HOW TO BE FREE AS A NEW BEAT

HOW TO BE FREE AS A NEW BEAT

I KNEW THAT SHE LOVED ME

I escaped last night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep

and the stars murmured

their cool ballad

to the approaching sky.

Secrets hung like ghosts

in the corner of my wanton world

all blurred and drugged too deep

and I knew that she loved me

from her invisible motions

and the dagger in her soft reply.

The questions concealed in her eye.

Her smile a luring prison.

Her blink a beautiful danger.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

And I knew that silence

would soon let slip its whisper,

knew that fantasy

had never been so real

and I knew that she loved me

because I knew everything.

I knew.

LE LITTLE LAPIN ON LE LAWN

Le little lapin on le lawn,

trembling in the dusky dawn,

forlorn as fallen autumn leaves

is the wave that misbehaves,

it makes you melancholy mad,

where the wave-forms terminate,

mind the gap, wet, spastic mirrors clap,

you don’t need meaning on a plate,

you’re dying slowly as the light

pours forth from the glowing east,

the sun a hedgehog in the air but

slow and Bible-black the beast,

O little lapin on le lawn,

who sheds a secret tear for us all,

sup the flowers like a cup

before the rusty autumn falls.

AURORA FLOREALIS

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.

*ketamineguitar*

AWAY WITH THE FAIRY LIQUID

As if even Natural things are given over once again to a Barthesian world of product placement, it might be instructive to consider the healing of my busted, dusty Hooverbag lungs… once I was away with the Fairy Liquid. I became interested in the switch thrown. There were new maps sprawled on the point of a pin. I hungered after The Snowbell Prize. My brief fling with the politics of flight kept me up all through the Ancient Night. Another high-powered dawn was born but what was the WATTAGE? Well, I felt a leaf, I fell out of life, probably no-one else knew, but then there may be some. I wallowed in my lazy swamp, languishing, lizarding, long. Interstellar Artois was the effect of fat, planetary raindrops beating down on sad, Lucozade lights, lying lambent on the paving stones. DogMuckels was not what it seemed. Quantity Streets were typical of consumer culture. By now, the National Hypochondriac Service have sorted me out. My mood is made stable on a sterilised table. Fakeazade does not come free from the kitchen Tap as yet, but we are working on it. Savlon is wrong. Erase the Dettol. There’s no such thing as cinnamon, but then again that is not strictly true. Well-weird this ward: words woke it: walls broke it: Weirds walk it: or they should, break it open to the light of day, straight away. There’s little to do except listen to the snap, crackle and pop of the cereal, cereal in the morning after a dark night of the soul in winter.

THE NEW MOON BEAM

O Flo’, O woe, O what am I ever going to do now?

As if to make sure I am still a nutter

the kind people of the intercom have asked the poet

to redo for you what I did for Nathalia

which is to climb on to the roof at sunset

here where the stars re-align

even though it is long past sunset

and write a series of strictly 12 love poems

out there, lying back on the roof at Cumpstones

which is as I say where the Plough alignment lives…

sooooooooooo within moments

of the kind people suggesting I remake them

just for you whom it would seem

is still to be my lifelong dream,

I found a pen, some paper, a buttercup-torch

and made my way to the play room in the attic

through whose Velux I used to climb

and O woe is me! The Velux no longer opens!

What am I ever going to do?

Instead I sit at this flat, anti-Romantic screen,

venting my spleen, my mood made stable

on a sterilised table far away…

gone is the day, and gone the day when

daring teenagers would smoke on the roof.

I guess the Velux must’ve sealed shut!

So no longer can you see love

as a search for much small proof!

I would be out under the stars, saying

it is dawn, and by dawn I would say

it is night, and you wouldn’t know.

I might’ve been in the city for all I let on!

It would’ve been interesting to see

if by now I had become the new Einstein,

and if the new, synchronised word stretched out there,

where I lay back in warm, altruistic night air,

under what Jim called a placenta of stars…

I would talk of the dawn in the dark.

Lament for the death of that lark.

It’s still not too late to separate

the wend from the stain, dream one.

Into the miracle-movie I try and move now.

