THE BIKE RIDING ITSELF

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 those weird 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 weird 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.

THE NEW BEAT AT UNIVERSITY

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form.

Sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day 

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

Mutation in consciousness itself, 

truth too simple to understand,

these are gesture-without-motion-bones,

like sadness gene and dreaming gland. 

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

Love is not a mechanistic set of rules.

Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication.

Love became grouped with language not God.

Love became a pragmatic choice of words.

Love has no ego as everyone knows. 

I think Lucy in the soul with demons

may happen to be an actual substance.

Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud,

a rainbow smashed a railway train window.

A baby cannot trip without memories. 

I remember “every atom ate our eyes.”

Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's

bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard.

There’s new, angelic music inborn in the inner ear;

but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad

are sent the end of Bike in their heads

and madness is not something to be

Romanticised as a return to Purity.

Impunity is more what the poet wants.

He likes to float on the artifice of organic

emotions through these new synthetic 

sounds, and is into exploring alternative 

histories suppressed by the overarching metanarrative.

For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries.

Poetry is the bike riding itself. 

Monopoly money will get us wine,

Monopoly money will get us bread.

She picks the blue tac off the wall 

and sticks together my wounded head. 

I put my wounds up on bright flags;

I take the rapacious angel up the arse.

To plug my senses in the mains

might yet engage all !00 % of my brains.

It’s all about a permanent reactivation

of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. 

Money shags in the dark. Thoughts 

of one’s greatness only diminish one’s

greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons 

excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. 

Shall I touch my heart with a red Biro?

When all the air in outer space is consumed…

The bird in the wood, it was definitely a horse,

with solar spike I can use the Force, 

with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, 

I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. 

THE O LANGUAGE 

It's laced with ecstasy, 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.

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

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.

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

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY INSECT COLLECTION?  

O il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just 

got to hit the road and

*

‘Game B’ I do not know much about 

nor what may soon ensue from @

in the international language alphabet.

*

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

*

My name is David Bonky, 

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird, 

there’s a tear up my jacket.

*

We are the velvet e’s, 

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the Roman road below, 

beneath us as we fry. 

(enter bass organ of ‘The End’)

*

If a flower-press ending on cannabis 

could be said to equal a dialysis 

a love poem hoping to impress Flora 

could be said to equal more a motor. 

*

Leaves that played on the surface of the water, 

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

*

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light. 

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light. 

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light. 

*

Signed by everwell, 

she couldn’t hit it sideways, 

or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman 

with the hairgel of Dracula, 

Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s. 

*

Isolation is Elizabeth Regina,

Emergency Rescue is Made In China,

but diseased vagina is diseased vagina

*

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)

*

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Gogh black border sun 

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

*

Thank you for dialling 911,

you are through to The Velvet Underground, 

I like to lick the honey between the stars.

*

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

LSD for Lucy in the Soul with Demons,

H20 for her hypothalamus tattoo, 

ESA for extra sensory allowance. 

*

If God = pi times MC squared

it’s because you wish to think Him round

and O is the key of water – be assured -

and its soul-assuring sound. 

*

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found. 

P. 

*

Wouldn’t it be pollen, 

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

*

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 predictable in advance. 

*

He has spines all over him. 

He is a ne’er-do-well; but

as Dr. Bob says, he is not evil. 

*

I still cannot tell if sipping sweet tea 

or stretching honesty makes the

more funky an encryption of the 

future that ain’t what it used to be 

but I still await the future with 

rapt uncertainty, full of suspense. 

*

This particular finger, why this finger here?

Keep it in YOUR purple, velvet box. 

It’s toughened at the knuckle where pens have 

been gripped. I can count it on the sun.

*

I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, 

watch the dream-tapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven,

I’m going to plug my senses into the mains. 

*

Wear an emotional condom before you fuck my mind.

I may not be good looking but I am not blind

A clock is only as fast as a wounded cheetah.

*

Love is the hope that the heart 

literally needs in order for it

to beat, to survive, without which 

it can stop meaning death, who 

is H suspended in deafness.  

*

Be careful when you mash the Y- key.

It might look like snowy, Alpine mountain

tops, flowers in vases, underpants or

the tip of a kid’s yellow crayon. 

*

When we wake, dripping, 

no sea-weed in our hair, 

words are stone shoes worn 

by the bottoms of clouds, weighing 

them down hopelessly. 

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, 

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.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell.

And when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

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

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

boom

boom

boom

boom

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self driving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one 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

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

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

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.

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 again 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.

DEFACED 

It’s actually a rather saddening story for now 

I’d be in and out of hospital for the rest of my days,  

still my father thought it hilarious, how, 

when I was first hospitalised I ran away, 

on my first escorted walk in the grounds, 

through a field and across a busy motorway

and up a serpentine trainline to the station 

from which I made it to Scotland by train,

thinking there’d be a different jurisdiction -

but oh how my athletic efforts were in vain!

The police found me wandering that other nation

and took me south of the border again! 

I’d been put under a curse unbeknownst to me...

forced to abide by the stringent rules,

I sat back in hospital writing poetry

in a waiter’s pad, inventing brave new schools,

smoking on the banks of the Styx of sweet tea, 

calling the conspiracy of doctors fools! 

I scored a question mark on the musical scales

in my writing, in that place so clean, 

such a sterile-surfaced Hell, run by females,

while Rachel’s party far away on the green 

summit of Parliament Hill went down with pale ales

and left me to dream of the space in-between.  

I’ve got a degree since then. My feeling is 

that the ill are capable of increased lucidity

but I rue the new remit: not to dream with open eyes,

nor await the future with rapt uncertainty,

not to plug my senses in the mains, but de-stigmatise

mental illness. It doesn’t come naturally.

TEACHING MY SISTER THE SILENT ALPHABET 

In bed, at night, have you ever reached the point 

where word and muscle meet – where you 

attempt to think in words without moving 

a muscle in your mouth and stumble 

upon the secret, white, silent alphabet? 

There are certain letters, certain sounds 

you simply cannot think without 

a twitch from your mouth muscles -

so you play dead. You lie there and 

try and underwrite the thoughts… 

some graphemes, phonemes, plosives 

and fricatives are possible in silent,

white and secret thought alone but 

no utterance seems completely pronounced.

The silent alphabet thus has several letters

missing; and by dawn you might still 

be lying there, awake, trying and trying 

to think the word “whisky” without 

a movement of the tongue. It can 

be done but is found further in 

the mind, where hands can not go. 

That’s why seeing in the dark is so tough. 

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.

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.

DA 

The doors computer game, I found it hard, 

it was hard to find. Luck blames the winner.

Chance blames Ariel, Fate blames Caliban.

When dad dies it is the end of an era.

When an era dies it is the dawn of a new age.

Door, a miracle in the divine corridor. 

A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES 

All my rage in the cage for the minimum wage,

I sketch the shadow of my hair on the page. 

To plug the senses into the mains

might liberate 100% of the brains

I don’t know how to renew the bird in the wood

where once upon a time I stood being good

but I guess it’s something I already did

and then they stuck the end of ‘Bike’ in his head

O bullet up the top of a telegraph pole 

the pole itself is already Robert Lowell

Now I see that I speak too soon

under the sleepless omen moon

who shines like an electric coin

over the fell’s unravelled groin 

and seems to be in love with the sea

a little bit further down the valley

or at least with her own shattered reflection

having as she does quite a fear of rejection…

One night we’ll chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots.

