SONGS AND TRONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heart-felt thanks go to my family for helping me get through this work. Susie Tucker my mum has been invaluable as has James Tucker. Thanks also go to Dr. Robert Tucker and Hannah Tucker, plus their partners Claudia and Seb respectively.

FOREWORD

I think looking back to days when my pants and top and leather jacket were often black I had a happy knack with musical concepts in my youth – for instance one was contained in a little poem I wrote called ‘Unplugged In The Blue Room:’

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Another was when I came into possession of a Pearl Jam ‘VS’ cassette tape that was cut in the reel. After a delicate operation to reseal the reel it had a small pause in the music, so the ideal was to do away with the small pause, by methods which included sitting in a circle with your friends and rhythmically chanting the mantra “another, another, another f**king joint.”

My mnemonic for the strings became Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. With friends I recorded a little album on binaural earphones, said on the record I would “plug my senses in the mains.” At Warwick University, furthermore, I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons happens to be an actual substance and it got a First, but it got lost, maybe in the void!

My first mobile started to reverberate the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang from home. The air, the telly, the stereo, the laptop, would all start bleeping the monochrome and drone version of ‘William Tell’ then you’d hear my phone go in my pocket. There was also a movement to tattoo someone’s name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, and finally the one that takes the biscuit is when I discovered my brother’s sheet where pictures grew.

The pictures it would seem do depict the lyric to a song I wrote back when I was trying to be Kurt Cobain in Oedipus Wrecks - but still it wasn’t mine because I didn’t lay it down. Anyhow that pretty much sums up what I was doing with my musical youth - and now here I sit ( ) striving not for effect but still struggling to just talk.

After garage and house comes library. Voices could be quavers, could be onjects, could be syllabubbles, could be sonic machinations at the periphery of sound and most importantly could be the colours of the vowels. They ask you to increase your threshold of Negative Capability. Meanwhile there’s something I think I know and shouldn’t impart but it’s because I have a heart; and writing a letter Dear Music could be instructive in mental health in the future; and putting Paradise Lost to music shouldn’t be done unless it’s going to be amazing, so it’s an aesthetic not moral question.

I also remember, when Aphex Twin’s new double album came out around the Millennium, it was comparable to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I failed to make an essay of that moment, while my brother-poet Dedalus was writing of how Autechre is the heir to Wagner in the use of rhythm.

Sometimes, I look back and consider the road of rock n roll cliché as leading only to badness, madness and sadness. I hear the voice of my father saying “it’s alright if you’re especially musically talented but with you it’s just a vapid fashion statement suitable only for the rebellion of youth.” Well, I would say the music world is largely a wankered planetarium of ego – but then again at other times only picking up a guitar and playing a song seems to survive the shipwreck of the soul because songs are Portable.

Music is not just shaken air, entering the Byzantine conduit of the inner ear, rattling tiny bones in there and recognised as sound; it is also penetration of is-ness. It renews sensation’s quest. Meaning in music is solipsistic: it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s three creatures in a cloud-change. The bands I have been in amount to five, like the Glastonburies I have been to, and the number of Lucies it takes to be clinically insane. The first album I wrote was The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob but it was only a family album done by young kids singing of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail and recorded on a ghetto blaster. Then at 15 or 16 Oedipus Wrecks formed and gigged in London and foreshadowed doom. Moving schools I then formed Secret Chord H with the best drummer of his generation Zach Lait. It wasn’t until my Gap Year though that I formed the Flood and we started to properly record, on earphones as I say.

By now I am in Black Hole Myths – an art therapy/ outsider art two-piece with Grant Aspinall. I am past 40 and genuinely don’t know off the top of my head if it’s 42 or 43 because of the way things have gone. This book only contains the lyrics to the recorded material that is available to listen to online. It doesn’t include instrumentals from the various albums – like putting in a note on a musical piece just to represent it – but only the lyrics. It proceeds through the recorded albums with a chapter for each album.

CHAPTER ONE: THE FLOOD

Music went from black and white to colour for me when in my Gap year in Cambridge I formed The Flood who only recorded on binaural earphones. My brothers both assure me that the earphones were my idea to invent in a very prophetic speech I made in the barn in Cumbria before I ever set foot in Cambridge; but I did not implement the idea. I went down south after school and someone else implemented the idea. In around 2000, maybe 2001, we started to record on the earphones. You can hear it to this day as a play-list on Soundcloud. There are only six songs, and only two with a long enough lyric to warrant inclusion in a songbook but I would say it is a fine piece of work. We noticed that even the background static and feedback from an amp, when recorded on the earphones, as in ‘Voodoo Echo,’ makes a tone-poem in a neo-Classical sense.

The overall picture is more of a dark CD, dark in the sense of dark matter. I, who said I would plug my senses in the mains on the album, still hear the dark CD when I put on the dishwasher and the waves are accentuated into words! It can crop up all over the place! The actual play-list itself contains instrumentals such as ‘The Blasts’ and ‘F Sharp Minor’ that I am very pleased to have been a part of. ‘The Blasts’ is a math-rock number which I wrote when living in the shed in the band commune towards the end of my stay. ‘F Sharp Minor’ came together one night previously when we were at Agent G’s house and he h-a-n-d-e-d me a guitar in F sharp minor de-tunings. I think the idea is that when you detune the strings all the way down the streetname for E becomes “F sharp minor.” The guitar part I came up with in that one I would say was as good as the psychedelic guitar solo in the long version of ‘Light My Fire’ by The Doors.