Into the flow of words I go,

after the alphabet dancing again,

investing my mind, knowing

it takes passion to reignite

the long gone song in the heart.

Courteous blandishments and platitudes,

cruciform shapes of longitudes and latitudes,

all prior armour, can be gone,

as through love the switch is thrown…

needing to move for the retirement of my mum,

I think back to the bats in the attic,

and all that has gone on, and how

I would weep to leave, really grieve,

and lose my bond with the stars.

When I let you know what went on

in terms of certain Naturalistic Observations,

attestations, weird specimens, even

you had to deal with it and heal with it

and I regret ever letting anyone else in

but at least by now my main concerns

are all you whom it seems

is not smitten with the horseman

who’ll only let you down.

Out on the roof meanwhile where

flat, blank, Skiddaw slates are lying,

there is no-one to capture the rapture,

to see how far they can see,

to contemplate Infinity, if

the universe goes on forever,

how there’s no such thing as “almost infinite,”

how there needed to be everything

in order for there to be anything at all.

So although it was a brilliant idea

of mine originally, to write up there,

and now again of whomsoever it is

that feeds us, whom I hear call,

alas, O woe is me, O Flo’, O no,

the best work of a generation is impossible

and with that we land quite flat

as a screen, as a mental patient’s mood,

back in the posh, coffee-cake dining room

where I have made my bed underneath

a large, pastoral painting which seems

to smuggle God’s nostril into the cloud…

by now when I talk of wandering

lonely in the cloud, there is new meaning,

but all I do is sit here pondering,

who is calling, and writing…

I would like to liken your blink

to the fluttering of the butterfly,

like I did last time when this went on.

By now you might be starting to doubt

whether I am even dressed, and

what it is that I test, and which

exiled world is the best at every wrong decision….

At least we still seem to have some purple,

even when the people call out of fever,

at the radical, recalcitrant renegade in the middle,

grown repentant for all that’s gone wrong.

I would be calibrating a new, musical scale by now

had that window opened, and truly

am only starting to see that

it’s become a bit like us

who did not seize the chance…

by now this rewrite of my first collection is getting full.

By night I write but am not on the pull.

I might be out there inventing a new force,

spelling “entropy” backwards as if to

frame the first, unformulated spark

of appetence in Nothingness preceding

Creation, but instead pleasure is fleeting -

a callous colour of mind overcomes me.

How I would wash you, anatomise you,

take you to the zoo, hold your hand,

oversee the growth of your dreaming gland,

expand your horizons – all gone.

Now my brother’s love is what I cherish.

WIRED TEETH

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

She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

(Kilburn)

ON 4CMC

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

“Literature has started to release serotonin.”

He was on the new designer drug, a cathinone and

NPS called 4CMC when he dreamed up the plot.

There was an holographic bike out the back

all through the night. The dark was glittering

with tinsel. Mangled love was the overall effect.

He saw the world through the frame of angel

hair, there were weird Escherian shapes in

the air, there was light deep inside the dark.  

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

For once you remove the inner monologue

you can become an open energy conduit.

Question the comfort and see for yourself.

READING MATERIAL

If there were paper under my heart there would

be writing on it and at last it would be red

like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst

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

scattered, tattered-knicker clouds conceal

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

for a bus-ticket when the fiver-river’s gone.

That page, my wage, an underground organ,

with its meta-fictional shorthand and triplicate, 

something like the opposite of a bus ticket,

in taking you on an inward journey forever:

surely it would feel shocked to not be legal tender?

