THE NEW ROAD

THE NEW ROAD

If I were actually writing a book of philosophy in this day and age I would wish to use a title belonging to my friend P – McTruth And Flies – which seems apt for an Age of Terror – but which didn’t originate with me. Instead I might do well to write about some of the amazing things that have happened in my life, to sound out what has gone on.

“My life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won,” sang Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins; and I can relate.

“In my life,” as Morrissey sang, I encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, had a hand in inventing the net at seven, attempted the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark and separated the pollen from its name – all in my seven year old book – made some Naturalistic Observations I didn’t quite understand, including something the Irish keep hidden, another a kind of plastic spreadsheet called “Grand-darth’s ship” at the dawn of the net, which meant I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures too, developed a slight tincture meaning I was incrementally marked by that experiment into the maths for the new colour, cried but still wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, invented and falsified the Nirvana barcode, and haven’t even left Prep School.

When I did I formed Oedipus Wrecks, attained the face of stars with some friends, formed Secret Chord H, started a poetry magazine while still at school, predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in before the machine was built at CERN, forewarned my brothers of September 11th in 2000 by using my own brain, prophesied the Plough alignment but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my own back garden at home, set aside an ideal for a book to write about it all that would later turn out to be my University tutor’s unpublished scientific paper, wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation, and left school.

When I left school I recorded an album on binaural earphones in a Cambridge band called The Flood, had other experiments, other bits of gear like an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, had an experiment into healing and fusing a cassette tape with a pause in the song where stuck together in the reel, was amenable, even, to the ideal of someone else – maybe a Natural Biologist - tattooing the name of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, wrote much about the new A. I. Revolution before it happened, then got a First Class Honours degree despite the onset of mental illness by then.

Leaving University, I hosted the Plough alignment from my back yard, attested to real skywriting at the Secret Garden Party, attested to the pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital and much more, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into A. I, built the Tower of magical books like one that started to smell of perfume and others whose first appearances were deceptive, recorded a further album in a barn studio in a secret location, and when my dad died discovered the sheet where pictures grew, gave it away to my brother, who designed it, then attained visual radio, visual radio broadcasting dreams that billow like a weeping willow in the wind and swirl in purple, digital swathes about the head of the seer, who carried on writing and writing and writing, all of it not for a penny either, which is another remarkable thing.

What am I to make of all this?

I don’t think you should go through all that and still not be able to afford a sandwich; but then again if I started making money off a visionary aspect like “attaining the face of stars” I might be a tyrant and that I am not nor have any desire to be.

I’m not in it for the money, I’m in it for the paper, the end result.

I’m in it for the light that is shed.

Normally just helping invent the net at seven would be enough to qualify one’s genius but there are those of late who have denied it. It was spoken of long ago – that I was genius – and generally accepted – but I fell into mental health troubles which are unwise to talk about.

I’ve been shopped for things I didn’t do, spiked, persecuted, cursed and more in my life and despite having that insane CV which I crammed into but a few opening paragraphs, feel I am yet to score so to speak, yet to deliver something of timeless worth.

“What’s it going to be John?” I ask myself. “Is it going to be a rewrite of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob? Is it going to be a paper on the failed, failed maths of the new colour as a cellular mark? Is it going to be the falsification of the Nirvana barcode all over again?” These things, first time round, were already achieved before I left Prep School. They would still be the things I would focus on, and I feel I have found a way in, a way to begin, a way to start a paper, that does contain all these things in time.

For an example of the mental process going on in The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob – which we can consider to have begun round about now – if I have a dangerous and subversive theory about, say, The Lords And The New Creatures, I will probably write it down for the sake of scientific learning and go back and erase it for the genius of self-annihilation, for the preservation of goodness, and because as Dr. Robert says: nobody is interested in The Lords And The New Creatures. The less said the better. So in a way I am cutting out the cancer. Just because something is true doesn’t mean it is interesting to science. So you see I was done evil. In among it all I wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob and it has been regarded by science as the ticket.

Between you and me, there are voices in the air and they are peppering the air with terror. What am I to make of it all? What is the answer? What does the author do? Who even is the author when all these voices are sounding out? What can I make of the idea that the new style is proleptic? Does co-imagination lie beyond it? Who is the author? What does the author believe?

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Start learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road on a smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when late birds sing in the trees, birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, when nothing really matters.

If you get me, you get me, and see what I am trying to do with regard to juxtaposing a line of obsolete French and a line of truncated, Go-beat-stricken English. If I could re-iterate my point: the trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside. Still, that is a line that was sent, texted, through the new air, the new A. I., the new ESP – and who by I do not know...

Quite conceivably by now, I can’t really renew the lost, boyhood album I made with my siblings called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob as an album of songs without the rest of the band. Still, I already feel I should be able to make it a lasting paper. Before I go on any further down that road I should mention that I have – when in a pit of despair – actually been visited by angels who deem it a positive step to try and make it a paper, and that it might be the only good thing I ever do.

There were two of them who pulled into the drive in a car, got out and started looking at a road map.

I went out to help them, to see if they were lost but they weren’t and only wished to take a photograph of the house – my mother’s house.

So I said “okay” and came back in – and that was when I realised they were angels, two angels from a template by Blake. I realised without them even saying anything that they had come to get me to renew The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob – but (I thought to myself) where does one re-begin such an adventure after all these years?

Maybe it’s about Backward Liquid Maths?

Maybe it is not safe to say E minus MC squared = only relative zero?

Maybe it’s about being in a state of unself?

Maybe it’s about Divine Technology of the Fifth Dimension?

When I first wrote it as an album of catchy songs, I was a strong believer in God. I liked the definition of God as “thought thinking on itself” and prayed every night. Prayers would elongate as I drifted off to sleep and sometimes I would forget what I was doing and enter a semi-conscious state whereupon I would snap to again (or else fall asleep) and realise I hadn’t punctuated the prayer with “amen” – so would rewrite the prayer with the renewed energy of a terse precis – still trying to get everyone in.

That was before I came under the influence of a powerful intellectual, atheist, who couldn’t tolerate God. He said “we don’t deserve a God. We are just monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers.” I was sitting on the fence at the time and almost out of politeness I said to him “so God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness?” and he said he accepted that. I started to question God myself, to say things like “God is to behead, dethrone and become not worship blind in dogmatic slumber.” These days I am not too sure how to leap into it without such beginner’s luck!

I’d say that God could be a game; that the game is based on permutation. I’d say The Lords And The New Creatures is also a game – a wide yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and whose circumference is closing in. I’d say it was also a media-compression experiment dreamed up on who knows what under a hot, Californian sun. I’d say that a game is a rehearsal for death.

I liked reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and liked the way Jesus had a sword in Heaven. Traditionally the warrior poet is from the Muslim faith – so I was thinking maybe Milton was saying “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet,” which means a great deal to me here at the foot of the fell, where the stars realign.

About God I would say when I stopped praying my life became worse. I would say that it has been scientifically proven that even if there is no God, to pray before an LSD trip engenders a miles better trip than not praying beforehand. That is regardless of whether God exists or not – so prayer can act like a placebo… it’s why I might have to persist in this “game”.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob was never intended to be a post-Einsteinian comedy. I got the name of the family band from a Christmas card sent to my mum by a family friend who said “Happy Christmas to you (and the mob.)” I was also a fan of the band Nirvana. So the name was born when we needed to make an album on a rainy day.

Anyhow, I used to think of Heaven as a pile of statistics – I don’t know if I told you already or not – that nobody would ever get to see. Walking up the fell one day I wished to know if I had been up more times than anyone else and the truth is I will probably never get to know.

Some say answers to the divine will arrive in maths.

Some think God exists on a mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

Some say vision is demarcated from wild hallucination by the fact that it contains a revelation of the divine – like a theophany. Ted Hughes took issue with this because it means vision is indoctrinated by the Church whom he said only brands Nature as evil.

Rimbaud would be content to extirpate every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unloose the mind of form, method-act every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams but even this is mere consumerist entertainment compared with Blake breakfasting with angels. Blake was deemed a true visionary but Ginsberg meanwhile who was visited by the ghost of Blake and taught by that ghost the true Notes to the Songs of Innocence and Experience, was deemed mad because the vision did not contain a revelation of the divine.

I am back to the dog of it all now, interested in states of ecstasy (they might hide behind the square panels of the kitchen.) All of the art on the walls, the Notice Board, the mirror, is indomitable according to the great, ancient creed that Jim Morrison left us (naturally it became an obsession of mine in teenage years to reread The Lords And The New Creatures but it wasn’t an ego-dystopic obsession.)

Anyhow, round about now, as a preamble almost, I feel there are fragments from those old days of boyhood which may be spared the inevitable waste and sway of Time.

For example, even my babyspeak had some kind of post-Eliotious and counter-poetic ring to it to those that know their 1960’s American verse.

“Look Fufie, I can fee feep!”

It templates over Jim Morrison’s opening line, as if I were born the witness. Consequently I am interested in fossils of art, encryption, antipodes, negatives, blueprints, fingerprints, alkalis, mirror-neurones and other things too.

The way ahead may appear to you to be quite avid. It is replete with busy detail like Outsider Art which is because I became ill.

Still I remember back in the day: when my dad was away working as a fine art dealer, I spent my days designing tunnels inside the oldest fell lined with free beer dispensers, fruit machines and burning torches; also cheques addressed to myself for ludicrous amounts; also pen-knives with ludicrous tools.

‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world. There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn.

Something about being a Starvationist.

Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.

Then my seven year old work started to show early promise. Even though I probably didn’t yet know what sex was, I encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, proved the net and cloud existed in the imagination of a child before their invention, attempted the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark and conducted a proof of “the metamorphose theory” from Jim Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures.

The work emerged when my dad died in 2014. Dr. Robert, upon tidying up the attic found a stack of books I had written. He brought them to me; and I went straight for the two, red, English, exercise books. One had on the front

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and another had on the front

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Some choice fragments from that seven year old book might run as follows...

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

a cloud, two planes,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

In our new program there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

I saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full of dead skeletons.

He has spines all over him.

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers.

It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

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.

Well, one day, I met a big-eared sofa in James’s bedroom (that anagram of boredom) and I said, that evening, at the dinner table too; and then too soon I met something else as well.

My head filled with war one morning in chapel and I collapsed, went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

Looking back for some kind of sophisticated response I find the final line in my school project on the dinosaurs in Junior Four to be quite inveigling:

“Last Autumn, two biologists announced they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct, stingless bee found in amber.”

There was also a rather revealing incident at the same school. We had a music teacher – said to be gay – called Mr. Williams. One day we were waiting in class for him to turn up. The teacher from the previous lesson that had just ended was still there. Then the headmistress came in and said to that teacher “Mr. Williams can’t be here.” The teacher said “why?” and the headmistress whispered “Mr. Williams is invigilating.”

I didn’t know what to invigilate meant, and felt stricken by some kind of aspect of horror to consider the poor man sitting on the edge of his bed at home, unable to attend because he was “invigilating” which I took to mean some kind of biological reaction to being gay, possibly to do with laying eggs.

When my dad came to pick us up I quietly asked him “what does it mean when someone is invigilating dad?” and he said “it means to oversee an exam.” I was relieved and even disappointed but the point was the “wuh” sound. I think my imagination as to what “Mr. Williams is invigilating” meant proves that I had made an encounter in James’s bedroom that might be best called an encounter with a cooked breakfast that contains every snooker ball colour.

Back then, even then, my dream was to be an English teacher who subsidised a writing career by teaching English. I remember writing a letter to a green organisation about our family finding a gannet with a broken wing on Silecroft Beach at a bonfire party; and the green organisation planted a grove of trees for the effort: they were petrol ink purpose for pen ship sail!

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle,

bongles has still got the stones.

The song in my head as I lay in bed in the boarding school dormitory at Night seems looking back now to have put words to the demented goose sounding out at the end of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Bike.’

Through the wood. Running. Knocking off the fungus. With a hockey stick. Dad and mum were there. I remember. There was a song going “I’m So Dizzy My Head Is Spinning” on the radio. I remember it came up in the wood. When dad and mum were there. They were singing it. At school.

“I’ve written two prose poems mum. One is called ‘The Fire’ and one is called ‘The Sea.’ They’re about 4 sides each. I did it voluntarily.”

The latter means there is a difference between humidity and moisture in the air.

That was when I rounded the gang and said:

“Right I’ve got an idea guys. We’ll write an album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. James you can be on Spanish guitar, Bob and Hannah on backing vocals and percussion, I’ll be on Casio keyboard and vocals.”