We all met when Paul and I were busking in my Gap Year. Mark Velarde, a fellow musician and Beatnik was walking past with Tom and they stopped and asked for a song. I was singing one that went: “I confess my open heart/ is lying with her legs apart.” They invited Paul and I for a beer then we went back to their student digs, for they were at Anglia Polytechnic (APU). That was the start of the scene for me. When in time to come I was kicked out of Paul’s house by his mum, I moved in with the Anglia Polytechnic students, and was sofa-surfing. That was when The Flood formed with Paul and myself, with Niki (or Agent G) who also attended Paul’s and my boarding school and lived in the area, with Tom from APU and Steve too.

I took the name for the band from a quote from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, the first line: “when the idea of the flood had subsided, the rabbit, in among the flowers, said a prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.” There’s also the Biblical event, serotonin disinhibition, proximity to the Pink Floyd, and the fact that there was a literal flood at the foot of the oldest fell where my parents’ house is, where water seeped in from the overflowing beck in the back and turned my dad’s vinyl into an archipelago. When we woke that morning the dog was marooned in his basket and the vinyl scattered all over the floor!

I remember sleeping on sofas a lot, in those nomadic days, the extended Gap Year, not eating very well, deeming pot more important than possessions – and how much I loved my friend Paul who was on bass. If you listen to the Playlist on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page you find one song called ‘Mantra of a Madman’ where Paul and I are singing major harmonies: I inverted the Great “I Can, I Am” from Venice Beach, 1967 into the mantra “I am, I can,” because things had to be back to front for the earphones. You also find that my Floyd was very Freud and we broke the ancient silence.

When Paul and Niki went off to Leeds University and when I went to my own University, Warwick, in 2002, we would all still reconvene in the holidays in Cambridge. Mark Velarde, at some point, dropped out of APU and formed his own band with Jez. When I left Warwick with no degree I went back to live in Cambridge and that was the time of the school – a time when the youth artists commandeered an old, abandoned Primary School due to be torn down as a venue, a reading room, a rehearsal studio, a gallery, and a home. Some said it was like Warhol’s Factory. We, who were listening to the Velvet Underground at 16, and considered ourselves Bohemian aristocracy, loved it. I played an acoustic gig there one night, and the Flood also supported Mark’s band on another occasion.

So there was a period where I lived in the shed in the garden of The Flood’s commune (nicer than you’d have thought) and only down the road the School was going on. This was a time of road trips as well, for I seem to remember we were practising for Berlin. For our band or some of us and Mark’s band Tea With The Behemoth both went to Europe towards the end of the School. We went to Brussels, Paris, Berlin and then at some point The Flood came back via Amsterdam. I was still doing Beavis and Butthead impressions in Berlin, going up to the frontman of the other band and pretending to be Beavis, saying “are you threatening me?” I seem to remember playing no gigs on the band tour, just walking round drinking beer a lot, for mile and miles every day, then sleeping in the car.

I was eventually kicked out of the Flood. I came home from the pub one night with Tommo on 3 F Sharp Minors, 5 White Russians and several bifters and launched into an imaginary language while rolling round on the floor in the professional hysterics of neo-shamanism. My house mates called my mum down to have her take me away and I think at some point she told them I had written a text of Beautiful Functionality to do with inventing the net in my boyhood at 7 years old and didn’t yet know about it.

I came home to the north to attend University a second time but still took holidays down there for a while. Even though it was too late, I did after I left The Flood continue to have bright ideas for the earphones: one was to incorporate the theme tune from Withnail And I into a jam; another to put words lamenting the cricket being sold to Sky to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’; another was to put words to ‘The Firebird’ by Stravinsky, which seems to be “containment” of Grieg. When I came home circa 2003 or 2004 from Cambridge, where I’d been living in the shed in the commune towards the end, I wrote a poem starting:

The train of my thought is the 19. 30,

in one ear and out the other.

I later found out Syd Barrett himself, when he was going through his mental breakdown at the end of his time in the Pink Floyd, drew a picture of a face with a train going in one ear and out the other. During my time in the Flood in his hometown, he was rumoured to have been seen walking round with a fish strapped to his head. There was a lamp-post called “Reality Check Point,” where one night I spoke to some strangers about the possibility of injecting smack into the Universal Mind through the agency of snowfall.

Our little 6-song album wasn’t supposed to ape or mimic the Floyd: it was nearer the opulent light sabre fizz of Nirvana. It was more about the way distortion is clarity. It was more about catharsis by chaos. Still it was said that in the song ‘F Sharp Minor’ we got the cat from Piper At The Gates of Dawn just right. That means ‘Lucifer Sam’ – that we got the slinky feel of it right on the guitar. The binaural album is best to listen to when high and up loud too. As I say there are only really two lyrics which are as follows...

THE WARNING

“Going to meet with the Otherness,

best go get a party dress,

play a stone, live in the wilderness,

I'm going to beat with the Otherness.

Suddenly their brain is an alien visitation,

suddenly I am the imposter againe,

lying in secret wait of myself,

knife ready to treat the pain.”

HUNGER

I e I e I e have I e I e I e have

I e I e I e have I have Hunger

I'm a sick magnet I e I e I e I'm in want

maybe all I need is a new pair of shades

I'm a craving slave for you

your pleasure's dust your pleasure's just

your pleasure's just your suffering's bait

it's a sucker's fate for you

escape escape escape escape

your home your clothes and all you know

leave no footprint in the snow it's just a photo

escape escape escape your name

your stain your skin your dead routine

for the pristine dream for her

I'm going to get your freshness back

plug my senses in the mains

it's just a bloodrush to my brains

I'm going to get pretty much f***ed up

flee this world on a midnight plane

dance with the aliens and the insane.