There’s no such thing as Secret Chord H

I believe that the mating queen is a bitch

and if she said she’s in love with me

I wouldn’t go taking it personally

a bimbo in limbo a waif in a safe

she expects too much out of life

though I confess my open heart

is lying with both her legs apart

I found my voice isn’t papers scissors stone 

when you’re most in love you are most alone 

I extirpated every trace of recognition 

from the mind unloosed the mind of form 

method acted every adjective in Howl 

set myself the task of growing new soul 

attained visual radio broadcasting dreams 

dreams that billow like a weeping willow

in the wind that seemed deeper than memes 

only once in a while setting head on pillow 

but what goes up must come down

even if you cut a route direct to Heaven 

and make out death to be a clown 

and stay up holding Holy Communion 

and that would be mad as Arthur Rimbaud 

which reminds me of the time an acid-rainbow 

smashed right through a railway train window when 

I was sitting there travelling holding a pen

going backwards to Christmas on a train 

placing bets on the drops of rain 

running down the penny-tasting glass

dissolving the mind of prejudice and class 

trying on the doors film for a costume. 

Now the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland 

since I left my last rock n roll band 

the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill.

So monopoly money should work on wine

and monopoly money should work on bread 

and Freedom is the bike riding itself 

carrying messages like those in the blood,

let’s permanently re-activate the Glastonbury Spirit. 

I remember I once felt like a fine-mesh net 

back when Jokeo and Ruliette met 

a net so fine-mesh it was but smoke 

and static and grey and fleck no joke 

neither retaining nor permitting a thing 

and the edge of life was a playground swing 

and then I felt a leaf and fell 

out of life and down a well 

which probably no-one else knew 

but then there may be some who 

followed my path on the internet 

back when Jokeo and Ruliette met 

a meeting as star-crossed as their namesakes 

in the land of flying fairy cakes.

Now new music searches the night for a mind 

and I am the one it happens to find 

for music chooses you not you it 

and I’ll have to be patient and for a long time sit 

at a new laptop working out how 

to use Ableton and meanwhile a cow 

is not made of dialectical antagonism 

and I hurt after each little musical orgasm.

While my friends turned Einstein’s nose 

into a magnanimous hot -air balloon 

that floated away over the carking crows 

I stayed with the moon inside myself in the noon 

and fought putrid demons excreted through stone 

Let’s hope the universe is not in a hearse 

let’s hope if the universe is but a corpse 

it’s a luminous corpse with love in of course.

I am but a lost soul looking for a dream- meet experiment  -

to Heaven not McDonalds we went 

driving a drum through outer space 

in realtime leaving a sparkling trace.

I see through your mirrors in the big, glass day 

I see through your costumes in the summer parade 

As a kid I mixed up drugs and AIDS

but now I know more or maybe it’s less

I am made to beat with the Otherness 

let stress be the enemy of mental illness

I couldn’t tell you why there are fallen leaves inside 

it could be a clue that Romance has not died

We stuff full the Nothingness with butterflies 

there’s a bit between its wings / I am not telling lies,

we adorn the void / a schizophrenic mechanoid / 

with many lost belongings / when we’re paranoid 

I remember we used to stand in CD shops

in social states gone to those on our tops 

rereading the sleeves of albums we had 

like Joy Division / exploring the bad mad and sad 

hardly ever making new connections 

although we were filled with defamiliarisation 

fresh alien eyes / visions entombed in our brains

I have come to recognise the lay of the land 

as a playground for us and every other band 

we long since passed a fallen road sign 

saying THINK in the nettles as we drank our wine 

and the mystery of the single shoe 

beside the Cambridge B-road too 

we tripped up on buttercups / and fell in love againe / 

yes we were teeming with visions in the brain / 

and left alone on the Circle Line / 

at night to get it out would be fine / 

but we didn’t do anything before the cctv. 

we’d write on money in Berlin bars / 

we knew of love under the stars / 

we knew the impunity of being true / 

to yourself was only being what you / 

dreamed you  were / not a figment or a blur / 

and reality grew arcane with a drug-slur / 

and air started talking / and a feeling was lost / 

as a colour was passed through / a border was crossed / 

the music was full of osmotic porosity / 

the music was a film of cell division pulsing on the wall / 

the music was solipsistic in listening / 

and back in the day my best friend was Paul / 

we start with endless possibilities and 

then they narrow down to one / 

like a phonebook full of soul-mates 

reduced to dying alone under the sun /

We slept on the ceiling with feelings of love/ 

as we slept on the feeling with star-tracks above / 

Soft and loose like yellow pencils 

scribbling dreams as they arrive/ 

a long blonde hair of yours is a system 

through which all my dreams could thrive /

the spies were out but the spiral was in/ 

and everyone knew there was no sin/ 

when the world was after Bin/ 

and new maps sprawled on the point of a pin / 

Over and out testing testing 123/ 

welcome to my presence and its intensity/

All things must be returned to earth / 

surrendered like a rented thing to death /

and the breath of the morning is fresh up in the Lakes / 

where the stolen Dream Factory car is made without brakes / 

and the logging on of brains with marmalade and tea / 

means they dream a bit of the deep blue sea / 

in whose maternal bosom there are many fine wines

Money, money is but an ode to death / 

death is an out-post of liquid crystal meth / 

the ice cream van turns his menu around / 

so the customer can procure from the map of sound / 

now I know as many words for young love/ 

as the Eskimo has for snow / 

but I grappled like madness with Simon’s dove / 

before I went down to the dealer’s below / 

seth portal menu-bats eeked to the conker tree spolar spike 

but only in the sense that woofkitten voices sever to themselves. 

