get out your ode to death

for that's what your money is

and he sells liquid crystal meth

Here comes the ice cream van

he'll give you a gun for a grand

and everyone queues up

to join his merry band

Here comes the ice cream van

he turns his menu around

so the customer can procure

things from his map of sound

Here comes the ice cream van

the music he plays is a racket

and what with the things he sells

he's going to make a packet

Here comes the ice cream van

mouldy old death can go home

but remoulding the human form

we still end up in the loam

[R]

[R] is for Revolution

E to the plug and to the mains

V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings

underneath the madding sun

L to the turn of three o’clock

don’t block the U bend in the shower room with hair

fixing the TV aerial

sparkling the drop of rain

look to the sleepless omen moon

and to the top of the telegraph pole

we’ll keep on playing until the power runs out

O let’s have another one

A TRANCE OF STALKS

A trance of stalks

It walks on stilts

Like a stance on talks

Only to the toilet

Then back to bed

To rest its head

Underneath the soft

Pink Panther blanket

And drift to sleep

And dreams of having

Sex with Flora

Whilst reading

Liquid computers

To whom you seem

To be able to save

The dreamwriting

But who on waking

Seem to have crashed

Crash being a verb

With many souls

Still I think I prefer

The stalk to the bud

Prefer the starlight

To the black holes.

BIRTHDAY OF I.A.

You're not a knock-kneed hummingbird

and you're not a birthday of I.A.

and who you are I'll never know now

and if I did I'd still never say

I am your head-banging elephantine

and I cry on the windows of trains

placing bets on raindrops running

down the penny-tasting windowpanes

and through it all I wish you rainbows

made for two and very strange

and somehow what's most familiar

is what really can most estrange

and she says she's my number one groupie

and whatever it is I choose to do

she will worship the ground I stand on

as it's moved by music to morning dew

O so music is organisation when

you're out there in the green garden

smoking a bifter in the ego-loss breeze

kind of doing exactly as you please

TRAVELLING BY XYLOPHONE

Anon harnessed the breeze using tearable

as for organisation use Ariel

who rued the smell in the original

Buntwood cleared it up

butter cutter cuticle

how beautiful is staring

at Pizza Hut or McDonalds

a little litter of glitter

wide it

do little

Shareman opened up

he bore his soul:

“do only in life what feels natural

board a train not knowing where it's headed

maybe Mexico but be careful

sheath-hop and wear a forcefield

and be the change you want to see

maybe a drug called Strictly Free

and go to the new Block Party

to mingle and tingle

and smile and pill

and mill with the spillage

and tangle of people

in the stairwell

and tick it.”

Petman weaned it off

weaned the beck down

to a thin trickle

vowels pure vowels

wheat-horses have it

have a bit of sex

Saul

and Bill it sign it Bill and wait

you almost forgot

half the cable

sucrose garment

unmanned harebell

sensory garden

songcell

halfbeat

medium

steal hull

Banchelaw

bandit

booticross

mydal

moodwing

sing

letgorne

grapple

grove

seth

portal

see

upsuff

hammel

collit

deemily

soven

hall it

kout it

harmy

Sellafield

crime

hoofit

Parliament

PRAYER AT A PURPLE-BLEEDING SCREEN

Black digital light

which art in Hell

follow be thy gnome

hollow be thy game

thy kingdom gone

thy won't be do

in Crufts as it is in

the black angel's death song

give us this day

our crucified pollen

and avenge us

our sacrifices

as we avenge all those

that sacrifice against us

lead us not into gay

and deliver us from Reason

for thine is the kingdom

the power the glory

not for long

fuck you

WHITE EYEBROW

I heard it said

and did not like it either

that the lingua franca

is more likely to be

the least and not the most

poetic language under the sun

for poetry exists in contingencies,

in discrepancies, in inklings,

in nooks and crannies,

and in a similar vein

there is nowt so dead

as an important thing.

When it comes to my poem

about the alignment of

The Plough and oldest fell

Black Combe, a preternatural sublime,

only on the democratic election

of the poet Mr. Obama

I am never sure what to write.

Sometimes when I am getting

dissipated with friends,

I draw a picture of it,

draw a large, dilated M

and the Plough plugged in

to the socket and say

“have you ever heard of this?

This is only visible

from my back garden.

It is an isolated property.”

I never get much of a response.

I am a seer, you see,

and have seen many things,

have seen the new creatures,

have seen the face of stars,

have seen the future

on several occasions,

and of all that I have seen,

this remains the most immense.

But when I am writing

a poem about it, all I can say

is that it's like a game of Tetris

where the pieces are enormous,

or where there's only one piece

and it fills the screen.

And my father contends

that the value of this house

should include the Bigger Picture.

And when he's gone

I must assume

lawnmowing duties

and look after my mother

and get her coal and wood

for the living room fire.

SUNSET TO THE WEST

Swimming in the Irish Sea with my mother,

watched from the stony shore by my poor, dying father,

languishing in wound-healing expiation as a

laughter of seagulls flew past in shark mask replicas,

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 saw that bonfire jaws is Holy,

bonfire jaws is bought and sold and silting gold

leaking out in all directions like mc squared =

swimming in the Irish Sea with my mother,

watched from the stony shore by my poor, dying father,

languishing in wound-healing expiation as a

laughter of seagulls flew past in shark mask replicas.

THE SONGBIRD

(after reading the red on black JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS at the top of the Pompidou Centre)

O il faut que je m’en aille,

with sadness in a backward eye,

what is this new dream

into which I am hurled,

the trumpet wears his

foreskin on the inside,

the mustard has to be English,

the mustard has to be English

and blowing outside in the wild,

where we’ll all lie down

in green grass and smile

for sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and.

Sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and

pass the fallen road sign

saying THINK! in the nettles,

and the mystery of the single

shoe beside the highway,

the open window a roaring lion,

The Beatles’ back catalogue

tumbling from the speaker,

Paul passing you the pen,

and all the world your oyster.

RED KITE TRIPTYCH

Vacuating kite, microphone breath, bollocks to saw.

Not to call God holocori bottomous Rontaur tor.

Obviate not titivate, sate your thirst for sex and

fling to your bright ring, your peerless orbit,

your wheel of hunting, outstretch wings to

be engorged on air’s ranting, rock-strong

sockets braced against crushing uprush-

ing rivers and sail up the coast to

the old closed down Prep school.

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

THE CLOSED DOWN SCHOOL

The conker tree grows old

with expectations as to be harbouring

snooker cue smooth fruit

wrapped in rebarbative

army army helmets there where

fast fit Christian soldier

found out action on tour

your eyes out maaaaaaaaaaan.

CLOCK ON WHICH YOGI BEAR DIES (1)

To break out of frames. To trespass into forbidden gardens. To wash the poison from mine eyes. To see the secrets of the skies. To break Sum Hymen. To make the cops turn in their badges. To go over all the edges yeah. To dream w/ open eyes. To be more fresh, daring and exploratory. To make them sound genuine and believable. To be utterly modern. To make a discovery as big as fire. To overthrow the predominant brain hemisphere and the conscious self-censor. To scar sand birthmarks beneath my skin. To beat w/ the Otherness. To trust chaos to babysit my precious things. To float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds. To expand my threshold of Negative Capability. To affect change through incremental steps. To explore alternative histories suppressed by the over-arching meta-narrative. To plug my senses in the mains and utilise that typo !00% of my brains. To escape the shape of the paper. To advance my sense of Time's maturity, and expand my sense of Infinity's profundity. To allow but a little light shed rather than heat and allow but a little love shared rather than hate. To melt death and attain perfect listening and not remove the key from life. To calibrate the key of telepathic grammar. To walk down the ocular nerve. To flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light. To unloose the mind of form. To de-institutionalise the town. To explore brave new senses on alien planets w/ plants at the poles. To relive life through art.

CLOCK ON WHICH YOGI BEAR DIES (2)

To be the kid that took care of the new creatures. To do the maths for the red skin cell. To write The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. To take the Jews to the face of stars. To write the set-list for Oedipus Wrecks. To start a diy poetry press/ magazine. To get on the radio with a new band, Secret Chord H. To speak against September 11th in 2000, also predict the God Particle from looking at dust, and utter the name and concept of your future university tutor’s unpublished scientific paper. To write a full-mark A-level exam essay. To record music thru’ state of the art binaural earphones, promising to plug your senses in the mains, in a fourth band, The Flood. To write the score for the sheet that would later grow pictures all about how Lucy in the soul with demons is an actual substance. To pick up the effervescent mobile phone reverberating William Tell through every technological inlet in the room and find your father on the other end. To get a first. To attest to the alignment of the Plough and Black Combe. To become diagnosed. To notice a sensory overlay of your name on Piper. To witness a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. To start a new band in Black Hole Myths. To cook the tape whose pause where cut and glued in the reel healed and was gone. To work at a numinous purple bleeding computer screen. To discover the James P D Tucker sheet that bloomed or even grew pictures depicting a lyric from an old song of your own, leading to the equation for the ratio between light-speed falling and gravity pulling down on the sheet that is simply: c/ G = G/ c.

HALATNOST IN CRISIS HOUSE

My bedraggled crow's nest splay

is portable in all directions.

Oh no, oh no, the Spirit of Music

has been lost forever,

down on beautiful, heartbroken,

sentient, rosethirsty earth,

where the wetness is jealous

and the witness is smitten,

went the Spirit of Music when

we thought it lost forever;

and money's not for drying

your eyes in the medicine queue;

and these rude, Nirvana-barcode

fingertips did not touch her;

and the summer moon wears

the ultra-scan of every baby.

DON'T KILL HIPPIES

The Periodic Table of Altered States = puddles

Calculator Tomb = clay

FROZEN (in red) = fire

BY SENSATION (in blue) = sea

Random Access Imagination = rain

The Extinction of the Gun = rainbows

Digitalis Principalis = snow

The Death of A.I. from the Spirit of Music = air

A Trance of Stalks by Prof Quentin Ponsonby = grass

McTruth and Flies = sunlight

The Future State of Poetry = glass

(Hadrian Unit)

BONDING YEARS

“The universe is but a projection of the mind”

spills Calculator Ptom with innocuous vision.

His G note’s green on the fretboard. My blind

mnemonic is “Even A Dick Gets Big Erections.”

While society falls from a high rise buildin

g thinking to itself so far so good, so far so good,

we board a train not knowing where it's headed -

maybe wake under leaves in a suburban wood?

He says “we're the glitter on the Christmas trees

and not the litter in the filibustering breeze.”

We’re woken in Luton compress sans money

as the raucous dawn birds invoke the honey.

We get sent packing back the same way home.

We're getting bored of ash and atoms and foam.

We're swelling with Homeric adventures in towns

where planes, planes are the shoes of clowns.

Indeed we sleep the day away under leaves,

past the purlieu in the sylvan frieze. It’s cold;

and Death is God, as my philosopher friend believes,

and ‘Born Slippy’ evidence dance can have a soul.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

For civilisation is but a thin veneer belied by

dark, arational forces, terrible goats from Hades.

Adventures scintillate more when you may die.

He wanted an imaginary word-chord constructing

piano at the vacillating threshold of resolution

allowed in my band, and thought pretension

a positive quality in art, which is our salvation.

(Hadrian Unit)

PURPLE

Voices also told me to write of the

colour purple. In Steiner homes for autists,

rational but socially inept, the corners

of the rooms are round and purple

because it's less threatening than the geometry

of rightangled corners. My room

turned out a little like that when,

as my dying father lay in the attic,

my screen bloomed a numinous purple

light daubing the walls until the

bedroom, an anagram of boredom,

seemed like a featherlite love poem shop:

a little girl's lava lamp of a room!

sometimes the seeping foxglove aura

vacillated back and forth between

purple and its normal screen light,

refusing to settle for any long period of time.

My bro said I'd caught some virus;

the computer programmer down the pub

just said dying, and he was right,

for by the time Blue passed away,

Blue being the art-smuggling codename

dad used in his shady occupation,

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

and farewell luminous dark of half Denmark!

Now all I can think to say on purple

is this: I would put it in my mouth.

And I would chew on it like a cow

grazes on grass, mulchy and blind.

And I would ingurgitate it fully

not spit it out like a child his dummy.

I would taste it like her name. It's

the colour of mystery and sex and

saudade and longing and shame. And

it's the colour we associate with depth.

When I first looked at the colours of the vowels

I noticed the presence of its absence,

as if you'd expect it there because

it's the colour of deep things.

THE FIREGUARD

[a Russian folksong]

Freedom rules art and science loves too.

Equals love equals and love equals love.

The crown grows upwards from the green.

I am only standing with a banned bird above.

Already the elements have nettlestings for names.

Hollidot is a peaceable, grammatical shapeshifter.

“Compress sans everything” is for Hamlet in flames

and only the static caravan knows a half road Rontaur.

WATER FEATURE

“Water should come free from the tap.” – Tom Woodhall

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

That trots down from the fell’s striated way,

Split with discourteous unicorn hooves,

Brackish to Blue and Blakeian to me,

Brackish to Blue and Blakeian to me.

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

Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,

It falls two feet into a sound as sweet

As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss

That bloom mellifluous on the carnival's street,

That bloom mellifluous on the carnival's street.

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

It gushes down into a double-barrell'd tunnel,

And disappears for a mile or more underground,

And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,

For all the world a good map of sound,

For all the world, a good map of sound.

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

Deep in Optimus Prime leaves blocked the tunnel

And water seeped in under the back door

To scatter an action painting archipelago

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,

Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.

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

Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,

Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,

And record stores close and folk heroes pass

But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,

And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.

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

UNMISTED

Two lines thrown

To an infinite point

Always converge

But not w/ love

Only w/ life

Not w/ the splash

Of swift ellipsis

Into mystic heated wine

But the crash

Of the face into water

Before firestreak'd dawn

Not w/ love

Only w/ life

I want to be clear

Love does not await

Where those fine parallels

Collapse into one

Beyond the burning horizon

For that is a mystification.

A FROND OF BRACKEN

[with apologies to Brian Patten]

You ask me for a poem.

I offer you a frond of bracken.

You say that’s not good enough.

You’re not buying it.

I say how mood

Is also a bracken frond

Drooping down and

That is why I chose it –

To represent ‘mood’

This mundane Monday morning.

You’re not buying it.

You want something textual.

I say I plucked it from the fell

Which turns in summer

From russet to green

Like an homicidal machine.

I plucked it at random at dawn.

You’re still not buying it.

I seem to remember a time,

Taking the old bramble road

At the Augustan/ Romantic

Crucifix w/ you

Where a frond

Of bracken

Would do.

REMEMBERING THE FACE OF STARS

Along the ancient way beside the River Esk,

we puffed our pot at a tarn at perfumed dusk,

perambulated back through concussive dark,

guided by nothing but a cigarette lighter's spark,

came out of the dripping trees into the open,

the universe enlumed, drenched with electric diamonds,

crossed on the stepping stones to the other side

and a fire fish tail well it conspired to glide

across the dashboard like wet, electric semen

and Tom and my hands shot up meaning

we were already pointing up at the face rapt,

the face where the fire fish tail fizzed out

like a wink from its twinkle twinkle little eye

and I won't omit that we emitted a little sigh

like a Fanta can can when away on holiday

in Portugal or Spain where natterjack-sparrows play;

and so by the dark dream radio of the wood

in synchronicity, simultaneity and syncretism we stood

gazing at the face enraptured and enthralled

the face that is now to my myriad mind recalled

when from the river bank Ben came to join us

to have me elongate his eyebeam across the universe

to that face of stars who surely made no nose

and then I was me and they a duo of Jews

and life a little litter of glitter on a cuticle dialling

love under the fleck of epic dereliction forever, meaning

not just a dirt-computer from which we can

download the lowdown of downtime, man,

and everything was amazeballs, yes, yes, yes,

and for once I was not just the solitary witness

but had my friends around me to attest to the vision –

a theophany or not, it was still a revelation.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY ROCK N ROLL CAREER

Languishing in the tepid fluids of elution

in a bath-tub, the last thing a glass gene,

I found mine bike got a tear up the front.

One day it just appeared like hypertext.

I gathered the gang to make an album:

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob.

It was recorded over with radio. Only

the static caravan knows a halfroad Rontaur.

Only the eponymous song remains extant.

But I still recall bits and pieces. Well,

there was one called L to the Pregnant Snorkel

containing inflections of Popperian epistemology,

a chip off the old fissile block – followed

by a song for Ossie the dog, who went

round and round chasing his own tail

and only went upstairs for a trail

of Maltesers. Later my second band were

called Oedipus Wrecks and we played

some good gigs in Camden Town pubs.

My third were Secret Chord H, who got

Dream With Open Eyes on the radio.

Then came my Gap year band, The Flood,

down in Pink Floyd town, Cambridge.

We recorded a demo on binaural earphones.

These days I put others' poetry to music -

Blake, Jim Morrison, Jack Kerouack -

in a secret room called Room 101. When

pressed by voices to lose the book or guitar

in that strange abeyance after The Flood,

I elected to lose the guitar, except

mates keep getting me to play on.

I can't seem to say goodbye to one or

the other, but it doesn't really matter,

in fact I should not listen to voices at all.

CHEESE DREAMS

Di di dit

di di dit

di di dit dit dit

Di di dit

di di dit

di di dit dit dit

Di di dit

di di dit

di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one w/ the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels Immanuel Kant

will come to thee w/ immanence

You come home smacked up you come

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

yeah yeah yeah

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self drving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one w/ the sonic boom

knickers knickers faster than lightning

skin up fall out of bed

and did those feet

in ancient times

rain down, rain down,

come on raindown

and walk the sun

fatter, hippier, less well connected

always walk the hallways

down to create my own

and in the meantime

I'll do the monkey bars w/ my legs

manic depression has enraptured my name

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

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

rainy waif, rain always,

lay back and dream

on a rainy waif

now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

no more la la's

removal van canes will be turned into furniture

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

you never see me dead near an inch of closure

|| | |||| | || | ||||

we are the velvet e's

we're shitting in Cuntington's letterbox

the Roman Rd below

beneath us as we fry

[enter bass organ of 'The End']

WHITE TROUBLE

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

“Literature has started to release serotonin.”

He was on the new designer drug a cathinone and

NPS called 4CMC when he dreamed up the plot.

For me, if plot is the first recourse of the dullard

narrative is the invisible engine of the story.

If plot recalls the dullness of Taxonomy,

narrative is a new bird preceding the gravity

of the word putting it in chains. Plot seems

to operate in the bounds of linear time, and

narrative be what can deploy the plot in an

ever more abstract diagram of the world. Anyhow,

there was an holographic bike out the back

all through the night. The dark was glittering

w/ tinsel. Mangled love was the overall effect.

He saw the world through the frame of angel

hair, there were weird Escherian shapes in

the air, there was light deep inside the dark.

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

For once you remove the inner monologue

you can become an open energy conduit.

Question the comfort and see for yourself.

It's all just telepathic telegraph poles telling you

what to do and what not to do. And once

you become that open energy conduit then

you can start to channel it in different ways.

It's difficult to know what to say after that.

COTERMINOUS ORBIT

She does not know fertile fire from 'fir',

long logopoeia from logs for the dancing fire,

Negative Capability from negative equity,

bonmots from pink, French confectionary,

backward f, forward f, equals running through

from the effects of global warming on the unicorn

under stood as a postmodern, post-Freudian 'id',

the colours of the vowels from alphabet spaghetti,

the Objective Correlative from ironic self-distance,

sprechstimme from kettle steam transcribed as

Ariel returning on Caliban's leash singing

something crude about dungeons for the depraved,

chiasmus from napkin-kissing-gates silting

their electron-haired dandelion-puff, nano-

language from the Nanny State, hypertext poetry

from The Dude's notes on hyper-vision, ostranenie

of perception from South African ostrich pie,

Aurora Florealis from Flora Borealis, the

esemplastic fled away w/ the quadlibetical

from the wire of red plastic on the quad bike in the field,

intelligence distilled into truth from lying

about your age to bed some froward, feckless youth,

seth portal menu-bats eeked to the conker tree

spolar spike but only in the sense woofkitten

voices sever to themselves from the derangement

of the senses to attain the Eartoon, Eartoons

bloomed from barbecued tunes, the anti-

dactylus from the talking pterodactyl, the

psychosensitive flower – talkative and invisible-

from the psychotechnological error, but oh my,

magical woman, aren't you a beautiful one?

THE MACHINIST

A country w/out times names borders laws

is only the other side of the doors.

You're waving for the raven's throne

to usurp the kingdom for your own.

We'll plant a solar panel hexagon road

when we get back into the mood.

We byte the wave of cosmic sadness

hoping it won't lead to madness.

Hallucination's liquid mirror

is often trying to reappear.

The ramparts of your heart are burning

so you have to come to learning.

Hot on the trail of Rimbaud,

Now begins the Fractured Know.

There's no DogMuckels print in the sand

on the lost shores of Gondwanaland.

Intermittence on the conscious/ unconscious border

does not qualify as a disorder.

The Goyt flows a strong brown god

all the way through the Land of Nod.

May Beauty and Truth be a pair of wings

transcending the world of Stuff and Things.

Only tomorrow is covered w/ leaves

which now cometh cover up the waves.

Under the bridge w/ the madman's daughter,

leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are leaves they have in heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

THE NEW HOUSE

Look Fufie I can fee feep!

Birmingham is an English city.