CHAPTER TWO: THE FIRST SOLO ALBUM

Well, when I was kicked out of the Flood I came home to the Lakes, fuming, and set myself an ambition of recording three albums like Nick Drake. Many of us back in the Cambridge scene liked Nick Drake – and by that stage there was already one album recorded, the earphone album, which I wasn’t including but which I do now include. I returned to University, my local in the north, Lancaster, had a breakdown but pressed on to finish my degree; and when I had got my First Class Honours degree I was diagnosed mentally ill which is when I got together with a fine musician called Grant Aspinall who helped me make a solo album - something good to look back on. I don’t know what to say when it comes to Grant. At the moment I have the solo album he recorded for me on Soundcloud under the name John F B Tucker but there’s also an album of spoken word pieces called ‘Eternal Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths (which is our band name as a duo) that has been recorded but which isn’t yet online. On the former there are a handful of interesting lyrics; on the latter I only contributed one lyric, a spoken word narrative, while playing guitar, and narrating Grant’s spoken word pieces. So I’m going to give you the lyrics to the solo album first. The album is called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3]. It isn’t actually recorded on earphones but in a more normal studio set up, in a secret location in Disneyland, Paris. Grant was really cool in allowing it to happen – he says things like “it doesn’t matter how old you are unless you’re in a boyband.” Also “you don’t have to be Syd Barrett, anyone can do it.” My mother’s generation, he likes Bob Dylan and the Pink Floyd.

GROG LADETTE IN G

Baby we create the dawn

behind a veil where silence is born

and dawn conspires with the sea

and everything untrue recedes

and down into sleep with no dreams

and all that’s left is you and me

and all that’s left is you and me

no-one knows how to free you

eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou

no one knows how to free you

eeeeeeeeeeexcept for meyou

horserace books in traffic light

colours through the ancient night

in the end it’s all white

in the end it’s alright

ONTIMEY

If this thing were a woman

I’d be in trouble by now

and if it wasn’t I’d

be in double by now

like a witch she says

take FACE instead of fags

and then I put my

wounds up on bright flags

READING THE LESSON FROM JOHN IN ETON COLLEGE CHAPEL

Once upon a time there was an acid-rainbow

that struggled from a black hole and smashed through a window

of a big cathedral and landed on a page

and rearranged the sermon the vicar was enraged

O but then he found it bore a strange notation

and it was so profound he needed medication

and then the paper bread turned to acid which was nice

and everyone was singing music from a black hole by Jesus Christ

all the congregation gave their neighbours a nudge

and asked if every good boy still deserveth fudge

the wine it came in buckets through the back of the song

and even the vicar too, he started to sing along

3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?

I was at the beach I threw a stone to the sea

to rearrange the day and the deity

no-one was beside me except the pretty dog

oozing and exuding uncomplicated love

voices from the city they were heard between the waves

like lost souls trapped in the cracks between the paves

then I saw the mystery of the single shoe

and knew that it was time to drop a line to you

you were off your face on something by this stage

said there’d been an accident and were hiding in the cage

and Barnes has scored a chicken and blanes is a liquid knife

and wingers are allowed bikes in the afterlife

3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?

IN A FIELD KNEE-DEEP IN GRASS

Lovers and tools are breaking their own rules in the game

mad children play unaware of the guilt and the shame

pirates are looting the world and riding the breeze

angels and thieves are kissing at the tips of the trees

and I’m in bed against you

wouldn’t bet against you

I’m in bed against you

shouldn’t bet against you

if all that I’ve loved is a bunch of telly snow

still you can’t take away the afterglow

Science says don’t touch your dreaming gland

it’s all Thumper to you VS Edward Scissorhands

and I’m in bed against you

I wouldn’t bet against you -

I’m in bed against you

shouldn’t bet against you

and I’m in bed against you

I wouldn’t bet against you

I’m in bed against you

and b equals d

[Note: this song seems to be concerned in part with a tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ that has a pause where cut and stuck together in the reel.]

CHAPTER THREE: AGAINST THE EVIL EMPIRE

If it seems already that words, written words, are an Evil Empire compared with the fluency and currency of musical sounds, I think that part of the point. When I was still at Warwick University, and I visited Devon with my musical friend Mike we saw stickers on telegraph poles saying “Keep Music Live, Local And Free.” I like to rule my kingdom with music and think in music regularly.

That year in Devon, with Mike, we were back from Glastonbury. He had smuggled me into Glastonbury, backstage, in a cupboard in his camper van where I had an empty lemonade bottle to urinate in should I need to. The queues were long and the weather was hot but getting out of the van backstage was amazing and the first thing we saw was the lead singer of The Clash messing around peeing into a didgeridoo. It’s good to look back on things like this. Blank pages flung from the sun on E and mushrooms. Lying back outside sleeping in the rain feeling happy with a sense of impunity. Famously all the Glastonburies roll into one ball when you’re looking back with hindsight and I do forget how many I have been to, but some memories remain prominent.

There was another year with Agent G where I was calling out ad-libbed poetry over the bongo drummers at the stone circle. In fact before my illness I was just the sort of artist to do stuff like that: to call out ad-libbed poetry over the bongo drummers round the fire at Glastonbury stone circle on an E come up at nightfall. You’d suddenly hear someone shout out:

“One star leads to another star,

but the gateway drug has to be her bra,

in the back of the cinema,

when Star Wars isn’t going far.”

It might’ve been embarrassing for those with whom I was there, but I liked to waste poetry on the ego-loss breeze back in the day.

Anyway, I think I agree with James Joyce that it isn’t about the words or music themselves but what lies behind them. That was why it was so good when we did the song ‘F Sharp Minor’ in The Flood because we encrypted a node in musical truth without words. With this in mind I have organised a slim, streamlined pamphlet of miniaturist poems for the meantime. I already showed you the first one – ‘Unplugged In The Blue Room’ – but will repeat it for the sake of unity. The following miniaturist poems are the bits in my poetic oeuvre which others have said are the beautiful bits largely because there is something behind the words. They would work as defaced bank notes. In fact I’m going to give you the whole defaced bank note piece that was ideated in the old, abandoned Primary School in Cambridge, and actualised when I went to Lancaster. That means the idea was from before my illness and the fulfilment of it was from after. It means also that I am showing you some of my undergraduate portfolio from Lancaster, for the writing of which I was awarded a First by none other than Paul Farley.

