ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR FROM CHIPMUNKA
Soundcloud Rain
The Sunset Child
WIRED TEETH
I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.
She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.
She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.
She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.
She slides the stick of it out of the pack.
She puts the stick of it into her mouth.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She puts the packet back in her bag.
She swings the bag about a little bit.
She walks past a little pub long shut.
She might go check out a flower shop.
She loves to chew and to suck the taste.
She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.
(Kilburn, 1997)
‘THE GREATEST SIN’
[A GIFT FOR NATALIE]
COCOON OF LOVE
A glance
A blink
A fault in the stars
Her mascara slips into pools of black
A chance
A second
of Infinity
She flutters her eyelids
like spring’s first butterfly
LOVESICK LULLABY
Love hides inside the empty floorboards
Love glistens from the shining dew drop
Love rises from the end of a candle
Love hurts & wounds the sleeping innocent
Love screams & kills but we forgive it
Love wanders through an empty corridor
Love arrives like a midnight butterfly
Love jumps up from the serpent’s shadows
Love fills the air with empty spaces
Love seeks those who least seek it
Love kisses those who don’t deserve it
Love falls & takes you to the sea-bed
Love’s name is hidden in her whisper
Love sings like a silent choir
Love dwells in lack of truth or reason
Love dies when she blinks her eyelids…
TO SIGH
In a half lit world
I sink to see a moment of you
& I’m scared to believe
That death not ends these fearful dreams
But at least I dreamt
Amid a lost desire
Alone on a sinking ship
Sinking into aborted love forever
& it gives me hope
To sigh
But darkness dwells so deep
It makes me want to smile
Because I don’t have to pretend
Yes
I know I’ll drown
But at least I dreamt of you…
TO FEEL
To feel the despair
in a lover’s breath
To feel the heat
in a wayward smile
To feel the mystery
of the heart
I can’t keep hiding in the shade
To dare to see her
blink her eye
When she is gone
her scent remains
I dare to feel
I dare to touch
I dare to believe in Heaven…
FOOL
I can’t see you
so I guess you must be
invisible
I can’t feel you
so I guess you must be
perfect
Into this wilderness I’m born
Into this longing heart I’m thrown
Into this sea to drown
To die asleep & dreaming of you
Because I am just a fool
I hope I die with you…
BY DARKNESS
She dances in the darkness
like a flame
She disconnects with a sigh
I fall into the trance
& awake
only to sleep again…
THE URGENCY OF NOW
The warm urgency of now
Pushes me deeper into the tide
I surrender to desire
& let you conquer me
Floating asleep on a laughing sea
I can see you
on the shoreline
Waving slowly, calling softly
I must see you again
Tomorrow will bring treasures deep
Rich & warm comforts of the soul
I need you here
Before I cry & close my eyes forever
I can see you
On the horizon
Beneath a melting sunset sky
The stars awake to notice love
She waits with open arms…
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 & 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 & 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...
WAITING
Slowly rise
Slowly stir
I lie waiting, thinking
Wishing I was lying down
with you
Sleeping in soft grass
Wandering, laughing through open fields
Drifting through meadows without fences
Outside dawn blooms into spring
Birdsong chatters in the trees around
She will find a way
If I can find her secret heart
Then everything
will be
okay…
AWAKE, THE CRAZY DREAM
I am asleep
until she smiles,
I am perched
on the edge of a dream,
She dances along the summer horizon,
& loses me with the blink of an eye…
PURPLE PERFECT
To trade desire, wrapped in silky cloths
To build a fire, where the insects flock
There is a candle, I don’t believe the light
But I can feel you, we’re on the edge of night
Into a theatre, onto an endless bridge
Into the ocean, on the back of a bomb
Never yesterday, in its faded tomb
Nor tomorrow, in its empty womb
Fresh desire still feeding hope
Onto a bonfire, down a necklace rope
While I’m blinded, there is no horizon
But I can see now, the sun has risen
With strange colours, mixing the twilight sky
& love is our sin now, we could forever die
together
In the depths of a dream
Live together
In a world unseen…
THE WISH OF NIGHT
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...