[Silecroft Beach]

INVINCIBLE LOVERS

I’ll tell you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

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

SYMMETRY LIPS

Symmetry lips   symmetry lips

kiss me quicks  need a fix

make me feel  natural and real

cuts heal  with a plastic seal

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

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

now consciousness  is everywhere

now consciousness  is sentient air

the sky falls  apart into place

I crave to sleep  behind your face

everything in its  proper place

live where the sky  and the river freely give

live where the sky  and the river freely give

ON HEARTBOOK

[warning: contains voices]

Up all night working the guy who said he would plug his senses in the mains

incoming voices seem to be Smart-talking

Simon says fragmented for reasons of solidarity with the dispossessed of the world

feeling the Age of Communication = the Age of Alienation I am

chivvying words in different orders recalling the machine in Gulliver’s Travels that precedes the computer whom it seems might have destroyed the spirituality of Cabalistic permutation games of heart-purifying nature based on quest not arrival but whom it seems might not

sharing secrets on Facebook as if it were Heartbook

can’t upload spittle to philosophy chatroom

can’t pass the gravy over Facebook enough

started out writing a good book but laptop became huge container for storing the sum of all knowledge

thinking the surface area on which I write being infinite the story is now infinite, the content gone endless

still like Gulliver’s Travels and ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ – goodbye

still think if the windows were washed – every one - I would see nothing, nothing but the white mirrors re-affirming the quiet interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction where I write by night furtive in flight with the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper At The Gates of Dawn

when I look out of the window at dawn I sometimes see Eden, am like Adam walking in a prelapsarian garden with a bagful of names to scatter freely on things

the ingredients of apple juice might make a found poem called ‘Text Message From An Alien’

seems the internet is to writing as photography was to visual art

seems the on/off switch of the laptop is its clitoris

seems the omnijective interface of random access co-imagination is the new, synchronised word

through the rooms people come and go Smart-talking on magic alphabet radio

when I see the sun in the morning I think it is Holy not just a 2 pence piece

the kettle rises to its silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain singing sweet song my one note on hyper-vision this fair dawn

it looks like a good book is on the cards

it looks like Heartbook might’ve fled away with the Smartpoem

it looks like mutation in consciousness, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture without motion bones like sadness gene and dreaming gland and the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland and the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill and we are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land still

was remembering recently the time my friend sent a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH into space, and I was the one underneath it, the one to catch it

think it might be a psycho-technological post-poem pertaining maybe to replace the archaic sense of ‘gay’ gone to apathy, barrage and detachment

reminds me love is a choice of words

was WH Auden that said that not me

I still think love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop

PROSPERO IN AMSTERDAM

First time I smoked a bifter

it was like the sea

was set alight to

with petrol

and burned.

We were in the den

by the beck in

the Combe field

when we smoked it.

My bros seemed alright

as if it were banal,

trite, not the sheer,

cold terror I felt.

I went up

to the attic to play

guitar, and still felt

so paranoid, as the steal

strings of the guitar

were strummed

and the world

went round

and round the sun

that I had to stop.

I went for a shower

to wash off the paranoia,

masturbated in there,

and orgasm was

so long, so prolonged

it changed my perception…

I was suddenly absolved

in warm, soapy

bubbles. Supper

was called. I went

to eat spaghetti

bolognese with my

family. The threat

of my parents knowing

diminished to nothing

around the table;

I was sold on the

green stuff, suddenly.

So began a Romance

that I would say

was a Holy sacrament.

So began the self-legitimising

pact of the stoner

circle too: how

we smoked to get

sober from the

advertising trance.

How we wished to abjure

temporal wealth, bondage

to surface Gods of

illusion; renounce

worthless dogma

to consumerism

that only robs us

of our bodies; touch

the texture not

name side of life;

turn life into love.

We used to discuss

casual, embedded

drug references in culture:

Mario mushrooms

conferring energy;

Tinkerbell’s dust

that makes you fly;

the field of poppies

in the Wizard of Oz

that makes them see

the Emerald City.

As I say this

was part of the

self-legitimising pact.

By now I’ve

packed it in. By now

I know the brain releases

cannabinoids naturally

for moments of

Signification, like

reaching the top

of a mountain; and

if you flood your brain

with cannabinoids

un-naturally, meaning

and signification

become aleatory,

become a mess: there

is suddenly meaning

at every point of

intersection in the

crazy palimpsest of memory.

Wishing to still have

a good short-term

memory, wishing

to not break the Hollow

Claw, wishing to

still be a poet, I

don’t wish to

smoke cannabis anymore.

A TRANCE OF STALKS

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.

ERASING THE DEBT

My father told me he smuggled fine art,

told me adult things way back near the start

of my life and I was surprised – but it didn’t hurt.