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

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and

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.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE NEW DA VINCI CIRCLE

Well, the next phase of musical recordings is the most recent, when Dr. Robert urged me to purchase Ableton Live and gave me some equipment, a Soundcard and a compressor. He gave me a crash course in recording which took half an hour and left me to record in a home studio set up in the posh, coffee-cake dining room here at Cumpstones. A few weeks later I had recorded much of my back catalogue and that was then structured according to my brother James’s design of the new da Vinci circle.

James (because he’s a genius) designed the new da Vinci circle as a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 points of difference, namely

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

This not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by including a long squiggle might even simultaneously situate itself outside of the totalitarian machination of every word, book, sentence, paragraph, letter in every order which a new super-computer can organise.

James had also made another sheet to the <BEE> one that contained Badly Drawn Boy lyrics slightly imperfectly quoted and rendered as an anti-clockwise spiral that looks like a word-sunflower, a sunflower made of words –

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you…

So I turned up to the barn where they were both left to rot; and I read them; and on the second-made document (the <BEE> one) saw only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes! There was no new da Vinci circle! I assumed the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes – which seemed like the international language alphabet laid bare – to be permanently available to sensory perception, and left it alone.

A further visit to the barn proved that it had gone – on that particular sheet, only the <BEE> diagram remained. Then when our father passed, a further visit to the den in the barn was when I discovered the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had bloomed or grown pictures – pictures that seem to depict the lyric to one of my old songs! This came at the end of a long chain of events that increased in numinosity according to the number of items in the series.

James says to design the sheet where pictures grew took a deft left hand born of another deft left hand (meaning my mum) and I can believe it. So eventually I structured four solo albums according to the new da Vinci circle.

The material was well-written but the recordings are not that great: they are all an unchanging processed beat overlaid with a couple of guitars and a vocal, leaving a big, bass-shaped hole. I would say they are quite poor but at the same time they are part of the new da Vinci circle, and even have things like the sheet where pictures grew for a cover. So between book, record and photograph there is a kind of un-categorisable machine going on where the songs are as much scans or even scones as songs! So I am going to give you the lyrics to those four albums, album by album.

CHAPTER FIVE: ‘THE NEW BEAT’

What is the cover of The New Beat? It’s a picture of me looking good at Glastonbury at 16 with Dr. Calculator Ptom. Dr. Calculator Ptom actually named my second band Oedipus Wrecks, from way before The Flood, and we were quite good – some of our songs have been infiltrated into the circle. It’s the same with Secret Chord H who came after Oedipus Wrecks and only really had one or two songs: the material has been infiltrated into the new da Vinci circle. A Secret Chord H number called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ is the first song as a matter of fact. It’s just a shame that the renditions are not good and the songs not meant for the tron set up. A tron would be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge. ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ is a good song but with an unchanging processed beat for a backing and no bass it suffers a bit. I think this first in the cycle, The New Beat, is supposed to showcase me as a new Syd Barrett character and to be fair I have had issues with drugs, especially LSD, ecstasy, skunk and amphetamines. The production, orchestration, depth and arrangement is nowhere near Piper standard but I think the songwriting itself okay.

DREAM WITH OPEN EYES

(by Secret Chord H originally and used as radio jingle circa 1999)

Last night it seemed we couldn't

sleep but maybe I was dreaming.

The world expands inside my

hands it's getting heavy.

Of all the treasures I could

choose I can't seem to decide.

Today the shade was washed

away where I would hide.

Dream with open eyes, come

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come

below and we can fantasise.

Last night it seemed we nearly

died but maybe I was dreaming.

It made me feel sooooooooooooo

alive and soooooooo in love.

Dream with open eyes, come

below and we can fantasise.

Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come

below and we can fantasise.

CHOCOLATE DOG

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL

(aged 8)

BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE

Such a bad day at the office

down the pub to get pissed

though I can't afford it

we'll never get a pay rise

stay up till sunrise

call in sick in the morning

spend the whole day mourning

underneath the covers

where the fuck is Batman

Sugar Candy Mountain

waiting for some action

heard it brings good fortune

papers want a scandal

tell them the truth

if you can handle

what a fucking headline

where in Hell is Tinkerbell

somewhere alone and dying

dawn calls in sick in the morning

what's the use in trying

don't believe in dying

it's shocking and appalling

it's four o'clock in the morning

and Paradise is boring.

CHIEF OF THE BLACKBIRD SPIES

Well I fell up a sycamore tree

and nearly spilled my glass of wine,

and though nobody came for me

I didn't mind it I felt fine,

for I was trading stories

w/ the chief of the black bird spies

amongst new leaves and old branches

that don't know how to tell lies...

He said to forget the job,

sack the boss, and hang the cage

which containeth all your rage

for but the minimum wage.

I said it's easy for you

in your neighbouring Otherness -

be Nature custodial or frightening? -

to avoid the mad enemy Stress.

He said he finds it fun-loving

to tense-hop all around

for cataclysm is catalyst for the cat

that sat on the map of sound.

Quite soon he spread his wings

until his wings were spread

and flew to Morrisons supermarket

for a tamed and manner'd head.

He’d said he thinks privation

is the mother of imagery,

and inconsiderate violation

at the root of the creation of beauty.

We’d bemoaned a lost society

w/ all its malaise and cheap talk,

its word-ways no better than

cheep cheep squawk squawk.

We’d spoken in no uncertain terms

and out in the great outdoors

where Mother Nature operates

according to her natural laws.