ANON LOVE POEMS FROM THE MAG ‘POETRY NOW’ WHICH THE POET ESTABLISHED WITH A FRIEND AT OUNDLE SCHOOL, LOWER SIXTH
INVINCIBLE LOVERS
I’ll tell you how strange and wild
With wanton promise comes she
On an unknown hour
Like an uninvited guest
You’ve somehow brought to bed.
All night we’d
Sit and think of history
As if it hadn’t passed,
The great wars and the ancient peoples
And all the silly fears.
We’d think of how much we’ve changed
And how much we’ve remained the same.
We’d think of moments of mine
We somehow shared and how I longed to live
In circling illumination of all those moments,
Fragments gone.
And softly I wished
To expand history back into the past
And never to move again an inch forwards.
And to run through the memory of Time,
Ancient, timeless galleries.
Often we’d sit and think of speaking
Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.
Always we’d realise we never had
Time enough to waste or spend.
So we gloried in ourselves
Like invincible lovers,
Always boundless in new being.
And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,
She would turn and smile
As if to boldly offer
‘Come take my hand,
And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'
(Anon)
OPEN
In the cotton mist she came in shining leather.
Time 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.
(Anon)
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.
(Anon)
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.
(Anon)
HAIKU FOR SPRING
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but like butterflies.
(Anon)
FROM ‘THE GREEN TUCK BOX POEMS’
THE EMERALD PRINCESS
Sadness is the mother of dreams
dreaming of the perfect Girl
who cannot fit into this world
because she’s not a human being
The emerald princess
gloating in the green-gorgeous Oasis
licking lush and lustful lips
attending to her crawling king
Her kiss is wet
w/ water clean and thin
like the spirit of Heaven
& the mind runs clean
in pristine dream
when you suck
the redness of her kiss
DEEP
The dark and gold sea
is still softly folded
between you and me
O to be there
on that burning shoreline
& touch with mine her waiting palm
& assuage my aching
reaching longing
- I must dive the
dark waters,
dare the currents
where the Ocean is free
& rhythms beat
in silent madness
- Dare to love
my own sadness
___________________________
The Night is my guide
& Freedom is a solitude
that is entire with all else
“Come now,”
beckoning the Perfect Girl
into uncompleted loneliness
Like the moon’s silver legion
of onlooking stars
are all put out by a wayward glance
________________
I’ve talked to God
on reverse charge call
& he told me the Word
& the Word had no meaning
________________
“Why of course,”
she sighs, enlightened
in an instant
“we can’t see God
because we can’t
see ourselves!
- God’s only eye
is blind &
God is but an
inward eye,
for eyes cannot
fix on themselves
& the murderer
never murders
the murderer.
- So how can I
let go of my self?
Surely I must
just let go
may your lives
sometime ‘midst day and night
become perfect
- confess yourself
then when all is gone
you will have won
My life is a
confession of joy
STRANGER
Stranger we must pass like prayers
together in the ballad-murmuring breeze
we must go like pilgrims to Parnassus
boundless in our impossible hope
perhaps again we shall lie like children
& invent such things as poetry
follow swift untrampled footsteps
in the candle-forests of Holy Night
we must be silent, listening
for whispers creeping away
like tiptoe-shadows
stranger take me now unready
I stand unsteady on this path
sad there’s too much still to forget
my eyes are sad for delivery
stranger show me all that’s strange
I need you just to touch your eye
or show me that you’re still alive
perhaps your breathless heart has stopped
to catch its breath trapped in heaven
lover you might tell me your name
I’ve nothing to say to the endless pupil
______________________________
SAMADHI
I found you at last
caught between the beat of a heart
between time where
you cannot look
in flight with the sniper
breathlessly trapped
in a glass moment
staring helpless
- cannot make a sound -
between breaths
of life or death
no not a chance for
final tragic exaltation
no need for the past
or its war with the future
I found you at last while
leaping between the beat of my heart
____________________________________
TRAIN STATION PLATFORM
Two imperfect 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...
it is running round and round on the stones!