I remember how the Regret Industry booms/ 

how lithe and limpid laser lights fuck far-fetched rooms / 

I believe in music in a room with no door / 

making quite a racket / and more and many more /

and seek not the silence of beautiful snow / 

falling slowly to a petticoat earth / 

but new electronic music fattening the soul / 

who flies to the stars in myriad mirth / 

and gestures without motion to signal that it’s time / 

for the proverbial mating queen to also come / 

come to Harpshire’s shore where waves come home / 

crashing with white and froth and foam / 

marrying together stunning juxtapositions/ 

of all unlikely Orders of Being/ 

Sensation precedes thought in art/ 

chain is made from same as key/ 

waves make gentle love to the shore / 

homework tonight is to remember your dreams / 

Man is words and man is a word and 

words draw bridges / across metaphysics / 

and words make connections / 

between first and third person / 

O O O O O here we go again / 

in search of trouble kicks action sex and change / 

going out at smouldering sunset in the city/ 

before the sea change into something rich and strange / 

the redolent and fresh and enervating scent / 

of change fermenting on the ego loss breeze / 

knowledge is steam/ always have a dream / 

and in autumn we’ll drive off just to look at trees / 

for the beauty of love is everywhere /

I’ve gone from Barrett- esque 

screerunner-death totalisme to / 

tree-hugging, tea-totalling blue / 

just another shooting rock star trying to find / 

a voice amidst the inchoate breaking up of culture 

/ into a pluralistic atomised vulture / 

incommensurable islands may commence / 

from henceforth like a strange new tense / 

I’m drot so nunk as some thinkle peep I am / 

I was thinking of moving to Amsterdam / 

but I have to colour in the government’s new / 

application forms for £ove with a yellow / 

crayon and join the dots and spot / 

the difference and yet not / 

that Spot the Dog is a constellation / 

on the saddest night of life at this station / 

O track the low-hanging sensational star / 

back to the boot of a beat up old car/ 

planes are the shoes of clowns in London / 

but I’m here now not away being wanton / 

the fashion police car crashes into the tree/ 

Simon says that the River Goyt / 

might become the Styx in Heaven / 

so I say my dad didn’t smuggle art / 

it was recourse to euphemism for pollen / 

don’t paint it black I like all the colour/ 

but colour’s not enough / gone under the dollar / 

so nothing could be duller than the dollar methinks/

and I turn attention to our physical hyperlinks /

content is a palette if form is an easel / 

that would be ample for a new steeple/ 

bind it to life/ obviate not titivate / 

turn to the light your deepest down dirt 

Only Smarties have the answer / 

girl you’re such a beautiful dancer/ 

give me a twirl / give me a swirl / 

then give me a glass of sparkling water / 

the trees kneel down for you in prayer / 

the skunk traced its footsteps back to its lair / 

the demons recede with tails between knees / 

the angels swoop down from the boneless skies / 

and fly about your head and bless you on the skin / 

and the dream necessitates that the dreamer dream on / 

now I hear the porous chorus, the jingle / 

of my soul telling me to stay single / 

Language speaks man and vowels are our souls.

I am the Burger King I can eat anything.

I take out my eyes to see in all directions at once/ 

the infinite cocks are fucking the infinite cunts/ 

The heart beats to the rhythm of 1.

Only tomorrow is covered with leaves.

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.

RAP NO # 19

Dream with open eyes or else you’ll force / the bird in the wood to turn out a horse / the dog used to run up to the farm / the Natural world has a psychosensitive fire alarm / I like Boards of Canada / I like Radiohead/ I like Arab Strap / not so much The Grateful Dead / and I can be free from tradition and institution and emotional repression and profusion / it’s why I sip cyanide but now I am gone / and I’ve left my pink pyjamas on / space is big and the middle is the edge and the edge is the middle and the roadside hedge / is brimming with metaphors / I will collect / and later in love I will get wrecked / and you’ll get ruined / and we will say yes / to each other’s plans / but it’s just a guess / and from a Saturnine corridor / we will emerge through the Other Door / and ladybirds love as much as us / and lay on the charm / and make a right fuss / but to be in love with the idea of love is only to be in love with your own sadness.

RAP NO # 34 

Such a glum day at the foot of Black Combe/ a day that recalls the eyes of a fish/ but mother always said from the mundane can come/ a wish-fulfilment fantasy if you wish/ I think for a split second of the taste of heroin/ then I pause to consider Kurt Cobain/ then I think of slipping inside a watercolour/ then I think of travelling by xylophone / if I include you when it goes tits up/ I’ll have to scrap it all and start all over/ PURE GENIUS is written on the coffee cup / I got from another former lover / but it’s you I await in a dream without a packet/ pacing in the solipsistic kitchen of fiction/ the kettle rises to its silent scream / its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain / and we won’t be walking anywhere today / we’ll have to stay in and have a brew / I’ll be trying to think of something funny to say / that brings a sunshine-y smile out of you / hey how’s it going have you got a new remit? / I fell from the top to the bottom before / I might try a new stance and angle of approach / before you come and knock on the back door / excellent news could be delivered in a reel / renaming reality could last forever / the poet only grows bare in the soul / his anger at the sun is a rusty saw / he sends a share in chair legs on the blustery wind / he doesn’t want to do anything unless he’s sure / he needs a brand new female friend / he knows what you get when you mess with the law / and that the guitar is tuned as it is for the reason of maximum variety. 

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.'

FINIS 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.

THE BET 

I prophesied the ire ii net way back as a seven year old. 

I wrote one poem in which a clock is only as fast as a cheetah. 

I did the maths for the red skin cell in the same book.

I do not know if that means the new colour as a scar though. 

I invented in theory a living spreadsheet called Grand-darth’s Ship.

I conducted a scientific test on a theory from The Lords And The New Creatures.

I divorced, that is, the object ‘hashish’ from its name, habits, associations.

I met the juggernaut, that bird which wriggles its little wing.

I encountered and read the living spreadsheet “Grand-darth’s Ship.”

I honestly cannot recall what I even did with the hideous thing. 

I survived mine own maths for the red skin cell in the bath. 

I don’t know if what I mean is the new colour as a scar. 

I wrote an album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. 

I started a second band called Oedipus Wrecks who gigged in town. 

I lead my Jewish buddies to the face of stars on a starry night.

I started a diy poetry press/ magazine while still at school. 

I started a third band called Secret Chord H – a metaphor. 

I spoke against September 11th in the year 2000. 

I uttered the name and concept of my future tutor’s future paper. 

I got the address for our Plough alignment wrong, saying “maybe in India.”. 

I predicted the God Particle from looking at dust in a sunbeam. 

I wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the country. 

I recorded an album through state of the art binaural earphones in The Flood. 

I had a mobile phone I can only describe as effervescent. 

I wrote some good undergraduate pieces like Lucy In The Soul With Demons.

I was placed under a curse and became mentally ill and diagnosed.

I still got a first but was sent insane as I have said already. 

I hosted the alignment of The Plough and Black Combe. 

I attested to large skywriting at The Secret Garden Party. 

I attested to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. 

I found my name scratched on Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

I listened in to many a psycho-technological post-poem. 

I formed a full fathom fifth band in Black Hole Myths. 

I worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding computer screen. 

I had a book that emanated the smell of redolent perfume. 

I had a book that seemed to have lost a limpid line it once had. 

I built The Tower as an instrument of civil engineering. 

I cooked the tape whose pause in the song where cut and glued in the reel healed and was gone. 

I discovered the James P D Tucker sheet that grew pictures. 

I discovered the pictures depict the lyric of a song I once wrote. 

I did what it took to attain visual radio broadcasting dreams.

I suddenly heard from a little bird of The Future State of Poetry. 

I recently had Reiki to block the curse I was placed under. 

I am thinking of preserving nothing from before that moment. 

I think my father would hate my use of the first person pronoun herein.

I think my Prep School teacher would bemoan the lack of variety. 

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 things chime like bells,

reverberating up in the fells and strike

a warm, psychic chord, use 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, with 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 with 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 there are tunnels lines with free beer 

dispensers and fruit machines in the fell.

*

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, sending 

up the parochialism of this siding. 

*

The Tower 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 without 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.