When he left it grew quite quiet

for he was a tremendous talker

and had a way with words

and had said I would go far…

when I left his sycamore tree

I was glad to see my own home

and return to my own kind

near the beach that’s good to roam

but I remembered that black bird

and his eloquent influence

performing from the end of a branch

in ways that just made sense.

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

AIR RAID SHELTER

(originally recorded on binaural earphones in The Flood but not used for their record)

Air raid shelter, we're in it together,

let's not get entrenched too deeply,

fear and pain's our only motivation,

got to break free from that habit apathy.

Clinging to loveless, sweaty, rubber limbs

won't cure your heart, it's a painful art,

air-raid shelter, we're in it together now,

wrap me away in your wombs and duvets.

See this world from outer space minor,

saaaaaaaaafe distances have found

all our solid, common ground,

echo grammanon habeo amore.

Won't your spaceships come to find me,

pull myself right back to the centre,

attack on all sides, hold you soooooo tight

now that there is noooooo time.

I’m just trying to forget how to smell acid,

and still it seems acid isn’t flaccid,

but I think that you’ll find I still

got there in the end somehow.

THE NEW BEAT

Door the case / fluff the line / feel the last / dull the white / hone the drift / dawn the most / deaf the ear / grope the bread / fee the seat / blue the ticket / dream the lemon / boat the weed / I watched myself today in postures of raw decay because there was nothing else to do / mine the brick / dwarf the vote / peace the bull / D the random / renew the two / widen the road / steal the wings / gate the lane / mean the scene / send the head / rend the Hell / roll the ball / I watched myself today in postures of raw decay because there was nothing else to do / visual radio was on in the car and bike and train and bus and lorry and van / visual radio was on in the boat and tractor and plane and train and truck

(C/ Em/ G/ F/ G/ C)

LUCY IN THE SOUL WITH DEMONS

(warning: contains voices)

I no longer know if Lucy in the soul with demons

even happens to be an actual substance

but I know that acid can alter personality

and when home-made and strong be very scary.

Do not flinch at your own shadow when

you take its dark receipt into the glen

for panic in a wild stallion horse’s eye

can spread like wild-fire across the madding sky

where a digital wind of blue and green

blows in fake and chemical as glycerine

and the derangement of the senses can go

hang its head in shame, dear Master neo-Rimbaud.

PRIVATE DETECTIVES AND SECRET SPIES

I sleep in a hole for the Hoover tonight

there's always something not quite right

look at a wall it's not too hard to see

all the cracks and flaws beneath the paint

maybe all we need is to decorate the place

private detectives and secret spies

seem to have uncovered all of my lies,

scar sand-birthmarks beneath my skin,

should I sever my face with razor blades

to show you some ugly truth w/in

well maybe I should but I'd prefer to

score your flawless body with sin

like two new humans made for life

with default buttons to wipe any slate clean

and one of them man and one of them wife

in Crufts as it is in the black angel’s death song

A SMALL ADVERT FOR FREE SEX

My name is David Bonky,

I'm a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there's a tear up my jacket

and I heard a different word:

Trans/ philo/ quis/ ation.

I fly through colours and shapes.

Lightspeed is my passport.

The countries are for apes.

A knock-kneed hummingbird

table on which to land and read

does not seem to me to be

such an unreasonable need.

I'll breakfast on snooker colours,

spark a dullard cigarette,

sail the wind of change and

have no room for regret.

I deem it quite Romantic

to go do the monkey bars 

with my legs into her open

chamber underneath the stars. 

I think love is both the all-

seeing eye and love is blind.

So wear an emotional condom

before you fuck my mind.

For that’s what language is,

the emotional condom of

the world into which we’re

all thrown in search of love.

Soon I must fly on, from

this gnarled treefinger perch,

and heal the glitch in the soul,

and join the Giant Search.

I don’t know what we’re

searching for but it’ll find us first.

Maybe just some peace and

quiet to slake the eternal thirst.

(reconstructed)

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.

OCEANS SMILE

(originally Oedipus Wrecks)

Oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with rain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost, the last thing a glass gene.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Death will come on silky wings

but I for one will not go.  

A soul is endless, oceans open

and keeeeeeeps a perfect O.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Go drink the ocean with your tea

cup, give your heart far out.

If oceans smile with liquid eyes

then they'll give you a shout.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Too drunkenly I sail the water

on Rimbaud’s smoking boat.

With whiskygills primed in fire

I sail the waves to Boot.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

(reconstructed via the new, synchronised word)

CHAPTER SIX: ‘SONGS IN G’

This second album in the new da Vinci circle contains only songs in G. It’s not that good, but you have to see the new da Vinci circle as one of the quirks of the net – an un-categorisable machine that includes music, picture and literature.

The cover of ‘Songs in G’ is the melted tape. The tape that had a pause where cut and resealed in the reel was a successful fusion and one of my favourite musical concepts. When it was successfully fused I put it in the oven for a writing experiment. I took it out, and photo’d it and that is the cover. So already the cover is a work of art. Then you’ve got the numbers and two of them are co-authored by my brother James. In fact the one for Flora is “James’s song.” I believe he actually knew her sloppy, angel kiss. She would’ve been the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh in my teenage love poetry, and was – but I never got the girl on that front. I did get other girls but not Flora. That’s why he got to do ‘Flower-press Love Poem Music’. When I say he got to do it, it seemed like I was writing the song, with the guitar in my hand, laying down lyrics, but the music came from James for that one and originally the lyrics were an American guy on live streaming – but I rewrote them.

The song ‘I Knew That She Loved Me,’ meanwhile, was initially written as a poem when I was at Flora’s school (Oundle) and only 16. It lately was put to music to gorgeous, Irish effect and I feel it one of my best numbers.