Instead of trying to make conversation,
they listen out for the tannoy and its
annoying voice to make an announcement,
or seek distraction from the situation
in 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, screensaver faces and answerphone
manners, dead pedestrians with rich
antennae pointed dead to the ground,
in some kind of somnambulist trance,
under orange lamp-posts like snakes
shedding a sad, Lucozade light. The
car, car of crows can be heard, raucous,
at this juncture of missed opportunities;
then rain starts to fall with as many hands
as there are names for new rock bands…
it seems not only is one never so alone
as when one is in love but the very
smooth running of social intercourse
itself depends on the repression of
emotion, on the negation and denial of
one's most primal instincts. Sooooo
the sensuous mode of being has gone
under Gondwanaland again; and we
all wait around anxiously checking the time.
(reconstructed)
SCENTS OF SPRING
I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring
suffuse the air and pervade the senses.
An AEIOU bird
toots its hollow horn
outside on the A595.
A celebratory genesis is everywhere.
Mother earth
is giving birth,
menstruating season
and ovulating dawn.
Fresh lovers maunder
hand in hand and
knee-deep in redolent flowers
into shade to take repose
by cool, running waters.
Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.
The blue sky arches and swoons,
I bridle the mind and race apace to the shore
where seabirds scream
from the ragged rocks,
O is it their love-song or elegy?
Waves make gentle love to the shore.
In alchemy a galaxy
of stars exploding
into being above is perceived
as an orgasm, is perceived,
that is, in an erotic sense.
Liquid night arrives too soon,
O moon, O beautiful,
sleepless omen moon,
who shines like an
electric coin and seems
to be in love with the sea
or at least her own
shattered reflection:
she scatters her jewellery box all around.
Homework tonight is
to remember your dreams.
I prefer telepathy to 10p.
I need to find a round map of sound.
HYPERTEXT AT THE GATES OF DAWN
No worries, lost lover,
Science has the answer,
all wrapped up in its
rubber-gloved hand
and they’re soon
abolishing altogether
sadness gene and
dreaming gland -
for Science has told
us many of the stars
you gaze at tonight
at not really there
but illusions of the
light that takes so long
to reach the beams
of our glistening eyes
that for centuries
after the star has died
it still appears to
be hanging there,
a little, glimmering
crystal tear, in
love with the dark,
as bright and beautiful
as it would be if
it were really there.
(Cambridge)
EXCERPTS FROM A DIFFICULT PHASE
THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE OF GREEN
My development as a writer since arriving at Warwick has been truncated and stultified by my refusal to abjure a little clinging: psychological addiction to cannabis. Where before I would smoke and make smoking a magical sacrament too for magical de-familiarisation, now the refreshing thing would be to get sober. The paranoia levels are quite bad and sometimes I get so paranoid I have to leave the room. I have started to contemplate the spare time continuum as a fictional continuum with two poles of faith and of doubt, like positive and negative energy swirling in the void. All this was just the evil weed speaking, like the arch-tempter snake. So you see I need to break free, maybe spend some time in a log cabin in the mountains to apply murderous and ruthless revision to the work I have brought into being. After all I am one of God’s reporters and should bring people the Excellent News about how flowers grow. I am not just pilgrim to Parnassus, deep-sea diver in collective unconscious, psychic map-maker, alchemist of perception, liver-function of language but translator of feelings and the feelings you get on drugs are all fake. Paul speaks of being a robot and robot-builder in one and how we must look within to improve ourselves in evolution. Madness and gayness are both pressing in on my brain, and on weed, at night, in bed, I cannot defend myself against the paranoid accusations that arise in my haunted skull. Chicken Blames Egg, the burlesque newsprint headline reads, then, in terms of the paranoiac circles that go round and round. Sometimes I can be found applying some of these midnight thoughts to a page, in darkness, with a pen that has run out of ink, almost carving the letters in to the page so that only by tilting the page to the light in the morning can one discern any of the words. Even then I go over the same area of page sometimes and make a parsimonious palimpsest of pentimento. It seems in the morning like I have created a scab, a white scab. Sometimes, because of the nature of the chemical – how much it costs, how sacred it is as an effect and as a ritual alike – I think these midnight scribblings are valuable – epiphanies worth something to the world – of a visionary proclivity – but really I will likely end up binning hundreds of notebooks – all of them – from my youth – in not one, not two, but three big, black bin-liners – and that’s without even reading them. Gone will be the moment I first dared to trespass into forbidden gardens apropos writing about the face of stars in naked, honest, open, convivial, face value narrative. It’s all going to get thrown away and that may be why my father says “writing is biodegradable in the end,” as if even when you word process it, the actuality of the literature remains biodegradable.