L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog,

he should be sleeping like a log,

goes round and round, chasing

his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail

of Maltesers, nice, round and pale...

“We’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there.”

Flutter in the sideways.

Flutter in the sideways.

Bring your brief fling with the politics of flight!

There’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

So. That was it. That’s as much as I can remember of the original flourish, which went on before I had left Prep School. It was a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, and we managed to redeem the situation of all evil.

Looking back now, when we wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, incorporating a song called ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel,’ it contained inflections of my father’s LSE degree in philosophy. My father studied under Karl Popper who, although I have only heard from dad as opposed to reading myself, came up with the epistemological methodology of P1 to TT to EE to P2. It was diametrically opposed to Logical Positivism (apparently) who at the time believed even the circular argument to trend forwards towards a Bigger Picture that Popper no longer believed in.

It sounded like a mouthful to me – this P1 to TT to EE to P2 business – so I just used to say ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ instead. It became part of what I could call “an Utilitarian Martianist slowspell.”

Ossie the Dog meanwhile was a daft golden retriever. It seems to template over or be a fossil of that moment in The Lords And The New Creatures when Oswald escapes.

The eponymous song of the album had a catchy melody I can still remember, and it goes well in major harmonies. The lower road is like something from China and the higher road more emotive and anguished and together they are beautiful.

As for the bit about the butterfly, in my memory it was there but even so I shouldn’t say it in full, because there are those that, say, encrypt it in musical truth without words – and I am still not entirely 100% secure that it was on the album – though I think it was. Moreover, it is enough to hear my brother switch a light switch in the night-time now.

As for the old falsification of the Nirvana barcode, there was a government-set intelligence test at the computers at the world’s most expensive Prep School after exams, for the winning of which there was said to be a prize. Wishing to prove myself intelligent, I finished the task at the computers first, but was systematically ignored, whereupon I tapped in the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana into the computer’s controls. I was a big Nirvana fan. My dad had got me into Nirvana. That was it. That was why I wrote the little “poem” beginning “sullen, silken sulks” – to contain that situation in the I. T. room – to say “there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode.”

Then at the age of about 14 or 15 I provided a new thing: a booklet of poetry called “The Fire-Dance.” It was about being free with Nature and is said to have contained some timeless lines.

The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums

where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap

and bells let peace form in blue notes

and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it

and wet let excellence sound out its criticism

and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting

and chloroform in the heart let see

if only Game Over was seen in nights.

The

sun

hanged

himself

from

a

length

of

daisy

chain.

Folder graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. The system works quite well. The grass is always long on the Other Side.

Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.

Clocktick clock not being clocked off by time.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.

Break, bird with the skin of snake.

God rushed into the cold cod quick.

Behold! An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Barnes has scored a chicken

and wingers are allowed bikes!

I imagined a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except a swear word in every box, to go at the end.

Even A Duck Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings of the electric guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say.

Hey, my name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

[1998]

Around this time two friends and I met the face of stars and I am still unsure as to whether or not I should call it “the Spirit of Music.” Dr. Bob assures me the face of stars should not hide under a different name. It was amazing to stand there, enraptured and enthralled by the cosmos, with two friends who confirmed the same sensory data – but still we had to walk away.

One notebook I wrote for a girl contained the line:

“The stars awake to notice love,

she waits with open arms.”

I sat on the roof of the house where the stars re-align at summer sunset and wrote poetry, teenage love poetry, for a girl, including the sentence:

“But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

images before I sleep

dancing, escaping memory

they seem to have no cares at all

they seem to know the name of love

they seem to be my sacred friends

ancient messengers, waking at night

but I will forget them and never care

about what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it’s love

just us and love forever...”

I sometimes wish I had nothing but a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:

“The light of all that’s good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams.”

One night Dr. Calculator Ptom and I boarded a train without knowing where it was headed in London. We fell asleep and woke in Luton missing a ticket at dawn. We were sent back in the same direction from which we came by the conductor. I think we slept under leaves in a suburban wood but that may have been a different time. He named my second band “Oedipus Wrecks.”

I seem to remember taking some kind of pill on the night we ended up sleeping in the wood. Dr. Ptom didn’t, and I ended up puking. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with an actual female!

I’ll tell you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

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

See I was writing acceptable, nearly-publication standard poetry already at 16. My teacher had to check online to see if I hadn’t stolen it and found I hadn’t. Still, I was brushing the dust off ancient fragments.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Soft

and

loose

like

yellow

pencils

scribbling

dreams

as

they

arrive.

At Oundle School, I started a third band called Secret Chord H with the best drummer of his generation AND a poetry magazine with the best poet of his generation too. He said he thought I was better but what remains of those Rimbaudian days?

Opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over.

Semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

While the boys upstairs played Mario Kart I wrote a little number off the top of my head that now I find hard to get rid of, as if it contained a watershed, a demarcation between that which is old and that which is new.

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.

Magic poisonous a breath her. That would be the opposite of a logically-worked-out system of priorities by which to live and love. But at least the evil of a nuclear situation would not hide in a Nintendo innuendo or “poetic conference” and go down as nothing but gorgeous description – so the threat is dissolved, revealed to be the redolent perfume of the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh whom it seems does not fancy the poet (alas).

I think it would’ve been very Heaven to know her kiss. I think The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob would’ve found its ultimate Apotheosis in the form of love.

V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings.

If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.

By this stage I had met P. We used to hold “Poetic Conferences.” We would also waste poetry on the breeze. We we were delicate angst-angels perched on the dome of the world! It was he that got me to do away with the old Oedipus Wrecks set list because he preferred ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by Secret Chord H.

[missing fragment]

Sometimes perhaps 

down opening quiet

I am drawn down 

long and alone

and my friend and 

my foe recede 

into deep sleep

sudden and still 

like a dawn behind a 

screaming veil 

where silence

is born and all that's 

loose and tight and 

all that's light is light 

like first morning 

with no night

and wend my way 

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy 

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live 

the last poet's 

last poem.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

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.)

I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring

suffuse the air and pervade the senses.

An AEIOU bird

toots its hollow horn

outside on the A595.

A celebratory genesis is everywhere.

Mother earth

is giving birth,

menstruating season

and ovulating dawn.

Fresh lovers maunder

hand in hand and

knee-deep in redolent flowers

into shade to take repose

by cool, running waters.

Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.

The blue sky arches and swoons,

I bridle the mind and race apace to the shore

where seabirds scream

from the ragged rocks,

O is it their love-song or elegy?

Waves make gentle love to the shore.

In alchemy a galaxy

of stars exploding

into being above is perceived

as an orgasm, is perceived,

that is, in an erotic sense.

Liquid night arrives too soon,

O moon, O beautiful,

sleepless omen moon,

who shines like an

electric coin and seems

to be in love with the sea

or at least her own

shattered reflection:

she scatters her jewellery box all around.

Homework tonight is to remember your dreams.

I prefer telepathy to 10p.

Mad, Icelandic inventions from 2000 included (though this is not comprehensive) a virtual death machine, a word-chord keyboard, a drug called “Strictly Free,” an holographic horsecock wheeled in the poet’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 telly, a neutraliser drink that sobers you in an instant… and now I hear I also spoke of recording an album on a pair of earphones.

Then the prophecies apparently included prophesying the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in; included forewarning of September 11^th in 2000 using my own brain; included predicting the Plough alignment but getting the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my own back garden at home; included also setting aside an Ideal for a book about it all called The Scientific Papers. It was to be a Trilogy classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.”

Artistic ambitions meanwhile included finding an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English; replacing archaic “gay;” conducting an experiment into the international language alphabet; overthrowing the conscious self-censor; and making a discovery as big as fire.

I was philosophising about what I called “simultaneous orgasm of Man.” The world arrived at a series of maxims, arrows, aphorisms, angles, approaches and axioms. Much of them were 2. 2 standard, PPE degree at the LSE type axioms, which I might have inherited from dad too soon. I have a whole list of them but the best one for me was:

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

Self-aggrandising at it sounds, in 2000 I wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation, marked at 100%. So I went down south to stay with P. We had some laughs and worked some terrible jobs. There were further conversations, unspoolings.

I. T. soon stood for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the soul w/ demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for Extra Sensory Allowance

and I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

P and I wrote a song together using a letter sent from BT – the telecommunications company – as a “found poem” – and which I augmented with some original lyrics. We never made much of the whole John and P thing really. We were always together in a co-imaginative bubble and in love with the pleasure of each other’s company but as close as we were you never heard me telling P about my life – how I had been the witness, how I had attained the face of stars before we even met. You never saw me try and turn the situation to my advantage. I never even mentioned the narrative of my life history to my friends.

We used to drive around, in our drummer’s car, listening to the Beatles’ back catalogue, the whole of it, on epic pilgrimages around Cambridgeshire. Sometimes a song like the one going “because the world is round” would bring tears to our eyes. We’d usually have notebooks open, P and I, and note down thoughts or images, collect metaphors.

They were testing troubled times, times when CD shops were all closing, when everyone plugged in and got phones, when Radiohead went electronica, when the new Aphex Twin album came out. It was because I went to live down there that I never even learned to drive, and my dream of becoming an English teacher to subsidise a writing career went to waste.

I still think of these ‘on the road in England’ days, and try and attain the same lyricism in prose as if the end of Jack Kerouack’s famous book.

Sometimes I feel like my mouth is full of cold, stunning, heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills, and did you know Beavis was an undiagnosed, high-functioning autist, and when I see the low-hanging, sensational star of evening shine I think of P, whom it seems was in love with the feeling, ever since we met, a long time ago, in a galaxy further than the stars and closer than the eye?

We noticed that when recording on earphones even just the background static and feedback and distortion from the amp makes it a tone-poem.

Syd Barrett was rumoured to have been seen walking round with a fish strapped to his head.

When I got to Warwick University, I wrote what I thought was an alright poem that tried to calibrate a new, magnetic language by encrypting events in the mystical realm as a series of adverts for imaginary products that also satirises consumerist greed.

[missing fragment]

Actually, I wrote it when my Millennial ideal for a book called The Scientific Papers, which was to be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception,” was suddenly published by my new University tutor, in-between my expressing a desire to write it and my arriving at his University. It took me a while to see that I got it from him before we met and not the other way around!

I also wrote an actual paper on whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons happens to be an actual substance – it got lost but I still have notes from that period.

[missing fragment]

At some point my phone started to reverberate the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. At a further point in time I left Warwick altogether and returned to Cambridge to finish the album, promising on record I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”

Concept for an undergraduate portfolio. This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

On the train to a brother-poet’s birthday party in Leeds one day I wrote in my notebook, all the way there. I wrote the whole alphabet out:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

Then I went on a bit about ancient alchemy – about how to alchemise the alphabet into something good, transmogrifying lead into gold. It was going to be a reading at the party – but despite all that I had written, when it came to pass I had nothing left except

“I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life.”

By now, I have given you the words “il faut que je m’en aille” because it is an obsolete French subjunctive meaning “I too must go,” which I found in a book on Rimbaud. The next line is New Beat and even Go-Beat-stricken – it is a line of mine own. The idea is to confer a specific message in the white space in-between them – a Holy, glowing, Beatific, pure idea.

Indeed it all seems to be about Energy, this Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. Blake said “energy is eternal delight.” He knew a thing or two about life did Blake. My father’s sons were named after the Doors!

Anyhow, what you choose to do with your white space is your own choice but I choose to daydream of Love. Love, says WH Auden, is a choice of words. I mentioned this in Breath Trapped In Heaven – that when you group love with language not God you become pragmatic.

When I got back north from Cambridge and before I went to Lancaster University as a mature student, I embarked on a program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise, inspired people to give up smoking, ran up the fell, read Proust, coined the word “co-imagination,” developed a better singing voice, and wished to become a teacher still. I went off to Lancaster University which sounded like a word-guitar from Fender to get my mature students degree, to be the sad one in the corner!

My Lord what a lot of reading I did! I read every book on the course and double that amount! My degree was interrupted by the onset of mental illness but that does not affect the intellect – so I could still read and write.

When we had to fill in a form about what our favourite books were I did not say The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison – because I wanted to follow the marks – I said Crime And Punishment by Dostoevsky. The teachers must have thought this was quite funny, this smuggle. “Was it the moment,” one of them might’ve said “when Raskolnikov took out his eyes to see in all directions at once?”

So you could begin an intertextual book where the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures is at University and soooooooo paranoid (like Raskolnikov) that he can’t admit to what his favourite piece of literature was. It could become a fusion. It could be a campus novel and a fusion and like, say, Alice from Wonderland going through The Trial by Kafka, or Joseph K from The Trial going through Wonderland.