BONECHINA

Where has all my washing gone?

Maybe it has gone to Heaven!

Mirrors on the street rebound.

Everyone is happy and free.

My dream-meet experiment tended there.

Not the local DogMuckels.

All walks of life were gathered and one.

To wake from the dream is to die.

That’s when you put on your socks.

Unless they’ve gone into the sock void.

Don’t mind me I’m paranoid.

I’ve got some bizarre ideas.

If a clock is only as fast as a cheetah

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel

but I’ll pad downstairs and drink a cup

only at my own slow speed.

FLOWER-PRESS LOVE POEM MUSIC

If a flower-press ending on cannabis 

could seem to equal a dialysis 

then a love poem hoping to impress Flora 

could seem to equal more a motor 

but giving up weed in order to be free

I can’t see how this really matters to me

and if it’s a system I just love you still

and love has not gone under the green hill

if all the noise in the world would be quiet

I’d hide in the cupboard during the riot

if systems rule with fear not love

I’d half it and laugh it with an imperfect dove

here I am at the foot of Sea Ness

this anagram of boredom is in a mess

I’m all set up for a walk on the beach

to watch the waves rolling out of my reach

I trust my family and I trust my friends

I hope my dog’s life never quite ends

the kitchen is clean because I cleaned it myself

my father’s philosophy is up on the shelf

if all the greed in the world would go away

I’d still be Bede at the end of the day

if power is wrong at least it’s transient

a birthday came and a birthday went

and this is the me we all want to see

and this is the way I know to be free

and this is the Now that is in Eternity

and this is the leaf that came to the tree

if the wording of this little contract is mine

alas you are not but I’m still feeling fine

I’ve seen the stars that are out tonight

I’ve tried to forget exactly what colour is white

I’m drifting to E on the end of a stick

I’m searching my memory but it’s just a block

if only I could hold you in my arms

I’ve fallen for all your loquacious charms

ICARUS UNBOUND

(a finger-picker in the drone of G)

I really love you my friend Mark,

don’t get me wrong I am not gay,

it’s just a way for me to start,

it’s just something to say…

placing bets on raindrops running

down the opaque window pane,

I have been a melting robot,

then they said I was insane...

there you are across the water,

living on the Isle of Man,

if only my attention-span could

be more like Peter Pan...

you’re the one who taught me de-tunings,

stairs down to The Velvet Underground,

I am the one in love with Flora,

and that fertile map of sound...

you say it’s got too late to make it,

I hear you crawl through new air,

but I was never one to fake it,

I for one don’t really care...

in your room was a very high ceiling

and I remember it was bright,

I can almost taste the loving feeling,

even though now it is Night...

you could not tell if the vocal

in Aphex Twin was a demon

so made us listen to Nick Drake when

on another easy comedown...

lines are blurred in drug-slurred idiom,

lyrical streaks now open up.

I’m thinking of youth which has now flown

but I’ve still got a little plastic cup.

THE FIRE-DANCE

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 GREEN BLUES 

I read through the news, 

hats off to your blues,

a chimney falls under my head.

I stomach the wood 

that tastes very good, 

better than Jesus’s bread.

I glow for the coal, 

don't bury your soul, 

backwards in spire I get high.

I'd go for the house 

that's quiet as a mouse 

and emblazon my name in the sky.

I'd slip through the skin 

of a thesis as thin 

as the Rizla it's in and be born.

I'd light it and write it,

I’d burn and unlearn,

I’d even hairdress the dawn.

I'd sip on White Russians, 

on white and South African, 

and dance to 360 vision.

To take out my eyes and

see in all directions at once

is but one general direction.

SONG OF THE NEON DAWN

X-ray specs don’t lead to sex

and mobile phones don’t have gay undertones

and television is a big decision

and the internet can’t just forget

and laser beams are born in dreams

and digital clocks don’t come in flocks

and Ableton Live is my nine to five

and the latest App is an angel’s lap

and I sing for Kate whose always late

and I write the Night until it’s white

and my vertigo lives down below

and my neon dawn will be reborn

and we’ll renew the morning dew

and Google our senses out there like a tide

and dream of love aloft on wings

and try and forget the nights we cried

and the alphabet is the suicide note

of Nelly the Elephant if you deem it true

and love’s gone veggie over Disney again

and the grass is green and the sky is blue

and E is a bet with the myriad mind

and I’ve seen so much I’ve gone blind

and a poem’s a seat where you sit and eat

and a driverless car has gone quite far

and a use for dust is a beautiful bust

and the wheel of a bike is a map of the Lakes

and a rugby match is quite a catch

and an abandoned band is written in the sand

and a red skin cell is a state of Hell

and sadness seems the mother of dreams

but maybe that’s the other way round

and a flower grows just for your nose

BIRTHDAY OF I. A.

You’re not a knock-kneed hummingbird, / you’re not a birthday of I. A, / and who you are I’ll never know now, / and if I did I’d never say… / I am your med-banging elephantine, / and I cry on the windows of trains, / and maybe all I need’s a length of, / need’s a length of metal chain… / and through it all I wish you rainbows, / made for two and very strange, / and somehow what’s most familiar, / is what really can estrange you, / rearrange and slowly derange you, / oh yes it most definitely can. / So don’t run in the corridor / or you’ll sin in the eyes of Santa / as he watches on.

TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

Another, another, another fucking joint.