READING MATERIAL
If there were paper under my heart there would
be writing on it and yes it would be red
like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst
or nuclear-fall-out-in-reverse-of-dusk, whose
scattered, tattered- knicker clouds conceal
real live U.F.O's, and non-exchangeable
for a bus-ticket when the fiver-river is gone.
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 to Alaska:
surely it would feel shocked to not be legal tender?
SYSTEMS
If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear
not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell
in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here,
where a stolen volume of verse has started to smell...
to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the
old colours of the vowels in English you can
find pasta, tea, air, hair, water, that your ordinary
speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-
air poem – quickly, O prophet, get it down! -
your notes on hyper-vision echo in the new air.
What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern
ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?
For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!
For writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet or not!
MESSAGE RECEIVED
O il faut que je m’en aille,
with sadness in a backward eye,
what is this free dream into
which I am hurled, gone
past the mystery of the single
shoe beside the road and the
fallen road sign saying
THINK! in the nettles in a
fast car with Paul and the band,
on a smouldering evening in
Cambridgeshire, when late birds
sing in the trees, birds that
are intelligent, trees that
are our friends, when nothing
matters especially and sometimes
you’ve just got to hit the road and
HALATNOST IN A 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 is not for drying
your eyes in the queue for medicine
and these rude, Nirvana-barcode
fingertips did not touch her
and the full moon wears the ultra-
scan of every baby and the
silver forest is enraptured
by the fanny of a bee.
(London)
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.
ON 4CMC
“I've got a new plot,” thought the dullard.
“Literature has started to release serotonin.”
He was on the new designer drug, a cathinone and
NPS called 4CMC when he dreamed up the plot.
There was an holographic bike out the back
all through the night. The dark was glittering
with tinsel. Mangled love was the overall effect.
He saw the world through the frame of angel
hair, there were weird Escherian shapes in
the air, there was light deep inside the dark.
“Yes,” he thought, “Literature. Serotonin.”
For once you remove the inner monologue
you can become an open energy conduit.
Question the comfort and see for yourself.
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,
the derangement of the senses to attain
the unknown from the derangement of
the senses to attain the Eartoon, Eartoons
bloomed from barbecued tunes, the anti-
dactylus from the talking pterodactyl, the
psychosensitive flower – talkative and invisible-
from the psychotechnological error, but oh my,
pneumatic woman, aren't you a beautiful one?
CRESTS
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 McTruth and Flies 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 angel's daughter,
leaves that played on the surface of the water,
these are leaves they have in heaven,
these are the leaves of love.
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.
SINGLE AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS
LOUGH
Night arrives like the pallid ghost of Hamlet Senior...
after toast, for a moment, I think of my own father.
He came in once and simply said: “Michelle Pfeiffer”
as if it were enough to say a host of lovely things!
But is it falsifiable?! It seems the stuff of wings!
It’s love that makes us break into spontaneous songs
and I think love also a pragmatic word-combination;
that true love has no ego, is some plush machination;
and seek a night with Michelle, of sumptuous consummation -
but to be quite honest, it would take a God above -
and I say beware the woman you’ve been dreaming of,
for you’re never so alone as when you are in love -
and that I do not feel now I am but staying single.
Staying single, meanwhile, is like my spirit’s jingle -
unless Michelle were here, and then we could entangle.
I’m such a lonely person, just between you and me.
My friends have commented I live and breathe poetry.
I dream but know to dream is an escapist tendency.
“Lough,” cries the north wind, as it buffets the trees
with a tidal roar. They too would bend down on their knees
if Michelle walked from the shore, begging her please!
The bees of summer too would perform for her senses!
The Bard would erect her several brave, new tenses!
The sea would seem to keep within the creosoted fences!
I’ve dreamed of a dead seal washed up on the beach.