At University I learned a lot. I learned for example that the lesson of post-structuralism is two-fold meaning:

a) the condition of being a text can extend to any quotidian ephemera, any object, say a pen

b) the condition of being a language unto itself can extend to any text, say Frankenstein.

I learned that Deconstruction is a dream, letting the eye become distracted by things not meant to be in the text, for instance the monster learning the language in the hut in Frankenstein could be Caliban.

Speaking of learning the language I learned The Great Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panchronic, panoramic overview like a chronotope turned euchronia, unless this represents a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy through whom the esemplastic has fled away with the quadlibetical.

I presented my defaced bank note portfolio which advertised itself as defaced bank notes, then explored topics such as:

- how my father’s international art dealing business was recourse to euphemism for pollen

- how our band The Flood had gone to Berlin where it happened

- why the English language is worth billions of pounds

- how to skin up Writer’s Block

I did my dissertation on the tutor from Warwick with whom there was uncanny imbrocation, overlap, in terms of our both having the idea independently to write The Scientific Papers. When it happens in sheep it’s called morphic resonance; when it happens in academia it’s called uncanny imbrocation.

Something interesting turned up during my degree about the letter ‘A.’ I was studying Dave Morley’s scientist-poetry and became attracted to the line “the heart trammelled and rammed on the anvil bleeds visions.” I noticed not only is it written employing the anti-dactylus, meaning two soft, one hard, but the stressed syllables were all ‘A’ sounds. There was no name for it in all the array of hyper-specialised tools of sustained critical micro-analysis – so I called it kinetic, said there was invective monotony written into the line’s musical configuration, and let it go.

I read masses of Michael Hofmann poems – Hofmann being the poet who wrote poems with the ideal of the shape and texture of bricks.

I had a beautiful girlfriend and we both had the best sex of our lives. When I told her young daughter it was 4 O’ cloud I meant it and they thought I was mad but in the end I was right. Sometimes it seems my best poesis is wasted on the breeze – my most prescient moments – and that looking back I seem like some kind of Godfather of the modern age. It’s why there are some that don’t wish for me to renew the teenage love poems for the subject of my teenage love poems.

I was keeping fit, keeping off drugs, doing well despite the onset of illness and the intake of large amounts of medication. I got a well-deserved First in the end.

One of my pieces was inspired by Martin Amis who wrote Time’s Arrow – I read most of Amis on top of the course – and this piece presented a backward-time version of September 11th. By now deep into the repeat prescriptions I will just say there was fire generating staplers inside the office and it ended when the mute, blunt nose of a plane left the spontaneously self-healing window and flew backwards away.

I had half a notion of “a thesis as thin as the Rizla it was in.”

I tried to “escape the shape of the paper.”

I said I “lived between the letters of the word OK.”

I sketched “the elongating shadow of my elongating hair on the page.”

On weekends during my third year there were psycho-geographic pilgrimages with a good friend who was writing a novel in which someone was attacked then went out taking revenge on the wrong person. It was an allegory for September 11th.

I myself had a novel on the go, a dream-meet novel that was interrupted by a burglar. They said (the new crew crew) it would be more interesting if the burglar was the one that then got killed.

During my undergraduate degree whom it seems took a while, a friend of mine and I were talking. Someone said we should do away with Trident and explore space instead – but someone else said we would get held to ransom by someone like Iran.

It wasn’t until after my degree, after all this learning that I even recognised I was the witness in boyhood. I was watching Match of the Day and the pundit Alen Hansen said “it was definitely a foul,” and I suddenly had access to my memory from boyhood. I realised I was still at Square One, and that was when I was formally diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder which by now I will have for life.

My old band The Flood fell north when we had the Plough alignment, then there was also real skywriting at The Secret Garden Party, then I went to London, still collecting “magic sayings hidden in the tree tops.”

Obvs I came home at some point, after the lootings, which I had no foreknowledge of, nor took part in. I will admit though that I attested to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital, also studied the tiny, blue, carbonated electrons that swarm in the air near park benches, also found the Oyster Card reader on the Eastend bus flash up BACKPASS ATTEMPTED instead of NO MONEY like a psycho-technological post-poem.

The great search-engine continued probing, the great note-taker continued note-taking, the whole endeavour of it continued to be all-consuming and heart-purifying too.

One of the most gratifying things was when (back at home in the north) my dying dad took out a flower-press ending on a comic-strip anti-hero, made for him by someone; and just around that time I saw the most beautiful lass from boarding school trotting on a horse in the village!

That’s when I knew I was in the sea.

As the car came back from the beach, driven by my bro, I was checking out the lasses on the horses as usual, and she was there, on a horse, trotting, smirking, knowing. I tried to get my bro to stop the car but he kept going. At home, I got spruced up and then went down the pub to see if she was there but couldn’t find her, not even the remnants of her perfume sliding in the air.

I chased her for a while online but soon got the message, by not getting any messages: she was not to be mine.

Even if I did not get the girl I got the pretext to the teenage love poetry at least and at last. If I spell it out, maybe it has to be Anon, and not wishing to do that I won’t.

The dialysis itself was more about leaves. It was comprised of Honeymoon clippings from Crete, coming with a running commentary on Taxonomic properties like healing, food and myth and proved Cretan literature is not dead, delightfully.

That a teenage love poem for this particular woman = a motor is not necessarily entirely true in my opinion but relatively speaking is, when you consider that it might have more narrative momentum, rhythmical frenzy, than a flower-press that tempts the law towards the end.

As for but a few of my own minor triumphs, as well as the effervescent phone and recording an album on binaural earphones, there was also: my Natural Scientist mate stamping the witness’s name on Piper; a project into fusing the cassette with a pause in the song where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel; working at a numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen; building The Tower of magical books that often appeared to change like they were a mirror for the soul; and upon my dad’s death I discovered the sheet where pictures grew. I should run through these in a little greater detail...

Firstly The Flood’s binaural earphone album went online. Looking back, attempting to “plug my senses in the mains” via the album recorded on binaural earphones may have been folly, and I still find I can only receive and not send, here in this Age where we can send without form. When one of the numbers picked up a sensory overlay, a sophisticated arrhythmia, a clickety clickety clicking like something from Autechre, I started to entertain it was a quote, a sonic machination from The Lords And The New Creatures, the moment when “the chopper blazed over/ inward click and sure.” My good friends in the band assured me it was nothing of the sort, more a technological quirk, and that may be where I went wrong, or they.

As for healing the tape with the pause where cut and stuck together in the reel in a delicate operation, the tape didn’t start as mine, so I don’t qualify it as my own “property.” I can say its successful fusion may have combined two things:

1. my grand-dad’s motto “the mustard has to be English.”

2. my knowing the Thai for the tacky, 1990’s pop song ‘There’s No Limit.’

When after years the fusion was (somehow) successful it became an objet d’art, a Strange Attractor, a dream-meet connector, an utilitarian Martianist wedding ring that lived beneath my pillow and propitiated dreams of things like “The Ninero Ratio.” Still, one night as the wind enwheeled through the dark garden trees and an alchemical, base metal feeling pervaded my soul I remembered the formula for mud from Primary School:

water + soil = mud

and by now having gone mad went downstairs and cooked the cassette tape, the evidence in the dark blue AGA, top oven, hottest one. I still think as my dad said it was then that it became “a valid work of art,” which I dutifully photo’d and put online somewhere.

As for the numinous purple bleeding screen, its colour was co-aligned with mystery, sex, suadade, longing and shame thus to incorporate every vowel-sound into a feeling.

All these examples and more I would contend could be considered “halfware.” There was at the time also an exploded telegraph pole and more and many more and they said my name was tattooed on Piper and I was still trying to write songs.

It was around the time of my dad’s dying that I dreamed up the whitespace poem. I was trying to use white space to confer an idea, through the operation of suggestion, even though the idea wasn’t mine, but something that belongs to All of us, especially the idealists.

My dad’s death coincided with so much at once: the death of the numinous, purple-bleeding screen, the emergence of the sheet where pictures grew, my return to the subject of the Nirvana barcode from Prep School and that was also when my boyhood proof emerged replete with scientific functionality.

Some deem it that it was sooooooooooo good that it had to be seized. Others deem it that the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark (which didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end) was wrong and there was nothing worth keeping but a few measly images and the song about the dog with no brain.

In the middle of it all, having now the proof, the discovery of the sheet and the Nirvana barcode along with other things too, and having no dad anymore, I lost my mind with grief and walked out naked into the heaving capital.

I was put in a cell screaming a demented scream, compress sans nicotine and medication, where I drank from the toilet, where I recited the end of The Lords And The New Creatures to the CCTV, and at the time to show how badly I was feeling, I actually believed I was Dog Tanion from the children’s cartoon when I was young!

Someone I knew came to find me for all I am not completely and utterly alone and without ally in the whole world.

I was actually in the belief for a moment that space was being emptied of the human form and I was to be left alone in the cell as a joke while it was happening, so ill I was… this person that found me, they put me out if this specious notion and told me the doctors would soon be there.

It was only then that they told me I was actually a scientist who had had a hand in the invention of the internet at seven years old, two years before Berners-Lee invented it. That was when they said I might actually go on to win the Nobel Prize myself.

When the doctors arrived they said I was thought-disordered and called an Ambulance to see me up to my local mental hospital back in the north. When I got there someone I knew was there which made me feel a bit happier.

I sat at a table in the Arts Room in mental hospital after having gone for a naked walk, and drew a table at the table.

[missing fragment]

I used coloured felt tip pens and everything… having done that there was also an aftershock image that followed on:

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

Eventually I was allowed out back to the foot of the fell, but my former sense of self was gone.

I brought out a terrible book called Rose Petals In The Ashtray which was a name my dying dad had given me and which he meant to denote something specific I didn’t understand… how was it ever going to be good when I didn’t know what the title meant? I had also thrown away most of my work so went fishing in my boarding school tuck box and found a 16 year old poem with which to start – but not before removing a line in the name of revision! It made it even worse! Then the second poem was written before it in the initial sequence, and I even had to pay for the potential ruination of my career. All these years all I had wished for out of life was to be a writer and there I was – well, nursing the ruination of my dream! When I found out what my dad meant I retracted the book from publication.

When I look back at some of the artistic ambitions set out in 2000, I feel apart from making a discovery as big as fire they are realised. Even then, some would say the sheet where pictures grew is a discovery as big as fire. I have written at length about it and sent it to my brother James, who designed the sheet, so who should still own it even if the pictures depict the lyric to one of my own old numbers.

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 with the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels 

Immanuel Kant

will come to thee 

with 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 with 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 with 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 laaaaaaaaaa 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

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

“and a record made of sound

goes round and round, conveying

music to the speaker through the stylus,”

says the radio as I turn it on.

Well, although there is no

such thing as the Nirvana barcode

it opens up a discussion about

the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how

if barcode is rain barcode is phone...

and at least I have

the grace to come

back and say that the

extinction of consciousness

has no monetary value.

It is past dawn

and I see that

that first mobile

phone has gone.

c

Pi = a soft, round, gelatinous eyeball.

Sine wave with minis sign coursing through...

Backward f

forward f

equals

running

through.

+ x ½ = -

If a flower-press ending on cannabis = dialysis

a love poem hoping to impress her = a motor.

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

2

SYD BARRETT

ENGLISH

E

ENGLISH

SYD BARRETT

HARECROFT

1

Colour circles red. How many circles?

When I was 4 I was on holiday in Sweden.

My brother is five years old.

I was sitting on the sofa drinking lemon-ade when suddenly I felt funny and then I started shrinking and shrinking till I was six inches high.

“It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.”

For example, there is an exercise about the surface area of objects: you have to go through a series of shapes and ascertain:

1. area of whole shape

2: area of unshaded part

3: area of shaded part.

EQUATIONS

(1) 3 a + 4 = 2 a + 8

(2) 4 b + 4 = 1 b + 7

(3) 5 a + 3 = 2 a + 12

(4) 5 b + 1 = 3 b + 11

(5) 7 c + 3 = 3 c + 31

(6) 7 y + 1 = 3 y + 25

(7) 11 c + 9 = 8 c + 24

(8) 7 b + 12 = 1 b + 24

(9) 3 t + 5 = 2 t + 12

(10) 5 b + 10 = 2 b + 19

SYSTEMS 11TH MAY

1. 211

2112 ATTRACTOR

2122

1132

211213

312213

212223

114213

31121314

41122314

31221324

__________

21322314

21322314

I might as well add that the lightning bolt is part of the God Simulation!