He told me he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall,

sold his business when the Berlin Wall fell,

told me he donned faux Australian accent

and code name “Blue” – but in time I went

and found out that (as I had suspected)

it was pollen he smuggled. The story he told -

it was to keep his young family protected! -

art was but recourse to euphemism for pollen!

He didn’t charge the Germans for the return

of Russian-plundered, pastoral paintings

but had a pollen farm high in the Moroccan mountains.

My private schooling was funded that way.

Now I’m trying to think of something bright to say!

Blue was his nickname, Blue as the sky today,

through which a docile cloud-change migrates -

and he shipped tonnes of pollen to the States!

Now that he’s gone I can, yes, I can impart

what my father really smuggled when he said art:

tonnes of pollen, containing mascara bruise,

peacock feather, velvet flare, butterfly wing, whose

effects make me laugh at Flarf, snooze to News…

inducing tangential-thinking and demotivation,

it’s non-conducive to old-fashioned concentration.

We dreamed we could legalise it, make it free,

use it as currency or to cross the Irish Sea,

but came across the wall, the wall we adorned

instead of breaking down and soon it dawned

on me that like Michael Hofmann I mourned

my father before he even went and died,

which is called proleptic mourning, then he did,

left me remembering him saying “life is one”

under a bleached, wide, tired, madding, English sun.

[reconstructed]

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS

Let us have a go then, you and I -

when we are tired of getting high -

when the note-well is filled with stars that swap

places when no-one is looking, let us kindly lie

down on the top of the oldest fell,

one midsummer night on the heather,

and munch our popcorn in front of the cinema.

Let us travel by xylophone up there, predictive

text, Robin Hood arrow, fountain pen,

or even better, to use imagination,

as the poet must again and again,

let’s travel by bullet up the top of a

telegraph pole opening piratical CD shops

at all the local telegraph pole tops.

Let us bypass normal societal procedure,

and stay there until we yawn at the dawn

and emerge from dreams as if from water,

brush the crumbs of sleep from our clicked-on

eyes, befuddled, encrusted with glue…

For up the fell no cars come and go

with backbeats blaring on the stereo;

and no go faster stripes of booze

are streaming on the unicorn’s side.

Ha, let us open a Burger King joint

at the top, not so much to reappoint

the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods

whom it seems disintegrate under their sods,

but to allow a new sense of archaic gay,

replace that emotion now gone astray

with gun and bud and band and butter:

let it be like writing a long letter

either to or maybe from a higher self

whose brain sits upon a Waterstones shelf.

Let us first dare the darkness to insist

we sip our flasks at night and get pissed

on firewater whisky – let us turn

to God and see what we might learn.

If dog still equals pi times mc squared,

because you want to think Him round,

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

and its most soul-assuring sound,

let us babble down in the morning,

all the way, heeding the warning,

to make as mezzanine our science,

in an increasingly competitive world…

already the elements have nettle stings for names.

The deep, green lane leads you home,

but first you must launch your song

into the blue ether like a Timeshare salesman

sizzling the dream of a plate of roast beef.

Draw on this dystrophy of darkness

soon coming to your cinema screen

now that we’re at the summit and can glean

honed alertness, awareness, from a purpose

achieved over a long afternoon of walking,

walking side by side and even talking

on telepathic walkie talkies of how no,

there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode,

how maybe in very Heaven every step

we’ve taken up the fell will be kept

in a pile for us to count and compare -

only to find no statistics up there!

Ah, I forget if we are up or down -

let us fetch the wines of the wise men -

it seems planes are the shoes of clowns -

but forgetting is part of escape and return…

there is only loss of self and recollection,

which templates over life and writing,

which templates over experience and data,

which templates over the now and the after.

Let us phone a supernatural female deity

on collect call, and find that she

never hangs up, after a prayer,

let us pray to the closing of the door,

the ordeal of the seer may well soon be over,

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

let be the beck as it rambles and falls,

let know the flowing of dry stone walls,

let over be under and all be at one,

let the land of flying fairy cakes be fun.