I’ve deemed Michelle too beautiful, too out of reach.
I’ve rendered loss in words, with a form of delicate speech.
The dumps I have been down in are designed too well.
I sip my tea and have a textual spree in quiet Hell.
I sit and am the seer associated with the oldest fell.
If love could be returned to white light and white heat
and reforged, inside the sun, then life could be sweet,
like blissful lovingness is where all religions meet,
but stale it seems, to say this. My mother contends
there is a soul-mate out there, for all, but I think she pretends.
Once I heard that boys and girls can never be friends,
it’s hypocrisy, there’s always ulterior motive to undermine
amicability, but that one’s not really mine own line.
To be in love would be, I rather think, to be born again,
and birth we know is trauma, trauma for all concerned.
In love I have been before, and of love I learned.
Its language is of fire, heat, flames, blackness burned.
But I must resuscitate mouth to mouth my dream
before the new ecstasy is re-won like in a game,
where chance comes into play, and far-flung Whicham
Valley is no likely place to find a partner. So to go
elsewhere to find love is something I might have to do,
in the end, my friend, or else I’ll stay forever blue.
AURORA FLOREALIS
If mother’s flower-press ending
on cannabis still = a dialysis
a love poem hoping to impress
poor Flora still = more a motor, but
seeing as I no longer
puff weed, nor am
in love with her anymore
I cannot see how this is of
any interest to me…
so I am putting it out there,
this pretext to teenage
love poetry, almost like
furniture on E-bay. So
feel free to take it up
as your cause, but don’t
be surprised, if she, being
the mating queen in the flesh,
does not even respond
to you on Facebook when
you try to befriend her,
smitten, and in empty
warehouse zones of the psyche.
*ketamineguitar*
CONFESSIONAL POEM
I still think of you, all these years on,
from all those years we had. You
used to make us sleep with the light
on and I still do – for it feels like
switching that switch will flush
the past down the drain. That’s where
years of writing went when at the end
of our time together, you said “I don’t
want to be in it.” So I could only bin it.
All those times we went off exploring
just “to look at trees,” as you put it -
on the premise that “there should
still be room for Nature in the Future...”
I remember that I did document a
lot of it - but it’s gone. There were
inward journeys too, like a poem is the
opposite of a bus ticket - and I remember
when we drove into the Lakes from
some other place and I wrote down
every sign along the way for a poem -
how semantics is a road sign not a place!
Well, that too is gone – all the love
poems gone - and there were, well, poems
born of recreational drug use for
the sake of literary experiment, and it’s
all gone - under Gondwanaland like
the pollen, under the green hill like
the ecstasy pill. For it was all for you,
and you are no longer in my new life.
There was even one about the neo-London
skyline as a part of the Tube service,
but I was with you when I wrote it
so it too is gone. Even the dreamwork
diary I kept won’t work with you gone.
At least some of the melodies remain;
but I’m too old to make it as a pop star,
prance round in a vapid pose suitable
for the rebellion of youth – no, it is
as a poet that I wish to leave my sting.
It seems unfair that I was faithful, and
it’s all my work that’s now destroyed, but
I suppose it could be worse: I could have
grown homosexual through the onslaught.
Maybe I did and just don’t know it yet.
THIS BE THE SONNET
Sometimes undying love just has to be buried,
a love you think to be pure, maybe first love,
love at first sight – whom it seems is getting married -
the woman you have long been dreaming of -
but love will come again, love will knock
again at your door. It may be the same day
you bury the dream – where no-one will look -
love will come again and blow your mind away.
It may be the same day you finally get pragmatic,
abjure nursing the suffering of your ideals,
temper the wild, impassion’d, Romantic
proclivities of temperament the poet feels -
the same day that you accept “she is gone” -
love will come knocking on your door again.
IN YOUR HEART
Internal is the Eastern sun when it rises,
internal the Western sun when at sunset;
and Christmas is coming, filled with surprises;
and everything begins and ends in the human heart.
It is with your heart that you love anything,
it is with your heart also that you don’t.
It is with my heart that by now I sing.
My heart is ocean-going, my heart not feint.
In my heart – or in yours – there are corridors.