I had a song when I was 15 about a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face of stars will still write the line I wrote about it at the time and think it his or maybe even her own:

________________________

If water’s effect on water might = 0 – 0

and E minus MC squared only relative 0

water on water might = 8 – 8

and E minus MC squared have to wait!

QWERTYUIOP

ASDFGHJKL

ZXCVBNM

H = t times Pi.

c/ G does not equal G/ c.

Dog = Pi times MC squared.

G = c times t

and if G = c times t, I have to express what t = and might be wrong in saying

t = c divided by G

and might be wrong in saying t = 0.

y. p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4

Permutation minus T Intention =.

Don’t forget, it might not be too late to reiterate the point:

V to the knock-kneed hummingbirds’ wings;

and if E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared!

Then the utilitarian Martianist slowspell of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob will be complete! If it seems a bit slow bear in mind I am on medication and got distracted by other things! So you might see the failure of the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark, the renewal of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob and the falsification of the Nirvana barcode are contained.

“Not with a bang but with a whimper,” is how T S Eliot says the world will end, and I find myself in that position of trying to up the ante, to bring the paper towards a moment of ecstasia, catharsis, closure, resolution or even concatenation, but what else have I to say?

The first resolution I should arrive at is not to take drugs. Because drugs ruin lives. Drug-taking is monumentally selfish. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on drugs are all fake. I’m not just paying lip-service to the State but genuinely believe all this, even if I echo the sentiments of my father. I do know doctors that will say it’s less simple: that you are “made of drugs.” Derrida meanwhile would say to label all drugs ‘drugs’ represents a dangerous narcotisation of the truth. Still, by drugs I mean illegal drugs, which reminds of another resolution.

To not break the law in any way is a resolution of mine. I would echo the sentiments of the great poet Geoffrey Hill who says “the law is grace.” With me I never had it easy. My dad’s job might’ve been something borderline illegal, and there was pot in the house when I was seven, which was used to fool me, to make me look like a fool, when I was seven years old. I was to separate it from its name in my seven year old homework when I found it in the chocolate cupboard and couldn’t identify it. Really, deep down, I have never wanted to break the law at all. Raskolnikov in the great Russian novel Crime And Punishment ends up talking to the policeman about “the deleterious influence of society.” Peer pressure can be a difficult thing to resist. Opportunities for vice are increasing. Some say the West has fallen and if it has it wasn’t on my watch – and what is it that spiritual people hate about the West? Is it greed? It might well be – and might also be the prevalence of drug-taking in the modern world.

I was going to turn this into a fiction in which I met someone that had a drug called NZT as in the movie Limitless, a drug which increases your brain’s activity to 100%, but having said what I have said about drugs it would represent an hypocrisy. The idea was only a literary idea: to try and write like I would had I taken said drug.

If I were just “putting anything in” – I would be making a wry, political comment – a pacifist comment – and I did try this at one point while I was actually in the process of trying to O. D. I was literally just “putting anything in,” and that I am not doing now, but exercising careful and intelligent selection.

The night has left us now and it is dawn. The clear light of day, thankfully, reveals no new creatures that are not subjectable to science… and is it very Heaven to see the sunlight blushing on the fell-side that turns from green to brown? Blake could see Heaven in a wild-flower. Wordsworth went to the French Revolution and said it was “very Heaven” to be on the crest of that wave. Heaven might also just mean the unbroken, blue dome above.

Now I am going to copy and paste in a section of what I call “lost miniature dreams,” even though to not repeat myself I have had to deplete them of ones seen before. They are the defaced bank note section, the NFT Haiku section, the Punk Koan section and you’ve seen quite a few already. Here then is the depleted passage...

[missing fragment]

Necklace noose,

reckless truce,

drooling before

wet, electric eyes

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

[missing fragment]

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea…

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh, up

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

To plug my senses in the mains

might engage !00% of my brains,

but it’s gone wrong at the plug,

just a dream on a drug.

I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life,

probably no-one else knew.

A trance of stalks walks on stilts

like a stance on talks only to the toilet

then back to bed to rest its head

under the soft, Pink Panther blanket.

She blows a poisonous magic

searched the corridor for a

crash had no survivors in Soviet

be weed

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

Signed by everwell,

she couldn’t hit it sideways

or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman

with the hairgel of Dracula,

Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

“Is there anything I can do to help?

Looks like I’m on washing up duty.

It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.

It won’t take long then I’ll be free.”

£34. 84 at the Take-away joint

can get you quite bloated,

not just quench’d and sated;

and by now I sit here wondering

just how much it cost.

My fingers have crashed,

my fingers have crashed

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in

can lead all the way to the loony bin,

can make you forget how to spell

Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.

The day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me.

I remember when banks let pens go free.

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.

Love has gone veggie for reasons of Disney!

The future is no longer what it used to be!

I still crave a greedy DogMuckels when

the plush seat gets a hard-on at the end.

Caroline is the last yellow crayon.

This could be the key to telepathic union.

My grand-dad was in the Air Force and his wife.

Under a blanket in the back of a car.

I think of it now that I’ve reached this far -

alone in the solipsistic kitchen.

When Paul was talking of “McTruth”

I noticed a swarm of flies in the house.

Nobody else could even see them but me.

My mother calls he pills I pop “poetry

buttons” in motley conglomerations

like pool balls or songcells and

their names should not appear in poems.

Walking down to the Irish Sea quite slowly

to see if my place in life is lowly

I reckon a dying animal goes much faster.

In The Stream by Simon Pomery he writes that “sleep is the only heaven.” What is it that makes that Simon Pomery’s intellectual property, as opposed to Anon, or air from the great subconscious, or even authorship by Einstein’s value for lightspeed (c)? While I don’t know the answer I can report that Joyce says the artist is a doubter and the scientist believes. Simon says he believes he is Dedalus. Simon says violence cannot contain me. Simon says “I had a goyt. It was loud, vivid, tactile, tasty, smelly and long.” Simon says a lot of things – and I think I like that poet. There is surely a difference between a writer being a rewriter of other texts and being a pastiche artist or even artiste. There is surely a difference between looking forward to the future that ain’t what it used to be and failing to understand that art is above politics.

My dad left behind some Precepts to guide me in my writing, did you know. My dad was a failed writer himself. Like Rimbaud he stopped writing and took up smuggling, art smuggling in his case. Before he died he managed to do away with all his writing except for conveying these Eight Precepts in ordinary speech to help me with my own writing.

1. All writing is fiction.

2. It is rude to write of the living.

3. A standard of truthfulness should come before the need to the sell a story.

4. A writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

5. “Why not?” is not a good reason for writing a poem.

6. You’re supposed to get the ball over the other guy’s head.

7. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

8. Literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness alone.

I like them all apart from the moral compass one, because it could be seen as being a bit reductive and old-fashioned. One of dad’s examples of “sheer cleverness alone” was William Burroughs because of the cut-up method, but Burroughs was found on Ted Hughes’s bookshelf and Hughes would definitely appear a writer of moral compass to me. So things are not so black and white.

Dad used to say “the devil makes work for idle hands,” and you were probably wondering when he was going to pop up… as a writer who is all of skint, single, unemployed, mentally ill, medicated, car-less and living with my mother, I have many files. I actually have more than 1000 and that’s just this latest computer – it’s been going like this for years. There is undoubted genius in there and yet nothing, nothing good has ever come of it. Anyhow, the point is that The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is just something to pass the time.

If I were to engage brain and get down to it – I would say take the example of a shopping list. If I in The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob wrote a shopping list – would you deem it that how it really goes is backwards? Would you deem it the last item first, or would you deem it that the whole thing needs spelling backwards? What I seem to have done is conjured this band name, this album name, and made very little if any attempt to treat the title like a contract on a grammatical level. I say that, but there is always the dog. I am sure many families have a nonsense language, use backward names, and even think the dog a vote for atheism. In ours, when I was lost in the woods, I would call “muppet!” upstairs for supper. I would call soup “moop” and toast “boast.” There was a charming dyslexia going on. Dad was “Badmunch,” and mum, mum was either Mumphis or madre as in the Spanish. It’s all very embarrassing but that’s just the way it was.

In case I didn’t say John, James, Robert and Hannah were born in a season each, spiralling Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer in the birthdays and marching right left, right left in the hands and no we don’t think it is a Swastika, we think it fair as fair can be.

Hannah is a blonde palindrome from summer’s first day and probably, as a title, what comes after The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. She just wanted someone to play dolls with when the boys were booting the ball about in the field. She says “I always expect something magical to happen when we all meet up.” One Christmas, we each got a DVD of the film Inception from one of the others, which I find quite magical – and while we’re on Hannah my favourite of her magic sayings hidden in the treetops is “when you give up on Starbucks cool, new stuff can happen.” She’s radiant, she’s liberal, she’s permissive, she’s cool, she’s even due to give birth to her first child quite soon.

The point is, that when I was Noj, James was Semaj, and then he became Semgas, because he didn’t like fizzy drinks, only agua singas; and Robert, Dr. Robert, was Trebor and Hannah being a palindrome didn’t have one, a shadow, a tombstone-shadow, a state of unself, so I made up the name Rannock. So you’re starting to see the Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is serious.

I was quite good at language and even coined the word “amazeballs” waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in something like 1997, with my London friends. What so dismays me is looking online to see who is said to have coined the word “amazeballs” which is supposed to replace archaic ‘gay’ and you find some kind of fashion designer in the year 2009 is said to have coined it.

There’s nothing about – well, can I say it? Ted Hughes seeing a monster in the river in his childhood. Nor is there anything about the part I played in the invention of the net which was only minor, but still something.

Anyhow, to bind this to life, there has been a break for a while – while I tended to another file. It’s ready to go, you know, but there are those that don’t want it published. It’s called Brave New Tense, and takes on the ideal of writing off the top of your head to Tap the beck in the back garden here where the stars realign, and not only that but it tries to connect dad’s beck with his Irish mate’s piece of indigenous wisdom from across the Irish Sea. They don’t want me to do it over there, at least not yet.

The Chipmunka books, as awful as they are, are supposed to be the building blocks of a happier world. Soundcloud Rain is songs but also falsifies the Nirvana barcode and gives it away to everyone. Still, I don’t think anyone will ever finish it.

The Sunset Child is the seven year old proof, proving the net existed in the mind of a child before Berners-Lee invented it. Then came Breath Trapped In Heaven which was all love poetry, supposed to make literature release serotonin. I don’t think any of the three are really that good but there is genius on my laptop and I am not sure if any of it will ever see the light of day.

The opportunity is here to do a fourth and I don’t want to rush it. Brave New Tense was an option once upon a time – the beck book – and went out in a state that was unready so I retracted it. Stuck to the trinity-tree, the unholy triumvirate. For a long time before I published them there was only the trinity-tree. One was a Syd Barrett, another a Jim Morrison, another an Arthur Rimbaud. So that was what I clung on to even when things changed, in both life and art.

Now these angels have visited me and who knows what they really want?

If I could bring out Brave New Tense as a fourth Chipmunka book, to extend the trinity-tree, I could say we are following the course of the new psychological model for the ascent of the inherently self-elevating intellect. The first stage is when the new style becomes proleptic as in pre-emptive. Then we have co-imagination. Then love is the answer, so you’d better tell your brother, engage with the other, otherwise I will tell your mother. Then fourthly in the model I would say you have my black friend Joy who doesn’t wish to read only dance, have fun, have sex, take E. Cool stuff. Fifthly you have the omnijective plane. This is a word I gleaned from Lacan. As it stands I am stuck at three and don’t feel like any of them are that good. There are other options on my laptop, and if you remember I have 1000’s of files, and many permutations that aren’t even explored yet, but I am stuck with the three publications as I say, and know that I can’t end it where it was ended, and am sooooo polite I don’t want to offend the Irish, nor can I resist performing for the angels that visited me to get me to renew the Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. I would like a job, a dignified job, as a writer, making papers, and maybe, maybe poets should be paid the minimum wage for their work, but maybe it’s just a pass time, a bit of fun, and not to be taken so srsly. Maybe, that is, poetry and money just don’t mix. It could be the essence of Joyce’s opening to Ulysses. Poetry could be a currency dead against money. An alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real, is what I used to say. It’s getting better whatever it is, and would be a shame to stop. Who knows what those angels ask of me? Do they want me to say “when a new species comes into being it has the memory bank of every other species to fall back on?” That would seem to me to be like an Englishman’s response to the Lords And The New Creatures. In fact applying the savoury tang of the cheddar cheese of the Ploughman’s lunch at the Natural History Museum cafe to The Lords And The New Creatures is a scientific ambition. One thing that came to light in Brave New Tense was that the witness from The Lords And The New creatures was an Irishman before Jim Morrison was even born. Now we see that we don’t even need to cross the sea to be at one!