Already the yellow DogMuckels M

atop the pole in the industrial park in town

is the postmodern churchspire, in

the spiritual vacuum, post-modernism

theme dissolved into message, and

semantics is a road sign not a place.

Already margins are centres, centres margins,

surface is depth, and distortion

clarity, and there is a ream of cheap tea

from Africa in among the supermarket bargains…

Hell, we’ll have another game of cards.

We’ll link to the internet in actual clouds.

Yes chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots.

Sometimes in dreams I find an organisational system

for the organic whole of the magnum

opus, that living work of art

I might call Gondwanaland and

which is a living thing, which I should leave long,

not try and make cohere like Pound,

but when I wake and press my feet to the ground,

the Order I dreamed, the scheme, is gone -

and Truman speakers wake me like a gong

augmenting the end of ‘The Lemon Song.’

Who will renew the morning dew

that music has moved the green grass to?

All the birds have gone south by now.

I heard that they sing with their wings.

SYSTEMS

If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear

not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell

in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here

where the dream of love meets the oldest fell...

to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the

colours of the vowels in English you can

find pasta, tea, air, hair, water, clothes, that your ordinary

speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-

air poem – quick get it down, get it down! -

your notes on hyper-vision dissipate in the air!

What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern

ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?

For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!

For writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet or not!

HOPE

As I lie around careless of a map of sound

I love the lie of the land

where quiet gilly flowers

curtsey like ballerinas.

Streaming is vision.

Bees pollinate the garden,

birds pepper the lawn

where you let your flowery

blouse come all undone,

and a ray of light

soaks us all around.

The sky is a blouse of blue

hanging on the line.

Harmony thrums and

the sentient air is everywhere.

I lie back without a care,

sunlight blowing my hair about,

without a grey shade of doubt,

and deem it lazy of us

to let it get this way,

a day of careless play,

a carelessly radiant day,

all my troubles float away.

MUM’S COFFEE BOX

The lid is on mum’s coffee box and

that is a good thing seeing

as coffee goes stale sooooooo quickly -

reacts to the air; and she

loves our ground coffee to be fresh.

It loses all its coffee-ness

if you leave off the lid -

even for a few seconds.

Everyone here loves their coffee.

We have an instant coffee machine.

It makes espressos: usually

we make a double and add

warm milk from the AGA.

Sometimes I wish to plug

my senses in the instant espresso

machine. Sometimes I wish

for instant travel. Usually though

I’m content to just have coffee

and the place where I’m free.

It is far better than instant

coffee and Monopoly Jail.

It is midnight on a warm, summer

night; and I might have a coffee.

Then I might have a flashback

to a bad, vampiric, anti-social

Gap Year rhythm, needing

cashback to perpetuate an

adolescent fantasy world.

LITTLE JOHNNY’S EXPERIMENT

The boyhood work only emerged when my dad died in 2014. Dr. Robert, upon tidying up the attic found a stack of books I had written at seven. 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.

The book seems to have encrypted a sophisticated scientific node to do with gravity, storing the idea of the net in the attic so it could grow round the world; calibrated an algorithm by sublimating numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour, I think, could be rendered as a cellular mark; and separated the object ‘pollen’ from its name.

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

SKUNKFOOT

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland. It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows. I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity. Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains. It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real. Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven. The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

NINE LEAVES LEFT

I

UNPLUGGED IN THE BLUE ROOM

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

II

HAIKU FOR SPRING

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

III

SHADOW PAGE POEM

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea…

IV

AN INWARD PRAYER

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).

V

WEIRD SEMEN

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

VI

DOWN

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

VII

LEAF

I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life.

VIII

THE NEW BOX

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and

IX

THE END OF PI

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

COTERMINOUS ORBIT

She does not know firking from fire,

logopoeia from logs for the log-box,

Negative Capability from negative equity,

bonmots from pink, French confectionery,

the colours of the vowels from alphabet spaghetti,

the Objective Correlative from ironic self-distance,

sprechstimme from the kettle rising to its

silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban's

leash, my one note on hyper-vision this dawn,

chiasmus from napkin-kissing-gates silting

their electron-haired dandelion-puff,

nano-language from the Nanny State,

hypertext poetry from notes on hyper-vision,

Aurora Florealis from Flora Borealis,

the derangement of the senses to attain

the unknown from the derangement of

the senses to attain the Eartoon, Eartoons 

bloomed from barbecued tunes, the anti-

dactylus from the talking pterodactyl, the 

psycho-sensitive flower – talkative and invisible-

from the psycho-technological error, but oh my,

pneumatic woman, aren't you a beautiful one?