The rhythm of the River Goyt beats blood to my head like a cold muscle. Goyt staff arrive at mine midden ear. Barcode band dunes anon on offer like musac from a black hole by Christ, Susie. Zone of sophisticated voice and bedroom, Tap, turned into Nature reserve. Walk to the morgue and see and smell.

When death dies it becomes All. All plastic contains Paul. All Pauls contain the ideal of souls. All souls contain the ideal of breath. Close up inspection of Grand-darth's Ship does not truly reveal... all plastic is the soul of death; all plastic is the soul of Paul.

Naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws. Both our dads had chainsaws. Both our dads had chainsaws.

It takes large scale Mordor to record on rabbit ears and sand, to give the new dawn a crewcut, to melt evil Hal 9000, to pass through sea-blood into a calm garden, critical. Signed by everwell, she couldn't hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60's.

POEM

Fee the red

beat the swivel

gore a bean

what the money

turn it warless

loot the wheat

cheaple the bottle

crash the hash

bone it good

own it a problem

deal the country

marra the tryst

pull up a cloud

drug the word

read your text

see the guns

on the earth

leg it away

eat the mushroom

chain the laser

sever the O

free the bread

not the doh

we the law

THE POWER-BALLAD OF MARTIN VICIOUS

I can see death and see flippers

coming out of his senses and say

“come closer you f***ing terrorist,

come closer you f***ing terrorist,

come closer you f***ing terrorist.”

It's because I live a life of all time leisure,

all drugs pure and the radiance just right.

I might be wrong but then I might.

Score some dodgy crack and die

here alone with nobody for a name.

I can be Proust and fathom ten

or eleven types of ambiguity and

rue them all cantankerously,

rue them all cantankerously.

It's because I live a dream of my still

working, all love pure and trust in the night.

I might be wrong but then I might.

Score some dodgy crack and die

here alone with nobody for a name.

SOL CAMPBELL'S SOUP

Sooo oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with Pepe Reina.

Soooooo wear an emotional condom

before you fuck my mind McManaman.

Sooooooo take some elaborate notes

on Saami Hypia- vision where

there is nowhere safe to rest your eye.

So eating an every snooker ball

coloured breakfast can help you

to truly log on your du Bruyne.

So painters used to visit the French

Patrick Viera for inspiration.

So Warhol famously reproduced

Sol Campbell's soup as pop art.

So in Rimbaud's French simultaneous

orgasm of man is called simultaneous

Immanuel Petit mort of man

and happens when the witness

confutes the so called lightspeed

law of neuroplasticity that states

it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.

LITTLE JOHNNY'S AILMENT

Today, probably fallen out of youth,

I g-a-v-e clean away the sheet where

pictures depicting an old song I wrote grew

to my brother who first drew the pentimento.

Today, I also gave clean away my old copy

of The Lords And The New Creatures

to an Asian-extract film student still

young and trendy and took both back.

Today, I asked myself if I was foreknown

for having grown or not grown the new

colour in a scar on my foreskin

back in the bath tub at Prep School.

Today, I asked myself if the very CIA

were listening in to my phonecall away

because I'd spoken against Sept 11th

in 2000 whilst still a schoolboy

and I laughed at how they'd only have heard

stuff like “mate have you got any weed?”

and “does this massage parlour

accept full sexual intercourse?”

(Dova Unit)

NATURALISTIC HEALING

Well maybe it is your moral obligation to lie

to all forms of authority when they may say

there is no more pejorative term than human,

that weird, insectivorous species forming

society, bounding in unbroken circles in space,

not getting any closer, treading the broken metaphysics....

and they are wrong and blind to the way

words are not but cunning knives that we say,

love not a paranoid conspiracy but a spontaneous

song to beatific beauty all around! Take us

on the morning we went outdoor swimming

up Ulpha Fell, for some naturalistic healing

after my last release from mental hospital,

those moth-dull days of climbing up the wall:

Always recall: you found the timeless sound

of water pouring through the stones, I found

the plush, frothy fermenting software of green,

you the birdsong hidden in the bushes, then

I the submerged lighter fluid canister blotting

the landscape, then both together – connecting -

the ripple of silver fish nibbling, the first morning,

sitting on the green bank up Ulpha Fell, drying,

for all the true architecture of State should be Nature,

and now I thank you, thank you for being there.

THE RAGING BULL'S BONECHINA SPEECH

“Thank you for dialling 911 you are

through to The Velvet Underground

alas all our lines are busy right now

but if you hold on someone will try

to connect you soon for connection

is heaven and heaven connection

and there is connection between

heaven and vision for vision may

feel in a state of heaven and heaven

only exist in a state of vision I like

to lick the honey between the stars

for I’m the stud on this map of sound.”

THE TREE OUTSIDE THE WINDOW

The tree outside the window rises

in a long Y and to stare at it

as it gently sways not drowning but waving

is like unto seeing as drone is to music

stilling and distilling the air inside the mind

intensifying the present tense until you see

straight through

the empurpled germs

accrued on the windowpane

like equations for hypervision

in their aleatory swirls

to a state more true

to a state more real

like when her photo'd

face becomes an evolutionary

corridor leading back

to the elemental realms

to how things are to

the tree kneeling down

in Nick Drake's detunings

to show a digital cathedral

in amongst the branches

finemesh as a pair of ladies stockings understood

as a new form, a nacreous Pooh Bear dial

SYD BARRETT

He found a dead seal

on the beach washed up,

thought a tonne of bricks

heavier than a tonne of feather.

Only weight wakes the moth.

Robot in the wing in the

fairground. Winston Churchill, she

thinks my version of Dark Globe

better than Syd's. The future,

nascent, latent, imminent,

immanent, incipient, hurtled

to London-in-Cornwall,

while no goat areas spread

like picnic blankets on sods.

In my knife is my lying.

Bertram Huff, the wind

went on tour. To moan

about gout, sea-freeze.

Dare-fling white high

as a kite. Be a quilt and

get some sleep. Draw Drugs

Druid Drew Dregs Drastic.

One more crumble: to

cure testicular Santa.

WICKER CHAIR

Baby I can see

the tree kneel down

in Nick Drake's

detunings before you

maybe it's just

the purple germs accrued

on the windowpane

maybe it's true

love love what's

love halved in chaos

my hypothalamus

traversed the universe

the universe-hearse

is in your soul-

hole life’s not

just a little litter of

glitter on a cuticle

dialling love

under the fleck of

epic dereliction forever

but a dirt-computer

from whom you

can download

the lowdown

of downtime

manoeuvre the

Hoover outside

into the sunshine

down on beautiful,

heartbroken, sentient,

rosethirsty earth where

birth is trauma

A TALE OF TWO GALLERIES

In the Tate Modern I started joking

that the immediate giftshop surrounding

was actually a secret art installation

and we wandered through towards

the galleries and noted the obscene

amount of wasted, empty space everywhere.

I thought of making a spontaneous

tribute to Tracy Emin w/ you in a queue

for a film, and whether i'd get sectioned

againe, then the flashing lights made you

dizzy so we left before we'd seen much

at all, except to recognise the po-mo

trend of witty text-art which neither

of us poets liked. We took a taxi

w/ automatic closing door to the other

Tate, the more traditional one and saw

the Turner room where I whispered

of the Romantic break from Neo-Classical

photographic representation of reality

to include the effect of feeling and

perceiving the world, and you spoke of his

“turmoils of colour merely suggesting

a shipwreck on the sea”. We filed through

to what I joked was 'The Chamber of

Dead Women', recognising Everett's

Ophelia Drowning, which I think

Rimbaud made a poem of, ekphrasis,

though you didn't want to listen, to me

expounding my booklearning, my broken

record from a sad, grey institution, preferring

to liberate the brain from its shelf. Then we

bought two postcards, both useless, one

frantic one vacant, and left the building,

got on the neo London skyline, that rises

ever upward, slightly incongruously.

SEMANTICS IS A ROAD SIGN NOT A PLACE

A mad bike on top of a sign. Hidden dip.

No footway for 400 yards. Esps Farm.

Lane End – Do not follow SAT NAV.

[missing directional arrows and colours I am]

For sale. Now what? I see a horse in

a field. 8% low gradient for 1 ½ miles.

8% keep in low gear. In Beanthwaite

I see a yellow house, in Grizeback

we pass an Ambulance. A595 – 1245

deaths in 5 years. Drive carefully. Danger –

forestry work. Speed cameras. Turning

vehicles. “Tired now?” “I've got a headache.”

WESTERN LAKE DISTRICT. SD59 0ZM.

Oncoming traffic. Oncoming vehicles in

middle of road. Millom 7. P 6 miles.

Broadgate ½. WAGONS TURNING.

For sale. Broadgate ½. Reduce speed now.

Caravans for sale. Traffic lights 200 yards.

THE GREEN. 40. Punchbowl real ale

good food parking. 30. THE HILL. Please

drive slowly through the village. THE HILL

VILLAGE HALL IS ON FACEBOOK. Thank

you for driving slowly through the village.

WORKS ACCESS. Millom 1. Picture of

a cow. Welcome to Millom. Welcome

to Millom Fairtrade town. Please drive

carefully. When red light shows wait here.

ON THE HUNT FOR A BLUNT KNIFE

In the case of Millennial pen knife tools

like a drug called Strictly Free that is

and makes you strictly free to consume,

a Virtual Death Machine, an holographic

horsecock wheeled into the PM’s bedroom,

a red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-

pong ball, an invisible square of air called

‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on live

television and a word-chord constructing

piano, one with words for notes, what’s

wrong with them is that they are not real.

Further mad, Icelandic ideations include

a text message from an alien, having

the mind about you on a screen, a quick

Nirvana button or pill, a website called

true love dot com, a God Simulation

including real live lightning bolts daggering

down, a role in the doors computer game,

a psycho-sensitive fire alarm sounding

out like a demented, stentorian bird,

ideals like Heartbook and the Smartpoem

and as well as Apple or Orange, a whole

fruit salad of inventions, maybe also a

spiritual or germ X-ray acting as a cinema-

tographic super-freeze, plus two new feet

in the spongadiddle and the bongsteroo,

Top of the Poets on magic alphabet radio

and a computer speaking to you in the

style of Rimbaud (translated by Mathieu) -

but still I am gripped by the school wood -

trapped by the gravitational pull of the real.

YOUR HEART MY BEAUTIFUL ENGINE

You sit on the brown, leather sofa o'er there,

brewing tiny storms in your eyes,

leafing through David foster Wallace,

almost but not letting yourself cry,

turquoise housecoat wrapped around you,

pink blanket on lovely lap,

not knowing where the future's headed,

not needing any kind of map.

I read you like a still-life stillborn,

you drift off into the reading,

into the soul's luxuriation, its soap,

its spiralling lethargy, its languishing.

It's not what you say but the way

you say it, so stern. When you're mad,

I perk up pert as a pig's ear pricked to a whistle

and listen in to the sea so sad.

To you my mind is polluted by sex,

vexed by jealousy that's claustrophobic,

broken by fear of fear itself,

and this precludes our natural magic.

You sigh as a poem comes together,

hopeless, unimpressed, tired I imagine

of my antics and too good for me,

your heart my beautiful engine.

THE YOLK

Thank you for dialling 911, you are

through to The Velvet Underground.

I lick the honey between the stars

because I’m the stud on this map of sound.

I can look forward to the future in

a reverent state of rapt uncertainty.

In fact you could say I anticipate

some of The Future State Of Poetry.

Alas no-one can be here right now

to take your call but if you hold on

someone will try to connect you soon

for connection is heaven and heaven connection...

connection is heaven and heaven connection

and there is connection between heaven and vision

for vision may feel in a state of heaven

and heaven may only exist in vision.

I've heard a cloud of powder'd light,

seen wriggling stone and colourful smoke,

and found that in my frying pan

it's impossible to mend a broken yolk.

So thank you for dialling 999, you are

through to Fear And Loathing In

Las Vegas and no doubt know that out

here on the edge there is no sin.

After death, empty, all but a horse

gone under Gondwanaland, giving the floors

in the imminent Future State Of Poetry

the bounciness of kids’ trampolines.

<BEE>

[after a work of visual art by James P D Tucker]

Now that <BEE> may proceed from @

in the international language alphabet

to <BEE> A.W.O.L. in the garden's plush,

frothy, fermenting software of green,

or not to <BEE> unbalanced, that is the

Bullshit Detector, that the lost Beautometer,

prancing water, computer at its side

but an animal in formaldehyde, talking

Poem Records, the garden's seer, radio

stations, climbing the mapless space.

DEBTS TO MANAGE

It is to James P D Tucker that we owe the notion that <BEE> might come after @ in the international language alphabet.

Dr. Bob meanwhile says the symbol [R] might represent the stance, the large R Romantic stance, that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

Dave Morley contends that water’s effect on water might = 0 – 0 ; but what that equals in turn may well depend on whom you ask and why.

My tea goes cold over there on the sideboard. It would be a typical James P D Tucker thing to do to make a cup of tea and leave it lying around, like making an artistic avowal.

Hannah says to keep only four of what has gone on before, four poems from all the morass of them she read, the poems from my now-flown-away youth, and move on.

E minus mc squared, meanwhile, might be said to equal only relative zero; so through water I have seen, divorced of the mind-forged manacles we make.

Actually, bro, I think I was the first one to say that thing about [R], down in the barn in 2000, when I was full of aphorisms, ambitions, inventions, even prophecies that proved true, such as September 11th.

HOW TO BREAK THE LIGHT SPEED LAW OF NEUROPLASTICITY

You're The Juggernaut that's what you are

walk like an Egyptian and wriggle your little wing

like a winged chainsaw flying up in the clouds

swoop down and fuck my soul and everything

For I'm the witness of this scene

I've read the pages of orange and green

I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean

otherwise I'll offend the mating queen

On Grand-darth's Ship I went off a-sailing

suffice to say your horror-packet is served

and when I get back I think I'll give you a ring

for it's the least that you my demon have deserved

For I'm the witness of this scene

I've read the pages of orange and green

I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean

otherwise I'll offend the mating queen

and when you score such a radical goal

it stays w/ you forever in your open, Holy soul

and you get no money and get no headlines too

but you've done what someone's just got to do

THE SUPERSTRING GUITAR

Cool white is the highnote if it's up to me,

cascading down to the deep blue sea -

will blue trousers over the trouser blues

fall down on the Excellent News?

Music penetrates is-ness,

renovates sensation's quest.

Out in the desert the pigeon-stars

ripe w/ new creatures won't bring out the Tsars.

Water splits but the desert's dry.

Stonemouth silence chewing gums by.

Why the high note seems to be white

is the sideways gravity in the smile of night.

The Super String Guitar was electric and was smashed.

Transcendence is the dream of anything squashed.

“You're going to get a dog w/ a laser brain.”

L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.

Impairing the wild pear tree to tears.

Impairing the wild pear tree to pears.

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.

Phew for a minute there you lost the screen.

E = L to the pregnant snorkel.

L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.

BLUE

I am the dead man you killed my son.

My car took a train across the boat

over the bus through the tram and

via the telephone on the aeroplane.

I've seen wit. He's got grit. I can

beat the Germans five to one baby one

in five. Love is the hope the heart

literally needs in order for it to survive

without which it can stop. Emotional

balance is more the gift of the liver.

I can drum up a drum bigger than a

dream bound in the leather of a

Jim Morrison trouser. I can whip up

a frenzy as easy as cream. Pretend

it's still a dream-with-open-eyes-er.

Death is H suspended in deafness,

not the frozen abstract tangential

angel of angles of light thawing in

emotion you want me to mention, but

death is H suspended in deafness.

Hover like the dragonfly over the

pond that codes the kiss of the wind.

FASTER

Looooooooooooove, love, gooooooood for the brain:

the more you eat them the more you go insane.

Loooooooooooooove, love, goooooooood for the heart:

the more you eat them the more you break apart.

They're dissipating energy with spiraling entropy,

they're falsifying visions with indoctrinated feelings,

they're colouring perception with vague mysticism and

you've been plugged in to the mental health system.

Looooooooooooove, love, gooooood for the brain:

the more you eat them the more you go insane.

Looooooooooooove, love, goooooood for the art:

the more you eat them then the miracle will start.

You've got to get sober from the green yellow M.

The street is a bird's nest high atop a ragged tree.

Her being isn't bound by her green yellow them

and the crows are the ones supposed to fix the TV.

With freedom comes energy with energy happiness

with happiness feeling well not just feeling crappiness.

The way she holds Nirvana, the extinction of consciousness,

in a goldfish blink in her eye is quite priceless forever.

HOLLYWOOD MAP OF PRIME

Not behold an evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Not the sun hanged himself from a length of daisy chain!

Not clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick!

Not clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time!

Not the Universal Mind's moon meat man might!

Not the Universal mind's moon meat man meant!

Not the Universal Mind's moon meat man met!

Not in a sensuous graffiti of blind white light!

Not in a sensuous graffiti of blind white Lent!

Not in a sensuous graffiti of blind white let.

Not break bird with the skin of snake, cutting

not crack code with the skin of black, beheading, dethroning,

becoming not God rushed into the cold cod quick!

ANON SAYS

Anon says people are not interested

in poetry anymore like they were

back in T. S. Eliot's day. Anon

says Love in the Age of Facebook

is more interesting than spirals

of epistemological doubt. Anon

says people are not interested

in the new creatures themselves,

that the future of Artificial Intelligence,

the possibility of other dimensions,

of Phillip Pullman-esque portals are

more interesting than the new creatures.

As for the face of stars Anon says

it should not hide under a nickname

like Wordsworth's secret lake but

be called the face of stars. Anon says

if it were him or her he or she

would make some ten by ten

syllable compactions. Anon says

that would be to make a comment on

the digital/decimal world, the quant-

ification of art/ aesthetics, the labeling/

scoring of things out of ten or mul-

tiples of ten. Anon says you should

not make the same mistake as

Pound who tried over and againe

to make it all cohere, you should leave

the magnum opus long. Anon says

it is like it is for a reason, it is a

living work of art. Anon says

computers can confer a spurious sense

of creativity so you should close the

laptop and do something different

like drawing or analogue writing.

Anon remembers from his days of

making glitch electronica what it is

like to overwork on a project.

Anon says and over the phone

to me all of it that he's thinking

of writing againe. “I am thinking,”

Anon says “of writing about a nano-

brain introduced into a computer. Lan-

guage for me is the most interesting

thing about the brain.” He goes on

a bit further and then Anon

says to me “good luck w/ your

awesome poetry man.” So there!

GO FETCH

the setting sun seen as a soft orange gulp,

the yew tree rising in f short, squft Y-shape,

the daisies out there littering the lawn

like little satellite dishes, the dandelions

needing f hfirbrush, not the alphzbet

left zs z suicide note, maybe the Matrix of words

resolving in the scattershot-logicfl, pointillist

pattern of dots on the hospitfl floor, the

sprinkler-w/out-physicfl-form sounding out

f twin-note wfrning fs you lfy out on

the artificial lawn, the bright sleeping pills

above at night, the chains'w pull of the motorway

you once crossed in escaping from your

escorting walker, the tulips out there with their

plush, purple lips swelling fnd opening,

the Poetry Tap of clouds seen browsing through

Cumbrian mental hospitfl glfss only meaning

that all things must pass, lie down in

green grass and smile and muse and wave

and dream and forget, condensed to f single

soft white fossilised dinosaur skeleton floating

beside the nicotine-stained war-torn moon,

the slow black crow black crow – eloquent -

who visits the roof of the non-smoking garden,

the riotous, anarchic, febrile, vernal, verdant,

fervent, fermenting scent of change redolent

on the ego-loss breeze in the sprung spring

kept some one foot width of brick away.

(Hadrian Unit)

E-MAIL FROM AN ALIEN

I sizzle the dream of fine red sand

and step over mountains here in my land

I can equate mutation in consciousness

with truth too simple to understand

My blotchy skin might well never end

or then again it might never begin

the password to my imaginary world

started as Garden and now it's Heroin

I've got no alcohol here in my flat

but the smuggler's dropping me off some soon

I'm content with just myself and the cat

but I still dream on of a distant moon

Palaces are the wench servants of caves

way up here on my ineffable planet

it's highly frowned upon for me to text you

and it took years of subterfuge to plan it

Diagonalised by omnijective interface

of random access co-imagination

I was diagnosed because two of my elders

were on the doors computer game on the Playstation

I work in special fur but am not gay

I'm available for love but you're light years away

my time-machine has got Gucci guns

and runs on love under red, triangular suns

My planet's rings go round and round,

round and round, round and round,

my planet's rings go round and round

like fresh waves in the fallen-off seascape.

LIBRARY

Cliche hurts more than truth.

Where rain falls, falling reigns.

Eartoons are done without hands.

Money is but an ode to death.

Life is not just about naturally

occurring fossils of Jim Morrison's

poetry for the witness but of the

live doors for everyone else too.

Language smuggled out of the

unconscious is a leather boxing

glove protruding from the telly

on a mechanical, metal arm.