FOOD 

Food, prawn and chilli, tomato pasta,

got to move faster, to my ghetto blaster,

the walls are shaking maybe the plaster 

will crumble like the hash of a Rasta, 

fed up writing, witness in the lightning,

never got a penny, living off the State,

wait for Kate she is never coming back, 

and we have still failed to paint it black, 

track the low hanging sensational star 

back to the boot of a beat up old car 

driving around London Town, down 

in the south, it started out as a noun, 

planes are the shoes of clowns down there, 

binoculars to God hanging tight in a bra, 

Rah the Sun-god is sleeping upstairs, 

I don’t want to be doing this says ma, 

it’s too cold for starters, and anyway 

we’re all martyrs in this modern day, 

training the river to sit on the point 

of a pin when you’re high on a joint, 

begin with the Louvres then manoeuvre 

the Hoover to the song it is a groover, 

lover is later, a bit like an alligator, 

tripping on a trinket a bit like a traitor, 

dreaming of an Eden, dreaming of an Eve, 

oh what a mess, you would never believe,

it’s so hard to cook when people can’t be arsed

to put things away, let past be past, 

got to give up sugar, got to give up smoking, 

and I am not joking, I am not poking, 

forever is forever, it dips in the middle, 

all at once the cat ran away with the fiddle,

a drivel while I drive, I was free to cook 

but I sat here all day glued to a new book,

dreaming of the green eyed princess, 

and now you arrive I am all in a mess, 

need some more peppercorns and then 

we’ll chill with the still all over again,

play let’s pretend and draw on money, 

all sorts of funny faces that aren’t very funny. 

THOUGHTS WHILST WASHING UP 

She used to do the washing up in the river.

Now she has got a dishwasher.

If necessity is the Mother of Invention, 

it does not augur well for my Millennial list:

- a virtual death machine

- a drug called Strictly Free,

that does what it says on the tin, 

is and makes you strictly free to consume 

- a word-chord constructing piano

at the vacillating threshold of resolution 

- an holographic horsecock wheeled

into the Prime Minister’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 

- a neutraliser drink that expunges

all noxious toxins of deleterious 

self-derision from the bloodstream…

These things seem to have no need.

I think of them while I am washing up.

They may be images born of privation. 

There were further futuristic ideations too. 

One might also consider things like:

- receiving a random text

messagefrom an alien

- having the mind all

about you on a screen

- a quick Nirvana pill or

maybe Nirvana button

- a website called

true love dot com

- the doors computer game

- a God Simulation including 

real live lightning bolts 

daggering down 

- a psycho-sensitive fire alarm 

sounding out like a 

demented, stentorian bird

- high ideals I have invented like 

Heartbook and the Smartpoem 

- a fruit salad of Apple and 

Orange and Kiwi 

Fruit and Grape

- a spiritual or germ X-ray acting 

as a cinematographic super-freeze

- two brand new types of 

poetic feet in the spongadiddle 

and the bongsteroo

- Top of the Poets on 

magic alphabet radio 

- a computer somehow 

speaking to you in the style 

of Arthur Rimbaud 

(translated by Mathieu). 

Again there is no need for such things. 

They may be but consumerist entertainment. 

A button with which you can text yourself 

to sleep may augment the little list but 

they exist in a state of Unreality. What’s 

wrong with them is they aren’t Real. 

Anyhow, I was just faced with tonnes

of washing up. It needed doing. 

I surrendered to the necessity 

and on doing that a poem 

started to form. Now I am free. 

I am free to dream of other inventions, 

though I’d rather tell it like it is. 

PHILOSOPHY CHAT BARN

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. The Enlightenment 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. 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. Everyone is my brother and I love them. 

WHICHAM VALLEY AS A SCRATCH ON A CD

In the hour before sunrise the Eastern sky is a negative.

The trees in the garden hog an inky blackness. 

Then the bird-nosed sun probes over the horizon;

and floating in the quiet of a weightless dawn, 

the buzzard is the crux of the flux of Time.

He knows to obviate not titivate like me, o’er

the top of the fell. The foothill of Black Combe 

is called Sea Ness, and according to a white witch 

who proofread for Norman Nicholson, it was once 

Seer Ness, after a seer and his trance. Nobody 

seems sure if it was St. Patrick or not but I am 

known as the seer now by some locals certainly. 

I’ve seen strange creatures, I’ve seen the face of 

stars, I’ve seen the future on several accounts, 

I’ve seen quite a lot more, but am still not sure.

Nevertheless I love to live here a Londoner 

in the Lakes, devoting my life to literature.  

Nature’s scales are diatonic and from all background 

static depression here is her sonic, spiritual tonic. For 

all there is no noise in Nature, only sound. The beck 

runs its hand through an angel’s hair in the background. 

The powers that be may be clouds passing by 

in slowtime on their superior roads while down 

here our own roads are still meant for horse and cart.

Only opportunities for vice, the birth of the internet

and the MacBethian treeline of windmills out 

to sea revolving their Mercedes-Benz sign arms

seem new since Nicholson mapped the area. 

Also global warming, making me feel eco-poetic…

well, the literature of rootedness can be repetitive;

still it is a pretty and privileged place to live.

At sunset, pale, emaciated, blue, monastic light 

calls to you from over the dark shoulder of the fell. 

By summer nights, the pink blossoms look like 

white snow in the darkness. Then the moon might 

emanate a mercury halo up there in the ragged, 

Gothic, wolverine, malting, Star Destroyer clouds,

lighting the dark. Meanwhile, down on Silecroft 

Beach the waves make gentle love to the shore.

ISM 

If after garage and house comes library,

that may be where we go to learn things, to see 

“full fathom five” could not be another number 

for Virgil says “there are tears in things,” brother.

I dream of a magnetic language, by the way;

that Radiohead’s a field with a river down the way, 

where mad children can splash and play too, 

trying to escape the blue that they once knew.

Jerry Springer, meanwhile, won’t breed gilly flowers, 

and between us is the weather, the weather ours.

The Yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole 

is the postmodern churchspire, bad for the soul, 

in the spiritual vacuum, postmodernism theme

dissolved into message. To relive the dream, 

the effect of global warming on the unicorn

succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn, 

became a kind of Freudian, postmodern ‘id,’

left us all feeling irate a bit like poor Syd. 

Ours is the generation with X tattooed on its face

and we copied it from a ballad to Outer Space.

Numbness to love will likely heal the wound, 

where selfhood is a tumulus or burial mound. 

Don’t fit in or else you may well never fly.

When you lose your concentration you die. 

Even that means to an end the alphabet 

could seem Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note… 

the stars themselves have turned out sleeping pills, 

and only seem visible up in the green hills. 

The new rain falls with as many tiny hands

as there are names for unformed rock bands. 

Society has started changing inordinately fast,

since they erected a new telephone mast. 

Portability seems the Apotheosis of Form 

and it’s not impossible to write an anti-poem.

McTruth and Flies could be an inscape of wings

that flap around, careless as lost key-rings. 

There is ironic equipoise in their collocation.

Isomorphic, they underwrite the name of a nation. 

So I get dumbed down against the rising tide, 

and say the first things that pop into my head. 

I privilege a standard of truthfulness ahead of 

a need to sell a story, and wish I was in love.

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 elegy?

Waves make gentle love to the shore. 

Liquid night spills on 

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 

reflection: she scatters 

her jewellery box all around. 

Homework tonight is 

to remember your dreams.

I prefer telepathy to 10p.

Because the world goes round and round.

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 fulfil 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 packet 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 canonical voices 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

blow gently in the breeze for all eternity.