There is snow that melts from a heat of ecstasy.
I have been in your heart, seen inside doors,
where death is but the birthday of Eternity.
If something is felt, then it is genuine,
but if it is not felt, then it could well be sin.
SMART-TALK ON HEARTBOOK
Up all night working the guy who said he would plug his senses in the mains
incoming voices seem to be Smart-talking
Simon says fragmented for reasons of solidarity with the dispossessed of the world
feeling the Age of Communication = the Age of Alienation I am
making par for the coursework assignment whose hand-in date was decades ago
chivvying words in different orders recalling the machine in Gulliver’s Travels that precedes the computer whom it seems might have destroyed the spirituality of Cabalistic permutation games of heart-purifying nature based on quest not arrival but whom it seems might not
sharing secrets on Facebook as if it were Heartbook
gone mad with internet pranks, you say?
“hey let’s get a condom on Facebook”
can’t upload spittle to philosophy chatroom
can’t pass the gravy over Facebook enough
started out writing a good book but laptop became huge container for storing the sum of all knowledge
thinking the surface area on which I write being infinite the story is now infinite, the content gone endless
still like Gulliver’s Travels and ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ – goodbye
still think if the windows were washed – every one - I would see nothing, nothing but the white mirrors re-affirming the quiet interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction where I write by night furtive in flight with the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper At The Gates of Dawn
when I look out of the window at dawn I sometimes see Eden, am like Adam walking in a prelapsarian garden with a bagful of names to scatter freely on things
the ingredients of apple juice might make a found poem called ‘Text Message From An Alien’
seems the internet is to writing as photography was to visual art
seems the on/off switch of the laptop is its clitoris
seems the omnijective interface of random access co-imagination is the new, synchronised word
seems weak, Wikileak tea is writing done by voices
seems the notion of a tele-book is afloat
through the rooms people come and go Smart-talking on magic alphabet radio
when I see the sun in the morning I think it is Holy not just a 2 pence piece
the kettle rises to its silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain singing sweet song my one note on hyper-vision this fair dawn
it looks like a good book is on the cards
it looks like Heartbook might’ve fled away with the Smartpoem
it looks like mutation in consciousness, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture without motion bones like sadness gene and dreaming gland and the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland and the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill and we are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land still
was remembering recently the time my friend sent a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH into space, and I was the one underneath it, the one to catch it
think it might be a psycho-technological post-poem pertaining maybe to replace the archaic sense of ‘gay’ gone to apathy, barrage and detachment
reminds me love is a choice of words
was WH Auden that said that not me
I still think love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop
ON THE DOT
Do you want to have sex?
It's apocryphal until I press the
PUBLISH button at the top
of the blog. Yes there are
some strange goings on
on the online world. Do?
I'm starting to see that I
might be good again. Do you?
Update saving changes
saved. Do you want?
Same as last time. Do
you want to? We still
deem that it's false as
Walls ice-cream. Do
you want to have? Life
could be a dull throb
of loneliness in your chest.
Do you want to have sex?
YELLOW MELONS
[spoken word narrative for lo-fi backing or maybe even Moogwash]
“I was staring at two melons in the fruit bowl, and thinking of an ex gf’s gorgeous breasts – like precarious water balloons - and getting turned on – and then I found two insects walking across the melons. Now there’s a melon for each insect – they seem to have separated as if Nature is playing out the roles we played in our relationship. Ted Hughes meets Darwinian science. I like a cheese Ploughman’s in the cafe in the Natural History Museum. Now one of the insects has gone. I stare again and ignore the insect and focus on the big yellow melons as if they were breasts. Her breasts were genuinely as big as these melons and beautiful. She gave great head on the double bed. Thought women should play in the Premier League. The Union Jack should be pink she thought as well. I never told her my story but there was nothing to tell. I never thought I’d be as turned on as I am now by a pair of literal melons and I feel nervous too. As if I am performing for a camera or on a stage. I might get criticised for example and cry. One insect is going for a walk on the left breast – left that is if they face you. I don’t think I am ever going to get to shag her again. Orgasm’s tides lap on sleep’s crumbling biscuit shore. Reconciling pre and post orgasmic consciousness you can fall asleep.”