The day is quite nice outside, and I say this because WH Auden says only nice people talk of the weather and I am trying to be nice, to have no nastiness inside me. Getting a First was supposed to be the end of having nastiness inside me but I still battled with dad after it and it made him sad the way I was turning out. I can still honour my father’s best wishes even though he is dead. I can also remember something the poet Neil Curry said which is that our feelings for the dead don’t fade just because our memories do.

Someone is in the shower now, and I remember that my write to right of it ends where another’s naked body begins. There is no pause in the writing, even when I don’t write, for someone is in the shower. I reach into the present tense at last. I reach into the present even though it’s already in the past. The shower sounds like a droning ferry engine, crossing the water, whichever water it happens to be.

Anyhow, as I write there are three. Three Chipmunka books – plus a load of self-publications from before it I am trying not to think of!

I like to count things sometimes and sometimes when I get a song in my head I count things to music too. A slight diagnosis of high-functioning autism is a grey area with me. Some believe some don’t. Anyhow, the shower is pumping water. I think of the angels, how they can fly, how they live in Heaven, how they have got me, how they wait, and what it might be they are waiting for. They might let me know when it’s done.

Back to the old dog of it all, I am, and it’s not a slog, but is a pastime. Michael Hofmann said Robert Lowell had an overinflated sense of poetry’s value – when poetry is just a bit of fun in reality - but how this can be poetry I do not know. I would say if anything it’s “backward liquid maths” but we can’t seem to find it. If among my triumphs, you find the invention of backward liquid maths I would be okay with it, but as I say we can’t seem to find it.

Anyhow I believe in propitiating states of ecstasy. I no longer believe in the misappropriation of Nirvana tools for the sake consumerist entertainment. The road keeps going, eh? Maybe the Irish didn’t want there to be such Mis Lit as they call it connecting us in the formal written word. Ginsberg called it “Einstein’s bomb.” I wait for angels to see if this is done. Imagine if they wanted me to turn out Satan in this one! I am my mother’s kindest child, dear, gentle reader, I’ll have you know! The shower stops. So do I.

I paused for a moment then a friendly voice in the electric human chain which is also an automated conveyor belt of poetry flowing from room to room prompted me to recall something: I was saying: if I write a shopping list, you who is by default in the band could deem that the last item is first. You could deem that it’s true spelling is backwards. Or you could do something else which is when I write of something pleasant you could deem it to mean pain. You could negate what I denote in its insinuation. It’s not just irony either. Irony is when the subtext undermines the pretext, some say. What I mean is it’s not the opposite of what I am talking about that is true to you, but also – if I say I am God you might well be within rights to take it to mean I am Satan.

So there is something of the carnivalesque going on. There is also something open, open-keyed, and polyphonic too. It could even be called polysemic, or anything else under the sun, and even my friends across the sea, deem this one to be done, for we all live under the same sun, life a dirt-computer that keeps going on. I want to write my name in the dirt of the dirt-computer that is life like a wave. I said that meaning it to be poetic but it wasn’t. Now you know what I’ve been through you might reread Breath Trapped In Heaven which as I told you is just love poetry, but it was an actual angel that said to me to say that last bit, and my doctor says to ignore voices even if they are angels. How to get back on track when you start to hear voices, when you get hacked, appropriated, in this digital Age, and are helpless, in among them all, is yet to be seen. It could be that it is impossible to get back that clean unbroken mirror of life. I can go on about mental illness if you want.

For a start after the wood I was on the school bus asking myself “does the farm next to the school have a secret underground lab where unsound experiments are conducted on animals? Did one escape? Is that what it was?”

I was one minute on a course to headboy and suddenly had to leave the school as a ten year old – and when I left I still didn’t even know the answer to that question!

At my next school, the second specimen. I noticed a complete lack of communication, information, wisdom, and it manifested itself as my being literally starved of oxygen, blacking out to escape the pain, and waking in another room. All this is not worth talking about though. I mean, I could go on and might at a later date but have just been told by someone “I am always down at this time of year.” I pinpoint the word “down.” What would happen if I just said “down?”

The angels are above me on CCTV. I say that, but it’s a partial quote from Prof. David Morley. Why did everything converge on me in 2000, all the prophecies? Did the Towers coming down release untold psychosis? To someone that idly spoke against it in a conversation about a film? What it would look like if the film were real? All of a sudden I was rather dropped in it. Really, I would never fly a plane into a building in a million years nor would my brother. When it happened on the day I had mentioned, and in the exact same way, I became ill. There was livid psychosis in my head. Maybe it would be best to not talk about this – maybe it would be best to continue yet another teleological narrative of mental illness instead.

Well, it has been said my madness began when I started to read Conrad in Sixth Form. I was more interested, naturally, in The Lords And The New Creatures. I was more interested in books of poetry than novels, and wanted to do one. I also read the teacher Neil Curry’s book and noticed he had quoted a line from Conrad: “this too was one of the dark places of the earth.” So I asked the teacher, who was a father-poet, why he had quoted Conrad and he said “I didn’t,” and I went back to the book and found he was right. I also found he had a poem addressed to John Wood. It was about finding a gannet on a beach.

I probably told you but as a kid, already the witness from the wood, I wrote a letter to a green organisation about our family finding a gannet with a broken wing on Silecroft Beach at a bonfire party and the green organisation planted a grove of trees for the effort. Neil Curry was a teacher at the school when I wrote the letter. So I think in his poem ‘Skulls’ for John Wood there is two birds with stone. He speaks of the gannet on the beach and yet also says to win with such a thing you would need a knife.

So one point is that other people can make more money out of your psychological turmoil than you can, even when the experience is private; and another point, which is the point I prefer to make is that books can be deceptive, appearances can be deceptive, for when I went back to reread Curry’s book to reread the Conrad line it was not there, it was gone, just like the incident in James’s bedroom when I went back in, see, to find the breakfast of every snooker ball colour again.

It was only the first instance of a book appearing to change – and as I say some think it the start of my madness AND that I might be right about The Lords And The New Creatures! I can’t even imagine where people who have never made a mad encounter like I did several times are at.

The next thing I knew, in my gap year, Curry’s book had started to emanate the smell of perfume, so that was the start of the Tower and I built it up according to natural magic, like a book where I read the line “history is a way of thinking about history without thinking about history,” a line of shining conveyance it was, that chimed like bells and struck a warm, psychic chord, but was not there (again) when next I went to look for it.

So that was book two; then they gave me a mirror for the soul. My friend’s grand-dad who had been to Cambridge University in my grand-dad’s era – he gave me a mirror for the soul, comprised of

a) a James Joyce rarity with a silver cover

b) a WH Auden rarity with a black cover underneath it.

It really was a mirror for the soul and I didn’t read those two fully for a while and all of a sudden I found not one but two Joyce rarities on my shelf. They had literally multiplied by division! I read the new one first and it would seem the gypsies have rigged the Tower. They even said they would intercept my new proof. So I guess matters of M lie with them now!

Then I read the old one and it was a miles more friendly mirror for the soul and even took into account that I would read the new one first!

So I know big things can happen. So that is the narrative of my madness. I was already mad long before I was diagnosed, and in my gap year the Towers came down. Evil stuff. Having mentioned the plot, as I say, in a conversation about a film, I was suddenly dropped in the trouble. I couldn’t even remember the barn conversation for years, until a course of medication and treatment. As I say I would never personally fly a plane into a Tower in a million years, nor would my bro.

Years later, during my Lancaster degree my perceptual kingdom went crazy and I had a proper psychotic episode. That is that, and all I really wish to say in this narrative of madness bit.

The point remains though that if I am to take you to Heaven I must start talking about all the torture I myself have been through, for the maths to work properly in this algorithm. I had akathisia for three years for example, which is a side effect of neuroleptic meds that a doctor who self-induced it for but one day described as torture, on Wikipedia.

So to be fair you see I am gathering good memories for you to think of – happy days – where the ambivalence of the double edged sword starts to come undone, and binary oppositions too, and all duality is a hoax, and that would be a fine place to end, to park even, but the angels haven’t decreed it ready yet. Quite what I am to write I do not know but I guess it could be anything. I probe the unknown like a headlight or more a Google search engine of memory, and by now, true and quite, fair and even, sunlight prevents me from seeing the computer. It blinds me, gets in my eyes, and as I say I can’t see the screen. Maybe, a long calculation is going on, and maybe it’s the longest equation ever, and maybe it does in maths what James Joyce does with the longest printed sentence in literature in Ulysses?

I feel sad and ashamed. I genuinely do – and feel guilty and sorry for my brother. Would it ease your pain, dear, gentle reader, if I quoted Kurt Cobain and said “I hate myself and I want to die?” Party time for you, no doubt, but then again there is the sense that as Jim Morrison said any utterance means itself, its opposite and everything else as well. Maybe he meant it in the 360 vision way rather than to do with words and meanings – but it might be that one day you and I can sing on the same hymn sheet.

The English sun goes behind a cloud. I love it because I can see again, the screen. Just as I start to see the screen I lose my thread and with it my head and forget what I was going to say. There may be a day when rhythm takes over – when rhythm becomes the fusing agent between us – when everyone on or in The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob agrees in terms of feeling.

Now I ask myself what mood I am in, what emotion overcomes me. I didn’t even know the Plough aligned with Black Combe – which is only observable from my own home, my own back garden, until a rhythm change in the White House. The Road To Heaven may well be a lonesome road that leads to my own country garden. I look about the house – and decide for a little scene to take the laptop outside. The day is fresh enough. The bracken on the fell has almost overnight gone brown from green like a mad telluric clock. What name in music for the chord of the alignment except Y? I look up and see clouds go by. The tree reminds me like last time I did this, because we go in circles, of the tree at the end of the movie Pi. Please God please let it not be destroyed this time, please let my art therapy count.

Please look after all my friends and family, let them all have happy lives devoid of fear and pain and violence, lives full of love and happiness. I see the tree and don’t hang up my prayer just yet, even though I know you never hang up when I say it’s over. The tree is swaying like the tree at the end of the movie Pi in the wind.

In the movie Pi the man is chased by Stock Market controllers and by religious fanatics alike. Fanaticism is too much for me. Dogmatism is too much for me, but faith, faith, as Martin Amis contends – is the right to the approval by the supernatural – and there I go, having a majestic blip on screen – and I think of the simplicity the other side of the complex – when the man in Pi who has God’s holy name and its syntax embedded in his head – finds that simplicity the other side of the complex and stares at a tree.

There are many trees in this garden. Some of them will bear apples soon. I am not told to not pick any apples off any trees. Our dog has had to be put down because he bit my mother’s grandson. The tree is swaying; I feel I am still praying, making an all-inclusive spreadsheet. Clouds migrate. They wither and die. The green of the leaves on this particular tree is still green and I remember how the internet tree preceded the internet!

When I wrote of the net as a seven year old, I wrote of the cloud before it. I am reminded here in this garden of the pantheistic and animistic religion of Nature. Still it is to one God that I aim this prayer. Let the angels be happy with what is going on. As I sit here in this garden I cannot see the screen for it is too bright. This garden, it may be where the Road To Heaven ends. The Road To Heaven however, has no end, it is an endless bridge. Green leaves flicker like flames. The sound of machinery, maybe a tractor is in the background. Life is colourful coming into colourful resolution like the chapter in Wind in the Willows called “Piper At The Gates of Dawn.” It’s the same effect in the Wizard of Oz, so I guess here would be my Emerald city. No longer do I crave drugs or find them fascinating as a subject matter, but, I wish also for myself to have a happy life. So often the genius of the saint is in self-annihilation. So often the saint is squashed not even included in his own prayer for what might be called the shock-proof world.

I feel slightly vertiginous as an elbow in the sky. I know you are not a man on the clouds. Perched on a cloud floating by. You must allow us sinners forgiveness, and allow us poor, foible’d, helpless people to be happy. I do not wish to make war on God nor do I wish to make war on God. If there is atheism in the tree that aways it is only because it reminds of Christ. There are layers, levels in things, like in dance music, where looking at the tree through the window, through the aleatory pattern of germs accrued on the windowpane, can reveal tarantula arms in the tree. Once a hand made of light reached in through the arthritic window pane as my mother, as the angels, might remember and I heard a voice, as it touched me, say

“I swear if you don’t throw a switch tonight….”