Lucy in the soul with demons is

still an actual substance. Voices

only pathologise what might otherwise

be the property of Wonder. Once

an intelligent creature cannot

cope it never copes againe. Schizo-

affective disorder is a disease of

consciousness that only needs one

thing to happen. Ecstasy is a teddy

bear. If after garage and house

comes library, that may be where

we go to learn that full fathom

five thy father lies could not be

another number because Virgil says

'there are tears in things'. Water

dimly broken will definitely not

heal. Oceans smile with liquid

eyes and fill themselves with rain

too deep to feel. Music is the

soft footsteps of the soul. Reading

is the soul's soap. Reading is riding

the lightsaber horse. Ekphrasis is to

the arts as synaesthesia is unto

the senses. Birds are for flying

not for special perception. Feet

are wild. A soul is to grow as a

God is to behead, dethrone, become.

BLUE REVISITED

Blue you are my father's art smuggling nickname.

You charged the Germans for the return of their pastorals

and asked if on the school walk in Eskdale

I shared out my frumpy packet of Fruit Pastilles.

I'm reminded every planet has its own colour

and Calliope – O Muse! - means beautiful face

and that these are my two mangled hands

for plinking the piano up in Rimbaud's Alps.

I only really entertained your art smuggling ring

was recourse to euphemism for pollen

and dreamed of art where pollen is the front -

I hope you got to play with George Best in Heaven.

By my age you'd done considerable things

with your life, had two houses, four kids

in private school, and supported them and your wife -

life is less about books now that you're dead.

HEARTBOOK

Heartbook reborn is the language of eels.

Heartbook is gone with all the hurt that she feels.

Heartbook is blue as it always had to be.

Heartbook the accident that's happening to me.

Heartbook is water-pistols, handbags at dawn.

Heartbook under layers of prurient porn.

Heartbook reborn is the weather and the telly.

Heartbook is leather and Heartbook is smelly.

Heartbook incognito, Heartbook under cover.

Heartbook a lament for an unfaithful lover.

Heartbook has spoken like the first morning.

Heartbook comes without a strobelight warning.

Heartbook is stealth-boating down the river.

Heartbook is writing only read by the liver.

Heartbook is making it up as it goes along.

Heartbook is breaking into spontaneous song.

THE DUDE'S NEW HAIR

The Dude dabbling and smashed at the laptop

eludes accountability. The Dude rapping

and trapped in the attic bleeds real blood.

The Dude snatched and grabbed by the mad light

empties his hand. The Dude bragging and

drab in Accrington Stanley breeds doubt.

You can't touch this. You can't touch this.

The Dude gabbing and yapping on the axis

bores sheep. The Dude – heartbeat, heartbeat -

acting and reacting on the axle-tree-top

moves Night. Guitar ashing and hashing in

the rash judgment be right. Heartbeat. Heartbeat.

Program for understanding go home. Random

cataclysms are catalyst for the cat that sat

on the map of sound, meaning loam.

CRISIS POEM

Lies there shall be no more WKD lies,

for when your piqued social conscience rewakes

upon the crisis of the soul of the world

and all your flowers are plastic fakes,

you'll have to crawl home for a rethink,

the soul divided by the purple, digital wink,

and start againe, and rhyme “fear of change”

with “into something rich and strange;”

and “the effect of global warming on the unicorn”

with “now go raid the blood of iron dawn;”

and “the News reader's plush blowjob lips”

with “the News reader's child-bearing hips;”

and maybe “the asthma of the earth”

with “that fact the trauma of birth;”

and maybe “the outbreak of coronavirus”

with “everything is left in utter chaos;”

and maybe then you'll start to utter truth

that one God left since iconoclastic youth,

which poets should declare atop a marble edifice

for all their politician's fart out of the wrong orifice -

but why be crude, poet in a tender rage?

This virus might well be the test of your Age.

You can give up phet and againe get sober,

go home and write until it's all over -

for as petty as poetry seems to have become -

and as much as you need to be there for mum -

it might lighten the mood at least – we know

no crisis where poetry can not go, and so

I say take peacock feather and peasant blood,

and write and make sure it's not too good,

for with that you might not have difficulty,

and after all it's best to do what comes easily.

A VALUABLE

I think of Cities Of The Red Night -

the human project becoming untenable -

and picture the long, abandoned street

in 28 Days Later, its screenplay

by Alex Garland who wrote The Beach -

on this warm and soft-putrefying day

while I lizard out in the scattered sun -

and a flat comb of light beats the garden up -

licks the surfaces dirty not clean.

Old Hofmann's got a fifth collection out.

His second must've been difficult.

I order that fifth collection and wait -

like waiting is a good thing to do -

for all there's nothing more to be done -

so these are dull days through and through -

and fighting the climate of the times,

my mother is a model frontline keyworker,

though I will turn away to my rhymes -

like Romantic escape from politics -

and tend to my own difficult collection -

stuck out in isolation in the sticks.

THE PAST

Arrived at middle age this fast the past

becomes the fading taste of a dream,

the tang of wasted dawn on the tongue

upon waking early on a Monday morning....

an echo inviting shadows to dance

it's hardly biodegradable/ everlasting gum...

the first half of my life's over too soon.

I too will lay my head down upon

a pile of leaves by a big-hearted, green

bonfire as mystic dusk comes on,

and night with her purple armies that fight,

armies comprised of human emotion,

just like my dad when my gf came round,

around the dawn of the mobile phone.

What corners are there to a soul old friend?

The past is a montage that unrolls in

quick succession, sleeps in the human brain,

a medley of images with triggers and cues,

breeding nostalgia for friends long gone.

The happy days turn to the cosmic blues.

PLANTING A CHERRY TREE

Today I planted a new cherry tree

with my mother, dug

a hole, thinking about

how there's nothing like

digging a meaningless hole

to cure the lethargy that is Hell

or even a hole

at the top of the fell

to make a pile 12 feet high

and make it a mnt so

not a meaningless hole after all.

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 a wheelbarrow

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 while 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 5th Amsterdam trip.

Nothing else has happened today

that is more worthy of a poem

than my planting a tree

with my old dear and if

the day must be a poem

then it might as well be this one,

in which the brain is a tree

rooted in reality, branching to the light.

THE OSTRANENIE OF THE PROVERBS

You can't have your break bird with the skin of snake

and eat it. You can take a horse to water and drink

the horse. Don't forget if you are getting a puppy

for Christmas, THINK and wear a seatbelt. Drink

driving is for life not just for Christmas. One door

closes, another door parades in dandified attire.

We go a month of Mondays and by the time we

arrive, several weird species of insectivorous spy

crawl out of severed telephone cable. Life is not

just like a box of chocolates nor is it just a little

litter of glitter on a cuticle dialling love under the

fleck of epic dereliction forever. One door closes

another one allows for an otter to be exchanged

for a snake over long distances. When in Rome

all roads shit in the woods. The bear is a catholic.

Sticks and stones may break on the beach but

words will never go for a run. By the Combe I

sat down and wept. And did those feet in ancient

times raindown and walk the sun? Never judge

a book by the blurry photograph of the sheet

that grew pictures of my old song on the front.

A SPELL OR MAYBE A CURSE

Break, bird w/ the skin of snake,

seabird w/ the skin of dreams and flake,

stand naked on broken school

and have no clue as to who you are,

you and the child brother who weaned you,

who found you, who ran fast away.

Leave no chaos in your wake.

Turn wet water into wine like turning

turgid lessons into playful break.

Blow the candles off your birthday cake.

Be old, senile as the ancient lake,

(my God it's full of giggling stars

that swap places when no-one is looking),

and be as nothing, for God's sake.

For we are summoned to eat burned steak,

at the end of another busy working week.

Be fair, be averaged out like a wave,

that rises and reaches an ecstatic peak,

soar on high o'er green fields, where

petals fell that made her fall down weak.

Pray not tell of when smoke spoke,

felled and crumbled by a minor earthquake.

Leave w/ her hurts in your bark,

bite the bullet in your swelling beak,

begging the whole wide world to birth.

Africa, soon may mend your ache.

Thailand, craft the love you make.

London, let us off the secrets we leak,

the laws we break, the lies we speak.

Curse the lies, and up w/ the cheek.

Long the bogroll out and allow

the baby's kick to not be a fake.

Morning has broken w/ a bone to pick.

A chick flick channel to drink until you choke.

To watch until it makes you sick.

'Luke,' the first voice said, it said 'Luke' -

and that it was a “syllabubble” is my take.

Now there are millions as if by fluke,

raining e-mails down on Nick Drake.

Raining e-mails down on the Duke.

Rein back the voices, the eels of children,

silvered, and let me take a toke

on the Nirvana-blue solar spike

w/ whom I battle or just a long stick.

Stick to the backbeat on the click track.

Lay me down on my long back

and let me take a good long look

up at the lake, shining w/ stars, and like.

Let electricity run through the beck.

Let us seething wet meet in fleck.

Let pornography pan out in the system

that we arraign and inveigh against in my book.

Lo and behold, here comes a shock.

A numpty comes in a whole flock,

a dream escape from a mean old rock,

lowered down from a tower block.

Lo and behold, we took your rook

and hold your fate in our hands

and choose w/ it to burn the black,

back in the mansion of J. S. Bach.

Mine b/t/w/ is the book that shook.

Look under the rock where I crawled into

a nook too soon to sign the guitar pick.

Loom on high o'er the low fields

where grass can grow so creamy and thick,

seek the wick of the candlestick.

Look not for the time on the kitchen clock.

We've agreed there is none, no joke.

Gordon Ramsey knows how to cook.

Check the back, for a new word

or two describing my new work.

The porcelain laptop is an Apple Mac.

The fridge is full of delicious pork.

Smashed, I type, my fingers have crashed,

on a screen where before was board and chalk,

when they may need to go for a walk.

They mean goodnight, mean God bless,

and be not afear'd of the dark,

I'm here whenever you need to talk,

and although I might not be sunny as Blake,

at least I no longer ship around five bags

for a black dude on a riot-stolen bike.

MOVING FORWARD

All work no play makes one a dull Homo-ludens...

I go round and round like Ossie the dog chasing his tail.

It's feckless, it's fruitless, I need to be more efficacious,

the witness to the two new creatures been and gone

needs to get back where he once belonged and that's

not necessarily smoking a joint with my friend Paul

who knew nothing about any new creatures at all -

but where it is I should be has never been determined

and could be a new direction, and could be singing.

Singing a new song, the true blue song of Man. I can

pick up a guitar and blow your mind, make you believe

I am the new Syd Barrett or Kurt Cobain. Alas I am

too old for that now and have been there and done it all.

I contemplate going to Cambridge by train like I

would in days gone to meet Paul and talk all that

light evening jazz, unhook that inner book as good

as Proust everyone has. A sheet to sleep under

was a luxury in those nomadic days. On floors

under socks and curtains I'd often re-wake and bake

and fuel the new me, sizzle the dream, place a

bet with the mind, the drizzle outside a vision

or so it would seem. So no I will not go back. I

will not pester Paul and his family. You cannot

escape what's inside just by changing the four walls

which immure you. Escape is never the safest path in life.

There is more soul to stay. Leaves on the line will

probably keep me at bay, delay me all day, anyway.

So to the neo London skyline I raise my cup of tea

from all the way up here in the Lake District by the sea

in which the sunset has already put out its giant spliff,

and resign myself to this gravity-trapped chair of oak,

allowing the natural peace to settle around me. If

it naturally happens to settle in the shape of a bear

I am not one to particularly care, but I might wonder

what else it might have been, given some work.

We sleep in that fire, with the deep-sea creatures.

ON MY LIST

McBreastmilk McBreastmilk don't feed your kids,

it comes in paint-pots with impossible lids.

If you want credit in the soul it would seem

you've got to smear in gentle face erasing cream.

Get an extra kid free when you spend 99p

and Freefall 0800 down your own impunity.

I've tried it the rope went down the black hole.

They're avoiding the questions deep in your soul.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the mating queen in her hive.

I see state of head is more than Head of State

reborn as a massive, gaseous statue of Kate;

and Monster Munch can gobble up your food;

and Cancerel will always sweeten the stewed

carfume coffee in this liminal afterlounge

where Flora says “it makes most people cringe”

and “it has to be cheap as chips” – poetry! -

but McTruth And Flies will never set you free.

HELIUM AUBADE

I poke the morning in the arm

setting off the garden's fire alarm

the early bird catches the worm

while I sip on tea lukewarm

the resident pheasant has a name

he's MC Hammer in the game

but in real life it's just a shame

Dr. Robotnik is to blame

the milk lady might spill the milk

it's full fat for that's my ilk

it coats the throat w/ a lining of silk

and darkens tea already black

now the tide has all gone out

the dawn trees sway dark coral about

my head's been done in by a doubt

a hooligan a vandal and a lout

Fridja's steamers are going on sale

a mad C.V. is going stale

a cinema screen will ooze w/ ale

upon the fondling of the sail

the birds are peppering the day

the dawn tree's coral is still in sway

inside the globe there is a play

and it's called the big glass day

AGGREGATE STAINS

For money, you cannot ignore them,

the house-pipes glugging a guilty gulp from

a big, culpable jug of the ug of drug or

smuggle or ugly truth revealed inside.

You wish to make it chime like bells,

reverberating up in the fells and strike

a warm, psychic chord, using a word-hoard

including the new dog Baxter's bark.

This time, you hope to note the loose,

Betfair jingle of shingle lifted from

the big, flat bird-table when cars arrive in

Cumpstones drive or if they leave.

You intend to reference the MacBethian

treeline of windmills, w/ their Mercedez

Benz sign arms revolving out there

on the blur and seam of the Irish Sea.

As a fellwalker you smell a poem on

the breeze wherever you walk in this

bucolic spot, encouraged by the grizzly

drone of the tractor in the background.

You love the fresh, redolent, enervating

scent of change fermenting on the breeze,

the ferment of music in your head,

the tidal roar of wind in the trees.

The edge of The National Park is truly

demarcated by traffic lights, on the

bridge over the trout-brown Duddon,

drawn w/ appropriate faces for the waiting.

How the Plough alignment, holy cow,

that goes by the name of “white eyebrow,”

has only worked for the poet Mr. Obama

in my whole lifetime, I do not know.

Literature from the city is of alienation

and born from rootedness, it's repetitive,

while if the city's intellectual breeding ground,

rural life is closer to how we ought live.

It's but a myth that countryfolk are dim

just because the rhythm of life is slower,

and that skunkplant green-houses stomp

on the tops of fells in Goretex boots at night.

You reckon the artistic centre of the universe

is ubiquitous, the same ideas available

everywhere on Tap, and a religion can not

be transplanted from its landscape.

The Enlightenment is the simultaneous

astrological and sociological de-centering

of Man and the White House its child

in terms of both philosophy and build.

A bullet to the top of the telegraph pole

standing in the Combe field before the fell

will only wed you to the mating queen in dreams

and the pole itself is already Robert Lowell.

My brother and I mow the grass here

for nothing, for mother, and we share

the workload, dividing the front and back

and it takes a day, still excluding up the beck.

MRS BLOGGINS' GOLDFISH HAS DIED!

That is the shocking truth revealed inside,

a burlesque newsprint headline, though I was

only farting out of the wrong orifice soz.

The Tower, that is a mad childishing, containing

the fume of the mating queen, a mystery -

and a vanished line: “history is a way of thinking

about history w/out thinking about history.”

Gone are the new creatures like pudding,

though we spare several weird species of insect

crawling out of severed telephone cable,

as if to have vision is to have tunnel vision.

I quite like shoplifters of the world uniting

in a loose, nerveless ballet of looting,

when weird sudden giants have knocked a new door

that will not lock for all the docs of the law.

It is later that we think said WH Auden,

like meaning comes after in riots and art,

like Rimbaud bemoaning the peasants only

revolting to loot and burn, no coup d'etat.

If liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions

and it leads to Hamlet's harmatia irresolution,

pragmatism can be the reactivation

of an attitudinisation in that situation.

A SIGN OF LIFE

Why is the news always so dour?

Why do they never say a new flower

has broken through the new concrete

laid down on the Cambridge street?

And the touch of rain against the skin

is better as a value than heroin?

- I am backtracking to days of youth,

of discussing the power of McTruth.

And I think sumptuous consummation

better than mindless consumption,

consumerism and consumeritis;

and I still love the scent of clematis.

And I love the north for lucid light,

its fresher air and quieter night.

And I say No Nukes Is Good Nukes -

proffered up like a baby pukes.

And I've subscribed to the Green Party

and I'm renowned for being arty

and back in the day things were quite green,

the colour of Gondwanaland gone.

A murder has long occurred, dawn

was found cold on the edge of town. -

The stranger who leans in at the bar

and whispers 'whisky' has not gone far.

The effect of global warming on the unicorn

has succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Writing Bart Simpson's suicide note

appeals to the real in the poetic art.

Soon we'll run out of room in the ground

for the dead who'll have to lie around.

A drug called Strictly Free that does

what it says on the tin could be a buzz.

If earth has a CNS, air temerity,

water memory and fire fecundity,

why don't they say that on the news?

They choose to lose, renewing the bruise.

The lead petrol pool does not know

it contains all the colours of the rainbow.

I prefer its smell to the Christmas tree -

ever since the age of three.

The summer rain falls w/ as many hands

as there are names for new rock bands.

Look - the earth is no ordinary planet

but the teacher says the world has had it.

Quentin Ponsonby's leaflet campaign

will not ease off terror's pain.

Rhyme is no good instrument for

any poem on the subject of fear.

I am aware eco-poetry in all fairness

is not a green movement but an awareness.

The Strange Attractor lingers on the border,

in Chaos Theory, of chaos and order.

The Slow Art Movement arraigns

loud mouthed monoculture at the reins.

The Linear is a single outdoor line

but as a new form it is not mine.

I read the complete series of The Hardy Boys

when I was newly evolved out of toys.

All things must be returned to earth,

who knows all about the trauma of birth.

I'll ring the world up from outer space

and comment on its pretty face.

RANDOM ACCESS CO-IMAGINATION

Simon says The River Goyt

might become the Styx in Heaven.

Will says Hollidot is a peaceable,

grammatical shapeshifter.

I say oceans smile with liquid

eyes and fill themselves with rain.

Dave says only the static caravan

knows a halfroad Rontaur.

James says let's have one more

crumble from dad's pollen.

Jesus sits at the right hand

of the Lord God our Father.

Paul asks wear an emotional

condom before you f**k my mind, man.

Mother says imagination is a

muscle and language a creature.

Hal says I know you spoke

against September 11th in 2000.

Mark knows that I said a clock

is only as fast as a cheetah.

Andy says “I know the chords

to this tune by Bob Dylan.”

Kit says Bob Dylan invented

rap, he was the first rapper.

Hannah says the main attraction

of drug-taking is the connections

you make with other people -

but I for one will just have butter.

Stef says I'm right it's impossible

to remember a new yellow line.

Mother says I must remember

when I smoke to shut the door.

James says I was right that

dad used to smuggle pollen

and that the art smuggling story

was just an elaborate cover.

Mark says something like there

is no virtue beyond fashion -

or was it no vice I cannot

quite remember anymore.

THE MOTH

May mandibles mumble “marry me!”

to the pulchritudinous, nubile sylph

of dreams, and who knows, may she

answer “yes I'll be your wife,”

and may we all grow up to be

now and here and real in life.

Feeling too, proving love not death...

and may we park the driverless car

and be cool, not know sexual dearth,

but know of her soft, mangled jaw,

down on sentient, rosethirsty earth,

where all the stars seem so far.

May the Ancient Night capsize

the cave-skull of the Undying Worm

and may we all grow up to be wise,

and not be terrorists, and park at the farm

and look her in the emerald eyes

and gaze and muse and love and dream...

for the very bonemarrow of beauty

is to be here and now and real -

and may we all fulfill our duty

and not want to cheat or steal -

and may we not be made to feel lonely -

for lonely is no way to feel at all -

may we seat the blood in its Roman throne

and decant the moaning wine of sighs

and on our dying, when all alone,

may we have sipped from her eyes,

known love under stars, and flown

in freewheeling machines over the seas.

May we feel the resin in our souls,

crushed with butterfly wing, mascara bruise,

velvet and feather, may the holes

hold out in the soles of our shoes,

and may we not live in goldfish bowls

but turn on to the excellent news.

May grey turn blue and may red wear

a glittery dress to the new ball,

may all our deals be right and fair,

may not our angels come to fall,

may the circle fall in love with the square,

may the door not come off the wall.

May you be you and me be me,

may we speak not in stuffed double,

may all manner of things be free,

may we keep out of the way of trouble,

may our hour of darkness now be

gone and may no-one burst this bubble.

May we all wear what we want,

may the sleeping bodies wake,

may the sea not give up the hunt,

may the loving feeling not be fake,

may the pollen not have to be a front

for the art that the mad people make.

May the face of stars come down

from its sweet picnic in the sky,

may the guitars between the stars be tuned

into a beautiful, new kind of key,

may the new songs not all be drones,

may the free life never have to die.

May the new dawn mesh the best

of my new writing into a new look book,

may the myriad mess pass the test,

may the people even take a look,

where the metal vest of the West

is buried in too deep for its own sake.

May the gushing beck flow on

reminding of music but not the wood,

may the lamb meat not be gone,

may the remnant day be good,

may my loving brother's son

be born like he'd hoped he would.

May we be aloft on states of ecstasy,

may the local town celebrate together,

may the way ahead still be free,

may the sign of your day be purple heather,

may the world not come to see

falling frogs in its new weather.

May madness not obfuscate truth,

may I be a decent, loving person,

may we be free as we were in our youth,

may our conditions not worsen,

may we not surrender like a rented thing to death,

may we all learn well to listen.