 

COMING UP 

E was the heart of the new creature science 

E kept it hidden for decades in silence

E met the juggernaut as had James Joyce 

E didn’t know if it even had any voice 

E invented a living spreadsheet too 

called “Grand-darth’s Ship” and E might know 

if media compression has to be the way 

a true new creature can come into play 

(it was a flat, plastic rectangle with a pattern 

of black eggs splurged on top all of a sudden 

in a jacket that E had tried on and taken off)

E kind of objects to being called a toff 

E wrote “I have a scar+ that is red and black”

putting in a plus sign for the F of scarf like 

E had done the maths for the red skin cell 

E recognises that one isn’t Universal 

 

E took two Jews to the face of stars 

far from the passing of the midnight cars 

 

E lead the brothers through the Vortex again 

E said when the Towers were going to come down

E foresaw the God Particle’s discovery 

from looking at dust in a sunbeam differently 

E uttered the name and concept of his future 

University tutor’s unpublished scientific paper 

E got the address for our Plough alignment 

wrong even though E was being prescient 

E wrote the highest marked A-level exam 

in the country and E deemed it just spam 

E recorded through binaural earphones 

in full de-tunings and Eastern style drones

 

E had and held an effervescent mobile 

reverberating the rhythm of William Tell 

through every technological inlet in the room 

before it rang from his old man, whom

it would seem gave E the phone as a gift 

one Christmas, forever healing the rift 

then some fuckwit put E under a powerful curse 

and E didn’t know but it made life worse 

E was sent insane before he got his degree 

and lived nearly two decades in ignorant misery 

but E still hosted the alignment of Plough and fell 

E attested to large skywriting as well 

E encountered a pint glass exploding from 

thin air in the city and many a post-poem 

E found his name tattooed on Piper 

as if by some sprightly hypertext-sniper  

E had a tape with a tiny little pause 

where it was glued and it became a lost cause

E put the tape in the AGA when it healed,

when the pause was gone and all love revealed 

E used to write at a purple-bleeding screen 

some people say that E became a machine 

E built The Tower out of magical books 

E freed many minds from the heart of the sticks 

E discovered the sheet where the pictures grew 

E might be me and then E might be you 

E’s got the whole wide world in his hands 

Nirvana were one of E’s favourite bands

E’s mother says E’s gone and fried his brain 

but if E had the choice E’d do it againe 

E would half it and laugh it with his brother 

E would find a way to engage with the Other 

E would light it and write it on a comedown 

at the Gates of Hell, and burn and unlearn 

and E would be free to connect in all directions 

and Even A Dick Gets Big Erections 

and E feet walk in a sensuous graffiti of 

blind white light when you fall madly in love 

but E has developed in his soul a new jingle

and it is the stance that E is to stay single 

E found out E had been cursed at last 

and E decided to do away with the past 

E says an anti poem contains the negative 

of the mewling foot but wants to stay positive

E had a poem that encrypted the mystical

as a series of adverts for imaginary products, all 

satirising consumerist greed at the same time

then E rewrote it so that it would rhyme 

if E had to keep one poem from before 

E might rework that one and E thinks guitar 

music is of dad’s generation but poetry 

is not a dead art form, as some people say 

E says it is the dancing of the soul to 

the music of the heart when it feels blue 

E says it is not as Simon says, the cancer 

of language, for E thinks it is the answer 

E thinks the poet a translator of feelings 

not just someone who passes out on ceilings 

E seeks to delight in a wilful opacity about 

what E gets up to and scatter seeds of doubt 

but E keeps crawling back to naked, face 

value exposition about his life, his place, 

his Naturalistic Observationism, of childhood, 

when E first stood being good in the wood

E wants to redeem the dream of being a writer

E keeps wondering if his fag lighter 

would survive a shipwreck, that leads to a 

desert island, where he needs to make fire 

E has very good manners and is very kind 

E knows of madness and the split mind 

E has seen extremes of the human condition 

E has lost a lot of trust and been in the institution

E had a hard upbringing, but has now relaxed

E is for Jupiter now, and E is also for sex 

E concatenates the red electric guitar 

E coined the word amazeballs, and the genre

‘grime’ in the year 1998 down in London 

E was 7 when he first found dad’s pollen 

BONDING YEARS 

The universe is but a projection of the mind. 

The G note is green on the guitar fretboard.

‘Born Slippy’ is evidence dance can have soul. 

Poetry is untranslatable. Death is God. 

These are beliefs of Dr. Calculator Ptom. We 

boarded a train not knowing where it was headed,

fell asleep and were woken by the conductor, 

somewhere around Luton, missing a ticket.

We got sent packing back the same way home,

slept the day under leaves in a suburban wood…

we were sparsely dressed as if it were Rome, 

so the end result was that we felt the cold. 

I liked ‘noetic’ meaning ‘of the mind,’ but 

‘Homeric’ was his favourite word, he said.

Bold we were in the London days, two youths 

writing notes on hyper-vision like The Dude. 

It’s not too hard, for example, just to believe

that Monopoly Money should work on bread. 

It wasn’t long before, at the age of sweet 16,

I started my consumption of timeless acid. 

I guess at first I believed in the substance 

as a tramp must believe in his next food. 

Soon Dr. Ptom and I became blood-brothers,

and we still are, after a sporting exchange of blood. 

I feel bad because when I first met the guy

I lied and told him my dad was a landed Lord. 

Still, they were happy days, the Summer of Love, 

when we rode the rhythm, and felt so good. 

(Hadrian Unit)

THE GREEN BLUES 

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.

HASHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT

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 everything was amazeballs, yes, yes, yes,

and for once I was not just the solitary witness

but out there with friends footloose and fancy free,

less than seventy three miles from the Irish Sea.

ADIMAL FORM 

“Don’t tell Moronika,” squawks the purple parrot perched on the shoulder of Dr. Calculator Ptom. A green parrot, meanwhile, was sent to space through the conch, 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.” Now that a salmon has escaped the ancient net, a sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper At The Gates of Dawn accrues to the procession, and the anguila eel is wet, named after the devil for mysteriously appearing in the puddles of towns on rainy days. A Lion Bar is driven through the economy in a car and a carfume whooshes from the unicorn’s bottom… 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, fries and a large Coke. Gone north, to the foot of the oldest fell Black Combe, where the Plough aligns, I would say the buffering boa-constrictor of loneliness could be the wind. The scissor-bird is smitten with the chocolate mousse but the chocolate mousse prefers the Kit Kat. Baxter the dog sits down. James Bond’s fly ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ at the same time, buzzing in B flat. The computer mouse is universal. My brother James takes Baxter the dog out for a walk on a beach where a dead seal lies washed up on the golden sand.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS 

Let us have a go then, you and I -

when we are tired of getting high - 

when the note-well is filled with giggling, 

frilly sisters of stars, let us kindly lie 

down on the top of the oldest fell, 

one midsummer night on the heather, 

and munch our popcorn in front of the cinema. 

Let us travel by xylophone up there, or,

even better, bullet up the top of a 

telegraph pole opening plentiful CD shops

at all the local telegraph pole tops. 

Let us bypass normal societal procedure,

and stay there until we yawn at the dawn 

and emerge from dreams as if from water,

brush the crumbs of sleep from our 

eyes, befuddled, encrusted with glue…

For up the fell no cars come and go

with rudeboy bats on the stereo;

and no go faster stripes of blood

are streaming on the unicorn’s side. 

Ha, let us open a Burger King joint 

at the top, not so much to reappoint 

the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods 

whom it seems disintegrate under their sods,

but to allow a new sense of archaic gay,

replace that emotion now gone astray 

with gun and bud and band and butter:

let it be like writing a long letter 

either to or maybe from a higher self 

whose brain sits upon a Waterstones shelf. 

