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.
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.
SUNSET TO THE WEST
I was swimming in the Irish Sea
at sunset with my mother,
watched from the stony beach
by my poor, dying father
when I realised
my place is in life is lowly.
I was languishing
in salty expiation
as a laughter of seagulls flew past
wearing shark mask replicas
when I realised
my place in life is lowly.
I turned my body away
from the beach towards
the peach-stone of a
black hole, being slowly
sucked into the sea’s
watercress hives and drowned
and realised my place in life is lowly… and
the setting sun is bought and sold
and silting gold, leaking
out in all directions
like MC squared =
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 pogrom
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.
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.
SCENTS OF SPRING
I love the day the first, fresh scents of spring
suffuse the air and pervade the senses.
An AEIOU bird
toots its hollow horn
outside on the A595.
A celebratory genesis is everywhere.
Mother earth
is giving birth,
menstruating season
and ovulating dawn.
Fresh lovers maunder
hand in hand and
knee-deep in redolent flowers
into shade to take repose
by cool, running waters.
Sybaritic sylphs swoop in sentient air.
The blue sky arches and swoons,
I bridle the mind and
race apace to the shore
where seabirds scream
from the ragged rocks,
O is it their love-song or elegy?
Waves make gentle love to the shore.
In alchemy a galaxy
of stars exploding
into being above is perceived
as an orgasm, is perceived,
that is, in an erotic sense.
Liquid night arrives too soon,
O moon, O beautiful,
sleepless omen moon,
who shines like an
electric coin and seems
to be in love with the sea
or at least her own
shattered reflection:
she scatters her jewellery box all around.
Homework tonight
is to remember your dreams.
I
prefer telepathy to 10p.
NOTES ON HYPER-VISION AT THE MILLENNIUM
I
INVENTIONS
A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!
II
PROPHECIES
I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter.
It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a rhythm change in the White House.
I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th and I don’t think that a good idea but someone might do that.
I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.
It would be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances.
I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician.
I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too.
I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment.
I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.
III
AMBITIONS
To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced.
To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly.
To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition.
To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else.
To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London.
To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion.
I would like to invent something called the post-poem, and think post-poetry could be a valid thing in the future.
I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer.
If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass.
To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old.
To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal.
To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.
IV
DIRTY WORK
“You know how dad told us all
he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?
That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?
That he sold his business when
the Berlin Wall fell? Well,
I think it might’ve been code,
might’ve been recourse to euphemism.
I think he was a pollen smuggler.
I think he had a pollen farm
way up high in the Moroccan
mountains and shipped tonnes
and tonnes of pollen to the States.
This whole art dealer nicknamed
Blue thing is just to protect us.
At least this is what I entertain.
I also think he named us after
The Doors, John, James, and Robert
and then they had a girl of course.
Have you noticed we are born
in a season each, going Spring,
Autumn, Winter, Summer, and
march right left right left in the hands?
There are also four compass
points, four seasons, four wheels
of a car and four dimensions
to the mapping of any point in
the spacetime continuum including
time. Now revolve that joint!
Because it seems to me like
Jesus would be a proto-hippy
stoner poet in this day and age.
Ah, I love it when the Wizard of Oz
suddenly turns colourful. There
are casual drug references all around.
The Mario mushroom confers
energy, Tinkerbell’s dust makes
you fly and in the Wizard of Oz
they lie down in a field of poppies
and suddenly see the Emerald City.
Hurry up and revolve that joint.”
V
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER
A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.
Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.
Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.
Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.
The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.
Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.
The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.
The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.
The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.
The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.
When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.
When you lose your concentration you die.
Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.
There are too many words in the world.
Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.
The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.
You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.
All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.
Without difference no contradistinction.
Everyone is my brother and I love them.
The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
There is no more mapless space.
Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.
Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life.
Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card.
Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.
It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself.
Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.
All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.
DAD BLUES
I am the dead man you killed my son.
My car took a train across the boat
over the bus through the tram and
via the telephone on the aeroplane.
I've seen wit. He's got grit. I can
beat the Germans five to one baby one
in five. Love is the hope the heart
literally needs in order for it to survive
without which it can stop. Emotional
balance is more the gift of the liver.
I can drum up a drum bigger than a
dream bound in the leather of a
Jim Morrison trouser. I can whip up
a frenzy as easy as cream. Pretend
it's still a dream-with-open-eyes-er.
Death is H suspended in deafness,
not the frozen abstract angel of
tangential angles of light thawing in
emotion you want me to mention, but
Death is H suspended in deafness.
Hover like the dragonfly over the
pond
that codes the kiss of the wind.