May the gone things be retrieved,

may the lost and last E be regained,

may the dreams we have be achieved,

may the consciousness not be stained,

may my new look book not have deceived,

may I now look at the river I've trained.

May I be sensible, know when to stop,

may I heed the need for a warning,

may we not sell our souls to pop,

may we be happy with the morning,

may the sad raindrops no longer drop

on the new patio at the amazing dawning.

May the tone and colour of love be one,

may the mad bankmachine learn to lend,

may people be free to have fun,

may knowledge not be pretend,

may Kate do well under the sun,

may Kit my puppet friend understand.

May diamonds shine under the earth

and in the branches of the tree of heaven,

may we dig deep for them both,

may we let our children imagine,

may we shock only with new truth,

may we be better than Dylan and Lennon.

May the slippery lipread switch off

and the late conveyor belt of poetry

not like an engine splutter and cough,

may love and happiness happen more easily,

may a playground swing on the edge of life

concur with the fall of a leaf for all eternity.

AUTUMN AS OPTIMUS PRIME

Autumn has come who by my book

makes Optimus Prime in the reckless

compass which we spin. And much like

it comes in huge beer keggs, we bless

the air with plaintive, wistful, melancholic,

elegiac, applestasting note and tone.

In the garden, green and bucolic,

the apples are starting to fall down...

the wasps leave fag burns in their skin.

Northern and slowgrown, it seems

they have toenails embedded in

their apple cores in mum's dreams.

The backdrop of the fell has gone

from green to the colour of copper coin,

a russety brown that can remind one

of dad's baggy hammock; and down

to the ground the leaves will fall

full of parataxis married to catabasis.

Then the trees in the woods will be all

naked in branches and treefingers.

Already the wind is in mourning

and moving through the trees so soon,

colour-blind until the fair morning

sunlight arrows down from the sun.

THE NEW BEAT

How love and death are best defined

in terms of intelligence distilled into truth

matters little now that this world is gone

under Gondwanaland, and us too;

but at least we can say we lived our lives

to the full, stretched our potential, knew

the impunity of being true to ourselves, which

was only being what we dreamed we were.

At least we knew love under the stars,

dared to dream, to feel all, to see free.

No archaic-hearted words could fathom

the privation we seem to be about to forego –

and so the cold vacuity of space will grow

emptied of the human form and hang about

like a Mark Rothko painting on the wall of

God forever without any senses to perceive it,

to live it and take it in. – The irresponsible

matter of the elements can reign againe,

like a romance of chemicals and dust –

and I trust that silence will win – but I

thank you for the good times we shared,

the inspiration you gave me to write, despite

the fact all our poems were useless for the end

was always going to arrive, marrying

the prelapsarian and the eschatological,

into one ultimate terminal and end-point.

The good book says loss is the mother of

imagery, intimation with death breeds new

truth, but how we will ever know that now

I do not know, and would you like

to see my insect collection, and has

Pooh Bear found his inward God on a plane,

and shall we run away and have a jam?

LOOK TO THE PEACHYVAN

(a song heard in dreams)

Look to the Peachyvan

every moment that you can,

to eating sweets on the back of the bus,

and playing Tetris too.

Look to the Peachyvan,

driven by the driver man,

carrying kids to school and back,

comfortable as an old shoe.

Look to the Peachyvan,

and have a new contingency plan,

it's done some miles, heard some song,

the kids say it's a banger.

Look to the Peachyvan,

drawing Alice closer to Pan,

long live the birds and the bees,

and don't end on a cliffhanger.

Look to the Peachyvan,

see the triumph if you can,

if the song seems it came in dreams,

it's probably because it did.

Look to the Peachyvan,

try and revert imagination's ban,

the effect of global warming on

the unicorn is a postmodern id.

THE COLOURS OF THE DAWN AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS

I wake from a dream-meet experiment in fleck

at the break of day and the crow is so black,

the grass so green, the sky is so blue,

it seems the world is in rainbows, remade anew.

It's all so fresh it dissimulates red blood.

Up here in the land of propitious mud.

I see the whole gulp of sun lolling through

the frame of a black, thorny tree splinter into

a million needles of blind white light,

a coruscation of divinity after the Night.

The yellow WARNING sign on the telegraph

pole and the pinkish tint to the half-

a-mile-away neighbour's house make fuller

a survey of every snooker ball colour

in the garden. The yew tree is a traditional

Christian symbol, but completely original,

gathering her purple in her dark boughs

as I hear the baying of the newborn cows.

There's orange juice in the silver fridge;

and the latter object would be hard to budge.

Colour: the subject of philosophers near death:

but I should be years from my last breath!

The balls are broken, the Scrambler Suit

I wear resounds what I can not compute.

A dawn is an Eden and the story is the same -

life is clean and life is green inside a flame.

SIX PRECEPTS

1. The so-called truth that “Barnes has scored a chicken” also, in time, comes to mean its opposite, comes to mean “Barnes hasn't scored a chicken.”

2. The future of A.I., the possibility of other dimensions, Pullman-esque portals are more interesting than the new creatures themselves.

3. The bird in the wood: it was not the demented, harrowing goose from the end of Pink Floyd's 'Bike' if soundwave recognition qualifies a species.

4. The effects of acid i.e. LSD and of acid-rain on an imaginary species should equal the same, i.e. nothing; but the counter-argument here is that there can be no more proof of something being real than saying it is imagined.

5. If there were ever a Lightspeed Law of Neuroplasticity, it would only be that it is impossible to remember a new creature or rather a new yellow line.

6. When they say there's no such thing as a new creature, nothing new under the sun, this is no more true than saying there is no “after” the new creatures themselves.

BUZZARD

(for Flora)

Birds are for flying not for special perception.

The buzzard is the crux of the flux of Time.

In the upper echelons of air it hangs at dawn,

Waiting to swoop down and mug its victim.

Its partner also floats above, encircling air,

Over the churchfield replete with its cows,

On wings we would wear in heaven, where,

Who knows, maybe every good boy goes.

Humbled, I'm a witless blip down on earth

Living inside an evanescent echo of life,

But the buzzard, dawn-charred, real of birth,

Is pure, and has the cutting clarity of a knife.

Majestic, imperious, it knows to obviate not

Titivate, or else it goes hungry and without.

Feasting on a doormouse at dawn is what

Its favourite books would look to be about.

To go with the buzzard, to dive the channel,

Would be frightening as meeting a new bird

That wriggles its wing would be, the kernel

Of a sea-change now happening in the word.

We two apprentice skywriters might climb

The cool heights only in dreams in our brains,

But these two buzzards, who rhyme and chime,

Encircle their tender prey even when it rains.

THE KITCHEN TAPS

Tap the bird. Run. Take two.

Tap the terror. Moulin Blue.

Tap the tape with the pause

where its reel is glued – its doors.

Tap the dark night of the soul.

Tap musac from a black hole.

Tap the cloud where heaven's bars

are selling upturned sunset jars.

Tap the lapse of the focal point.

Tap the tapestry, not the joint.

Now we run from the woods.

The lines of law airdrop goods.

Tap the horror-packet served.

It's no more than love deserved.

Tap the tune recorded on

binaural earphones, Proustian.

Bullet up the telegraph pole,

the pole's already Robert Lowell.

Tap the sheet where pictures grew -

who knew but the late art smuggler Blue?

Tap the purple-bleeding screen -

tap the lunch for two gone on.

Take us to the ancient lake

on the back of a golden snake.

Tap the hammer on the nail.

Tap the keypad. Write an email.

You have to try and be opaque.

Tap the rain upon the lake.

Outsource it to who but Dave.

Land of the free, home of the slave.

Tap the new Beat Dharma bum.

Tap bisexual chewing gum.

Tap the riverbank. Now to herald

there's a new mouse called Gerald

guiding the raffle from above.

Beat the ticket, fall in love.

Clear it all. With a cloth.

Beauty is the child of death.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

Drinking on your own is tragic.

Streaky bacon. American cheese.

Sauvignon Blanc. Tomatoes.

Burger mince. Other stuff.

The bottom shelf is full enough.

Go and win The Nobel Prize.

Reveal the secrets of the skies.

The face of stars he made no nose.

Three were there. Thirty toes.

Heaven knows and turns its face.

Heaven's sleep. Know your place.

Tap the Freedom that is writing.

Tap the Roundhouse and its lighting.

Tap the Ketchup. Tap the laughter.

No such thing nor any 'after'.

Who would be a poet now?

It's all gone under Barrett's brow.

Cataclysm's catalyst for the cat

that on the map of sound once sat.

RENAMING REALITY

I am not just diagnosed but I seem to be

diagonalised by omnijective interface

of random access co-imagination which

is like meeting an on and off at once

and every second second, bigger than colour,

blogger than space, deeper than memes

and faster than drum n bass multi-media

of mutually assured semi-masturbation

in the global village in the middle of the day

whom it seems is but a dream’s balcony

around mellow me. So now I must

colour in the government’s new

application forms for £ove with a yellow

crayon and join the dots and spot

the difference but not that Spot The Dog

is a constellation on the saddest night

of life. The pills I pop are poetry buttons

whose names should never appear in poems,

the voices I hear are syllabubbles and quavers,

my mental hospital is Monopoly Jail.

UNDER THE CHEMICAL COSH

Omnivorous frog eyes blink in the puddles

like the pharmaceutical meds that make me groggy

and I don't know why something so pellucid

can come across as being green and froggy...

Raindrops drip and drop and bellyflop down

to drum on the paintpots left out on the patio

and I wonder if an object made of sound

can still meet the laws of the golden ratio...

The sheep in the field, you can still just see,

are standing up, eating the green grass,

in a flock whose pattern seems to be aleatory

unlike the human system that we call class...

The sky is far from drunk on molten gold

as we reach the end of this day duller

than the dollar or the glum green of fields

when rain has wept away the refreshing colour...

Yes my vigil at the kitchen window's habitual,

no I didn't realise it would be this tight,

when for a glimpse the pink light's spiritual,

and then it is winter, and then it is Night....

THE BREAKFAST OF KINGS

Ingurgitating A for me it was like

tasting that alchemical cake of black

they compact and turn into gold,

propitiating inner riches untold.

Eating E it was like the mouth

were full of cold water from the north

and when we spoke it all spilled

on the kitchen floor, deeply chilled.

Imbibing I it was red as the blood

that's comfortable as Glastonbury mud,

roaming in its holy, solipsistic orbit,

meaning scenes too ineffable to exhibit.

Consuming U we then took it in turn

to light it and write it, burn and unlearn,

and a green parrot was sent to space

through the conch, like an interface.

Toking O, well, the unbroken blue

dome of sky, it was good as new,

the rich, deep colour of innocent wonder,

an immense ocean free over yonder.

NO MORE ROOM

So to bind the girdle about the hilts, this

room has been around the tired sun on a

tilted axis a terrible number of times. When

my father passed we did up the whole house,

hence the walls are painted a sweet peach...

it's a soft, warm, Mediterranean colour.

One central feature is the dark blue AGA,

good for Slow Food and countrified values.

The new Smart telly preaches in the corner,

blaring inane garbage unto my meagre mind;

and the pnaio's to the rhgit as you wlak in

tuorhgh the nlwey wtihe-pnteiad door.

Some delicate China hangs on the walls,

along with maps, paintings, photographs.

When my father passed, mother had her

artistic way with all the decorations, doing

away with what she no longer could tolerate.

As I write, the main light is off, but there are

others on, brightening up our lives, trying

to entertain us with their true life stories.

One of the larger wallcharts represents all

the flowers of the meadows and their names,

plants like yellow-rattle, creeping-buttercup,

meadowsweet and softrush. I wish I was

walking knee-deep in them, hand in hand

with a woman, sometimes; but then againe

to stay single has become a new, tuneful jingle -

just in case the horses become genetic.

SECRET CHORD H

The third of my five bands were named

Secret Chord H and our drummer,

the very best of a generation bar none,

died young, which was a major bummer.

He crashed into an unforgiving tree

pissed and stoned while our first single,

'Dream With Open Eyes,' written by me,

was still fresh on the air as a radio jingle.

I cried for him yesterday like an oasis,

and wrote a new song rich with feeling,

about our lives descending into crisis,

since days we tried to sleep on the ceiling.

Too young he was, and still at school,

when our little group had to pack it in,

and now I grope for words like a fool,

and Secret Chord H feels like a sin.

It was a metaphor for some extremity

of experiential pleasure unknown, beyond,

and happened upon a genuine tragedy

and I was the frontman of the band.

ODE TO THE SLIPPERY LIPREAD

(For Anon)

O slippery lipread, what fantastic fingers!

You seem well, whenever we pass in the aisle!

I listen out now that you are host to my numbers!

Your proleptic whispers might come out in style!

Bonmots you are mostly and also anon!

A rabble of angry voices, you can make a racket!

Even the dog barks at you when you're gone!

When you go on, you come without a packet!

Dr. Tom says medicine wastes packaging -

which I see as a progressive thing to say!

Already as I speak the dog starts barking!

He knows when you're here, when you're away!

And so most of my symptoms aren't hallucinations!

And so you're a doormat to clinical voices!

And I wince inside at your exhalations!

And exile kingdoms with my mad choices!

How you know what you know I don't know!

O how metanarrativistic, what a Panopticon!

You are endangered species, says Rimbaud!

I tell him not to go, but already he has gone!

When for my life, I must write, what then?

Will you, too soon pipe up, too soon fade?

While I sweat away with the everlasting pen?

Let's pitch a tent in a sun-drenched everglade!

A SPIRIT LEVEL FOR THE SPIRIT

Yes I have built a spirit-level for the spirit

and before that it was a door to a lost kingdom

and before that it was more like timeless

ideas transmitted across time and againe

before that it was air frozen solid and

before that it was the portable gift and

before that the transforming agent of change

and before that chronotope turned euchronia

and before that intelligence distilled into truth

and before that the esemplastic fled away

with the quadlibetical and before that

it was the ostranenie of dull perception

and before that it was the ash of yesterday's cold fire

wrapped up in yesterday's newspaper and put out

in the right green bin and before that it was

the useless proof of a thousand hours

and before that it was The Excellent News

and before that it was the opposite of money

and before that it was some kind of religion

and before that it was some kind of vehicle

possibly the traditional driverless or even magic car

and so I am happy with my homeostatic device

which reminds me even as I write it down

that it is time to take my night medication

and think about the next poem on the blue horizon.

RENEGADE

Whatever pit of Hell I went through and survived

I hope that it made me stronger as a poet. You

should or rather should not see what tenuous and

intermittent netherworlds I have been to, modelling

every adjective in Howl, in search of poetry. In

madness, in altered states, in fatigue, in hunger,

I would search for poetry, to place my finger

on the pulse of life, and to open a new door

to a lost kingdom, and to thaw a frozen angel,

and to reclaim a sensuous mode of being gone

under the green hill, or else Gondwanaland againe.

I finally extirpated all trace of recognition from my

myriad mind and yet then found that I was still

deeply saddened by the loss of my dad, as I still

am, for to come to terms with losing a parent

is very hard and some say never surmountable.

But I have been with a demon under a hill

with drill-holes for eyes with which to see,

known great cataclysms of the soul, ruptures

rather than mere breaks from history, exchanged

pleasantries with the devil down there in Hell.

Insanity can be absolute torture, not escape.

POEM

Unicorn hoofprints in an ancient forest -

track them back to orgasm's tide

and ride a pleasant break, a crest -

no go faster stripes stream on its side.

Traffic lights on the edge of the Lakes

drawn with funny, appropriate faces

stick their tongues out at the fakes

as we race to faraway places.

It's a beautiful country where rain

knocks the pollen count unconscious,

washes away even the evil stain

left behind by the bad actress.

Careless, the way she treated me,

true, the way she plucked, she ate,

when in Eden, hidden in the shrubbery,

we'd made it to the Future State.

LETTERS TO AND FROM A HIGHER SELF

When you were recording on binaural earphones

you vowed to plug your senses in the mains.

At times you'd break down in tears and say

to your band mates “I think I am gay”

and that is because when the planes came in

due to the weed you had no recollection

of speaking against September 11th in the barn

in the year 2000, before you went down

to stay with Paul. Truly it was not until

the doctors put you on a little, bitter pill

every morning and every night that you could

remember your prophesy, and find selfhood.

Also only recently has it come to you

that if your father is an art smuggler nicknamed Blue

it can qualify as a strange and new sense

through which you can read of future events

and this is how you read the future, rather

than being the seer associated with the area -

and now your father is eaten underground

and it is too late to tell him what you've found

while your mates as well, from back then, remain

in the dark, scattering now that you're insane.

It can happen to the best of us and kind of did

when you of all people ended up like Syd

and now you know madness is not to be

Romanticised as some kind return to purity

and seek to destigmatise whereas before

to plug your senses in the mains was more

your quest, action sex trouble kicks and change

as the world mutates into something rich and strange.

So at least we know anagnorisis can be had

and that treatment can work on the genuinely sad.

You used to be so anti-Western medication

like it were a form of emotional contraception

and as a translator of feelings, think no poet

could write a good poem when stuck on it,

but now you appreciate the science works, plug in

to the available help, and let the healing begin.

A passage has been had, a door has closed

and another opened now that you're diagnosed.

WE FOUGHT

If the effect of global warming on the unicorn is a post-modern id, that tall pole in the industrial park with the yellow M on top could be a post-modern churchspire. It could be the subject of a Barthesian 'mythology' commenting on the spiritual vacuum. The four basic caveman cravings are salt, fat, sugar and protein, all provided by the Big Mac, that heir or heiress to the Apple of Knowledge. Once I knew two wings, carved and orgasmic, minutely articulated, when I tried to abjure the neuroleptic, mood-stabilising medication so the first, fresh, redolent, enervating scent of spring suffusing the sentient air and pervading the senses would not become a product. They

started as an albatross, became a butterfly, and when they went away, were a crow, like slowspelling

pasta, the average aesthetic system, or even some silent alphabet belonging to an alchemist of perception. Come and find them. They are absolutely awesome. Or wait in your bedroom, that anagram of boredom. Dust is mostly dead skin, whereas trust is stronger than the colours of vowels. We hid them from the wind. On one end, that yellow M, going nowhere, slowly. We must not try to shock, only with truth. Flies buzz mostly in B flat minor, where horses empty their bowels. Now history comes in such neatly sealed packages. In the future, as Dr. Robert contends, we may learn

to eat and shit words. Already a words as drugs analogy would look good on my groaning shelf.

And on my shelf Crime And Punishment is squeezed in and has moral compass as opposed to sheer cleverness alone if you may permit such a reductive demarcation, and I am at work on a postmodern equivalent of that. It might be naff, it might not be to your taste, but as a binary-machine, just wonder at your wings. For one day they may come to you, a miracle.

MY LINE IS THE SKYLINE

Le poet de sept ans, I wrote a little book whose timeless-idea-across-time is that a clock is only as fast as a cheetah, in which I foresee “the ire ii net,” purport to having “a scar+ that is red and black,” and discover dad's cannabis, although “i could not tell what it was that was making such a nose,” so conducted a proof of the metamorphose theory in Jim Morrison's The Lords And The New Creatures on the object 'hashish,' including the image “gilly flowers” and more.

When I was going through puberty, lying immobile as my own saliva in the dormitory at boarding school, the rock concert in my head included a song going “squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones, bongles has still got the stones, bongles has still got the stones.”

By the time I found out what cannabis was, and took a piece of green GM skunk from my father's Moroccan box into the den in the field, by the time I smoked it, it felt like my brain, that sea, was set alight to with petrol, while the rest of Noj And The Mob – my younger siblings - found it but a mild titillation.

When my father, the international art smuggler nicknamed Blue, showed me my mother's gift to him of a flower-press culminating in a homegrown cannabis leaf, at the denouement, like a favourite comic-strip anti-hero, there were a few water droplets in my eyes.

On seeing Flora from boarding school trotting on a horse in the local village, smirking, I thought there's a limpid dream, an evergreen light, a transcendent signifier, a metaphysical objective but on contacting her on Facebook to say “hey if a flower-press ending on cannabis could = dialysis a lovepoem hoping to impress you, Flora, could = more a motor and we could therein build a machine,” she wouldn't even acknowledge me.