Let us first dare the darkness to insist 

we sip our flasks at night and get pissed

on firewater whisky – let us turn 

to God and see what we might learn. 

If God still equals pi times mc squared,

because you want to think Him round,

and O is still the key of water, be assured, 

and its most soul-assuring sound,

let us babble down in the morning, 

all the way, heeding the warning, 

to make as mezzanine our science, 

in an increasingly competitive world…

already the elements have nettle stings for names.

The deep, green lane leads you home,

but first you must launch your song 

into the blue ether like a Timeshare salesman

sizzling the dream of a plate of roast beef.

Draw on this dystrophy of darkness

soon coming to your cinema screen 

now that we’re at the summit and can glean 

honed alertness, awareness, from a purpose 

achieved over a long afternoon of walking,

walking side by side and even talking 

on telepathic walkie talkies of how no,

there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode,

how maybe in Heaven every step 

we’ve taken up the fell, will be kept 

in a pile for us to count and compare -

or how there will be no statistics up there. 

Ah, I forget if we are up or down -

let us fetch the wines of the wise men -

it seems planes are the shoes of clowns -

but forgetting is part of escape and return…

there is only loss of self and recollection, 

which templates over life and writing, 

which templates over experience and data,

which templates over the now and the after.

Let us phone a supernatural female deity 

on collect call, and find that she 

never hangs up, after a prayer, 

let us pray to the closing of the door,

the ordeal of the seer may well soon be over,

the on and off at once invention is far too clever, 

let be the beck as it rambles and falls, 

let know the flowing of dry stone walls, 

let over be under and all be at one, 

let the land of flying fairy cakes be fun. 

Some say the effects of acid and acid-rain 

on an imaginary species equal the same, 

nothing, but then again there can be 

no more proof, if you ask me, 

of something being real than saying 

it was imagined, and so the effect of global warming 

on the unicorn is still a postmodern id,

and that must be something hidden from the kid.

Margins are centres, centres margins,

surface is depth, and distortion 

clarity, and there is a lot of cheap tea

from Africa in among the supermarket bargains…

Hell, we’ll have another game of cards.

We’ll link to the internet in actual clouds. 

Yes chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots. 

It seems in dreams I find an organisational system 

for the organic whole of the magnum 

opus, that living work of art 

I might call Gondwanaland yet 

which is a living thing, and which I leave so long, 

until Truman speakers wake me like a gong 

augmenting the end of the Lemon Song. 

Who will renew the morning dew 

that music has moved the grass to?

All the birds have gone south by now.

I heard that they sing with their wings. 

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. 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 James’ sheet

that bloomed or even grew pictures depicting a

lyric from one of my old songs on the front of it.

THE DRUM 

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 imbrocation 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.

HALFWAY TO HEAVEN 

Isolated we are up here like the tiny islands 

of the words “I love this place,”

tiny islands of the ink droplets that 

comprise the tiny islands themselves,

and I do love it, parked beside the sea 

with you staring out at the residual glow 

in dark mountain range clouds out there 

where the tiny island of The Isle of Man 

seems feint and like a stray dog 

sleeping on the horizon’s vertical wall 

that props up the windfarm out there…

we speak of the privilege of place 

inside the privilege and pleasure 

of each other’s company, in the car, 

not quite in love but in fond affection,

enjoying each other’s loquacious charms. 

Why I would isolate and pinpoint 

this moment with dull precision I don’t 

know but maybe to form a narrative. History, 

where everything happened, proceeds 

through conceptually carved up eras, 

cut into neatly sealed packages, 

 

digestible bytes and portions. They 

say the poet, like the madman in searching 

for the teleological reason of illness, 

also cherry picks and isolates moments -

and a moment it certainly was, sitting 

in the car, half-way to Heaven as now,

trying to close the distance between us 

with words. Blink if you are sexy. 

CREATIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE WRITING 

Barnes has scored a liquid horse 

it got on to the writing course 

and when at last its work was done 

then it flew back to the sun 

when it returned it was burned

the people asked what had been learned 

and Barnes’ horse said why of course 

we have to have more intercourse 

Barnes has scored a liquid noose 

and it’s full of pussy juice 

I’ve never strayed from the plan 

that was put forth by my old man 

we dream in synch we loot the dawn 

we have a cat we don’t watch porn 

and when at last the work is done 

we too shall fly up to the sun 

SKYWALKER FIST 

I think the Night sky only seems to revolve 

on axis unobserved. Only moments ago 

there was a crucifix-shaped constellation,

three stars across, one above, one below, flying 

above the house – but it would not move 

when I stared at it, only when I came 

inside, to my screen and went back out 

a bit later for a smoke. Speaking of a crucifix,

I think my right to write of who meanwhile 

is in the power shower, that makes the house 

sound and feel like a P and O Ferry, ends 

where another’s body begins. I think it is 

rude to write of the living, all writing is fiction, 

and maybe all selfhood mythology. I think 

I agree with Michael McKimm that history 

is malleable and with Syra Sowe that 

there is no immutable truth. So these 

make five tenets of aesthetic faith which 

make one’s creative writing a little bit harder.

At least though there are principles on which 

the art is based, and which I doubtless will 

go against in lax moments, though maybe not,

for I can always delete dodgy poems with 

ruthless and murderous revisionism if 

and when they irk my sense of self-defence.

WASHING UP AGAINE 

Washing up againe, 

I think how the provincial poet 

and the Buddhist share 

the belief that freedom 

can come from accepting 

limitation and how 

washing up may become 

like the garden in 

Brian Patten’s urban 

poetry or the leaking 

Tap in Bukowski, my 

recurring decimal, and 

of how the literature 

of rootedness can grow 

quite repetitive, how 

Norman Nicholson would’ve 

been even better had he 

gone like Wordsworth 

to the French Revolution, 

somewhere, anywhere, 

to get miles away, and 

when the work is done,

I feel better for having 

done something good, 

to contribute to the house, 

and make mother’s life 

easier, for as she says, 

life is not about 

being a genius, it’s 

about hard graft, day in 

day out, for as she 

continues, poetry is not 

the entrance and exit of 

life, it is not the root 

cause of all things, which 

I with my over-inflated 

sense of poetry’s worth 

sometimes forget, growing 

as obsessed as Hendrix 

was with practising his guitar, 

nor is it an ego-dystopic 

obsession, but a vocation 

which to those who 

have one means a calling 

and to those that don’t

can mean but a mild, 

Amateurish Hobbyism,

like painting toy soldiers. 

A FRIEND TO KISS AND HOLD HANDS WITH IS LOVELY 

A says to not grow too attached.

B remembers last time you had a woman.

C was sectioned three fucking times. 

D is fickle, renowned for it. 

E will only break your heart. 

F likes to flit from man to man. 

G doesn’t want to pick up the pieces. 

H says it’s fine to kiss and hold hands.

I warns not to have sex too quickly. 

J says what she needs is companionship. 

K says she is lovely, you could be a perfect match. 

L says she is on the rebound watch out.

M just doesn’t want you to get hurt. 

N represents the top of the telegraph pole. 

O is the key of the babbling unicorn.  

P says not to jump in too fast. 

Q is for Queen of Cumbrian scenery. 