AT INSANE MATE

At Insane Mate I lost my queen

whose eyes it seems were Gondwanaland-green.

We walked to the top of the Pompidou

to read JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS,

and in dreams ski down too fast

and get our dreams in plaster cast.

We married already in a pagan way

in a dusky playground scattered with hay

but I went down south to cross the border,

left good love in a state of disorder.

Now love works high up in the Tate,

selling great paintings over a plate….

and if she said she is in love with me

I wouldn’t go taking it personally.

A FROND OF BRACKEN

[with apologies to Brian Patten]

You ask me for a poem.

I offer you a frond of bracken.

You say that’s not good enough.

You’re not buying it.

I say how mood

Is also a bracken frond

Drooping down and

That is why I chose it –

To represent ‘mood’

This mundane Monday morning.

You’re not buying it.

You want something textual.

I say I plucked it from the fell

Which turns in summer

From russet to green

Like an homicidal machine.

I plucked it at random at dawn.

You’re still not buying it.

I seem to remember a time,

Taking the old bramble road

At the Augustan/ Romantic

Crucifix w/ you

Where a frond

Of bracken

Would do.

GO MY SONGS!

Go my songs into the ballad-murmuring breeze!

Go and be well-equipped with a

toothbrush in your inside pocket!

Go and be not afear’d of the sounds

of the crowded supermarket aisle -

sprinkled as they are with pheramone sprays!

Go disturb the comfortable

and comfort the disturbed.

Go dislodge the algebra from

the brains of mathematicians

and replace it with timeless

ideas transmitted across Time.

Go melt death and attain perfect listening

and not remove the key from life;

go calibrate the key of telepathic grammar;

go walk down the ocular nerve.

Go escape the shape of the paper -

go from me like newborn

spirits of the dead released.

PURPLE

Voices also told me to write of the

colour purple. In Steiner homes for autists,

rational but socially inept, the corners

of the rooms are round and purple

because it's less threatening than the geometry

of rightangled corners. My room

turned out a little like that when,

as my dying father lay in the attic,

my screen bloomed a numinous purple

light daubing the walls until the

bedroom, an anagram of boredom,

seemed like a featherlite love poem shop:

a little girl's lava lamp of a room!

Sometimes the seeping foxglove aura

vacillated back and forth between

purple and its normal screen light,

refusing to settle for any long period of time.

My bro said I'd caught some virus;

the computer programmer down the pub

just said dying, and he was right,

for by the time Blue passed away,

Blue being the art-smuggling codename

dad used in his shady occupation,

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

and farewell luminous dark of half Denmark!

Now all I can think to say on purple

is this: I would put it in my mouth.

And I would chew on it like a cow

grazes on grass, mulchy and blind.

And I would ingurgitate it fully

not spit it out like a child his dummy.

I would taste it like her name. It's

the colour of mystery and sex and

saudade and longing and shame. And

it's the colour we associate with depth.

When I first looked at the colours of the vowels

I noticed the presence of its absence,

as if you'd expect it there because

it's the colour of deep things.

POINTLESS ACTIVITY

Now that University is long out

I wonder what it is I am to do.

Now that I know, say, The Great

Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia

pertaining to panchronic and

panoramic overview, like

a chronotope turned euchronia,

or else a word-world gone

polysemic with the multifarious

possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy

through whom the esemplastic has fled

away with the quadlibetical -

now that I know the lesson

of post-structuralism is twofold,

meaning a) the condition of being

a text can extend to any object,

any quotidian ephemera and b)

the condition of being a language

unto itself can extend to any

text – I wonder what it is I am

to do. My father, after his PPE degree,

under Karl Popper at the LSE, learning

of things like falsifiability and

of P1 to TT to EE to P2, well,

he turned back to Winnie the Pooh.