GENERATIVE DEVICES FOR NEXT TIME

write a Shadow Page Poem i.e. in the dark and out there on the road

write about visiting a shop under the sea where dreams are stored on disk

write about walking to Iceland on a landscape of cloud

write a poem on a napkin for a stranger in a cafe called Clowns

write a song to be recorded on state of the art binaural earphones i.e. ones with tiny mics inside laid down on the Cambridge chalk grassland floor

write instructions for walking A to B down a real beach as if it is a map of the beach from Alex Garland

write about Lucy in the soul with demons as an actual substance

write rhyming riddles as clues on your family's Christmas presents

write a self-reflection for a portfolio from the perspective of the evil weed getting out of the Nam draft Jim Morrison style i.e. feigning madness and homosexuality

write the spontaneous chants of a poet calling out words over the bongo drummers at Glastonbury stone circle on ecstasy

grow a middle finger in a test-tube to show to your teacher

write automatic writing narrated by an actual arsehole

score a question mark on the musical scales on a waiter's note pad in mental hospital

write about inventing the Orange mobile phone from a real orange

write a poem from the perspective of fire but don't let on

write about eating a breakfast including every snooker ball colour and make it a perfect Shakespearean sonnet

write about the Mythical Mickey Bliss, 1930's rhyming slang for piss, like he is some kind of special friend

write a poem to be recited during the act of receiving a blow job

write about every sense of the letter E including demotic shorthand for 'he' merged

write a poem while a tape whose small pause where superglued in the reel has magically healed is being cooked in the dark blue AGA, top oven hottest one

write like you are the other Aphex Twin applying chemical names to arts

write of a bullet's journey to the top of a telegraph pole standing in the field before Black Combe the Lakeland's oldest fell

rearrange the names of Wikipedia around, like putting in Coca cola for the Sahara desert, and do as many as Shakespeare's sonnets

write about the doors computer game and explore it as you do so

write of the effect of global warming on the unicorn

write Bart Simpson's suicide note

write a piece where every word begins with the letter D even if it doesn't normally

write only about clouds seen through Cumbrian mental hospital glass only meaning all things must pass

write a poem that implies the turning of the page is the turning over of a steak

A FERTILE CORRESPONDENCE

James Douglas Morrison is just a name,

said Neil Curry, in an email, but there are some

who thought him the most beautiful poet

of a generation, save maybe Syd Barrett

who was a better lyricist unto my

meagre mind but you may disagree.

I ask if the seed-consciousness for Jim's book

came from Syd Barrett's song 'Bike?'

And while the former, Mr. Morrison,

was asking the audience “is everybody in?”

Barrett came up with an unplayable song,

and no-one in the band could play along,

and it was called 'Have You Got It Yet?'

whereupon Barrett, let's not forget,

was deemed insane and axed from the band,

and Morrison went under Gondwanaland.

I see a fertile correspondence between

these two people from the psychedelic scene.

At seven I came along and stole the show

which I am sure you already know,

became the kid who took care of the new

creatures themselves although there were only two

and once I put my discoveries down in the word

it was then I too was diagnosed as mad.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

1. This book is not an immanent, Kantian critique in mimicking the methodology of David Morley's series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.

2. This book is not an outpouring of emotion more terrible than the sun contained to a readily understandable system of signs that bear the langourous smell of repeatable process.

3. This book is not an infradiegetic heterotopia where chronotope turns euchronia pertaining to the panoramic and panchronic overview of something like Jay Gatsby taking out his eyes to see in all directions at once.

4. This book is not a doctoral thesis on the subject of James Joyce also seeing new creatures as a child, and whether or not therefore his writing the epic tome Ulysses becomes the reason why Ted Hughes then sees a monster in the river, and whether or not Mr. Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain becomes the reason Jim Morrison sees winged serpents in the desert and whether or not Mr. Morrison's writing The Lords And The New Creatures becomes the reason I myself make certain Naturalistic Observations in my childhood.

5. This book is not a strict rewrite of the lost album The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob as a collection of poems and songs pitched between Miltonian religious discourse and post-Einsteinian comedy where, say, an utilitarian Martianist slowspell of the word “love” ends on Einstein's E for energy.

6. This book is not necessarily an organic whole dissimulating the pep and semblance of ineluctable series while marrying as many heterogeneous sounds and images together as possible and ultimately arriving at messrs anagnorisis, closure, catharsis, resolution, denouement and maybe concatenation.

7. This book is not a complete proof of “the metamorphose theory” from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison that states when an object is removed from its name, habits, associations it is free to become endlessly anything, and conducted on a lump of hashish by a seven year old.

8. This book is not painstakingly transcribed from 100's or even 1000's of defaced bank notes like a wayward, underground classic of albeit hypocritical anti-capitalist imputations and diy dissemination methods that harness the snail-mail economy like an open-air poetry experiment.

9. This book is not a composite picture comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot fragments given artificial insemination, nor merely a collection of ink droplets made to stand still in perfect squad-drill constellations before the regarding eye of the gentle and forgiving reader.

10. This text is not a vanity-mirror for the staid cultural values of the bourgeoisie for whom the soul is the last stronghold against iconoclastic forces of Revolution that threaten to destabilise the given as a system with questionable innocence and neutrality.

BIN SEQUENCE

I remember sitting in a bin, in Camden Town, drunk and stoned, in around 1998, when my London friends at the time were still doing our GCSE's.

I remember speaking against September 11th in 2000 though I thought it might be Fight Club and not Bin Ladin and it did take a diagnosis and course of medication to remember this helpless fecundity of prescience.

I remember when the first plane came in I was asleep in Paul's room and Paul was downstairs watching and he came and woke me, whereupon we watched the second plane come in together.

I remember standing atop a bin when I had been banned from the Students' Union erroneously, and outside the Students' Union, with a band plugged in, singing Five To One by the doors, almost as a protest for being banned by the Students' Union.

I remember when I could not get the right bit of paper from Warwick University to prove I was no longer a student in order to get on the Dole and had to eat discarded Danish pastries from a Co-op supermarket bin, in days when I also lived in a shed.

I remember my father, who was a good photographer, making me stand for a photograph next to a bin on Lancaster University campus, on graduation ceremony day, with a sign from the ongoing building works saying ZONE over my head in the photograph.

I remember when Bin Ladin was said to have been discovered and shot and a single firework shot out over the rooftops of East London, where I was living at the time, after my Lancaster University degree.

I remember sitting in Mary's front room writing that Bin Ladin was a laden bin in a garden perhaps Far Arden or Eden or Edom or Moab or any of Blake's ancient patriarchates, and wondering if I would get in trouble for publishing such sound-sex.

TO A NEW TUNE IN MY RADAR

If form is an easel, content is a pallete;

but I would consider myself too good a poet

to write poetry that is about poetry -

and would rather write, say, about the pear tree

that guards the garden. Like a queen

in a game of chess, she oversees dawn

spread out over the great dome. Hearts

is her suit, and she presides over the Arts.

It's too late to taste her fruits this year,

but next year if I am still living here

I'll climb a ladder through her gnarled boughs

and pluck a pear, ripe as a cow's

udder, and taste the natural produce

of this green garden, where newly the use

of my hands on the land of my birth

will come to connect me to Mother Earth

whose soon-to-be-tarmac'd clouds above

still resemble the shapes of love

and outside the gamut of new emotions

a blackbird flies, and the new day's notions

go with it, off, elsewhere, far away,

just for the Hell it and anyway.

THE DEEP STORE

Black, bare branches

against a winter sunset sky:

I send out the search-engines

but nothing comes home.

It's as if no words could

spoil this winter vision.

A feeling of peace overcomes me,

falls into me from above.

Still I somehow stumble

on the word for Heaven.

The trees through the window

are guarding the Gates of Heaven.

The picture also comes under

the transience of all we love.

If I could have any drug

it would be to replay this scene.

It feels like only now

have I become a true poet.

I gaze endlessly inveigled by

the intercapilliary network

of bare treefingers like they

denote some emotional complex.

The light fades, I drift towards

sleep's crumbling biscuit shore

where Strange Attractors

linger washed by orgasm's tide

and I'm thinking I'd have

enough if I only had rocks

and stones and trees to write

about or with which to write.

MAKING A BIT OF SPACE

There are more things in the void

than meet the insatiable, naked eye,

my little baggie of acid and E

from Glastonbury stone circle yeah,

my copy of Universal Blues by

Charles Simic, my red pulling top,

a slightly affected Hendrix CD,

my old black wallet and my old phone,

so Jim Morrison can be happy

in the void for a week or maybe two,

and have something to do, although

I myself should be feeling sad, sad

my neighbour turned out mad,

but that just what the drugs can do,

ruin magic for all to see and

not just turn the colour red to blue,

but it doesn't matter, for I've seen the light,

and it is blind and it is white,

so now I'll live happy ever after

and fix the puncture in the soul of laughter...

A TORN AND BLEEDING FRAGMENT

Comity comity curer curer

yan tan tether Fuhrer femme

sex shoe Otto Neo teo

elve tvolve evolve evolve

if you jump in the Esk it Mite Urt

the progress of rivers running north

drot so nunk as some thinkle

peep I am mad as a box of frogs

and I may not be a pheasant plucker

but I am a pheasant plucker's son

da is the oldest monkey-unit

in all languages of Indo-European

etymological origins Shantih

Shantih Shantih means may

peace and peace and peace

be everywhere so – hum

means I am Him or soul into

universe the word psyche comes

from Ancient Greek for ghost

kopsiche and ghosts can of course

travel back in time one scholar

visiting Ancient Greece, finding

the Greeks tremendous actors who wore

long cloak, buskins and Red Indian

head-dress according to my source

whom it seems opened his mouth

to embark on a long horse.

TRANSIENCE

I wrote a piece of music once

that was timeless.

It was lost.

It wasn't the sort of music you'd get

on a dance music anthem

soundtrack.

It was sad, stirring,

from the bottom of the ocean,

the bottom of my heart.

And in losing it

I'll never get it back.

The sunset in the same way

is transient, unrepeatable, will never

come exactly the same againe.

Our lives are also temporary.

My blog is a temporary measure

against death, a safetynet if you like.

The stars are already gonners.

That one twinkling over the fell -

it is no longer a nuclear furnace

but a photo of a faded thing.

My heartbeat will go the same way

as yesterday's fashions and fancy trends.

The trick is to not mind it.

To make peace with the certitude

of losing, of death.

To reconcile yourself

to your eventual end.

Every step is a dress-rehearsal

for death, foreshadowing an

inevitable step into the grave.

I used to think, walking up the fell,

of Heaven, and how I wished

it would be full of statistics:

how I should be able

to access the exact number

of steps I've taken up the fell,

ecstasy pills I've eaten,

everything laid out in little piles -

but now I think statistics

would be Hell.

I am grateful for my life,

which my parents gave me,

and love my friends and family

but it all has to end sometime.

There is no escaping death;

and in dying we are set free -

free from the pain of dying.

Free to become elemental.

Free to become eternal.

The birthday of eternity is upon us all,

sooner or later, and we

must come to terms with it,

before we come to worms with it.

For all the grandeur of Man,

we are dust particles waiting to happen,

to swirl around trapped in a sunbeam, waltzing.

THE UNIVERSALIST MANIFESTO

I was thinking of writing a show called Synchronicity Shortcircuits, but it wouldn't take much writing, it would incorporate anything, as and when it arises, hammock, DVD, wetsuit.

You might have heard of automatic writing, popularised by The Beats like Jack Kerouack, writing off the top of the head, free association writing – but have you heard of Automatic Googling?

It's like this: let's go for a drive: let's hop like the grasshopper between any two random but associative things, adverts, films on youtube, and go astray from there, wayward, like a guitar detuning, all the way, down, anywhere, exploring caves, learning scales, automatic googling away to your heart's content.

In essence, the thing is: let's go for a drive, then: but I have never been, never been for a drive, although I believe I am the first to write about Automatic Googling.

Still I think there may well be people that lie in bed all day practising the deliberately pointless art of Automatic Googling as if it will bring them closer to automatic CIA membership.

You may also have heard of psychogeography, the field in which you might, say, navigate London with a map of Paris; but have you ever watched Dr. Who with a shopping channel for the words?

It's like this: we might be able in the future to spend more money exploring space, less money on nuclear arms, and even make provisions for leaving the planet before the end of the earth, but we will never get to know all of the universe, the infinite universe, who may well have life out there, so to kill the time, considering we will probably be around for a lot longer than we know and know already a full picture will never be known, we have to have a certain permutationism of resources, hence I suggest watching Dr. Who with a shopping channel for the sound.

In short, The Universalist Manifesto is a piece of shit, not a Foreward to an ouevre, not a list of tenets of aesthetic philosophy, just an experiment in itself, money, honey, bunny, sunny, funny, runny.

Sooooooooo I wander lonely in the cloud that floats on high o'er data and pill, when all at once I see a crowd of people standing very still... and this is a quote from my new old pen-name Wordsworth Zero whom it seems is a punk in punk's clothing too.

So you're getting the idea that in the Universalist Manifesto, anything goes, like in the unconscious mind when meditating, and you might've heard of Qualia but have you heard of Squalia?

Squalia include things like paint-splattered tracky bottoms originally stolen from ASDA by a tramp, or Danish pastries discarded in a Co-op supermarket bin – and they are of course things seen 'in' and 'of' themselves, like Noumena, divorced from the vagaries and colourations of perception, perception tainted and flawed by desire.

MASHING THE Y KEY

yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

BAXTER REVISITED

Baxter the dog has grown too used to me

feeding him bowls of oversweet, milky tea.

He pesters me for more while I write.

Sometimes I cave in just for some quiet.

But in the long run that's the worst thing to do.

Sometimes you just have to say no.

“Sorry Baxter you can't have anymore.

You just have to lie round on the kitchen floor.”

You don't want to breed a greedy animal.

You don't want him running round the table

all hyper-active and sugar-crazed, barking.

I hear him now, whining at me, begging -

“no Baxter you're not having any more tea,”

I say and he barks, not understanding me.

I think I'll just feed him one more cup.

Anything to make him temporarily shut up.

DARKNESS IS LIFTED

Darkness is lifted now my mum is a grandma,

and it won't rhyme with a handgrenade either,

and Lennon's right that love is giving,

and it's still rude to write of the living,

and tomorrow we will make some turkey pie

and congratulate the happy couple...

and mother's in tears, O mother's in tears,

and drunk on the 27th of December,

it's 2020 and we've all had plenty,

O it should be a night to remember....

the countdown went surprisingly fast,

the Christmas meal is already in the past,

soon the newborn baby will be at school,

where teenage music makes the sacred pool,

and cool's a currency, and daddy's already rich,

don't bite the hand that feeds you now...

and mother's in tears, O mother's in tears,

and drunk on the 27th of December,

it's 2020 and we've all had plenty,

O it should be a night to remember....

the dog's asleep on the cold, kitchen floor,

I'm wondering if there will be any more,

my mother's texting vexed lesbian friends,

to show how love and life never ends,

I'm being staid and forgetting my alcohol,

the church is some one mile away...

and mother's in tears, O mother's in tears,

and drunk on the 27th of December,

it's 2020 and we've all had plenty,

O it should be a night to remember....

SONG FOR THE MORNING

What a joy to see the birds, to hear the beck running its hand through an angel's hair out there in the back garden...

What a thrill to see the clouds moving along slowly on their cloud motorway of air up in the clear, blue sky...

Drill notes will not be recognised here nor roadworks of the soul in maintenance of some pretence or illusion...

The wind it blows through friendly trees, a gentle breeze, and a steal note is written into it now the white is born againe...

Home seems where the heart hurts, the hurt is, but we forgive our trespasses and live happily ever after now...

Black crows feed, eat off the land, they understand that our place is headed for the worms that squirm in soft societies below...

I've made toast, and made it to The Promised Land, to do what I want inbetween two poles of wake and sleep whenever I choose...

Two shoes touch down on the ground, I press them in, to make sure I am awake for all this might be but another dream...

The ferment of music froths in my head until I put it to words and then scrap the music and keep only the words...

The steam rises and steam over fame is a game I play to keep the priorities by which I live in shape and order still...

PILLOW SUITE

Emily's words are just for her

to remember the melody by

I think mine might be the other

way round on a map of sound

but maybe that has all changed

now the tune is Classical

although we are not meant to mention

the tune during the tune

for it's against the musical credo

dating to our youth's ideals

to make the song never repeat

was another one of them

to make you wonder how the Hell

you got down here from flat-top

without your noticing anything

untoward happening at all

and to what end is it pointed

all the morning's tintinnabulation

in the singer's throat a frog

is sonic machination anew

and we cut out the old and

make some room for the present

and the garden's cold and money's

thin but love's the answer still

THE BLACKBIRD

The trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.

I think I know what he's thinking.

It's a good place to hide, place to hide.

Love is a dream, a dream is a boat,

a boat is a vessel, a vessel is a craft,

a craft is a skill which brings us back round -

back round to love, love makes you daft.

Do not forget the triangle solo

in the orchestra of dreams,

it's tuning up now, where children play Lego,

and stuffed toys come apart at the seams,

come apart at the seams...

Here comes the dog,

downstairs in the morning,

wants to go out, into the pitch dark.

The hour before dawn, is the very darkest,

has anyone a spark, has anyone a spark?

I tend to my brain, with morning medication,

it helps to remember things I have done

like speaking against September 11th

before the year 2001, 2001.

O don't be ashamed

to stick a donk on the end of it

while the rest of the house is asleep;

and what is the most obvious donk around you

and how many donks deep,

how many donks deep?

THE PORTAL

Outside this room the city's wanting you and me,

filthy streets crawl with word of disease,

greedy-pigs window-shopping for wisdom we,

and rumour spreads the word to the trees...

now I'm alone with the wood on my mind only me,

the beck it gurgles through the open window,

of all the things on visual radio you can see

the beck it gurgles through the open window...

through the truth I see the world fall past the pane,

before the bed becomes a float-away raft,

you don't need to suffer for your art in pain,

we understand different things by given-ness and craft...

the tragedy of life is getting what you want,

want's a cunt driven blind with a spear in your heart,

to be the first to point it out won't make you blunt,

it's lethal when you're mad but at least there's art...

AS LIGHT FADES

To be forgotten about -

behind the cold affront

there is a Romantic attraction -

a warm, mystic light.

A truck passes by

on the A595 like a front

for a superhuman

narrator called FUCK.

The sunset comes in

long, bilateral streaks

of numinous, crepuscular

gold, a bandwidth.

I consider whether

blandishments and platitudes

are merely longitudes

and latitudes in cruciform.

Allen Ginsberg's opening

poem is written with

the inspired efficacy

of making you feel sick.

His second poem is

written with the inspired

efficacy of being the

shape and texture of a brick.

Dull the choice to be

a poet although you'd

have thought you'd be

the centre of all brilliance.

When I say 'choice'

I am aware that like

in music sometimes

the art form chooses you.

THE MOVEMENT

Mum said while I was tending to my text said about the food on the table “there's one leg left

if you could eat that you could bin the rest” meaning the sauce and I took her to mean if you could bin your whole book you could win a Nobel Prize doing a different one with all your background story so I shelved the book and started this new file but then I remembered to take every utterance at face value like to take every insult with a pinch of salt so I returned to the nearly done file and then I went outside to smoke and saw an alien spaceship or rather a red and white flashing light across the night sky and then I noticed the triangular constellation was back a four point constellation like a kite with no bottom and which I call the mental hospital constellation now for that's where I first saw it in an otherwise black black night although at the time then and there I thought of it as the pyramid on the front of Dark Side Of The Moon turned into a constellation for back then I was really into the notion of having a low-hanging sensational star and human manipulation and that sectioning was my second the one after my dad had just died though by now I have been sectioned 5 times been to Glastonbury 5 times been in 5 bands had LSD 5 times and been to Amsterdam 5 times which is where I might move when COVID-19 is over for all there are people who have tried to take my life here and when last I was in hospital it all got so serious that the very CIA were not involved and such has been the tone timbre tenor texture tincture and tint of my life of late my life spent in ignorant dreams where the pressure in your head can close the bedroom door and she has had a little bleed and there's a piece of plastic rattling round in there and you can't quite pass the gravy over Facebook enough to prove you're right about the mad lantern up in the hairy tarantula tree which Mary and I climbed to the top of in order to watch flocks of dreams flow by in the green midnight knowing no context nor extinction.

A CRUSHROOM

Mum's like a violinist on the Titanic.

Masks make us look like MC Doom.

COVID-19 creates empty spaces.

Separating the bride and the groom.

Friends and I cannot re-connect.

We're given to Facebook which is vapid.

One would hope the vaccine arrives

soon and the treatment is rapid.

I've been ignoring it all in my work.

Ignoring the gloom, writing like

it were before, though life might now

have changed, never coming back.

My background is ample and too real.

I colour in the government's new

application forms for £ove with a

yellow crayon, or maybe it's blue.

I join the dots and spot the difference

but not that Spot the Dog's a constellation

only on the saddest night of life.

I underwrite the name of a nation.

It's some kind of test but I don't know

what kind, though it's not The Trial.

It's not about thinking your way out.

It could be about still wearing a smile.

A smile is not enough to save us though.

Science will save is, it's under control.

The Arts Boom pales into insignificance.

Only science can now save the soul.

A MESSAGE OF HOPE

In the green spring when all this is over -

if in the spring all this is indeed over -

there will be picnics and barbecues -

there will be band rehearsals -

there will be gigs in pubs againe -

there will be art galleries re-opening -

there will be books looking back -

at all the boredom cures of coronavirus -

and there will be some pieces missing -

where the poet deleted 814 files -

and there will be long-term memories

about how Lockdown galvanised

people into a collective effort to help

not seen since World War Two -

and I will be older than I am now -

and you will be older than now too -

and there will be celebrations in the street -

like when Liverpool return with the Cup -

and there will be fireworks going off -

and people will remember the day -

when COVID-19 last caused a death -

and the virus will grow as the flu -

and we'll get jabbed as a matter of course -

and new life will grow in the garden -

and new love will flow in vein and vine -

and new wine will mature and darken -

and given all this everything will be fine -

and teenage lovers go to the movies -

and hold hands in the streets againe -

and strangers kiss in the nightclubs -

and lovers kiss in the teeming rain.

SOMETIMES YOU'VE JUST GOT TO SURRENDER

To churn up your time's valid evidence

you must surrender to the present tense.