R is a psychtrance fan from London. 

S says she heard you two had a snog.  

T says you fancy her rotten already.

U isn’t getting told off just warned. 

V knows she is lovely and beautiful. 

W doesn’t know what’s wrong with it. 

X simply can’t fix it when it goes wrong again.

Y could be the answer to all your problems. 

Z awaits the morning with rapture. 

HYMN TO LIFE 

I love this place, love staying awake at vampire o’clock,

love drinking tea and smoking in the rain before dawn, 

love the way the rain seems to concur with Shakespeare in 

not believing in a sexual truth, only in multiplying 

pleasure… I love the alchemical way it penetrates the ground.

I love loafing around, I love truth, I love the fresh, redolent, 

enervating scent of change fermenting on the ego-loss 

breeze, I love the sound of wind in the trees, I love to 

cut it all back down, my virtual Brainforest, my magnum 

opus, to but a few spatterings of ink. I love the dawn chorus.

I love to call it a day, and I love to start againe, and I 

love every permutation therein. I love to have Kathryn 

supposed to be coming round to pay me a visit today. 

I love the sound even of the cars grumbling up and down 

the valley, before the morning is even really up and running.

I think you’re never so alone as when you’re in love.

I love to defeat plastic with my life. I love to forget. 

I love the happy truce between us in the family againe. 

I love the new music scene around the area, I even 

love lugging the drums about like a roadie for my friend. 

I love the red flowers decorating the table but know they 

are poisonous to eat, so I won’t. I love the valley outside.

I love as I have said the feeling of starting out all over 

againe. I love the way the fag-end of winter has her 

compensations, like a blanket of frost underfoot or the 

rosy red cheeks of a girl down the local train station. I 

love the way plugging your senses in the mains you find 

the Natural World. I love the Natural World. I used 

to love all manner of noxious toxins of deleterious 

influence but now I love to be clear-headed, now I 

think the poet not just pilgrim to Parnassus, deep-sea

diver in collective unconscious, psychic map-maker, 

alchemist of perception, liver-function of language 

but essentially a translator of feelings and the feelings

you get when on illegal drugs are all fake. I love to 

love loving love’s loving lovely lovableness. I love 

to have my health, or some of it, and even though most 

of my youth has gone, I love to look back at it, and love 

likewise to surrender to the present tense. I love the 

smell of tobacco, the feel of dad’s baggy hammock 

from Afghanistan, the copper coin colour of bracken 

on the fell. I even love this winter women’s work. 

I love the whole world, and all its men and women, 

all its actors and players, and I love to connect with them. 

I love to look at the clock and find that it’s ten to eight, 

my birth-time, a time which followed my dad around 

before I was born, and which Stephen Fry uses as his 

example of meaninglessness in The Hippopotamus. I

love to look up at the field before the fell and see the 

sheep lying around and to subconsciously think of 

a stone circle and the length of female’s hair at once.

I love the name of Black Combe and its shape and 

its age and its shadow. I loved the Mind Drop-in 

- a safe space project for the mentally ill in Millom -

but fell out of love with it although I can remember 

saying yippee I have two blank bits of paper I can 

fly, down there, and of course love a brief fling 

with the politics of flight. I love the imputation 

of homosexuality in my song and flirting with it too.

For I love to sing in the masculine and oral joy of the 

bardic child like a New Beat poet. I love to unleash 

the song of myself at the Gates of Dawn. I love to 

log on my brain with breakfast, and I also love that 

the brain is not a computer for it can self-heal. I love 

to float on the artifice of organic emotions through 

synthetic sounds, like some of the Warp Records artists.

I love to explore alternative histories suppressed by 

the over-arching meta-narrative but now you are 

taking me back to University, 2002, where mutation 

in consciousness, truth too simple to understand, 

were gesture without motion bones, like sadness gene 

and dreaming gland. I love to take a breath, to sigh 

a sigh of relief. I love the quest of sensation itself 

to escape the narrow ways in which we perceive. I 

love to experiment into new modes of perception, I 

love timeless ideas transmitted across time, I love 

music that mixes the familiar with the unexpected. 

I love my family and friends and wish for them all 

to have happy and full lives, full of love and happiness, 

devoid of fear and pain, and violence both emotional 

and physical. I love Burger King more than McDonalds. 

I love the risk I am taking, almost like pushing the raft 

free of the medical gaze, love not being boring, love 

the catharsis of writing, the physiological kick it 

gives me, the instinct I pursue when I’m in the zone. 

I love the wait for things to say as much as the things

themselves. I love balance and radiance and more. 

I love the land of ample leisure laid out about me. 

I love the internet. I love to bring things into being. 

I love the way the rain drops blink like cataracts, 

or omnivorous frog eyes, in the puddles, while I 

am grogged up to my own eyeballs on medication. 

I love my mother. I love the smell of petrol as much 

as the smell of the Christmas tree. I love to label 

my pills poetry buttons whose names should never 

appear in poetry, and my voices quavers and also 

syllabubbles, and mental hospital Monopoly Jail. 

I love the way this list of loves may never end in 

spirit but in word it might have to. I love the sense 

of hardly scratching the surface, and I love the idea 

of writing in wrinkly, crinkly Christmas wrapping 

paper, before I forget. I love the abeyance between 

words, the word abeyance, the word propitious, 

the word noetic, the word suadade. I love the sound 

of the car arriving in the driving or leaving and

making a jingle on the shingle lifted from the big, flat 

bird-table. I love the literal bird-feeder out the back, 

that brings birds in spring like sensation after an 

anaesthetic, returning to the fingertips. I love infinite 

permutations of love this morning, where I turned 

back to my old file, and still decided against it

in the end. I love to not plough a singular neural 

superhighway with a trail of cultural subversion, 

shouting about mono-centric totemism and hegemony. 

I love the sense of sacrifice, this going without 

all those beautiful poems I wrote, which is married 

to a sense of adventure, in making new connections.

I love “bud scales” in James Schuyler as much 

as “poems the shape and texture of bricks” in 

Michael Hofmann, and love to learn more about 

the art of poetry, all the time, on the net, in books, 

in conversations, in experiences, all over the shot. 

I love the sense that the poetry world is the actual world 

in which we will all inevitably lie down and rest. 

I love one more cup of tea. I love to be humble,

love to aim Low. I love to be done with teenage 

love poems, Morrison pastiche, degree poems, 

mature student poems, dying father poems, poems 

from my amphetamine years, lockdown at the 

foot of Sea Ness poems some of which were published, 

and I love to be setting the record straight once more. 

I love the kitchen door. I love the laptop, slinky, 

though it mainly confers a spurious sense of Creativity 

and a garish blue light pernicious to the eyes, I hear. 

I love to hear that you are doing well, maybe even 

falling in love, dear gentle, reader, and I love 

my brothers and my sister, as I loved my father 

though we didn’t always see eye to eye. I love 

to leap. I love to keep a record this far out in the 

semi-wilderness, removed from normal civilisation. 

I love the isolation, with a few friends that come round. 

I love to create, love the first, unformulated spark 

of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation, 

all the way through to the eschatological imagination.

I love ascetic indolence. I love the soul’s right to 

loaf around, languish, in a sofa of spiralling lethargy, 

even wash in warm soapy bubbles of absolution. I 

love living in a place with no light pollution, no 

Lucozade snakes dripping their liquid on the streets. 