[Note: this song which was originally a Secret Chord H B-side concerns a cassette tape with a pause in the opening number where the reel is cut and re-sealed]

THE SWITCH THROWN

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)

and blessed is the rain that heaven sends

it is the life for the gilly flowers

some might say

it even falls up

and you’re going to have to think againe

for a clock’s only as fast

as a wounded cheetah

who knows how to

get drunk on cold Wifebeater

but gets drunk instead

on the rhythm and metre

O love thanks

for coming round,

O love cherish

your map of sound,

O love I dreamt that

we were drowned

I made such a mess it’s wasn’t cool

but at least I didn’t

give it away

that music is

the sacred pool

or whatever else I had to say

it’s half past four but then again

the Night is young

the switch is thrown

whatever could

the poor boy mean

he means his heart is yours to own

(N. B. co-authored with my bro Mr. James P D)

SAD HYPOCHONDRIAC

I know she's only a phone call away...

maybe she's got something to say?

Anyway by now her number's probably changed...

seems even numbers can't just stay the same.

You always used to say to me

“to love someone truly is to set them free” -

you always knew better than me

you always knew better than me.

I know she's only a daydream away -

transient rainbow not made to stay -

only made of sunlight and tears! -

beauty like that should last for years.  

You always used to say to me

“to love someone truly is to set them free” -

you always knew better than me

you always knew better than me.

I’m just a sad hypochondriac.

Just another shooting rock star in love with the black.

Don’t want to die of a sudden art attack.

I’m just a sad hypochondriac.

I'm just a sad hypochondriac.

I'm just a sad hypochondriac.

I'm just sorry for everything I lack.

I’m just a sad hypochondriac.

WE COULD BE SO HAPPY

(played at a gig on a rooftop in London, the last gig by The Flood)

Serotonin dopamine

no Codeine or Diazepam

I got ruin'd you got wrecked

let's just say yes to each other’s plans

we could be so ha ha ha happy

we could be so ha ha ha happy

Buproprion and Fluoxetine

a toooooooootal loss of all

language-is-thought-control

it's just some sedative we'll

hide away under snow

I wake up dying for some

junk food to save my hole

when all the money has run out

and our housing contract expires

and the pigs come to track us down

the night will be filled with burning fires

the night will be filled with screeching tyres

the night will be filled with burning lyres

we could be so ha ha ha happy

in the future that ain’t what it used to be

on a drug called Strictly Free

on the loss of the cannabis battery.

WICKER CHAIR

Baby I can see the tree kneel down

in Nick Drake’s de-tunings before you

maybe it’s just the germs accrued

upon the windowpane maybe it’s true

love what’s love halved in chaos

love’s the answer love victorious

love’s the hope the heart literally

needs in order to survive without which

it can stop and I love to be alive

so I thank you for bringing us together

everybody loves you between us is the weather

this fair day stay a while and play

trouble’s all gone away love is the only way

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN: ‘THE WHITE DOOR’

This is the album with the sheet where pictures grew as a cover and we’ve dealt with this by using the songs that are most dud, null and flat. Never before has flatness been so aesthetically accurate! It all contributes to the kind of multi-media that the new da Vinci circle attains. When I say the songs on this album aren’t that great, the first one for instance I decided to write and record for a mate while he was in the air on a plane – from start to finish – and send to him before he landed! It’s for the old drummer from The Flood. Naturally the song we mean when we say the sheet where pictures grew depicts a lyric is also contained. The lyric that the pictures depict goes:

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It was about the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic first person lyricism or ‘I’. I don’t think the guys that did it understood that, but to be honest I don’t know who did it, or why, or if it was my brother and I.

HEARTBOOK

We’ll never take E on a green,

Glastonbury hillside ever again,

never see Love playing through dark,

aviator Ray-Bans after the rain,

we’ll never be young as we once were

and looking back I know it’s all gone,

the real E’s a she and she is not free,

but we can converse while you’re on a plane

flying over the Atlantic ocean

you message me online full of emotion

to say new material has emerged

I tell you you’ve never done anything

which you need to apologise to me for,

you kept me in food when in Berlin

I spent my last money on a whore,

Everything happened back in the day

and we isolate bits to form a narrative,

everything that is except for work,

and we used to say live and let live

flying over the Atlantic ocean

you message me online the ball still in motion

to say new evidence has emerged

If work sets you free I will never feel

freedom not like I did back in the day,

the day we were young, you and me

playing in the band, whatever we used to play,

and only the songs seem to survive,

the poems don’t seem to want to last,

and I’m trying to learn Ableton Live,

and get your message like a blast from the past

flying over the Atlantic ocean

you text me online w/ a true notion

to say unheard music by us has emerged

TRUE LOVE DOT COM

Dead clock plodding play a different song // we're waiting for some action and some change to come along // been waiting all night at true love dot com // you're only just starting to notice the mushrooms are still too strong // dead pedestrians thinking fumes stay in and get fat in your new chat rooms // we chase the wave forms of the dusky dawn w/ black shadow cat-prints going backwards on the lawn // and I confess my open heart is lying w/ her legs apart // and if she said she's in love w/ me I wouldn't go taking it personally // for love has no ego as everybody knows  and something inside me she's given me grows // and a playground swing on the vexed edge of life sighs empty and forever and out falls a leaf // and not into love does that green leaf fall where wet Westerly winds swoop and call // we are the glitter on the Christmas trees and not the litter in the filibustering breeze // and the E comedown has no value in maths // and the loonies all walk on the wrong paths // and the grass is green on the Other Side // it pulls the ropes of the evening tide.

THE SUPERSTRING GUITAR

Cool white is the highnote if it's up to me,

cascading down to the deep blue sea -

will blue trousers over the trouser blues

fall down on the Excellent News?

Music penetrates is-ness,

renovates sensation's quest.

Out in the desert the pigeon-stars

ripe w/ new creatures won't bring out the Tsars.

Water splits but the desert's dry.

Stonemouth silence chewing gums by.

Why the high note seems to be white

is the sideways gravity in the smile of night.

The Super String Guitar was electric and was smashed.

Transcendence is the dream of anything squashed.