A Buddhist monk would say just be,

that's here and now as also in Eternity;

for Eternity is now and now and now.

So to COVID-19 I turn, and how

I would hit him if he were a person -

though violence would make it worsen -

and he'd grin the winning grin of deceit,

showing his teeth glistening with meat.

Already a much more virulent strain

has grown and now I know I am in pain.

I feel a cold, callous, short sort of shock,

ignore in the background the kitchen clock,

inhabit partly sadness, partly fear,

partly anger. It's like death draws near.

Over my home the stars shine on

though most of them are already gone.

The thought of apocalypse has crossed

my mind, of conspiracy – I've lost

my hope, my real-time farm, my crux,

and all is uncertainty, all is in flux.

To dull the pain would be a real gift -

to heal the hurt heart and its real rift.

My marrow is soft, soft just like yours -

I shall not charge you for guided tours

when you can do the same thing as me.

Surrendering to Now is to Eternity.

TO THE BROS IN THE DEN IN THE WOODS

I imagine now telling the bros in the den

in the woods my theory about the chain

of dark or even anti-evolution, that says

James Joyce, who also saw new creatures,

writing Ulysses is the reason why Ted

saw a monster in the river in childhood

who in turn wrote The Hawk In The Rain

which is then the reason Jim Morrison

saw winged serpents in the desert on acid,

whom we know is never quite flaccid,

and his writing The Lords And The New

Creatures is then why I saw not one but two

which I shall not delve into quite yet

but which I shall never againe clean forget -

the bros in the den in the woods might well

fall in with my scoffed at, empurpled Hell -

and with freed minds start to write poetry

to read out under the fallen down tree

in amidst the empty beer cans and ends

of cigarettes dumped there by their friends -

but what their fair maiden female companion

would make of the chain of dark evolution

could be that it's a bundle of fairy tales

unlike the crawling of actual snails

whereas I know the whole thing to be real -

and if I could show you how I feel -

would have you convinced that I'm right

but not well in the head, at least not quite -

which leaves me standing like a tall tree

in the wood where we used to read our poetry

which did, back when we were young,

and getting a foot on the ladder's first rung.

AMAZEBALLS

Amazeballs is the new day dawning

amazeballs is the amazeballs sun

amazeballs is its radiant sunlight too

amazeballs is everything and more

amazeballs is as if a new kind of game

amazeballs it is that the word

'amazeballs' spread from my tongue

amazeballs is its reach all around

amazeballs is hearing it on the radio

amazeballs the visions seen

amazeballs the long green grass

amazeballs is the garden in winter

amazeballs is the new morning mewling

amazeballs is the pattern spotted

amazeballs is the Lord up above

amazeballs are all the angels dancing

amazeballs is the coming lamb

amazeballs is the beauty of all of us

amazeballs is the wonder of life

amazeballs is the table before me

amazeballs is anything at all just imagine

amazeballs is the underlying atom

amazeballs is the new snow atop the fell

amazeballs is the new air talking

amazeballs is the cup of tea I sup

amazeballs all my friends and family

amazeballs the full stop that ends it

amazeballs the talking giraffe as well

amazeballs the white emulsion paint walls

amazeballs the secret diary of a saint

amazeballs its hiding places too

amazeballs the Beethoven in the porcelain

amazeballs the vision of powder'd light

amazeballs the wriggling stone on the comedown

amazeballs the visual radio blooming

amazeballs the Blakeian exultant tone

amazeballs the new Beat rush of it all

amazeballs the need to stretch and question edges

amazeballs the birth of Paul's daughter

amazeballs my brother's son as well

amazeballs my mother's loom in the attic

amazeballs the dog asleep in his basket

amazeballs the zoom on the binoculars to God

amazeballs the halls of fame I am climbing

amazeballs the new word in my teens

amazeballs the poems of the future

amazeballs the inventors of the future

amazeballs the present tense always

amazeballs the wisdom of kids

amazeballs the women of the world

amazeballs this winter women's work

amazeballs the day so white around

amazeballs the fresh air I imbibe

amazeballs the London crew surviving

amazeballs the Cambridge crew at play

amazeballs the new crew wherever

amazeballs the people who do their thing

amazeballs the doors that are cleansed

amazeballs the sound of the power shower

amazeballs the big white poem i.e.

amazeballs the one we never wrote down

amazeballs the truth of how I took it on the chin

amazeballs the way in to the new future

amazeballs the winning of the fellrace

amazeballs the losing of Paul's drugs

amazeballs the recurring decimal

amazeballs the loaf of bread over there

amazeballs the load of coal delivered recently

amazeballs the doors computer game

amazeballs the flexing of imagination

amazeballs the early work of Ginsberg

amazeballs the disparate islands of discourse

amazeballs the way everything is fitting into place

amazeballs man’s new highest emotion.

SONG FOR JESSICA

There's a bowl of darkness in my head

it's getting hard to get out of bed

my poetry is in a state of chaos

whom it seems is a renegade Deus

and QWERTY is a water pistol

that gets stocked up on blow in Bristol

but that's all just by the by

the look of everything says goodbye

a trap's a trap and a door is a door

the poet knows the transient law

here comes a voice I must be leaking

the sentient air is cleanly speaking

and on this strong new medication

it seems to preclude translating emotion

a pot of pot costs a pot of tea

and a poet of pot lives in eternity

and in that bowl some fruit goes bad

its plastic packets make me sad

I can reach out and eat an apple

but it's the woods with which I grapple

the time is one of radical change

I've not quite lost my will to be strange

but I don't put ice-cream in my arm-pit

not that is unless I can help it

for all my projects they're shutting me down

under the covers like I'm a clown

the new bird can't quite seem to fly

a mollusc is eaten by a hopeless sigh

this permanent two fingers to all

forms of authority will probably fall.

GONE THE DRUM

Since you've been gone under Gondwanaland,

I had sex with the floor in a different band,

the air's been talking and I don't understand,

sadness gene ran away with dreaming gland,

and a clock is only as fast as a cheetah still,

and the ecstasy pill's gone under the green hill,

and the jams that we had were such a thrill,

and Dorian Modes were dressed to kill...

since you've been gone it's a different world,

a half-light backstage into which we're hurled,

the frontman still never got the dream girl,

never saw her twirl a dress at the ball,

and a bullet was fired up a telegraph pole,

and the pole itself is already Robert Lowell,

and the postmodernists talk of death of the soul,

and the dream girl is still the unclinchable goal...

since you've been gone I've been holding on,

we never made it big and the chance is gone,

I became insane and Paul went anon,

and still there could never be another one,

and the dog starts to bark at my voices,

and the kingdoms are lost by our choices,

and life is still a bit like a mid-death crisis,

and I cried for you this morning like an oasis.

THE MODERN

The engine of the driverless car, coughing

Awoke disassembled as Proust in orbit

And felt ashamed to be conscious,

If feeling be the theme of the meme.

So soon it got dark as well, and

‘Garden’ was still the password

To my imaginary world, where her

Flowers curtseyed and pointed their

Delicate, ballerina toes through rubble.

It grew some new cells said to be

Of the red and improvised variety,

Put the handbrake on and drove,

Fast, passing through false Gods.

It did not pretend it prayed, it played

Let’s pretend we are fresh vegetables

Of the dusky dawn that leaks out

Hallow’d over the house and garden.

O little, bitter pill which art in Hell,

Give us this day our daily comedown.

It flew too near to the fireface moon,

Its sail bellying and inverse and I’ve

Realised I was put under a curse

A long time ago in a galaxy further

Than the stars and closer than the eye.

When I too was the other Aphex Twin

I was in a long corridor flanked by doors

And collected little gesture-without-motion-

Bones from the beach where waves

Are masturbating gongs; and

Now that I am sadder and older,

My talent is blank like my bank

Account is empty of fiscal stimulus –

But with humility I have grown wise,

And so I open up the trunk and

Climb inside a new, untitled zone.

THE JUGGERNAUT

What walks like walking fruit

For which there are no words

Only waves covered with leaves

Towards you as you are stood

Being good in the wood and

Crosses your body and parks

And starts to wriggle its wing?

Only “The Juggernaut,” then,

That bird with a human song.

So fight or flight chemical sets

In and you run, fleeing the scene,

The sylvan frieze past the purlieu –

And when you go back in to the

Wood to hunt for the thing, to

Drive your discovery out into

The light, you can not find it,

You find that it has utterly gone -

That bird with the human song -

And a mouth with which to connect -

And who knows upon what sun-

Set blanket underfoot it walked?

Who knows when againe it will

Come, like it came for Joyce,

Like it came for me that day

In my childhood, in the wood,

Where gnarled treefingers snap

So easily; where sunlight filters

Through branches like a Venetian blind?

I cannot say, and nor can you

And nor can Whinnie the Pooh,

Or the drug dealer in the town,

Or maybe even the Queen herself

Whom it seems has been a rather

Good queen as far as queens go.

SONNET FOR MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

My mother was kind, kind as can be

And a Finnish woman who knew hand-brake turns.

Fun-loving, free-spirited, always so free,

She put her hand in the fire that burns

To free James, Robert, Hannah and I

And always we shall love her for that

As dad loved her too, her skin, her high

Cheekbones, her bluegrey eyes like a cat.

To live in let live was her philosophy.

She used to say imagination is a muscle

And language a creature because she

Was eloquent and though her loss is irrevocable,

She’ll live on in the human heart and mind.

Farewell, my mother, so true and kind.

DOWN WITH IT

After all the mad, Rimbaudian visions

of powder’d light, wriggling stone,

visual radio broadcasting dreams

that billow like a weeping willow in the wind,

you have to come down. Then it seems

life is not just a little litter of glitter

on a cuticle, dialling love under the

fleck of epic dereliction forever, but a

dirt-computer from which you can

download the lowdown of downtime.

You spend time in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction, returning to status

life detail, the goldfish bowl soap

opera minutiae of daily life. There

the kettle rises to its silent scream,

and its steam may seem to be Ariel returning

on Caliban’s chain. Ornamental brass

camels put on the wooden beam either

side of the clock could be said to cross

the real live desert. Now the Google

search engines of your senses are sent

like pirates out there where form is

an easel and content is a palette, but

sometimes return with nothing but

the isness of a glass of tapwater. So to

quotidian consciousness you’ve returned,

like a sailor from the wild, stormy sea.

All that staying up all night, chasing

the vampiric thrill of mental illness,

furtive in flight with the sprightly

hypertext sniper on Piper At The

Gates of Dawn is gone. You modelled

every adjective in Howl, extirpated

all trace of recognition from your mind,

explored altered states and madness

for poesis, but now you must not

jeopardise your battered sanity anymore.

Boring as that sounds it is a relief.

Go to waste, was the command, from

the end of a branch, and you did.

Now you know taking drugs is a bet

with the mind’s eye which one always loses.

If there has to be a rationale for sobriety;

poets translate feelings and the feelings you

get on drugs are always fake. On drugs

one of the first things you notice is

the way you start preparing the lies

you will tell to those you love and trust.

This can only sully the soul. So it seems

drugs – not to be didactic – nor to incur

a dangerous narcotisation of the truth -

ruin lives – are monumentally selfish -

always lead to bad things – and enact

physical poems on the body of the subject

which you still crave as we speak. No,

you should not need drugs to see

how weird everything is or to feel

good and should get high on energy

instead of those noxious toxins of

deleterious self-derision you would take.

STAIRS

Barnes has scored a chicken.

Barnes has scored a liquid noose.

Barnes is a member of society.

Barnes has scored a family.

Barnes has scored a river.

Barnes has scored a liquid church.

Barnes is a liquid knife.

Barnes is a nobleman.

Barnes has scored a

Long distance liquid hero.

Barnes has scored a liquid snorkel.

Barnes hasn’t taken enough acid.

Barnes has scored a

Long-distance liquid piano.

Barnes has scored a breath.

Barnes was a footballing prodigy.

Barnes doesn’t need my protection.

Barnes writes articulate articles

About racism for the paper.

Barnes probably didn’t really

Have anything to do with the

Bird in the wood at school

Nor was it really a chicken.

Barnes’ goal against Brazil

Can be replayed at will.

Barnes’ poem asks the question

As to whether the new creature

In the wood can come again.

Barnes was my footballing

Idol way back then when

I was, like, less than ten.

Barnes, I hear, has still

Got all the footballing skill.

Barnes has scored a liquid horse.

Barnes has scored a long

distance liquid horse piano note.

Barnes is a new form of punctuation.

Barnes does not get tired.

Barnes is a deadly ludic weapon.

Barnes has scored a recurring decimal.

Barnes has scored a daisychain.

EARLY WEEKENDS

Rottweilers croon from the room with a stick

It’s too early for me to play my guitar

Mother goes to work but I am off sick

Just another shooting rock star

I’m still in my student overdraft

I’ve long since unloosed the mind of form

I’ve walked to Iceland on a landscape of cloud

I dream of a lover tucked up and warm

Well-to-do shoe-shiners do not happen

Sensing a tragedy we all fall asleep

We’ve a license to lethargy spiralling in dreams

Even in zones too formal to keep

Forefathers gone under Gondwanaland

Debate what’s our fate in the super-skunk wind

If a flowerpress ending on cannabis is dialysis

Where does a love song to Flora end?

Love is the hope that the heart literally

Needs in order for it to survive

Without which it can stop and she

Says I’ve got to work in the dirty hive

Death is H suspended in deafness

God equals pi times mc squared

A rose would smell as sweet if it called barmy

As the army of Michael Vaughan m ‘Lord

Not long ago I was innocent of grovelling

Now I keep my feet nice and warm

Where will it end I have no clue

But use it or lose it, it’s only a new form

TEA CUP FULL OF SAILS

Still rearranging all your guilt and your blame

For your open promise and freedom I came

Long forgotten my true love’s name

And I’m hoping that you might do the same

Don’t want to be a fresh vegetable of dusky dawn

Now the curse is lifted I am moving on

Trying to drive the night onwards up a slope

Trying to dive the right channel that leads to hope

Hope is more than dope, dawn is lifted by a rope

Maybe we can now see, the scale of Infinity

Breaking through the darkness we have left

Amazing ourselves with Promethean fire theft

The magic of dawn is dawning all around

We’d better try and make a map of sound

Don’t try and fool me into thinking

That I am the next bloody Lizard King

When I know I am but the Lizard Syd

Who took care of the new creatures as a kid

Now the moon has flown, wearing a silken gown

Draped all across the ground, down in the undertown

Rumour has it that you have gone quietly mad

That you tried to kill yourself which is too sad

That you turned against your own dying dad

And now everything has turned out bad

Don’t you wish to prove, infinite polyform love

The way she can move, the light switch up above

(2001 reconstructed)

ONE

If you dabble with the alphabet

You swallow the frogspawn of O’ Neil

If you follow sweetness-sweetness

You end up in the back of the real

If you fall asleep with Ulysses

You might dream of a new song

If you ever wake up againe alive

You’ll see song is where you belong

If you ever get stuck on a verse

There’s always tea and then the bat

If you deem this to be your quarter of

The pancake mix then that is that

If your dream’s too full of imagery

You might need to wake up fast

If you’re on strong medication now

Your demons could be a thing of the past

If we deem your dream book trite

We’ll put some thought into it

If we rename the days of the week

We might go more slowly through it

If it’s ten at only ten to seven

Then it’s still getting to be eight

If we’re still on the road to Heaven

Let’s not be early, let’s turn up late.

MCTRUTH AND FLIES

This poem is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes were damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts were made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. The composite picture of torn and bleeding fragments given artificial insemination is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, has become but a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the poem necessarily all about a new designer drug called Strictly Free that is and makes you strictly free to consume.

The language of embedded liberal capitalism, of whom we are liberal human subjects is bankrupt in Imagination. Already my poet/ songwriter friend Paul and I wrote a New Beat Manifesto in the barn at the foot of the Lakeland’s oldest fell Black Combe. Its mission statement included: “abjuring clinging to temporal wealth, fidelity to surface gods of illusion, renouncing worthless dogma to consumerism that robs us of our bodies, getting sober from the advertising trance, touching the texture not name side of life.” I think whatever the future brings we have to live at one with beautiful, heartbroken, sentient, rosethirsty earth and also within our means.

III

DogMuckels is not Heaven; it is the snake in the prelapsarian garden. The Big Mac, that contains the four basic caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein could be seen as the heir to the Apple of Knowledge. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is like the postmodern churchspire in this spiritual vacuum, where theme has dissolved into message and the effect of global warming on the unicorn is a postmodern id.

Sometimes we seem to come to a work of art presupposing false binary oppositions. A list of some of those binary oppositions might run as follows:

science/ art

inside / outside a convention

honesty/ craft

narrative/ confessional

creative/ critical.

A good work of art could undo such binaries, thaw cultural damage between coterminous fields of language. All modes of writing, at their best, seek the same answers, as if pertaining to meta-waves that underlie the variability of perception.

My undergraduate dissertation was on the subject of David Morley. It was an immanent, Kantian critique in mimicking the methodology of his “series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” My micro-analysis highlighted the line “the heart trammelled and rammed on the anvil bleeds visions,” whom it seems employs the anti-dactylus, two soft one hard, and looking into it, you can hear the stressed syllables in that metrical pattern all rhyme on a short A for atom, Adam, apple, suggesting anger and anguish, meaning the line finds invective monotony written into its musical configuration and is kinetic. I found no formal name in all the array of hyper-specialised tools of sustained critical micro-analysis for the effect and thinking it mathematically precise enough to warrant a name have gone and called it The Arcadian Reflex Function.

Seeing as poetry is not a marketable commodity, I was thinking I should employ my Timeshare selling skills to sell something more popular, namely shit: hot, tropical, fecund, loamy shit. I would sit between John and Mary to break the pact, then warm them up, then sizzle the dream of hot, tropical, fecund, loamy shit, and look in their eyes and smile and lie and say my granny also uses this ‘system’ and save something for the T.O.’s by the big boss and leave Financial Logic out for the big boss at the end of the presentation as well.

VII

The New Scientist says language is based on meat. We grew our brains to this almost otiose size by eating meat. We developed language in order to spread information about farming and cooking and killing further meat. So I was wondering, what if it were fungus instead of meat? What about muffled fungus language? Already my Fantasy Cricket Team floating mid-table in the list on the geography wall, in among The Champions and The All Stars were called The Fungus Faces. You can imagine them coming out to bat in clean whites against the Aussies, standing there chewing their fungus teeth.

VIII

It might be instructive to consider that the coterminous cultures of science and art still have differing sensibilities when it comes to McTruth. In science McTruth is to be falsified through which nothing is 100%, only the best theory at the time. In poetry there is McTruth-to-itself, through which anything can be 100% if well-made enough. A poem could get away with saying for example “the bums did not lose” and retain 100% McTruth. Poetic McTruth is therefore like the McTruth of the individual, constituted of its own inner nature.

Unlike truth and lies they both imply the same thing – “McTruth and Flies” - thus are isomorphic. The imputation of “McTruth” is casuistry. The imputation of “Flies” is specious just the same – also Portability, that Apotheosis of Form – and then the flies start to land on the kitchen surface, where the tea is made and the sugar has been spilled. The collocation remains a bastardisation held in ironic equipoise, good for sending up Diet Theory with terse brevity, ripe for philosophical satire, templating well enough over Jim Morrison’s title too.

HIGH BROW FARM

At High Brow Farm we get high on air.

We sit out on the fairy-haunted veranda

amidst the plants, sipping from our cups

and talk about art, surrounded by Nature.

Loose, broad brush-strokes of sun lick

the garden, where the bumblebee flies

looking for pollen among the pink petals.

The birds can be heard to chirp in the trees.

The horses listen to the radio there, and

the walls are adorned with paintings of

the pantheon of musicians. The sign on

the front door says WE ARE IN LOVE.

In the back garden, the dove holds a twig

in its beak, and flies over the merry scene.

It would make a perfect artistic retreat,

idyllic, bucolic, a bombardment of green.

Elegant kittens like miniature tigers

prowl on the grounds without a sound.

We walk to the field where horses stand

and take a good look at the world all around.

Rough-hewn bulks of rock protrude

from the topsy-turvy contours of the field

where we could stay and drink the view

until daylight fades and it gets cold -

although we can’t because we need to

wash the car, and then I will go home,

only a stone’s throw away in all honesty,

until I come back againe the next time.

We look out at the Duddon estuary beneath -

the last in the isles to not deserve a bridge -

and breathe in the air, a raison d’ etre -

and stand, proud to be alive, on the edge.

INSTANT TRAVEL REVISITED

Far, far away in Magic Faraway Land,

there’s poetry written on the bank notes,

sadness gene is smitten with dreaming gland,

the God Particle is among the dust motes,

I. T. stands for Instant Travel too,

LSD for Lucy in the soul with demons,

H20 stands for your hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA stands for extra sensory allowance,

and the war still rages between the two

brightly coloured post-political poles,

while at night it is to Whinnie the Pooh

that you pray for your loved ones’ souls…

so how about we go take a holiday there?

You don’t need a passport or a thing

You don’t need to see through the frame of hair.

You might just need a love-song to sing.