HYPERTEXT

No fear, lost lover,

Science has the answer,

all wrapped up in its

rubber-gloved hand

and they’re soon

abolishing altogether

sadness gene and

dreaming gland -

for Science has told us

many of the stars

you gaze at tonight

are not really there

but illusions of the

light that takes so long

to reach the beams

of our glistening eyes

that for centuries

after the star has died

it still appears to

be hanging there,

a little, glimmering

crystal tear, in

love with the dark,

as bright and beautiful

as it would be if

it were really there.

THE READING

On the train to Simon Pomery’s birthday party in Leeds I wrote in my notebook, all the way there. I wrote the whole alphabet out:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

Then I wrote it out backwards too, unsure which way round I’d give it to him as a present:

ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA.

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, in among radio snippets, phone numbers, the recipe for an opium drink favoured by the Romantics, when it came to pass I had nothing left except

“I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life.”

THE WAKE UP CALL

It has taken sooooooo long for me to see

that this has been just a heightened dream;

that you shouldn’t take your whole life

to click awake on a gone Paradise;

that there’s something Oedipal going on

that I have tried and failed to lick;

that a rose would smell as sweet if it

were called barmy as the army of

the new England cricket captain…

by now I see you and I may never be;

that I may never wear your sucrose garment;

that I must abjure nursing the suffering

of my ideals and get pragmatic; that

a poet is about as welcome on a creative

writing course as a cow in the Dairy

Farm’s Head Office; and yet that it’s all

good and I needn’t renew my taste for

waste ahead of fresh, minty, Colgate

toothpaste. In my dream I dreamed

that we would be the new Adam and

Eve in the prelapsarian garden with

a bag of Names to scatter freely on things.

THE COLOURS OF THE DAWN AFTER A MIDNIGHT VOYAGE

I see you in the luminescence of the dawn,

when dawn is a salmon ovulating in the sky,

when all night I have walked

in your general direction, and, fatigued,

stopped to make a fire of my poems in a lay-by…

like John Clare, I drift madly to you,

only to find my physical capacities

limited where my dreams are not.

My philosophy is ragged as when Rimbaud

lay down in the Green Inn and let

roads go through his head. My powers

that be are but clouds, floating by

on their sky-blue roads, wearing ripped,

blue genes adorned with peace, love

and anarchy symbols, also DM’s

on their protest march high up above.

Knowing that the dialysis in your pretext

extends beyond the end of the world

I find very comforting, and think

in an alchemical sense about it too…

but who am I to hold you prisoner,

like a daisy sellotaped in the back of a note book?

I deem you free as the weed should’ve been,

back when the plan was Amsterdam.

THE SONG

Sooooooooooo in the end the guys want me to rewrite the one about the time we smoked a joint, Dr. Calculator Ptom and I, before the rugby match.

I was playing full-back.

The ball went up high in the air and I was underneath it.

I was underneath it and dropped the ball.

It wasn’t like me at all.

I dropped it because I was still so befuddled from the joint.

The dads on the touchline were tutting, asking who was this inept player.

It was me; and my dad was also there.

He was embarrassed by me that day

because he was captain of rugby at his own school

and in every way the star player of the team.

So the lesson is not to get high before the Game.

Suddenly I remember that God is a game, that the game is based on permutation, that even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death. That The Lords And The New You Know Who is also a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. Yet this is not a media-compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun. This is not to say “he who controls the media controls evolution.” This is not about chance collocations churning up evidence through the operation of a game.

I seem to remember we lost the match.

I seem to remember I was dropped from the team.

INFANT JAZZ POEM

Sometimes perhaps 

down opening quiet

I am drawn down 

long and alone

and my friend and 

my foe recede 

into deep sleep

sudden and still 

like a dawn behind a 

screaming veil 

where silence

is born and all that's 

loose and tight and 

all that's light is light 

like first morning 

with no night

and wend my way 

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy 

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live 

the last poet's 

last poem.

CHEESE DREAMS

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one 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.