It trailed off and I added “you can break the speed of light.” Does love move faster than light? Does love have motion? Gravity does not have motion, so it is specious or has been said to be specious that if the gravity, between earth and moon is instant and enough to break light speed – well, I will leave the rest of that up to you. What I was saying though was not about the moon. I do see the moon in my self at noon, but I was talking about the tree. It is naked, but sex is an evolutionary corridor down to the elemental realms, the realms of chaos, elements, anima and matter and through the window sometimes the tree can further undress. Now I am wondering where the angels are. My brother went away to Hell, to get some shopping, and left this atemporal isle, this microcosm, this house that sailed away.

It is a house of many books, and I could think of nothing finer if I were they, the other poets, to write directly for me, here and now and real and feeling. Yes I look at the tree. The internet tree precedes the internet. I wonder about the net in relation to the tree. Maybe the net leaves the house by cable and spreads to the whole world? There is some secret about the net even my mum is not letting on. I will go inside and hope the sun is gone, the sun that blinded me and prevented me from seeing the screen.

Ah yes that’s right the table. The air of the inside. The drone of the fridge. Then you realise I am still in the garden. I see mother’s pot plants – is it Heaven? I think of Simon. Already it is out so I might repeat “Simon says the River Goyt might become the Styx in Heaven.” What a poet, what a voice! Does the derangement of the senses lead anywhere but Hell? - and Kerouack said did you know Pooh Bear is God? - and the clouds are floating by - and the wind is rushing a bit more now as if the whole of sentient earth and I are one. I said in my net book at seven I would plug my senses in the mains but said it discretely and what does it make me think of but pictures of Nature? If I could now only plug one sense into the mains it would be the eye.

So it is that I shall really go inside. So that I can see my screen. A risk it feels, being unplugged in the garden. The Lakes as a whole is very Unplugged in New York. There are still leads leading to amps, even though everything is acoustic. Most of the sky is blue, and the sky could also be one sense of Heaven. To hear my brother coming back would be another. If it weren’t so windy I might hear the beck. Infinity sags, dips in the middle. Like a hammock. Like dad’s baggy hammock from Afghanistan. It’s the moment when you realise you were saying a prayer and tumbled off, went astray, forgot, allowed the speaker to roll on, the film to roll on, the camera still recording, in there in the unconscious, absorbing the salt and vinegar of experience in the fish and chip shop of the mind.

Is this what I write not the ash of yesterday’s fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper and put in the right green bin? Is this fair? Please let Hannah’s life be a happy one, and everyone else’s too. Please allow us peace on earth, the end of war, the glory of the angels. Please allow fairness for one and all, equality, freedom of expression, the right to religious beliefs, even if the God is rhythm. Please let not Utopianism lead to terror. Please let Nature be a naked figure, undressing her veils for the observer. Please let more and many more miracles of magical nature happen.

Please let love dissolve the robots. Please let the suffering be eased. Please let dolphins clap and sing at the vacillating threshold of resolution because it is the end of the show and the start of natural selection. Please let Google search engines of memory be primed and bring back further bits of seemingly lost information.

Now the poet heads indoors, from this seemingly temporary but possibly infinite heaven.

Sadness. Guilt. Shame. These are words. I feel them upon returning to the same old house. Yet this could be made a happier house too. It is probably even Heaven back inside if I choose to meet God like I did with the elements just then. I mean I didn’t exactly meet God, but met, well, his Creation, his work. They say if the God Particle is found it will mean God is not extrinsic to matter but others who know more of both physics and of God say that matter is error compared with God, or at least the God Particle is a misnomer. I wonder when the angels will be happy… when they came all those moons ago to get me to renew the you know who, or what, they naturally drove away, him driving, her looking at the map!

So I see that we are all angels. As Jim Morrison never said, love makes angels of us all and gives us wings where before we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws. Please let my brother drive home safely from the shop. Please let him be well. Please let him get better from his unfortunate illness. Please let him be happy. Please let him have a happy existence. Please let him not live in guilt. Please renew our sense of conscience about the world, society, even the war. Please let war cease, let the angels that are above us on CCTV smile down upon our good behaviour, and let it be known that love and love and love is infinite in all directions forever. Please let peace and peace and peace be here and now and real and feeling. Please God give us trust in the future, the night to come. Please let us get on with each other, and not have regrets. Please let each mad, mis-shapen chord of my language in longing be healed and comprehensible enough, please look after the people that sing and even go wrong and get the wrong note sometimes, please let us all be happy. Let love and love and love protrude in all directions infinitely and forever. Let the centre of love be love. Let the edge be endless. Let us turn our prayer to space, and encompass the whole universe in your greatness, your benevolence, and let me stop before I get too greedy. Amen.

13/ 10/ 2024. Now it is the next day and I have rewoken, pale and late. It is Night now where before there was Day. This evening I read or re-read The Marriage of Heaven And Hell by Blake. I liked the proverbs he wrote in it. I have some of my own you know. I have many, many proverbs, in fact, and through reading might have engineered an opportunity to copy and paste some of them in. I told you I was collecting “magic sayings hidden in the treetops.” Well, here are some of them…

A moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism. Someone else can lose your marbles for you. Vowels are our souls. Meaning in music is solipsistic, it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s 3 creatures in a cloud-change. Life could be a dull throb of loneliness inside your breast as well as a colourful spew going on outside the cave-walls of the skull. If Liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions and it leads to Hamlet’s harmatia “irresolution,” pragmatism may be the reactivation of an attitudinisation in that situation. Planes are the shoes of clowns. It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space. A drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in huge, magic circles in space.

The Big Mac, which contains the four basic, caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein, could be the heir to the apple of knowledge. Love can go veggie for reasons of Disney. Light-speed is my passport. If acid is the microchip of a peach, the sun is the peachstone of a black hole. It is not true that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more proof of something being real than saying it was Imagined. The constellations only seem to turn on axis unobserved. A trance of stalks walks on stilts like a stance on talks only to the toilet then back to bed to rest its head under the soft, Pink Panther blanket. When a volume starts to smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume it could be the word of a dog.

Death’s breath is a tear of flame with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame. When you remove the inner monologue you can become an open energy conduit, question the comfort and see for yourself.

When we wake words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds, weighing them down hopelessly. It is possible to harness waves that also passed through the Beats. Leaves that played on the surface of the water, these are the leaves they have in Heaven, these are the leaves of love. There are fossils of art as well as fossils of life. Connection is Heaven and Heaven connection and there is connection between Heaven and vision for vision may feel in a state of Heaven and Heaven only exist in vision. Semantics is a road sign not a place.

Meaning is inherent in something’s exact mode of expression. Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time. Meaning could be an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words. Every planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means ‘beautiful face’ in Ancient Greek. The names of pharmaceutical medications should probably not appear in poems. Nature is the true architecture of State. If ever there were a light-speed law of neuroplasticity it might only be that “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.” Cliche hurts more than truth. Where rain falls, falling reigns. Pictures can be done without hands. Life is not just about naturally occurring fossils of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the witness but the live Doors for everyone else too.

Realism ice-skates on the surface of the dust. Language can be smuggled out of the unconscious. Enough is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop, meaning Duff which is H suspended in deafness. H20 might still stand for hypothalamus tattoo.

Chewing gum is bi. Voices only pathologise what by another name might be onjects, quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound, an instrument of wonder. Clouds seen through hospital glass only mean that all things must pass. There is no such thing as mind cancer. That women like Primark is hardly a timeless idea transmitted across Time. Ecstasy is a teddy bear back in the garden of Eden. Autumn is Optimus Prime already in Keats. Freedom not poetry is the bike riding itself. After garage and house comes library. The poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the mind, unlooses the mind of form, method acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio.

If your dad is an international art dealer nicknamed Blue it can become a new sense through which you can read of future events. It is not inconceivable that when we die we can re-access history at any point, be a real, live Red Indian, or a bird of prey soaring over a mnt. Birds are for flying not for special perception. The effect of global warming on the unicorn succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn. The summer rain falls with as many hands as there are names for new rock bands. The alphabet could be Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note. Sometimes on E it makes you feel like your mouth is full of cold, stunning, Heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills.

If form is an easel, content is a palette. The main difference between the sticks and the city is that in the sticks you acknowledge the stranger you pass when out there walking. Creation is a dark machine. It’s impossible to curse the sun. Acid is a spirit-level for the spirit. Without flaws there can be no opinions, as without imperfection there can be no taste. Galloping water is a cool thing to say. Things live inside onions of themselves. Freedom flies where flags fall. Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see. Water’s boiling point is when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the music.

Walnut halves look like miniature, shrunken brains. If Facebook is evil one reason is that it makes you say things you don’t mean and freezes them forever. Your right to write of who is in the shower ends where another’s naked body begins.

We are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land. I prefer The New Family Tao to the non-fungible token. The sound of typing can be used as percussion in non-metred Sound Art. When Baxter the dog walks on the laptop funny things come out like the names of glitch electronica numbers. The powers that be could be clouds that wear DM boots on their red brick road, and ripped genes adorned with peace and anarchy signs, on their protest march. A ‘tron’ could be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge.

Objects can vanish on the periphery of madness when emotions are high. Reality is not a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s and nor were caves alien cinemas in the long distant past. Waiting in darkness can be nourishing for the soul, reveal a Technicolour shoal. With drugs you have to realise: wise up or die. The world of Stuff and Things is not amenable to the world of Transcendental Metaphysics. Time does not pass but evaporate. Life is naturally the opposite of Lord of The Flies because the mystic character is the one that actually does see things while everyone else thinks he’s deluded.

Even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death. The exact same words can seem absolutely insane when written down and confer absolute genius when not written down. Dream-meets in the silver forest, ESP and telepathy are more possible with the net around. When it comes to the sheet where pictures grew, they could be “people,” as we are people too, people who are levelled by the sheet, whose Equality is enshrined. If you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should have that opportunity if they choose and that is my philosophy. Credits at the end of innocence still fall like numberless lists of fallen autumn leaves.

To be the first to coin the word “co-imagination” seems almost silly. Crocodiles have had Sat Nav for 1000’s of years before our Age. A bird is a bird is a bird is a bird. Just because it has been called naive to perceive of the left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes good to go down that path. Just because it was my brother not me that fired bullets to the top of the telegraph pole doesn’t mean all statements that pertain to axiomatic truth are his intellectual property. A thesis as thin as the Rizla it is in can lead all the way to the loony bin. Water has no more memory than it has smell. It is better to hide from the wind than it is to perform open heart surgery. When I say apples “occupy” a bowl on the table, I don’t mean they are a bunch of Nazis.

It would be unwise to use the same shapes as a previous writer like, for example, Jim Morrison, if your creative writing teacher says it would be unwise to. If “Philosophy is a sterile subject” (as my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom contends) poetry is probably by default more alive. If Flora was in nets, I’d be Barnes in the game. Nirvana did the sheet where pictures, pictures depicting my own song lyric grew, so that’s why people like it when I say it still belongs to my brother (who laid it down).

The healing and fusing of the cassette with a pause in the song where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel in a delicate operation could be down to faith more than doubt. Two photos on the blog, one for the ear, one for the eye, might still seem unfair. When you get invaded by madness and hear so many voices there can seem nothing going on in your own head but straw. If you did help invent the net you shouldn’t have to pay for publication. Words appear to come out weird sometimes.

Glastonbury should be free and life like that all the time. Some voices take a few moments to decode after their initial shocking impact. If I said I went to the Louvres travelling by drug-hoover, it might just seem like piss. The crawl of the Doorsian poet through modes of perception trying to find something that underlies their variability leads to water.

Maybe living here at the foot of the oldest rock I was never supposed to find out about the future that ain’t what it used to be. Cutlass maths is what I call the ruthless revisionist cut of William Carlos Williams. We live in an Age of sending without form. Drains can sing with Irish folk songs, about dreams that never die. There are dreams that never die. Love is a dream that never dies. Even the meme has split in two, and that was the new “uncuttable” once upon a time. There is breath in a death. It is not necessarily a disease to not be able to cry at funerals. The traffic lights of tears can be all dark green at times. The impassable gulf between first and third persons has been decreed metaphysics. The automated conveyor belt of poesis influences the voice to be a confluence of forces through voices even when I try and drive a straight line towards anywhere that may be light. We are all in one bed in Amsterdam. The light is a prism. Through the Hume people come and go, Smart-talking of Ted Hughes’s Crow. Life is fast, London brutal, travelling scary. Her wetness is so. Angels can be as frightening as demons.