Yeah yeah yeah, love is the answer,

dance in a circle around the tired sun,

love not hate will find a cure for cancer,

forgiveness not revenge, so I love everyone.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF BLACK COMBE

The idea of Order at the foot of Black Combe

whom it seems is asleep outside

like a great, slumbering dinosaur

come to fat and die by the Irish Sea,

remains that Order equals Happiness

as saith my father for whom there was

a file for almost all things in life;

and life is one, yes life is one

under the van Gogh black border sun;

and the same ideas are available everywhere;

and the artistic centre of the universe

is ubiquitous even in this semi-

wilderness; and it is impossible

to supplant a religion from its indigenous

landscape; and life does not ask us

to be clever, but to surrender to

the present tense, which is both infinite

and perfect; and there being no time

seems a timeless idea transmitted

across time, although between

universal truth and cliché is a fine line;

and did you know God = pi times

mc squared; and God is not a cartoon;

and Eternity is Now and Now and Now?

PUNK DOG REVISITED

MY DOG HAS LOST SOME WEIGHT,

MY DOG IS MY ONLY MATE,

HE’S GOT FIVE HANDS

AND A FURRY BUM

AND HE LIKES TO NICK PIZZA

FROM MY POOR OLD MUM,

HE ONCE HAD A CUP

OF TEA TO SUP AND

EVER SINCE THEN HE’S

NOT DONE THE WASHING UP…

STRETCHING HONESTY

Stretching “honesty” to its elastic utmost

doesn’t seem such a bad poetic Ideal -

and spreading the same butter over toast

that expands in surface area I feel

like a finemesh net so finemesh that it

is but grey, static, smoke and fleck

and will not retain any more than permit

anything through it, water from the beck...

I have seen in glimpses, in dreams

a city in the future where oil-drums burn.

It is no more my efficacy in poems

to light it and write it, burn and unlearn.

Passage to the Burger King joint atop

the oldest fell, by bullet up the telegraph

pole – just say goodbye at the top -

may turn a New Lakes poet onto flarf...

I wish to sing in the oral tradition of

the bardic child of the sights I have seen,

and also dream of living life as love,

in a place no-one before me has been.

I SING THE RED BOAT

I sing the red boat.

It’s carrying treasure

towards the sunset

or coming back home.

It does not matter

which way it is going

as long as I am singing

the red boat at dawn.

I sing the red boat.

I heal my emotions.

I feel I am ready.

To give this a go.

I sing the red boat.

Early in the morning.

It’s carrying pirates.

The melody is free.

The waves are music.

The music is waves.

Waving goodbye to

the scallywag queen.

I dream of an island

without a cameracrew.

And no footprint

in the yellow sand.

SHE DOESN’T WANT SMOKE IN THE AFTERLIFE

I imagine that when you lose your mother

you still have to go to bed and sleep,

weeping for the weeping willow, into the

pillow, before you sink down in to the deep.

I have been preparing with proleptic

strains for that day which may come soon -

not that she’s become a bawdy alcoholic

since dad died, just that she’s getting on -

and still my imaginative eye cannot extend

as far as feeling out what it will be like

to have no mother, like love will end

lying down looking at the stars in a dyke...

Our feelings for the dead should not fade

just because our memories do, nor will I

allow that blank amnesia, but be staid

in my staunch music when mum has to die.

Right now, to make a mental reminder,

she sleeps in the sitting room, drunk as a skunk;

I’ve come to think O is the key of water;

and the dog is beside me whom mum calls ‘punk.’

Duff Beer flung from the sun will pass,

and the house will be left partially to me,

to run, at the foot of the fell, a beautiful house

only some one mile or so from the sea.

I remember when I first clicked awake -

I’d found not one but two yellow submarines

in a Cornflakes box up here in the Lakes.

“You like ‘Yellow Submarine’ don’t you John?”

asked my mother and then I was aware

that I had to start trying hard to understand

what my father was saying, where before

it was microphone static. So I had found

my first memory and consciousness at once;

but this isn’t the start of a Proustian tome.

This is a dance with uncertainty and chance.

Here at the fellfoot, which is my family home.

SQUALIA

Well, living in the shed

when the band were recording

through binaural earphones,

a record on which I said

I would plug my senses

into the mains, I used to

eat discarded Danish Pastries

from the Co-op bin, wear

naff tracky bottoms lifted

from ASDA and splattered

with white emulsion paint

from doing up the commune,

write on receipts, Rizlas,

bus tickets, packets, sometimes

smoke heroin, sometimes

steal books from Borders

to give to my friends, live

like a dog, for nothing,

ransacking the tumulus of

postmodern selfhood for

all it was worth, feel worthless,

smell like skunkfoot was an

official nosological diagnosis

qualified as putrid demons

excreted through stone,

and one night after speaking

in an unknown tongue

for half an hour, had sex

with the floor on ecstasy.

ALL STATIONS BEAT

(for Grant Leonard Aspinall)

My beard getting bushy, my appearance like a behemoth,

my belly getting fat and my posture looking rotund,

and as we drove to the pub in your open-topped sports

car I remarked at how close we were to the ground

and felt that drunken butterfly feeling your wife must feel,

when you drive her, a man with a large sense of life -

such a thrill it was to be driven by you yesterday like

the danger of dancing on the very thin of a knife;

and what fine weather we had – a spring day to kill -

a day good for filming a music video as we did.

The lager was like nectar, that San Miguel, when

down our open gloating throats it finally, liquidly slid.

Hopefully we’ll not be like Verlaine and Rimbaud, eh,

but keep the bond of our blue sky art-house casual...

the buffering boa-constrictor of loneliness was the wind

that blew back our heads as we raced home homosocial.

Another fine escapade in the Lakes, and nothing illegal -

a drastic cut upon the film of Lockdown playing -

an instant of obeying the go-beat – and getting out there -

although it’s not accurate to say we were exactly “obeying.”

The search for action, sex, trouble, kicks, and change,

is old-hat to us, but the scent of change fermenting

on the ego-loss breeze, in springtime, is never cliché

but full of fun, fervent, enervating and dissenting.

LOCAL NEWS

We felled a tree at the foot of the fell.

The fell goes up, the tree came down.

Everyone helped, my brother as well,

my friend, and two gardeners from town.

Why I write it down I don’t quite know

but it might satisfy a craving for order.

We have got enough firewood for now -

to fuel mother’s fire in the cold winter.

The artist is traditionally self-indulgent,

escaping labour, and work with his hands

but to be fair to me this time I wasn’t,

dragged myself out from imaginary lands.

A sycamore tree it was that was felled,

and instead of it, we might plant an oak.

The winters up here are actually mild

but we still need a fire, with coals to poke.

DREAM-TRANCE UTTERANCE

My heart wants to bed a new colour.

My mind shrieks with Syd Barrett-

esque, screerunner death totalisme.

My mouth – blind – tastes

yesterday’s cold takeaway pizza.

My brain contemplates going through

every bodily part, drawing, and

then how to avoid it – and yours.

My Dorian Mode could be prophecy.

My normal mode, my normal code

could be “honesty,” but we are yet to see

which of my dreams it rhymes with.

My voice is of the lion at the

heart of Poem Records, singing.

My verse is a toneless room,

through whom actors walk, televised.

My foghorn is a moaning sound.

My bets with the mind have now ground

to a halt, and a mad, continuing want.

My leaves to a tree are a pattern,

whose continuation is but a recurring decimal.

My dog is begging for some more

sweet tea which I feed him sometimes

although it makes him pee, sometimes

inside instead of the eco-toilet.

My principle noxious toxin

of deleterious self-derision

is now supposed to be

nothing but literature.

My key to the map of sound is Freedom.

My father’s take on Freedom was

that Freedom is Man’s main psychic

thread dating back to his nomadic

days when he was tall, lean and muscular.

My guitar is propped upright against

the wall and may come crashing down.

My desire to give up twanging

the guitar and focus on a more

serious and/ or pleasurable tone

of mind is part of my ageing.

My truth is an apple from the north,

slowgrown, containing toenails

in the core, and which wasps

leave fag-burns in the skin of,

in Autumn, and my Autumn is

none other than Optimus Prime.

My favourite season is spring.

My favourite footballer is still John Barnes.

My dream is to make it as a writer,

to see free, to feel all, to flee Hell.

My time is the one with X tattooed on its face.

My town is a wafting into realms

of fantasy away, or where we sit.

My town-mouse is a happy mouse.

My country mouse is a sober mouse.

My computer mouse is a computer mouse.

My favourite five buttons are

Escape Enter Space Return Delete.

My rugby ball is Duff

Beer flung from the sun.

My sun is bleached, wide,

tired, madding and English.

My blue in you is paper.

My affable mixture-of-pixels style

is a late rendez-vous for the j-peg.

My perception is of the candle

over the Bunsen burner.

My memory of Finland

is that the trees are taller.

My Rontaur is a country,

not a colour, not a bonfire,

but a country and one where

the wind is an ancient sword.

My favourite English invention

might well be the sandwich.

My Lancaster University was

a word-guitar from Fender,

whereupon the ghost of Jimi

Hendrix turned up to play,

boggling the mind with runs.

My Zone on the Underground Map

is Zone Two even when I am

up here in the Lakes and forgotten.

My powers that be, I think,

are clouds above on their superior roads.

My synchronicity

is shortcircuiting.

My collective noun

for seagulls is a laughter.

My wink is a digital wink.

My ideals are things like

Heartbook and the Smartpoem

i.e. really “catchy.”

My confession to being

the person that coined

the word “amazeballs” and also

the musical genre “grime”

both in London in 1998 is a true one.

My quest for an aesthetic system

like the colours of the vowels in

English came across pasta.

My pollen is crushed

with mascara bruise,

peacock feather, butterfly

wing and velvet flare.

My own diy underground press

who were established in 1998

were called Ice Land Publications

after the country in Brave New World

where renegades are exiled.

My idea for replacing

archaic ‘gay’ gone under

Gondwanaland, gone to

apathy, barrage, detachment,

is a Burger King joint atop

the Lakeland’s oldest fell.

My neo-London skyline

is a train service that gets spilled.

My opposite word to ‘hello’

is not goodbye but ‘ok.’

My favourite name for a flower

is ‘self-heal’ though I have

never known its fragrance.

My job is as a pilgrim to Parnassus,

deep-sea diver in collective unconscious,

psychic map-maker, alchemist

of perception, liver-function

of language and translator of feelings.

My view is that you needn’t

suffer for your art in vain,

and that indulgence is good.

My memory is shortened now

like a goldfish in its closed world.

My seven year old homework

was amongst much else a proof

of Jim Morrison’s “metamorphose theory”

conducted on a round ball of cannabis

and has now been stolen.

My preference is a mixture

of coffee and cigarettes, thus

of both Blur and Oasis.

My scene is made up of atoms

much like anyone else’s scene.

My tune is a fey leaf

plonked with an encore of Rontaur.

My seed is an electric vine,

a crisis of authority,

a daring them to be.

My dish is too small.

My dosh is in dreams, for all

monopoly money should still work on tuck.

My ideal car would be the self-driving

one from that ages old telly show

for kids called Nightrider

because I do not drive.

My keys have gone flat

like tepid Pepsi left out overnight.

My list of loves include

life and the lucid, northern light.

SELF-INTERVIEW

A: When did you start writing and why?

B: Well, it was when I was about 5 and on holiday in France. It wasn’t easy to tell then, but looking back the reason may have been to fill a vacuum. Jim Morrison had written The Lords And The New Creatures, requiring a witness, then died. Ten years later no-one had seen any new creatures at all. There was therefore a vacuum. I was born into it. In France when I was about five it was like a giant force picked up my hand and started me writing.

A: So in a way poetry is like a religion for you?

B: Yes poetry is like a religion for me but it does not preclude science either.

A: Do you subscribe to the view of linguistic pragmatism that states there is a practical application for an idea in the world as a pre-requisite for the idea being thought?

B: I would have to know more about it, as I haven’t read anything on linguistic pragmatism but it sounds like it correlates very well with my reason for becoming a writer as earlier mentioned.

A: Is your original reason for writing still valid now that the new creatures have been seen and known?

B: I don’t know. There is an extent to which I should be writing now to de-stigmatise mental illness and affect change through incremental steps. A lot has happened since the new creatures. I was only very young.

A: Is there any sense in not writing anymore?

B: Well, I’ve only just read Ulysses so I think I am only just beginning. There’s also the fact that writing has become a kind of art therapy for me in my mental illness.

A: Are you going to move on from the new creatures onto something new?

B: I’ve already had to do that many times in my life, and still my childhood experiences remained an open-ended mystery that I had to keep coming back to.

A: Do you feel like reading Ulysses you have got to the bottom of it all a bit more?

B: It was profoundly affecting. To think that I wasn’t the first person to encounter a bird called the juggernaut that wriggled its wing in the wood. To think that James Joyce went through the same experience. To think that my father who has now died read this same book before I was born.

A: Do you think in many ways Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures was a riposte to Ulysses?

B: Let’s just say that Jim Morrison’s book started to smell of an Irish accent the more I read Ulysses.

A: now which one of us two do you think is going to go downstairs to get a pate sandwich, a cup of sweet tea and ingurgitate the morning’s motley array of poetry buttons?

B: I don’t it turning into a fight so I propose that you do whatever it is that suits you.

A: okay in that case you can go downstairs, prepare the snack on all fronts, food, drink, and medication, and I can be the one to consume it.

IN MY GESTATION CHAMBER

Genius I have heard described as an overused word,

bandied about by the unqualified, applied

to the merely talented, diluted in meaning.

Genius as I have heard described can be the grace

to offer to wash up after a banquet where

the guests discuss your brother’s genius.

Genius I know from my University course

is described by TS Eliot as the ability

to spot the pattern before it has formed.

Genius exists in everyone, even in the child

stuck on the train looking out of the window,

according to the poetry of Bukowski.

Genius one might presume is thinking outside

the box, like the guy that did the maths for the

red skin cell, not mastering a genre already known.

Genius – Paul says – is more knuckling down and

having a family, than discovering the sheet

where pictures depicting your lyrics grew.

Genius, my mother demeans, saying that

life is not about being a genius but about

the daily grind, the struggle, day in day out.

Genius (we know) comes from the same Latinate

etymological derivation as gentleman, genesis,

genitalia, genes, and a few other words too.

Genius, according to Henry Miller at least, or

rather a man of genius, is unwelcome, a pain

in the arse to other people, and a recidivist too.

Genius is often flawed in the traditional view,

and of course anyone can tell you, the line

between madness and genius is a fine one.

Genius I have been called a few times, but

my father disputed and even falsified the notion,

in fact would not have anything to do with it.

Genius is said to be free of the trammels of fact,

inborn in the imagination, through whom

the real is determined, even in the literary canon.

GUITAR

I imagine deleting everything I’ve done, erasing

hundreds of pages of poems, songs, scribblings,

starting againe with the moment I conjured up

a punkish mnemonic for the six guitar strings:

Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. Too crude

it might seem, but I am on strong medication

that precludes translating natural emotion,

with my illness perceived as but an imbalance

of chemicals in the brain, in the modern paradigm;

so crude would seem apposite and not unseemly.

These days my mnemonic has changed to:

Every Acid Dealer Gets Busted Eventually

and to abjure twanging the guitar has become

more my efficacy than formerly. Where before

it was to plug my senses in the mains, now

I sit in the midst of all the normal-talking air

selling shares in the colour white. It seems death

has gone to great lengths to bring you this vision,

light rinsed by perception and the other way

about, the fair day, out in the front garden.

The far right and the far left hold hands, form

a circle, and haven’t got any money, honey,

so to fuck the system is to say that the system

works quite well, quite ironic and quite funny.

DYLAN’S WALL

Permutation is the drain of Time.

When you’re sleeping nothing happens.

People like limpid lines that rhyme.

To trespass into forbidden gardens.

Only song can survive the fire.

Life is clean and green inside a flame.

We rehearse for death inside our game.

Love’s a lollipop trying to explode.

When the vision is decision you can unload.

Drugs are a bet with the eye of the mind.

The invisible is not unseen but blind.

I lost my teddy bear in the void.

The void is a schizophrenic mechanoid.

Love is Nature’s reproductive trick.

Some things I’ve seen make me sick.

Two timing words that have no view.

Like “Flora I am in love with you.”

I chased the dragon through the hoop.

I’m naked and I haven’t brewer’s droop.

A clock is only as fast as a cheetah.

God is drunk againe on Wifebeater.

DING GOES THE CLOUD

I’m on the phone to The Lords

And The New Creatures

talking about Flora and

her redeeming features

which are probably not

her loquacious charms

and how we should be lying

in each other’s arms

in the text they sent

through the chainsaw blade

they said we’re never

ever going to get paid

and the beer I’m sipping

tastes like a house-brick

and the gulf I’m crossing

is in the word for ‘tick’

and I wish I was away

with the cloud-change and

I wish I was away with

the dreamland band

meanwhile on the phone

in our old conversation

we spoke of the problems

of over-population

and how the trees are

being all cut down

and everything’s headed

for a singular town

in the brain they sent

through the microwave

they said it’s imperative

that I misbehave

and the tea I’m making

is the hippy kind and

the tincture of illness

can make you blind

and I wish I was away

with the starbeams and

I wish I was away

under Gondwanaland.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF BLACK COMBE REVISITED

To sleep atop the Lakeland’s oldest fell,

Black Combe, one midsummer night on the heather,

was my English-teaching grandmother’s dream.

Who knows, maybe this summer we’ll get there?

If only we could go by bullet to the top

of a telegraph pole, instead of having to walk.

Maybe at the top there should be a gift shop

where of Michelangelo the women talk.

We’d have to set off early before the sun sets,

and take coffee flasks and other supplies.

Ecstasy would be preferable, or amphetamines

although both lead to writing down lies…

a sugar-lust comes. The kettle’s on the boil.

My brother Dr. Robert is coming up in July

with his Eyetie girlfriend and their newborn son.

So maybe to the top we will all make our way.

It has to happen some day, on a balmy night,

underneath the resplendent plethora of stars,

in the unreal world, outside of civilisation,

far from the passing of the river of cars.

BUY ONE GET ONE FREE

I like pizza, you like pizza,

so let us one day eat it together

in the sauna on a day where

the weather is like a printer

in a primeval swamp – not

now, no, but sometime later -

and if we get too stuffed

we’ll give the crusts to Baxter.

For all he’ll like it better

than the dogfood which my

brother and I give him to eat

here at home in Cumbria.

Demon spills like silver water -

and then it’s out there, going

from white to grey faster

than you can say “ether.”

It’s buy one get one free.

It falls to me to be the one to say

three words cleansed by fire.

I love you. There you are.

This conversation is not over.

For all I’m a famous poet

around here, have been in the

paper, dispelling the myth that

there is no talent in the area.

I have liberated many minds;

and you are my ideal lover.

Far away on a boat in Australia.

For wonder is why I bother.

THE KEY OF DESIRE

My bro turned out an interesting musician

for all the doctor fixed his perforated ear-drum

with a tiny spec of Robert’s bell end

in a new state of the art operation

and now he can listen to the radio station

flick through the channels and land on Chopin

under the stars late at night while driving

over dark earth who should be sleeping

and where would he go but to see his girlfriend

she’s a good looker and a real person

must’ve been love at first sight between them

I think they’re going to have more children

if he’s very lucky the door will be open

like the keys of Blake in the songful morning

and she’ll be in the kitchen like a vision

and then they’ll go upstairs into the bedroom

and what goes behind doors in the backrooms

is private and not for anyone else’s knowing

and in a tight cupboard I will be hiding

making cave-paintings on the wall

CHRONOTOPE TURNED INTO EUCHRONIA

Carrying a sieve from A to B to prove

altruism or was it Alzheimer’s to a dictator,

through the self-organised orange grove

make sure you watch out for the Honda

lawnmower turning adroitly in the fading

light, missing a gnarled treefinger by an inch,

cutting grass blades where we were wading

down – and stop and sit down on a bench -

dreaming of a fair, free and equal society

where Monopoly money works on wine,

where a house costs no more than 50p,

and ecstasy flows through vein and vine.

Allow that water comes free from the Tap -

that O is the key of water and its sound -

that there is nothing mean or cruel to trap

the myriad branches of the monkey mind.

Insects will be flying in warm, summer air.

Beethoven will be hidden in the tips of trees.

As Roger Waters said, don’t be afraid to care.

Sigh, with relief, in the ego-loss breeze.

Then to work you might return and know

it’s work that sets us free. Round and round

you mow the grass, still dreaming. So

the summer rain heals the broken ground.

THE CRAZY PALIMPSEST OF MEMORY

I sometimes catch a glimpse of a street map,

a Where’s Wally? book, a Valentine’s Card

under the surface… now as I hear the tap

singing, the pipes glugging their yard,

I think the crazy palimpsest of memory

contains meaning at any intersection,

open to one’s own hermeneutic autonomy,

to reading and feeling and Deconstruction.

They say that all is story, all is fiction,

even your bones – they are spun fable.

As I hear plates clank down in the kitchen

having come upstairs and left the table

I think how meaning is an emotional

import given mere exo-skeleton with words;

how semantics is a road sign not a place, notional;

and how my thinking’s hampered by the birds…

I hear a knock at the door: my friend

has turned up to see me, a pleasant surprise,

carrying news of Man’s eventual end

in the wild excitement behind his eyes.

I love it when he comes round because

in him I can confide, and confound

the cosmic sadness of everything that was,

before I landed with my feet on the ground.

10/ 05/ 2021

My friend Mr. G came round today, riding

his bike round the hugs and curves

of the valley road. I helped him

send off an e-mail to multiple addresses

concerning his up and coming exhibition -

paintings, music, video and poetry.