OLD SCHOOL
Imagine if Einstein prayed to an
elephant and the rest was just a gag.
There’s nothing more colourful than
the secret of who it is you’re dying to shag.
Imagine if we could smuggle a submarine
under the bloody rugby pitch.
Sometimes you have to test if you are
dreaming by flicking a light switch.
DRUNK AND YOUNG
I don’t think you should stumble from the pub
drunk and young and urinate in the phone box,
obsolete and broken as it has become, while
horses walk past carrying beautiful women.
It would seem we have been here before,
that effort is inversely proportional to success,
and I’ve given up smoking anyway, so I
can’t party hard in the way I once would.
Back when I was born I was born a bat but
became a lion of consciousness whom it would
seem got on all fours on the floors of underground
drinking establishments when drunk and young.
Later only Flora would have me on all fours
but seeing as I no longer have any right to keep her
in my heart like a flower in mother’s flower-press
I can more easily bound down from the mnt.
A FOOTBALL SONG
Stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war stop the war
Love again love again love again love again love again love again love again love again love again love again love again
Not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know not to know
Why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile why I smile
Through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears through the tears
Just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you just for you
God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love God is love
Meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams meet in dreams
£OVE SONG
£ove is the answer, as they said in the 60’s.
£ove in the Age of Facebook, Farcebook,
is more interesting than spirals
of epistemological doubt.
£ove could be the hope
the heart literally needs
in order for it to survive
without which it can stop, meaning
Duff which is H suspended in deafness.
£ove said Kant is Nature’s
trick for ensuring reproduction.
£ove is waterpistols, handbags at dawn.
£ove is Man’s highest emotion.
£ove exists between E and MC squared.
£ove is not the G-spot of the brain
but death is, or rather Duff.
£ove is not despite the dirt beneath
your nails but because of it!
£ove it will wound you
and then forgive you too!
FACETUBE
Facetube, I dream of an hyperlink to Heaven.
Facetube, could you be an accurate fusion?
Facetube, it was you I thought I’d invented.
Facetube, could you be absolutely demented?
Facetube, you’re not for me but for women.
Facetube, some of them are gorgeous as pollen.
Facetube, erotic undertones are present here.
Facetube, almost as beautiful as Shakespeare.
Facetube, I’m running out of things to say.
Facetube, I no longer think that I am gay.
Facetube, I mean you seem made for sucking.
Facetube, more than you are made for fucking.
Facetube, you could be spliced in no time.
Facetube, and then surrendered unto rhyme.
EASY AS
Easy as air, tea, spaghetti, water, toilet roll, clothes, hair,
I speak of renouncing the folly of long gone love,
of tempering one’s wild, impassion’d, Romantic
proclivities of temperament, of making that
idealism to pragmatism journey, of abjuring
unrequited love that will only lead to eternal sorrow,
of learning the falsehood of my own opinions, which
is a quote from Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility.
It doesn’t mean I don’t still love you. It means
I abjure my little clinging, and start loving you.
That is the way round it goes for sure, and your
face would be an open door, and I remember only
one strand of your long, blonde hair. “Soft and
loose like yellow pencils scribbling dreams as
they arrive.” That would be my line if I had to
make a single long outdoor line to go up in the city.
Then everyone would know the way I feel about you.
Pretty lady, you make death hang his head in shame.
I abjure my little clinging and start loving you.
A LOST ALBUM THAT HAS JUST RESURFACED
NOTE
A lost album from more than ten years ago has resurfaced. It is called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3] and I wish to show you the lyrics. There are only 8 songs so it won’t take you long, and it’s just me being tidy really, or even messy, because the album never should’ve escaped from the songbook Soundcloud Rain. So here it is – and wait – it can be found on Soundcloud should you wish to listen to it – on one of my two accounts - and now the lyrics.
‘SONGS TO RECORD WITH EARPHONES’ [DEMO 3]
I
COMING UP
Face of stars he had no nose,
Einstein’s bros equals Einstein’s bros,
backward f, forward f, equals running through,
Frozen in red, Sensation in blue.