Whomsoever said philosophy is dead was evidently wrong when the world can just arrive like that at the condition of axiomatic truth. The above would be an unspooling in my book, an outpouring of free beer, almost like turning the Tap on and leaving it….

00. 37. I wonder what it really would be like if you could utilise all your brain’s potential, 100% of it, like the guy on NZT in Limitless.

I wonder also what A. I. would generate if I asked it for something for The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob.

Il faut que je m’en aille,

with sadness in a backward eye,

what is this dream into which I’m

hurled, gone past the fallen

road sign saying THINK!

in the nettles and the mystery

of the single shoe beside the road,

in a fast car with Paul and the band,

the Beatles’ back catalogue

tumbling from the speaker,

the open window a roaring lion,

late birds singing in trees,

birds that are intelligent,

trees that are our friends,

when nothing matters especially,

and as my grand-dad would say,

the mustard has to be English,

the mustard has to be English,

the mustard has to be English

and growing outside in the wild

where the lucid light of day

reveals no new creatures.

I would also like to say, maybe in The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob there is even an implicit sense of time-travel – that the original cassette we recorded can be rewound – and as I found out, even if we could invent a time-machine that equalled the speed of light we could only go back into the past not into the future for that hasn’t happened yet.

I would also like to say, maybe, maybe, H = 0 – 0.

It’s something Professor David Morley said about water’s effect on water. When he was working in the Lakes by the way, in my childhood, his stuff was actually in the water supply and would pop up in my own thinking. So anyhow, I was thinking maybe this unobtainable value H – in musical terms – could be rendered in a scientific equation – and what better way of expressing it than as above?

It seems much better to say this than to explain my “Theory of Dark Evolution” about the history of Naturalistic Observationism in writers that manifests itself and seems to keep going, which I am part of.

Sometimes I wish I was done with the word, and could launch into the kind of mathematics produced by Paul Dirac, who often started his equations on the imaginary value

i.

I think this is why the angels made me pursue The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, so I could attain this thin glimpse of light. There must be a lot of light of that sort in Heaven where they live – they must know a thing or two.

You may have heard me mention the sheet where pictures grew; but even though those pictures seemed to depict a lyric from one of my own songs, I did not design the sheet. I did not lay it down. It was my brother who still owns it; so I don’t think those angels want me to go on about that very much. If the pictures are made of dead light particles, because it was my song that first posited the idea of dead light particles – even though I don’t know this – and if therefore lightspeed was broken – some have contended it was myself that broke light speed – but as I say it was not I that laid the sheet down nor design it – and Einstein says nothing can break the speed of light. Take the gravity between earth and moon – it is instant – but not having motion could not be said to break light speed. Anyhow that seems child’s play. I must deal with what is new. What is new is that I cut out a large part of the text that concerned a theory apropos The Lords And The New Creatures coming true – apropos the continued history of Naturalistic Observationism in man – and as soon as I cut out what may be seen as an evil theory – I came across

H = 0 – 0.

Naturally then I am glad to have cut out the “dark” theory, even though it means the paper is no longer on the subject of the breakfast of every snooker ball colour I encountered in James’s bedroom. It begs the question as to what would happen if I cut out something else that would appear quite dark. Even if I don’t, I am already “happy” with the way it means The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob transcends race, gender, class, creed, and the sense of the unity of all of Creation contained in those few ink droplets.

So I’ve written the Theory of Dark Evolution out again and once more erased it – gone!

What does G = if H = 0 – 0?

I don’t know that yet but am reminded of another question regarding what M = if E = MC squared – and the answer I found was the oldest fell Black Combe, whom it seems is shaped like an M when you’re here at the foot.

06. 54. only two minutes ago there was different text here, but it was cut. If down from H is G, up from H is surely the imaginary number

i.

I think of writing sentences with it. I think of writing out the theory of Dark Evolution all over again, but think I am not to do it. It’s not that I don’t think it true – it might be – and it is certainly erudite – but it may not be sane and may mean those nasties come back again. Instead if only I could have one more glimpse at the light? The light of mathematics devoid of word.

07. 09. Only a moment ago there was a piece of text here about Lord of The Flies but I cut it out. It was not cruel to cut it out, nor difficult to make myself do it.

07. 04. Only a moment ago was a further piece of text. Here lieth no remains of it! Should I say it was the best equation ever written? That it was pure mathematics? That it would blow your mind? It wasn’t. I’d only be fibbing if I said it was. It was nothing. Rather, it was something but is gone. What is born from the loss is less than dross. What we get from death is renewed linguistic energy. The dawn leaks out – a bandwidth of soft, plush, plasma-screen pink shocks and entices the eye in the garden. I am again happy to be on planet earth. Barefoot I stood in the garden and will again presently.

There’s just sooooooooooo much pink in the sky!

I come to my bedroom feeling by now I could cut out anything, glad I chose to stick with The Road To Heaven over the old rock n roll cliché road that you saw a little bit of in some of the previous numbers.

I start to get a massive pain in my whole human heart and to fear imminent death.

I realise it’s wrong, H = 0 – 0 , that it doesn’t, because of everything H might stand for, ultimately it is the Heart.

I also think now that if H does not = 0 – 0, there is still hope!

14/ 10/ 2024. It’s been a difficult day in Hell. I have had worrying thoughts about my brother and though progress has been made in perpetuating the adolescent fantasy world of my music, human relationships are more important than one’s art. Around midnight I decided to heal the bond and write a song for my brother called ‘Song For James;’ and it’s good and already recorded and online. I can’t believe the instant travel of it all, the ease which you can cut a route direct to Heaven, in terms of getting stuff out there, but I am still in lugubrious mood about something or other… hopefully James and I will resolve to perfect our brotherly love tomorrow.

Further cuts have been made to the paper particularly where songs were copy and pasted in. If I am honest, there is a concurrent file of songs and I have been vacillating between the two trying to work out what to do.

As Thom Yorke sang, “I’m amazed that I survived,” meaning the heart attack situation last night. I have high cholesterol among other ailments and the only exercise I get is walking in a circle in the kitchen in the dead of Night. If you could see it you’d know it was a nice kitchen, with black slate flags on the floor but you’d also know I am not well. Darwin apparently paced up and down the ship at night… speaking of him we aren’t to go down that road. Darwin wished he had spent more time listening to music before he composed theories. He also wished someone would prove his theories wrong. I don’t want to do battle with Darwinian science w/r/t being the witness. I want to walk off talking of flowers instead.

Before you start to wonder, it isn’t the case that if I organise a back catalogue of singer songwriter material into a book called The New Oedipus Wrecks gig, and also organise an almost-scientific paper called ‘The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob’ one of them is James’s and one of them is mine. My brother James has his own things to work on. The song I wrote for James tonight – to heal the bond – I sang in a very Jim Morrison-esque voice, gently into the mic, like I were part of the baritone poetry section of music. What I am intrigued about is whether or not my brother will awake knowing I have written him a song and recorded it too. There are times when our sympathy as he calls it and our co-imagination as I call it surprises me. We are all one word.

Loneliness, apathy, barrage, detachment, these are words. I suppose I am meant to feel parameters closing in, see the ground rushing up to meet me as I hurtle towards a mid-life crisis.

I ask myself, this late into the night that I am out of contact with my brother in the house, what sort of dichotomy it would be if I did juxtapose a repertoire of songs – but now I have to hold it or change the present text – and a paper devoid of evil. Sickness and recovery. The people and the Feds. Escape and return. I don’t feel well. My head feels burned. I stare into space. The past is regrettable. My dad is dead. I hear early morning cars on the road. At least I know why I don’t think H = 0 – 0. It is because (once again) of all that which H could denote the most fundamental and underlying thing is the heart, that Simic says “beats its red drum,” and my heart is not dead. What have I drifted off into this realm within a realm for, this area of discourse? It seems obtuse and off the beaten track. I think for years I have been exiled from the band, misunderstood, depressed by sorrow, maligned, blamed, scapegoated, and am now not free.

17. 32. Another excessive sleep and I am woken by my friend, who has brought his guitar around for a jam. So soon he is gone. The further cuts are made to the text. Already the day is ending. The weary, late autumnal light looks like it might come in pear drops. There should be room for Nature in the future. Mary and I used to go on adventures just to look at trees. There are some nice ones when you take a left at Duddon Bridge to go up Corney Fell.

Michael Hofmann writes that “everything tends to the yellow of unlove.” I love his word-combinations, his intelligent selection. What an ideal too, to write poems the shape and texture of bricks! I had the ideal of defaced bank notes while I was reading him. Now my friends say my best work is the song lyrics – which are meant for wiping up semen - and it should start with the Oedipus Wrecks gig from 1998. After all it was an Oedipus Wrecks song that was meant when it came to pass that the sheet where pictures grew depicted a lyric.

Water chooses the path of least resistance, down-wards as Gravity and katabasis require. Maybe the only way is down wards? Silverchair used to sing “won’t you come with me to a place in a little town/ the only way to get there is to go straight down.”

If The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob were a rewrite of Paradise Lost maybe we’d be at the stage where Milton, after pages and pages of verse, brings everything together in a moment of terse brevity, impeccable concision, and writes:

“she plucked. She ate.”

Life is green and life is clean inside a flame.

All day I have been drinking unsweetened tea. It reminds me of this Hofmann poem which he ends “now it is one cube of sugar a day.” There’s something caustic about his poems. He says it’s systolic too, his style. Anyhow, I live in an intertextual if not mythographic universe. I love The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Blake. I also love The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison; Paradise Lost by Milton; The Four Quartets by TS Eliot; The Waste Land by TS Eliot; Pearl by the Gawain poet; Shakespeare’s sonnets; A Season In Hell by Rimbaud. I also love Ulysses by James Joyce which Joyce thought of as a poem if you can believe it. They say whatever the poet says is a poem is a poem. I could even say the present series of findings into itself is a poem. Neil Curry used to say “nothing can be said for certain about poetry except Pound’s claim that the poet chooses where to end his lines instead of letting the type writer run on,” but went on to say “the image is just the plastic Santa on top of the Christmas cake, not the actual cake itself.” I am plodding on like a half-broken clock. I put some Frankfurters in the dark blue AGA, and think to deal with the picture.

I got the line “il faut que je m’en aille” from a book on Rimbaud. I wrote the other line “sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and” myself, at Warwick University, the last line of a story. I think it’s about insouciant faith. It was in Sixth Form that my then gf Danielle and I went to the top of the Pompidou and found an artist had written JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS in red on a black back ground. It was postmodern text art; and I thought later what if I could confer a message through the operation of suggestion and faith? What if I could make a piece of postmodern text art to counter the French one? So I did – and that is what I have been ignoring herein. It isn’t likely to end wars but might be considered part of an experiment into the international language alphabet.

There was a lot of A and All in the Tap we had installed. After A comes Bic which could be but a substance that makes the sunlight brighter. I reckon in Heaven the sunlight will be brighter. Whether there will be mirrors on the street I do not know. Maybe we will find a hyperlink to heaven one day, in an age of psycho-sensitive technology. For now though, I am more concerned with the dust that lies at the bottom of everything.

M = c squared divided by E? Think! What is the truth! What does M = if E = MC squared? It = our house at the foot of the oldest rock – which I have not been up for years – and sometimes the stars are out and sometimes not – and when the stars realign it is writ – and the Enlightenment is said to be the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man – and it is the preternatural sublime – but I fear I have my maths wrong apropos what M =. Naturally it is the case that MC squared = E. It’s what they want me to do on days dull as washing lines, my homework! Does M = c squared divided by E? It probably won’t work like that – my maths is not so good – my brain not as big as it once was – my memory not as sticky – but I can Google it! Ah, there’s nothing there – but M should still denote “matter” in this case not the fell and its maternal and glaciated shape. I will go outside and look at the stars.

No, there are none tonight. They are obscured by clouds. Already we know the stars are mostly dead photographs that still appear to be hanging there because of the distance the light has to travel to reach our eyes…

Already it is known also that here the night-sky only seems to revolve on axis unobserved. You can stare it but it won’t revolve when you do. You go inside for half an hour and return to the garden, you find the whole jigsaw puzzle of it all has revolved without you witnessing it.

Yet at times the mid-day moon can be seen – against the back drop of the fell – to sink – behind that back drop – as you watch it. The reason for this is that the moon is much closer to the earth than the stars. Nor is the moon “dead photographs.”