He paints the portraits of the pantheon

of rock and jazz musicians from photos

with the music on and in mind, mixing

synaesthesia and ekphrasis, combining

the postmodern readymade and the emotion

of Romanticism, and you start to wonder

what of their hands, instruments, music,

outside the frame. He carried the coffin

at my father’s funeral. My father was

an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue

who charged the Germans for the return

of their Russian-plundered pastorals

and now that he’s gone I can say that.

He used to say a Russian has a right to a

square of red perceived by someone from

another land and Liberty and Trade go

hand in hand. I think that if your

father is an art smuggler called Blue

it can qualify as a new sense through

which you can read of future events

as I did in 2000, speaking against September

11th, although the cannabis I was smoking

prevented me from even remembering

my helpless fecundity of prescience

when the planes came through the window,

until a diagnosis and course of treatment.

On my blog, in terms of my own art,

you can find a demo recorded through

state of the art binaural earphones, and

one not, and two photographs of the

tape I put in the oven and cooked when

its pause where glued in the reel healed

and was gone, and a photograph of

the sheet where pictures depicting

a lyric I wrote grew, and then there’s

the problem of words, for I have

a boyhood book from in and around the

time I was the kid that took care of the new

creatures, which I think of as Morrison,

and a song lyric book I think of as

Syd Barrett and then a third book, of poems,

which might be thought of as Rimbaud,

so in a way as an artist I too have died

and gone to Heaven, where trips are free;

but then againe, there was a time when

all of it was going for me at once,

then there came a time when all of it

was over, all of a sudden and gone. So

I needed to heal. Medicine wastes

packaging. Mouth to mouth we can talk,

full of preverbal resuscitation. Like

going online in your lonely head at night.

Anyhow, I said to Mr. G maybe I

would produce a contrapuntal collocation

of art works, a series called “Speech Bubbles,”

where I paint lines of meaning, and his

musicians start to talk across purposes,

to philosophise, to extemporise even.

He said he would prefer it if I didn’t.

They would only be stock epiphanies

anyway. The world arriving at a series

of aphorisms, maxims, axioms and arrows.

For logic and science I arraign and

inveigh against or would in former work.

Touch is the shortest route between

subject and object. I wanted my work

to be more fresh, daring and exploratory

once upon a time and now I am open

to the weather, to the voices, whom

it seems pan like Interstellar Overdrive

and know what I am thinking, writing.

Ameliorate not decorate, obviate not

titivate, that’s what I say, make batteries

out of flannel not the other way about.

My triune arrangement of books as

earliermentioned might well come down

from the blog, disappear, as in here

the drip from the kitchen tap continues.

And who knows? Maybe one day

we will come to see a Complete Works?

I did a higgledy piggledy picture of

many days and conversations and

demeanours all rolled into one ball.

Now another mad genius enters the

kitchen: my younger brother James.

It seems that to organise a sheet where

pictures grow without and hands, you

need to split the creativity, the intellectual

property exactly fifty fifty between

two people, to be fair, and spoil

her flawless body with sin. Personally

I think the substance of the Eartoons

Lucy in the soul with demons, and

the Music Theory for them written

by me, although the sheet where they

grew, depicting a song of mine own,

was always going to be a James Tucker

zone. O brother thou art mine other!

We keep each other on an even keel.

We laugh to ourselves each on our own.

We sometimes stay up too late into the Night.

And this we know, there is no ‘we’

I am the third person immaculate, free,

so light saber down, Shell petrol station

close, open the sleepless omen moon,

who shines like an electric coin and

seems to be in love with the sea or

at least with her own reflection and

find the reek of small, burnt flowers

from Finland and try and hold onto them.

A NEW DAWN

The hour before dawn is darkest.

The Eastern horizon looked like a negative.

As light leaks out I think of how a photon never ages.

I think also how all my books are versions of the same one.

First there was Rose Petals In The Ashtray -

my dying dad’s code for coppers in jail.

Then there was Selected Poems 1989 – 2017

containing but a handful of my

seven year old poems which

had not fully emerged yet

from dad’s bedroom in the attic.

Then there was Vampires And Zombies -

at first juxtaposing 74 poems

and 74 songs, but then amended

to include four little books, meaning

all my boyhood writings,

all the song lyrics I could gather,

and two collections of poetry, one

Rose Petals In The Ashtray amended, the other

Lockdown At The Foot of Sea Ness.

I seem to have now fused it all into one continuum,

spent the night doing it too. Soooo

as dawn’s light leaks out I contemplate

whether the Night was well spent

or whether I should’ve got some sleep.

When my mother comes downstairs

to go to work, she’ll ask me if

I stayed up all night and

what I might say, is that the dog

got some shit stuck on his furry arse

and so I couldn’t go to bed because

the dog sleeps in my bed with me

because the dog was once abused, locked

in a garage for many years on end

by a former owner, so this

I am already planning to tell my mum.

I might just say “I’ve been at work” instead.

In many ways it is true, though

I don’t get paid for what I do.

The witness from Jim Morrison’s book,

and more and many more, I work

24/ 7 in an unpaid position

of unlegislatable and international nature.

I am more likely to win a Nobel Prize

than I am to get paid for anything I do,

and I am not likely to win a Nobel Prize,

because apart from a few bits and pieces,

the work I bring before you is full of

sex and drugs and rock n roll.

So many weed-reeking rock songs

are included to add colour to the mixture.

There may be moments when

you cannot tell whether something

has a guitar part and melody or not.

I feel I have done enough, not

for a Nobel Prize obviously but

to satisfy that requirement of Man’s

that the witness to the new creatures

provide some words, whatever

that requirement means, and

whatever the words that are conjured are -

I don’t think it a pointless sop

to liberal humanism to provide words -

but there is some kind of requirement there.

More leaves to a tree are forthcoming

but I forget what they are as I walk

around the kitchen and see

a singular magpie land on the table

out the back, and fly away, leaving me

to think of the colours white and black

and how everyone likes to dream.

Outside smoking, I deem the garden

to be the opposite of mental hospital.

Back in the scullery I feed the dog sweet tea.

I was a bit flirtatious with the doors,

with Jim Morrison’s poetry, which I used to

read online in 1998, way back in my Rimbaudian day…

and I might be searching for something

new to move onto even here and now…

and I don’t regret things, and am not

jealous of another man’s scope or gift

and the poems I have left out I don’t regret either.

If I could keep but one poem from the

whole lot of the ones I have gathered

it would be that spreadsheet of my seven

year old writing with which I opened.

And where is Baxter the dog but beside me?

And where are all the other poems

I have left out and should I make

the effort to cut and paste some of them in?

Yes I think I shall, and not censor

the cardiovascular heart reading of the hills.

Mother comes downstairs, takes her pills,

goes off to work, I shirk, will

go back to bed to rest my head

and write from a supine repose

O what shall we do about the crows?

They are nesting in the chimney.

They are ravaging the farmer’s land.

They are sitting on the telegraph wire

but will anybody else understand?

Ah, yes, that’s right, lie down in bed.

Not yet, I mean quite soon.

First I must crick my neck,

boil the kettle, wander round

the kitchen singing a melody -

O how the melody in my head

is capacious and Nirvana blue today -

and I can play it too, on the guitar,

the nylon string which I got for free, me…

now I wait for the brewing of the tea.

Now I am in my bed, said Baxter the dog

to himself. Only joking. Ha-ha!

Six thirty turns to twenty past seven.

I am in my bed, having fed

Baxter his sweet tea, and I am thinking

in pure, Nirvana-blue, lightsaber blue melody

and it is capacious melody indeed.

Something to whip out if ever againe I record.

Most of the songs are unrecorded.

Most songs have not been written yet.

Most songs, the unwritten ones,

decompose in a compost heap of silk.

Most of them disintegrate on magic mushrooms.

Then you must wait for more

blank pages flung from the sun.

You might also be on E at the same time.

Then you’ll know the day is a good one.

Unless you’re someone who, say,

never came back from an acid trip,

before your brain was fully developed,

before you’d even left school.

Hmn, difficult to know what to say -

you can’t just say “he’s definitely gay!”

with abject self-abnegation like that -

knocked back at a remove from your own consciousness…

I think Paul came back but not me.

I think I stayed a long way away,

past Black Head, at Lizard Point,

but I might be wrong about all this.

My fingers tap the keypad, elongating

the length and difficult of perception.

And where is the dog but beside me?

And why am I breaking the house rules

by smoking out the window of my bedroom?

Most poems haven’t been written yet.

Most poems are still to come.

Most gardens haven’t finished growing.

Most voices have not been heard.

Most dogs have not barked at the moon.

Most of the time I cannot even remember

if I have already had my medication or not.

Most of my boyhood poems were quite good

but I could not find a place for them

in my adult book, most of my friends

don’t talk to me anymore, half

of the doors are already dead.

ODE TO FLARF

There’s something deeply comforting

about an Autechre interview when it is

cut and pasted off Facebook and further

cut up with the music on loud it’s quite

kaleidoscopic really you get blank

canvas acid which can throw up sheer

beauty when I was a teenager with that

syndrome and listening to electro before

diving into the rave scene they often

lure in sophisticated arrhythmia using

notes for percussion finetuned notes

moments of this sort of work twice it’s

harder than it was they’d just laugh

so we were kind of discovering it

together with them two Mancunian

lads who’d grown up doing the uninitiated

techno tribe astral breathing hair because

you’re learning as you’re working outside

in the sunshine and haven’t bought any

new equipment for five years and have

to sleep and have no muscle memory.

DIARY POEM

It took me a long time to wake up today.

A list of miracles that miss my CV

were scattered and mottled and I had

to gather them together and wake for tea

and cigarette, aware that at some point

the dog was standing on the laptop in the night

and I had to gather my things and wake

to make sure the laptop was alright…

when I woke and smoked and drank

tea I chopped some kindling for mum

and her living room fire, fed the dog,

and started to think about my dream

and that lying patiently in wait for all

my precious things, the red skin cell,

andcetera, to wake with me, a chain

of metamorphosis I wear at the foot of the fell…

at some point today, grogged on meds

I spoke to my brother about poetry,

and he said “I have no interest in writing

it, it has too many rules for me!”

I could change my name to Jim Wood,

though John F B Tucker is my name,

a poem in its own right, a tautology,

or maybe even what they call an anti-poem.

A friend of a friend will sort my dream

of getting my works on Amazon out,

then at the Promised Land I will have

arrived, my baby will be born as art.

I’m not allowed to die before my mum,

for then she would die, and my brothers

come up to Heaven to bollock me,

after scattering my ash at my father’s

grave, in the churchyard up the way,

so before that happens, if I need help,

I’ll ring the CPN, tell him I’m about to

utter my final, primal, animal yelp.

He’ll do all that he can to ensure my ma

is happy, and life is sweet for one and all,

as it is for the friends that have scattered,

even the best friend I ever had, Paul.

A bit strong, is the medicine I am on,

but it makes me comfortably numb at least,

able to write numbers still, a John

who learned to walk in London, in the East.

Now the clouds are selling upturned jars

of sunset, in the bars of Heaven, out to sea,

as we forward march, to the end of the day,

and it seems we are put here just to see,

to hear and taste and touch and smell as well.

It’s all good in the realm of the senses.

We’ve invented something we cannot sell.

We have erected brave, new tenses

to inhabit in our minds. I look around

at the Natural world where music precedes

sense as an agent of understanding, and

all my worry and all my doubt recedes.

I love it here, living at the foot of the fell,

a stone’s throw away from the sea, the cave,

the town of Millom, where my friend lives,

the one with whom I sometimes misbehave.

The impassable gulf between the first

and third persons has gone away to write

in a log cabin high up in the Moroccan mnts,

knowing that a green leaf is a vote.

The Roman phone is now off the hook,

the squalid mess has now seen Sea Ness,

earth’s lumpen furniture darkens and I

am happy to be left waiting in darkness,

for all the darkness is nourishing for the soul,

and waiting is a good thing for one to do,

where the self escapes its green sense of ‘I,’

and the weather flees with Whinnie the Pooh.

There are still a few visible things left

at the fellfoot, though light is shrinking,

emaciated, blue and monastic, and Night

is coming on, and that might be frightening.

That we move on, that is a given, a need,

a requirement, and the Sarah of today

will by the Natalie of tomorrow, whom

it seems is a good girl, what else can I say?

I play the green drum on my keyboard,

for all it should be easy as leaves to a tree,

and maybe it is time for me to move on

to something else, not songs and poetry.

My heart was once a festival where all arts

went on, but now it seems all gone,

though the trees I had planted still grow,

and know more than they will ever let on.

Who will be the new witness, whenever

I have kicked the bucket, I do not know.

Now the stars are coming out, starting

to shine and illuminate the garden below.

That will be enough, a whole new tomorrow,

chocker-block full of fun-packed days,

soaking up the rays, dissolving one’s sorrow,

living the dream life, in many different ways.

A mere trifle, to stifle one’s better instincts,

but then I might write for kids instead,

or carry on with what I am on with now,

it doesn’t really matter, and it’s time for bed.

Once upon a time in a galaxy further than

the stars and closer than the eye, we begin,

life is a blink and then it’s all over,

and we are but actors out on loan

forever trying to give back our money

to the mint, our beck to the source, the rain,

and then it is spent, our time, which was zero,

and we’ll never get another chance againe.

Death is an emotion we come to respect,

to need, something to redeem us, for all

we have done or not done, our eventual

end will come, and all things will fall -

fall in line, fall in tune with the moon,

whom it seems is a portal to the city,

where now the magnets come undone,

and all the women seem so very pretty.

A love I have left behind, down there,

where death has undone so many more

than we can count, and now that it’s Night,

I might fight the demon, and save her.

A violet twilight sky has given way to

the tomb of Day, where Qui-gons be Qui-gons

and you’ve guessed it, we must practice

what we preach with regard to bygones.

A practical axis, I deem it, my word,

it’s full of glow in the dark stars on the ceiling,

and one more word would not do any harm,

for all I am a true translator of feeling…

intelligence is sadness, intelligence doubt.

Karma will be gained when I get to to the end.

Bilateral cloudscapes are smuggling rum.

I wonder if my dog is my only friend.

It’s healing is a dog’s uncomplicated love.

He explores the world with his mouth.

What would happen if you fed him a Dove?

I haven’t had one since the south.

I think Man will keep plodding on

but my prophetic aspect is too insane.

Who will renew Jim Morrison’s dream

when I am new to death, dead and gone?

What say we take off our fungal heads?

What say we redeem that dream of the wood?

What say I buy a fistful of song

through whom death hangs his head?

I try another four by four passing by

the house where alignment lives but am in,

even when out underneath the stars,

thinking of life as but a giant bin.

I’ve soared on heights over the mountains,

I’ve seen the Future State of Poetry,

I’ve felt that writing itself is Freedom,

and now I’m in the kitchen sipping tea,

and writing is the breath of the soul,

and morning is the painting painted by God,

and dozens are the ones that got away,

and say when we meet in the Land of Nod -

say “hi!” and give me a high five too,

and come down the tunnel plunged in the fell,

lined with free beer dispensers, torches,

and fruit machines sucking on lemons as well…

there’s nothing left to tie me to this room,

I’ve gone insane, like the madman who

cursed me, a long time ago, which I

being quite naive did not even know -

and the twilight bats flit about a bit,

and then it is ancient Night once more,

and the light that gleamed an instant is gone,

and we read of the suffering of the poor.

A pram is a fairground on the bank of

the River Goyt, a true dream gone by,

and where I am sitting, a note can be heard,

a word-chord piano opened up in the sky.

Forever exiling worlds with each decision,

we clutch at straws to stuff full the hole

and deem the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie

to be the sacrosanct and Romantic soul…

I’ve ranted for long enough, about how

I’ve rented my body from death, death,

whom it seems sells records on the corners

of underworld streets, also liquid crystal meth.

It’s love not death that makes angels

of us all, give us wings where before

we had shoulders smooth as ravens’ claws,

yes love not death, and more and many more

whom it seems can smile and wave

and dream upon her first morning’s colour,

while my guitar gently sleeptalks and

the fractured atom has gone under the dollar.

SPONTANEOUS SONG OF THE HEART IN THE MORNING AFTER A DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Madness does not equate to

darkness increased an inch and

times by five and broken with flags

darkness does not equate to

madness increased an inch but

the surface of smiley white

has gone under Gondwanaland

let this be a lesson to you

to only write of beauty and

sing your little heart out too

Captain Beefheart is singing in the

kitchen where women have been

bitchin’ and fiction is made

all night I write by the lamplight

until the dawn and quite right

I bin the first disclosure

mine heart is free and beating

your heart is lamb-like bleating

if it were truth or dare they’d

both be the same to me

innocence is fleeting in the

sense that we are all ageing

but soon it will come back round

new songs are cleansed by fire

surviving the funeral pyre

nothing is beyond poetry

I see the flower on the table

as a kind of glowing candle

and write a song with no guitar

at the fading of the final star

my heart it swims in joy

and your heart is not a toy

if it were paper scissors stone

I’d throw the dog a juicy bone

fan-mail arrives by air

I pick up vibes through my hair

a lone car is passing by

the valley road’s a lullaby

soft are the fingers of

the angels when we’re in love

I’ve said the password ‘garden’ to

all manner of unlikely things

and seen a black angel of

self-immolation spread its wings

it’s ten to eight, the time of my birth

when I first landed on earth

my spaceship smelled of super-skunk

and soon I was a baby punk

I’ve waded into ten foot flames

to free the sparrows from their names

they seemed trapped behind glass

and now another car can pass

over and out testing testing

123, the joker’s jesting,

trueness is quite, silence is white

and everyone is interesting

the mood is cute on medication

it’s crude the way they treat the situation

the mind is bulbous

with placid surface area

it’s seems extraneous

but acid is much scarier

now my heart it swims in bliss

the dog’s been out for a morning piss

I’ve melody coming out my ears

and drink a toast to your free beers

another lone car passes by

with love we might never die

I’d woof along with the dog

if I were but a wooden log

but I’m a person just like you

it’s true that here new flowers grow

oh yes but also oh no

we go where no-one else can go

outside the 30 CM ruler

there once was a man

who thought he was cooler

but I soon put him right on that

I let fall off my critical hat

a game will end in peace and love

I don’t know what I’m dreaming of

a druid drunk on dreams awakes

his mothers making fairy cakes

I love the gang

that’s gathered here

a lone car passes

fuelled on beer

a fellscape opens up to view

a thousand tinctures of wonderful blue

exist between us, now we’re out

in the garden wandering about

my heart it swims

in liquid gold

and now the story

remains untold

NOTES

Searching for an aesthetic system like the colours of the vowels in English you come across pasta.

I hear “full fathom five” could not be four or six or any other number because Virgil says “there are tears in things.”

Lancaster University sounded unto my mind’s ear like a type of language guitar made by Fender – whereupon the ghost of Hendrix came to play.

If Deconstruction is a dream, the latter means the monster quietly learning the language in the hut in Frankenstein could be Caliban or Frederick Douglas the same.

Did you know The Great Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panchronic, panoramic overview like a chronotope turned into an euchronia?

The Yellow Pages is not exactly a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy.

That it is rude to write of the living, that all writing is fiction, that all selfhood is mythology, that it’s malleable is history, that there is no immutable truth seem five tenets on the same level of analysis.

O is not a ghost-vowel but U is when opened unto the gloom under sliver moon I slide her over and againe “semen spills like silver water.”

I like that James P D Tucker posits in a casual doodle that <BEE> might come after @ in the international language alphabet.

The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

The word ‘goyt’ might be seen as Celtic thought-patterns meeting Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.

The word ‘psyche’ comes from Ancient Greek for ‘ghost’ kopsiche and ghosts can travel in time, one scholar visiting Ancient Greece finding the Greeks tremendous actors.

In postmodernism the signifier-signified bond corresponds to relations between the phonetic and semantic aspects of the linguistic sign.

Counter to postmodern theory on the arbitrary or even meaningless signifier-signified bond, when The New Creatures was given a traffic light motif of green pages it intrinsically conferred go, grow, evolve, happen, nature, continuation, motion, life.

The word ‘entropy’ spelled backwards might be used in physics to frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation and its dance in and out of itself.

Home-made Belletristics and Russian Formalism share the belief in treating the text through its own contemporaneous eyes as opposed to the new, trendy, Presentist view.

The lesson of post-structuralism could be two-fold meaning a) the condition of being a text can extend to any object b) the condition of being a language unto itself can extend to any text.

I think Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between the first and third persons.

I think language is the emotional condom of the world, but in telling you this, you understand you are sworn to secrecy.

I think that vowels are our souls and have long since understood the word ‘vowel’ can be spelled phonetically using every V-A-E-I-O-U-L sound in alphabetical order.

As a child I used to repeat the word ‘kangaroo’ in my head until it went numb, emptied itself of meaning, hopped off to become the mad kangaroo king.

When you sing a line like “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain,” it only betrays that you have read Rimbaud at sixteen.

The meditation mantra ‘so-hum’ means “I am Him” or “soul into Universe” or “soul into God” and I still employ it sometimes in daily life in my inner monologue though I no longer ‘meditate.’

When a volume starts to smell of redolent perfume it could be the word of a dog who has almost 70 such words which is almost as many as the French.

The Warehouse

Tuesday, 11 May 2021

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