Fire sticks and alcoholics,
violent Texan, bright northern becks,
the face of stars he had no nose,
Einstein’s pose equals Einstein’s pose.
L to the pregnant snorkel...
L to the pregnant snorkel…
L to the porcelain laptop….
L to the pregnant snorkel...
L to the porcelain laptop...
L to the pregnant snorkel...
L to the porcelain laptop...
L to the pregnant snorkel…
L to the porcelain laptop….
[Note: this song when played backwards recounts the story of a one night stand I had as a student. Somehow the lyrics just work forwards and backwards at the same time. I did not intend it to be like this and think it reveals that I was a bit of an ecstasy lab rat.]
II
EARPHONE RECORD REPRIEVE
Instrumental I am afraid. It was originally called The Blasts when I wrote it, back when we were recording through a mate’s binaural earphones in that Cambridge band called The Flood circa 2002. Grant Aspinall is singing some ah’s over it now – in harmony – to give it depth – thanks Grant – you made it a classic record.
III
PHYSICAL HYPERLINK?
To love someone truly is to set them free
to be who they are and not pretend to be
no-one knows how to free you but meyou
Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet
when all love is revealed all science is resolved
love is bigger than colour, blogger
than space, deeper than memes
love is the smallest unit of time
time is divided at last by the coruscations of divinity
IV
GROG LADETTE IN G
Baby we create the dawn
behind a veil where silence is born
and dawn conspires with the sea
and everything untrue recedes
and down into sleep with no dreams
and all that’s left is you and me
and all that’s left is you and me
no-one knows how to free you
eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou
no one knows how to free you
eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou
horserace books in traffic light
colours through the ancient night
in the end it’s all white
in the end it’s alright
V
NOTES FOR THE FILM ‘ENTER THE VOID’
Instrumental again. This instrumental has had a few names. One was ‘Musac From a Black Hole’ another was ‘Interstellar Artois’ but I think I like this present name the best. The film itself was recommended to me by an old friend who said it was very me.
VI
ONTIMEY
If this thing were a woman
I’d be in trouble by now
and if it wasn’t I’d
be in double by now
like a witch she says
take FACE instead of fags
and then I put my
wounds up on bright flags
yeah
ontimey,
ontimey,
ontimey,
untie me
VII
READING THE LESSON FROM JOHN IN ETON COLLEGE CHAPEL
Once upon a time there was an acid-rainbow
that struggled from a black hole and smashed through a window
of a big cathedral and landed on a page
and rearranged the sermon the vicar was enraged
O but then he found it bore a strange notation
and it was so profound he needed medication
and then the paper bread turned to acid which was nice
and everyone was singing music from a black hole by Jesus Christ
all the congregation gave their neighbours a nudge
and asked if every good boy still deserveth fudge
the wine it came in buckets through the back of the song
and even the vicar too, he started to sing along
3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?
I was at the beach I threw a stone to the sea
to rearrange the day and the deity
no-one was beside me except the pretty dog
oozing and exuding uncomplicated love
voices from the city they were heard between the waves
like lost souls trapped in the cracks between the paves
then I saw the mystery of the single shoe
and knew that it was time to drop a line to you
you were off your face on something by this stage
said there’d been an accident and were hiding in the cage
and Barnes has scored a chicken and blanes is a liquid knife
and wingers are allowed bikes in the afterlife
3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?
3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?
VIII
IN A FIELD KNEE DEEP IN GRASS
Lovers and tools are breaking their own rules in the game
mad children play unaware of the guilt and the shame
pirates are looting the world and riding the breeze
angels and thieves are kissing at the tips of the trees
and I’m in bed against you
wouldn’t bet against you
I’m in bed against you
shouldn’t bet against you
if all that I’ve loved is a bunch of telly snow
still you can’t take away the afterglow
Science says don’t touch your dreaming gland
it’s all Thumper to you VS Edward Scissorhands
and I’m in bed against you
I wouldn’t bet against you -
I’m in bed against you
shouldn’t bet against you
and I’m in bed against you
I wouldn’t bet against you
I’m in bed against you
and b equals d
[Note: this song seems to be concerned in part with a tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ that has a pause where cut and stuck together in the reel.]