HALATNOST IN A CRISIS HOUSE
My bedraggled crow’s nest splay is Portable in all directions…
oh no, oh no, the Spirit of Music has been lost forever,
down on beautiful, heartbroken, sentient, rosethirsty earth,
where the wetness is jealous and the witness is smitten,
went the Spirit of Music when we thought it lost forever,
and money is not for drying your eyes in the queue for medicine
and these rude, Nirvana-barcode fingertips did not touch her
and the full moon wears the ultra-scan of every baby
and the silver forest is enraptured by the fanny of a bee.
(London)
MESSAGE
RECEIVED
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
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
and
sometimes you’ve just
got
to hit the road and
LOST MINIATURE DREAMS
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.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Necklace noose,
reckless truce,
drooling before
wet, electric eyes
My name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
(1998)
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun,
this
is the dead land,
crack
a smile and curse the sun.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but
like butterflies.
Waves
[squiggle]
crossed
the FTSE
[squiggle]
and
the Helter-Skelter
[squiggle]
crashed
in the electric-sea…
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.)
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.
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 the
pills I
pop “poetry
buttons”
in motley conglomerations
like
pool balls or songcells and
their
names
should not appear
in poems.
Caroline
is the last yellow crayon.
This
could be the door to telepathy.
My
granny and grand-dad were in the R. A. F.
Under
a blanket in the back of a car -
I
think of it now I’ve got this far.
Alone
in the solipsistic kitchen
whom
it would seem is un-war-ful.
Walking
down to the Irish Sea quite
slowly
to
see if my place in life is lowly
a
dying animal goes much faster.
He
found himself on a plane.
He
found himself on a.
He
found himself on.
He
found himself.
He
found.
P.
If
dog = pi times MC squared
it
is because you wish to think him round
while
O is the key of water shared
when
rolling round on the ground.
O for a Muse of fire that descends
from the brightest Heaven of invention;
Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires
into
the burdened air, breathing.
One
night, Jim
Morrison pointed up
at
the night sky on LSD and said “look!
It’s
the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!”
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil,
it
was was not born under a hill,
it
is the best goal I’ve seen still,
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil.
If
the windows were washed – every one -
we’d
still
see
nothing through them but
the
white mirrors reaffirming the quiet
interior
of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.
Bart
Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d
@
Van Goghian black border sun
heard
James Joyce would just use |||| 4
ROYGBIV
in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile
“I’ve
been writing about bifters.
Hello
my name is Pirripa.
[sound
of sucking in of smoke.)
That’s
my boyfriend.”
Now
we are gathered to appoint the Gods,
now
we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,
now
we are gathered to ordain this dust,
we
are gathered to live and to dream.
If
you believe it, it is there,
naked
under nearer stars,
softly
swashing, backwashing music,
music
in a room with no door.
A
A Yellow
A Yellow Pages
May dawn behead me
A Yellow Pages will suffice
A Yellow Pages will
Farewell my life
A Yellow
A
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,
NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,
H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,
ESA for extra sensory allowance
but I for one still don’t really know
if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.
I
remember happy, sunny days,
days
when we scored some weed and went
out
in the meadows, when Paul
would
turn to me and say
“wear
an emotional condom
before
you fuck my mind, man.”
Wouldn’t
it be pollen
if
Barnes has scored a chicken
and
spring is a red horse?
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
I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea
or stretching honesty is the more easy
an encryption for the future that
ain’t what it used to be but I still
await the future with rapt uncertainty
and
cannot stand the suspense.
We
are the velvet e’s,
we’re
shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,
the
Roman Rd below,
beneath
us as we fly.
[enter
bass organ of ‘The End’]
Butter
is good when you’re a nutter,
but
I can think of something that’s better,
so
had better write her a letter.
Opened unto the gloom under
sliver moon I slide her over.
Semen spills like silver water.
We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.
Forlorn
as fallen autumn leaves,
is
the wave that misbehaves,
goes
out taking E at raves,
and
soon enough no more believes.
One
thing I learned I shouldn’t say too soon,
underneath
this new moon,
but
might instead just impart,
it
is because I have a heart.
What
actually happened was, I ended up robbing a bank, with a banana
smuggled under a tea cloth and a balaclava on my head and face…there
was a get-away car outside, and we went far and to a separate country
too. We started to loan the money out and thus made money off it
which meant we had plenty with which to use for a blank canvas. We
had to be concise, when writing our contract on
the money.
The
police were onto us, so what we did was wait until we had
disseminated our message, and earned more money off the loaning of it
than we stole in the first place, and quietly stormed into the bank
with a banana openly
protruding
from a balaclava in my hand, and h-a-n-d-e-d the money – and the
extra too – back to the bank. The police then let us off the crime
and we went home, knowing our nodes were encrypted.