I love fecund imagery, and yet I also love sound-sex

in the mind’s ear, which lies beyond the mind’s eye. 

I love the cars passing by, swishing in the rain. I 

love the way out of Religion, Insanity and Suicide 

I ended up with being formally insane. I love to count 

the corners of rooms, objects, almost like an autist.

I love to break free from tradition and declare that 

PALACES ARE THE WENCH SERVANTS OF CAVES.

I love to steal a punt from Cambridge University

and head down the River to an illegal gabba rave 

at dawn, and jump up and down on Ecstasy, or 

rather, I used to, when I was footloose and fancy free.

I love the dawn. I love the feeling of being reborn. 

I love to poke my erection into the arse of a woman 

in the mosh-pit. I love to go crowd-surfing. I love 

to go fellwalking. I love the ambivalence therein. 

I love the city, I love the sticks. I love piles of bricks. 

I love escape as much as staying put. I love thought 

as much as absence of thought. I love Word as much 

as absence of Word. I love wood and glass and metal. 

I love things ethereal as much as tactile. I love to have 

osteopathy, love to find a mine of wine online, love 

a wine-slick in a dream meet experiment, love a Strange 

Attractor from Chaos theory on the shores of sleep. 

I love long lines representing the breadth and depth 

of idea contained in them. I love a plastic yellow M 

on the end of the word ‘them’ smuggled in prose. 

Love to smuggle art. Like my dad. An international

art smuggler nicknamed Blue he was. I love blue 

skies, love K’s blue eyes. I love to float an hypertext 

of the word ‘pi’ over the real like an astral body, 

but I haven’t managed to conquer that one yet. I love 

to have a goyt as much as I love to get. I love 

Rimbaud, Rachel, rambling on the bramble road. 

I love the falling rain outside the solipsistic kitchen 

of fiction and how cosy I feel in here, like in a caravan.

I love drums as much as lyrics. I love the idea that 

a drum is also a dream of bounding in magic circles 

in space in real-time and can cleanse the soul of badness. 

I love to have K coming round and know that even 

though I have not slept and have not showered it 

will still be OK. I love to be thought of as someone 

with an over-wrought Imagination that no-one else 

can keep up with. I love life. I love life and think 

maybe all I need is a wife with whom to share it. 

I love to share, for I have many siblings. I love to 

fix myself a drink when I am on the brink and my 

mind is on the blink like a tired and yawning lion. 

I love Paradise Lost and I love Ulysses as well. 

I love the sense that art is all biodegradable as soil. 

I love the kitchen. I love the bewitched mystic scapes 

of yesteryear and the gear shift of brain cells of the future. 

I love to leave nothing on the pitch when I write 

sometimes, except my all, my heart, my soul, my love. 

I love the savoury tang of cheddar cheese in a 

Ploughman’s lunch in the cafe of the Natural History 

Museum down in London. I love the planetarium of

the mind. I love to write rhyming riddles on my 

family’s Christmas presents, almost to deflect them. 

I love the dream of finding a soul-mate more than 

a sex-body. I love the rest of the poem whatever it is. 

I love to liberate my self through feeling shame. 

I love to live within my means, I love to eschew 

what I was going to and did not know how to say. 

I love to go back on my promise to scrap the magnum 

opus and to finally make it work and work my way.

I love to return to a poem a few days later, after 

24 hours of sleep, and augment it, without even 

re-reading it, like James Schuyler might’ve done. 

I love to get osteopathy but can rarely afford it. 

I love Liverpool FC, and love it when they win. 

I love it when K might come round againe tomorrow. 

I love it when I have done enough, drank the Duff, 

sunk the Plough in the top pocket on the pool table, 

moved through moods and emotions that are new. 

GALLOPING WATER 

The rain applauds my good thinking. 

It speeds up like a galloping stampede.

I was thinking about that time I stood 

before the Millom audience and said 

my dad took an idea for a book to his grave, 

and I found it: to write it on speed, 

to make it about waves, and call it 

A Season In Heaven. I see a cloud 

of powder’d light billow in like magic 

curtains on the high, karmic wind 

and know it is an open chamber. 

That’s how it began, at the Mind 

gig, raising money for mental health. 

I was thinking back then how the poet 

can harness waves that have also passed 

through the Beats and which might 

date back to Wordsworth for whom 

it was very Heaven to be on the crest 

of that wave. So in remembering 

these thoughts, the rain sped up fast. 

It applauded. And it may not be lost. 

One’s connection with one’s dead dad. 

He could be surrendered to the elements. 

There could be no reason to be sad. 

I have a theory too, that in dying we 

can re-access history at any point, go

become a real, live Red Indian, or a 

bird of prey. My mother says whatever you 

believe happens when you die is what 

happens when you die. Death awaits 

and awakes the same me, I happen to say. 

And so Dear Dad, Dear Dead, what 

did you mean by the book you took?

I cannot believe anymore, now that 

I am no longer on the machinist drug, 

that you meant for me to take phet. 

So the rain comes down. I write on. 

When it applauds my thought I happen 

to believe in that, and think it like 

a neo-shamanic stance, a religion 

of anima, and an almost pantheistic state. 

And as I think I finish my poem, the rain 

stops. And as I think to augment it 

with another little flourish againe, 

 

it picks up a little bit. I turn away to 

Facebook message Kathryn, and when 

I wake from that little writing trance, 

I notice the rain has once more gone. 

RAP NO # 35 

She’s a reason to wash/ she’s not after your dosh/ you haven’t even got any/ not a single penny/ and God you’re so boring/ always sitting writing/ at a slinky screen/ you’re a writing machine/ have you ever been to Magic Faraway Land ? / there’s no Dogmuckels footprint in the sand/ you should go up to Eskdale / she loves it too/ show her St. Catherine’s pool / where the sunlight is new / you’ve got to be less passive/ see that Jungle is Massive / and your breakfast was good / three boiled eggs with butter’d bread / you were spreading the same pack of butter / over and ever increasing surface area of toast / and then one day you were cursed by a nutter / and it’s not something of which you should boast / who named Sundays? / who named the sun? / is she really coming round? / is she the one? / please send your answers by text message to the number on the screen.

HELIUM AUBADE AT THE FOOT OF THE FELL 

The first thing you notice when you have Reiki 

to block out a long-standing curse is 

the clinical voices temporarily disappear…

the next thing you notice is skill returning. 

Imagine that – being deprived of your own skill 

for nearly two decades, grogged up to the eyeballs 

on medication, being told you are mentally ill 

which you of course are, no question about it. 

And now I deem it no longer enough to 

have a brew and a fag and a laptop. 

Now I deem it time to give up smoking. 

It was one of my dying father’s wishes for me.

And now no longer will I wake in the bedroom 

where he passed away and be short of breath. 

It is for him that I am doing it, but also for me. 

I have given up smoking because it is nearly dawn.

I have given up smoking because I am bored. 

I haven’t even reread the Allen Carr book, 

but I’ve read it before and know what it says. 

I’ve just chucked all my smoking stuff away

in the bin, gone cold turkey, like a renegade. 

No longer will I wake in the bedroom where 

my father passed away, and be short of breath. 

I do not wish to talk about giving up smoking. 

I only wish that it happen, and hope it lasts forever.