21. 06. I’m at a loose end. Jimbo in Limbo is making steak to have with cabbage (with bits of bacon in). I already had two hot dogs and a cheese and ham and lettuce sandwich so am not sure I will appreciate my brother’s cooking fully. Of all that I have actually read, I’m ashamed to say I have never got round to King Lear. Rubbish goes in the bin. I sit and wait, uninspired, even terrorised. Fear can close off inspiration, love open it up. When Jim Morrison writes “Bali Bali dancers will not break my temple,” he could mean that he doesn’t want voices, or even real people with their outside influence, to destroy his text. I feel more secure when I know what it is I am doing, even if it be voices – angels! - that tell me to, say, juxtapose two books – and when someone else tries to disrupt it – as if they were bequeathed with a vision to destroy all my work – maybe without me even knowing – I start to feel upset – negative – downbeat – depressed. Having gone through so many schools I find they each have a different opinion as to how things should start. I didn’t know how to start 26 years ago and still don’t – yet you read my seven yr old work you find I was a natural born poet.

It’s heartbreaking having a CV like mine, but never turning any situation to your advantage. My life trajectory is like Barnes’s goal against Brazil but my art more like John Cleese in the Knights that say ‘Ni’ with every publication. When I think about it as an A-level student might I conclude that with a CV like mine, attaining the face of stars and about 20 other things, if I did “get it together” I would be so powerful it would be undemocratic, a risk to the government themselves. There may be a perfectly good and valid reason why I can’t seem to get it together – and I would be the first to accept that everything I have done is terrible in terms of trying to score a goal.

I was reading more Blake and stopped and thought to myself: “I don’t think there’s one writer under the sun right now that is going to last.” It might be a false prophecy this time, unlike others from the past; but I genuinely can’t think of one really notable work of art from my generation under the sun. The funny thing is I keep thinking about Barnes’s goal against Brazil, singing a made up song about it and having to tell myself to get back on the academic track and stop fooling around – but I would say Barnes’s goal against Brazil is still likely to be the best England goal in 200 years whereas I don’t think anything being written now will last that long – but I might be wrong.

When I was about to write all this down, as an essay like TS Eliot might, a voice popped up in my inbox in the air and said “I think you’ll find it’s been a bit too far out to do that.” He was right – some of the visual radio was astonishing and the rate and frequency of voices was married to that.

15/ 10/ 2024. Time passes or rather does not elapse but evaporate. I wake in darkness. It is hard to get out of bed. It has been hard since teenage years – since the boyhood maths left a mark – since my attestations as witness from The Lords And The New Creatures became multiple. All of a sudden in the middle of the road I saw a dead badger! But no this is not the time for fiction, for departure into fantasy.

The angels say say it’s all about the separation of Noj And The Mob. I can’t see what the angels see in this at all. Maybe they came to me because they were lost and needed to find their way home? Apparently – even though I never yet found a place for an eventual Collected Works to even begin – the books I have brought out have done some good. If these last final steps are agony – it could be about running up the fell? I live soooooooo near the fell, sooooooo far away from the local DogMuckels too. Ascending the fell by bullet up a telegraph pole, that never happens, you have to shift your own weight. There are messages in the air, there is post being posted in the postmodern times, that opens your inbox to the impossible. What happens when Noj says “I love you?” Have we done the maths for this unprecedented open-ness on our calculators? “In the FTSE 100 this evening, The New Oedipus Wrecks Gig has had more Blogspot hits than a book of verse called How To Be Free As A New Beat.” I sit in my seat thinking “a poem is a seat from which you eat.” There are better definitions, like the de-familiarisation of perception or intelligence distilled into truth. Murky headed I feel on these meds. My mate was right when he said “what you’ll find is no beds and no meds.”

Whomsoever those angels are, I see what they see now: they see the shape of the fell from the foot, the glaciated, striated cleavage of Sea Ness and Black Combe – in the words The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. So it is the starlings and stars are also on the same road. They see – those angels – two mounds of stolid earth. If as Norman Nicholson contends even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline, the time line would have to be very, very long to show any difference.

Now that we are in the company of angels, let us hear what their reaction is to this story….

Well, they say what we don’t know is whether or not the witness was chosen by Nature; or if it was political. For example, Jim Morrison wrote “a creature waits out the war,” and the witness’s dad sold his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall – which is when it started to happen.

What the angels also don’t like is the way the witness found it impossible to gain with it – possibly because the script said “not for a penny” – meaning there has been nothing the witness can actually do to earn him a penny. It could even be said to have become a farce.

Whatever the case I am starting to see The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob as a kind of spectrum, like the electro-magnetic spectrum, and to warm to the idea of it being a passage to the Plough alignment. It could be a pair of albatross wings that soar over the ocean; but more specifically its name contains the vision of the fell from the foot, into whose cleavage slots the Plough. - When The Flood came up to see the re-alignment they said it was absolutely terrifying. We had it all out in the camper van, talking about God, whether or not God was just some stopped, glottal monosyllable useful for filling holes in arguments or if he actually exists. I said “I think mystery will remain a constant,” but kept most of my thoughts private. The fact of the alignment would indicate Order in the Universe that could be synonymous with God – so atheism and Deism could even unite and amount to the same thing in the case of the alignment.

The whispering people in the wind, the voices, they don’t think I should have to have gone through all this and still have to pay for it to be published. My eyes have taken in quite a lot of imagery in my time – those two, soft, round gelatinous balls – as seer or witness. The truth is a system does not exist whereby a witness can get paid for attestation. There is no more centre of the universe that can dole out a payment than where I sit, alone in the kitchen. The idea of making a paper, includes the syllable “pay” but probably won’t amount to any payment. It’s almost like living in a country without times, names, borders or laws – which in literature is called an Euchronia. We will still struggle to pay the bills this winter, to not live in cold conditions. The house is very expensive to run. We have to pay thousands to heat the AGA, which heats the water for the shower. My dad left no will other than the sheet where pictures grew and though I discovered it and discovered that the pictures depict to the lyric to one of my own songs it wasn’t mine, because I didn’t lay it down – my brother did. Even that has been photo’d and put online for free and meanwhile the physical copy of it, in being folded, has now come apart into two pieces. If mum’s retirement doesn’t look like it’s going to be that comfortable, it isn’t likely to get any better for her eldest two offspring when she has to pass away. James and I can’t work and nor is there a job in the valley even if we could. There remains no paying publisher in the publishing world that wants to publish me – as I say I would have to pay to notch up another false achievement.

So there is an intermittent plan to sell the house, which has been recently as just under a million. With that my mother will buy at least one further house to retire in and probably still have James and I to move in with her and look after her. That’s if it even goes ahead: people have been talking about selling this house for years. If it cost us more than £30, 000 to do it up, which it did recently, it can’t be worth 7 pence can it? I did once consider that it should be a government property – a State owned Observation faculty – where the Plough alignment lives. I don’t think that idea is very popular among my family.

In the local area you find the nearest pub which was called The John Bull has closed – the garage at the end of the valley is dead and has been for years – the local village has closed down and again that’s been the case for a long time now.

My dad had the idea to build marinas, to ban trawler nets, bring back whales, dolphins, basking sharks, otters, and make the are into the West Lakes Marine Park to try and bring back wealth. He had quote a few ideas, my dad, but they are unlikely to be put into place.

As poor as I personally am, which means I haven’t been in the positive numbers as far as I can remember, which means since University ended, I still eat as well as I can through the Benefits system, and pay Benefits money to my mum for rent. The angels need something that they can say is a deed, and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is regarded as the likeliest act. The farmers used to get subsidies from the E. U. when we were still a part of it – why should it not be the same for an old farmhouse that now has become a little artistic centre, where The Plough aligns? It could be why I sit here receiving e-mails, unable to “press send” – because I live at the ultimate end of things, the gravitational, telluric and magnetic foot of the oldest rock. This is, as Professor Paul Farley put it, where “the sex-lines terminate.”

To “invite some last people” to a lavish feast was one idea suggested to me by the air, for a poetry book, and I never really did. (There have been other suggestions too like writing a book called Party Animals which is now one of thousands of files probably never to be opened again.)

My brother designed and directed the sheet where pictures grew and he can’t even afford to pay rent out of his Benefits Money – so it’s me that has to pay rent to my mum as well as food for the house – and that comes from my Benefits...and when I put a Blogspot entry online, I might get 20 to 30 people check it out at the most – and the only other option it seems to me is to pay to have a paperback go out – and they never get read by anyone. As James says, they arrive in a box and are ignored thereafter. I am so poor I even had to give away my own song lyrics, my own songs, for free – make them into a free-for-all – and in so doing, act with the self-annihilation of someone like a Saint. I am not even free to alter the recorded music I have put on Bandcamp without the voice of an anonymous stranger popping up saying “that’s MY music.” I mean if it’s yours, what’s it doing on my Bandcamp page? The answer is, I wrote it, and whomsoever thinks it theirs can’t even play it, and to be deprived of freedom over my own intellectual property – it takes the Mick. They say though that I did it to free everyone – so that’s not a bad thing. I liberated the left when it was all but nothing, all but destroyed. In the meantime the fitness still beat the witness, which so dismays me because I never even got a choice, in becoming witness, whether or not it would be evil. While the doctors have come to accept that I was the witness, there are still contemporaries who think me deluded and that’s another frustration. On top of all this I think people are trying to destroy my career, my work, in the name of some kind of political egalitarianism – I mean why don’t you go and misappropriate Paul McCartney’s lyrics instead? It’s not as if I am earning undue amounts of money is it?

So I hear out of fairness I have been allowed to have my own songs back!

Another whisper suggests: “it all went wrong when we found you’d done the maths for the new colour.” As James points out “if you’re not black it isn’t Universal so might turn out red.” I didn’t even know I had tried it, not until my father died, and the boyhood text emerged from the attic. It’s only a slight mark and I don’t think it should be focussed on because it’s private.

The fact remains I have been the most dutiful and noble servant of the poetry world all my life and can’t even get a first collection together. I work in an un-legislatable and international grey area all the time without payment. The literature I work on requires constant attention.

People want us to be at one, they want for me to be at one, and that was possibly why my lyrics were misappropriated, but my friends didn’t like the book at all, didn’t like what had happened, the way the Oedipus Wrecks in Camden Town at the start of it all wasn’t even represented. To now fix this would mean going back on the unity of everything, and if I am not too unhappy with the way things are I don’t need to renew the songbook. If I could redo it all, I would make one songbook only, incorporating all of them in chronological order, but by now I don’t feel like I should renew it. Problem is when people see my C. V. they think “that guy’s not actually a rock n roller. He should be working at CERN.” Still, the image of myself as a rock n roller, which is a false image and an image my father hated is perpetuated.

“Why it makes us angry,” says the wind, “is that if you still deem what you did to be the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, you shouldn’t even be allowed to do anything.” It was only a seven year old attempt – I mean we hadn’t even started science at school – but yes I do still know I managed to change the colouration of my own skin cells through the operation of an algorithm that sublimated letters and numbers on a cellular level. As I say I was seven when this happened and the writing was done before I became the witness, which kind of threw me.

If you deem it racist, you should know that my first friend was black and he was a true friend – and when I was writing of the internet two years before Berners-Lee invented it – I called it “the ire ii net” – and why? Well, the reason is I used to play pirates with my black friend on the shed roof when we were five and guess what? He was the only of the two of us that even had a computer! So it begs the question as to whether or not I got those two lower case i’s the right way round! It is also pertinent to mention that experts believe the ire ii net I ideated as a seven year old is the same as the internet we know today.

So we know the book isn’t racist, because its version of the internet is as a white and black collaboration. I think to be working on the idea that the colour of one’s own white skin can be incrementally changed through mathematics is acceptable if you’re seven but if you’re still trying to do it as a graduate it might not be the case anymore.

Anyhow you may see my contributions have been large even as a seven year old scientist and that fact remains – I have never earned 1p.

I am the eldest of four born in a season each, and my season is Spring – the poetic month. To include the other three of the four seasons in my signature herein would conceivably be false but that I may have to pretend to do. A leaf falls, the negative Fibonacci sequence can be seen in its spiral, then gilly flowers start to grow. Soon it will be summer after that, if you follow my gist. Then the leaves will start to fall again. That’s what is actually happening in the present tense moment where I reside. It is Night and wind is whispering in the chimney – and voices are whispering in the wind – they shall not go away now, which leaves the cold, inscrutable mirror of life refracted and even shattered. I try not to interpellate the fractured mirror but at times cannot help it. The sword in the stone is a classic tale, and one which my literary quest – a quest to score whatever that means – might rewrite. I would say the idea that Autumn is Optimus Prime dates back all the way to Keats. In reading most of the voices go away and that becomes a worthwhile activity the more you do of it. If only I hadn’t have fallen in love with someone I shouldn’t have fallen in love with.