Of
all the work I had achieved, be it before or after my mental illness,
I still think of the binaural earphone album and the defaced bank
note text as being among
the
best. I think if you remain on the left it’s alright but only when
it’s phoney, for defacing actual bank notes is against the law. I
think if you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone
should get that opportunity should
they choose and
probably for free too. I
think that
is my philosophy and even more so, yours.
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.'
THE POWER-BALLAD OF MARTIN VICIOUS
[warning: contains voices]
I can see death and see flippers
coming out of his senses and say
“come closer you f***ing terrorist,
come closer you f***ing terrorist,
come closer you f***ing terrorist.”
It's because I live a life of all time leisure,
all drugs pure and the radiance just right.
I might be wrong but then I might.
Score some dodgy crack and die
here alone with nobody for a name.
I can be Proust and fathom ten
or eleven types of ambiguity and
rue them all cantankerously,
rue them all cantankerously,
rue them all cantankerously.
It's because I live a dream of my still
working, all love pure and trust in the night.
I might be wrong but then I might.
Score some dodgy crack and die
here alone with nobody for a name.
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 drones.
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]
SAFE FROM HARM
Fleeing the scene of the smoking crime
my shadow legs were failing falling
decided to run forever but fell
the cops were swift on my slow back
& slow to follow my swift soul
which grinning escaped through some hole
& down a road safe from
Ignorance perfectly un-noticed and perfect
The cell was hard like white bone
& naked like something blind and ugly
I slumped & swayed in openly stonedness
& opened my black, silken shirt
“the silent one” sulking & moaning
in hooded prayer to an inward God
The cells were sick & blind
some people advertised their Ignorance
in graffiti screaming from the walls
“FUCK THE PIGS” someone had scratched
I would have told him to fuck himself
for what worse is a pig than a sheep?
& so it appeared that Ignorance wins
only over Ignorance again
& I was thankful for this thought
& thankful that I felt wise
& winked eye to my mind
thankful that though I know my judgment
really judges deeper and wider,
unlike the pigs and sheep I don’t
insist my judgement is better
____________________
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.
A BREAKFAST MADE BY MY FATHER
Breakfast today was two fried eggs, sunny side up,
on toast left to cool slightly so the yellow butter
didn’t break the surface, with a pink-rimmed cup
containing black coffee with a lump of brown sugar,
plus streaky bacon turned in the dark-blue AGA
and dipped in red sauce, all on a new, milk-white
plate with green rim, which, when eating was over,
and I was quench’d and sated, feeling alright,
I left to soak in soapy bubbles in the kitchen sink.
I belched quite crudely then, which was my food
popping up to say ‘hello,’ and drank of my drink,
the coffee from its pot, coffee which can be renewed,
and, grateful for plenitude, felt somewhat satisfied,
and took my leisure to the beautiful world outside.
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.
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.
WHEN THE BECK TURNS TO ICE CUBES
On our first night up my dad took me out
In the back and asked me what I could hear,
And I did not know, so he showed me the beck,
Showed me the beck to open my ear,
Showed me the beck to open my ear.
/////////////////
We traced its source up the fell one day,
But found only bog and marsh, no fountain,
And the fell itself I should say by the way
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain,
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain.
/////////////
Down as gravity and katabasis require,
Beckwater travels, always choosing the course
Of least resistance, scentless and cold,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse.
//////////
It's laced with ecstasia, the bright, deadly beck
That flows down from the fell’s striated way,
Underlaid with Technicolour unicorn hooves,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me.
//////////
Paul Farley would pee in it like a punk,
But I like to stomp in leaking welly boots,
On a trance of green, THC-free stalks,
And let the wet water get in at my roots,
And let the wet water get in at my roots.
//////////
It’s like a long necklace of notes and stones,
Laid over a lucky lady’s milkwhite neck,
And whatever the southerners say of a stream,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck.
//////////
Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,
It falls two feet into a sound as sweet
As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street,
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street.
//////////
It babbles down into a double-barrelled tunnel,
And disappears for a mile or more underground,
And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,
For all the world a round map of sound,
For all the world, a round map of sound.
//////////
Optimus Prime leaves once blocked the tunnel
And water leaked in under the back door
To float a massive, abstract archipelago
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.
//////////
Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,
Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,
And record stores close and folk heroes pass
But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,
And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.
//////////
So it laughs to itself, over what we don’t know,
As it makes that tear-clear journey down,
A fountain pen for all to write with – O! -
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain,
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain.
//////////
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.
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.
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 confectionary,
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?
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.
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.
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*
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.
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