“You're going to get a dog w/ a laser brain.”

L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.

Impairing the wild pear tree to tears.

Impairing the wild pear tree to pears.

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.

Phew for a minute there you lost the screen.

E = L to the pregnant snorkel.

E = L to the pregnant snorkel.

L to the pregnant snorkel = mc squared.

Flutter in the sideways gravity of the smile of light.

BAXTER

I love my dog

he’s barking mad

when he wants to smile

he wags his tail

his uncomplicated love

is healing for the soul

he has seventy words

like the book with smell

I wonder what the others are

maybe later I’ll know

mashed potato and stew

and a Pizza Hut

and the waves of the sea

go round and round

swim in mystery

but do not drown

ice cream is nice

on Freedom’s shore

so is sugar and spice

and more and many more

and so it came to pass

that I sat in a room

with the dog by my side

and the music on

and I’ve got the dog blues

yeah I’ve got the dog blues

which only means

I’ve nothing to lose

and the stream of life

flows on and on

and a cup of tea

awaits in the kitchen

and the dream of love

has not quite died

and I feel assured

deep down inside

because I love my dog

he loves me too

what more do I need

don’t need to sniff glue

to feel all high

when I have fresh air

and the Emperor has

abdicated againe

and a nice long sleep

will reunite me

with planet earth

at the end of the day

what more can I say

FAREWELL TO THE SEER OF SEA NESS

Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -

see you later when the future is less.

What will you do about your trance?

Will you send a postcard from France?

I hope that you have a lot of fun…

I hope that you may find someone -

and the scenery streams by the train

and the world is small beneath the plane

Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -

see you in the future when the past is less.

Will the future there be quite cold?

Will you feel sad and feel old?

I hope that your dreams all come true.

I hope that there’s hope for you too -

and the dreams stream beside the car -

and you make it Westwards quite far.

Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -

see you in the light we might bless.

Will the visual radio still swirl?

Will you still blame it on the girl?

I hope that your heart will beat on…

I hope that your hope’s not all gone -

and the freedom you find is the best,

and the beauty you dream is a quest.

Farewell to the seer of Sea Ness -

see you in the middle released from the stress.

Will the sound of silence be heard?

Will they hide the mystic bird?

I hope that your love arrows down.

I hope that you don’t hit the brown -

and the light will puncture you

and the good life will still be true.

THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)

[originally Oedipus Wrecks]

I'm the only one left, left to shoot my

own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile

and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.

Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-

waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts

lament. Come on baaaaaaaaaby, you know it's e-

asy, don't say maaaaaaaaaybe, let's go crazy. Death

awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give

me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The

ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.

||||.

[Note: when years later I discovered the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures grew, and the pictures seemed to depict the lyric to one of my old songs, this is the song.]

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

[spoken word narrative for B minor]

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. 

(2002)

WAVETABLE IN C

I remember when my mnemonic for the guitar strings was Even A Dick Gets Big Erections… now I don’t need one, I’ve heard a better one from a fellow autist, high-functioning autist – Even A – no – er - Every Acid Dealer Gets Busted Eventually. At the moment I’m on James’s red electric. I remember when he got it for Christmas and I got an acoustic, a Fender, an expensive one, and I wanted to be Kurt Cobain so I was annoyed that I got an acoustic not an electric. I was upset and offended my parents. And now here I am playing on James’s red electric. As I say my mnemonic used to be Even A Dick Gets Big Erections, but this one’s in C. I’ll leave it up to you to work out what that means. Your guess is as good as mine. It could be for countryside. It could be for court case. It could be for caliphate. It could be for civilisation. It could be for completion of the soul.

NO DEATH ONLY CHANGE

Don’t be afraid/ there is no death only change/ let’s pretend, let’s pretend/ there is no end of play/ tonight, tonight/ I only believe in tonight / so for once/ throw your cares and travel with me/ travel with me/ travel with me/ travel with me/ I for one/ have long gone/ out the door and far away/ down south/ mouth to mouth/ to exhume a brighter day/ live for this/ chance at bliss/ this kiss that wants to form/ on the air/ everywhere/ as the fungus sun beats down/ on the nervous under-town/ planes are the shoes of clowns/ yeah yeah yeah /

THE POSTMODERN ID

I’m thinking about the old days,

how the hippies are not ageless as the sun rays,

I’m thinking about the ideals of 60’s,

and though I don’t believe in pixies

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...

I’m thinking about the imminent future,

there has to be a place still for Nature,

thinking about the state of poetry,

the young light has dawned on me...

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.

I’m trying just to think about the present,

and how my life could be so pleasant,

don’t want to be distracted in daydreams,

by a woman as lovely as the sunbeams...

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.

I’m thinking about the doors of perception,

how literature is beautiful deception,

you might find the bedroom is hidden,

you might find the dawn is unbidden...

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

so try to pass the gravy over

Facebook now and be free.

Don’t know what a Dorian Mode is,

but I know who Toad of Toad Hall is,

and the lady in my life is all missing,

and the music’s only meant for kissing.

DOWN IN THE PATCH WORK QUILT BELOW

I like the light and the flight of arrows

I also love the sound of running water 

Down in the patch-work quilt below 

Where the river of sadness used to flow

It’s easy to trip up on a daisy 

Lazy of us to let it get this way 

Down in the patch-work quilt below

Where mad children splash and play 

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi 

She might go veggie for reasons of Disney

Down in the patchwork quilt below 

Where the ego-loss breeze can freely blow 

Heading down to the sea can free you 

No-one knows how to free you but meyou 

Down in the patch-work quilt below

Where we’ll inevitably have to flow

[N. B. co-authored with a little help from my brother Dr. Robert L G Tucker]

WALKING THE BEAT

(impromptu spoken word piece)

Women can be very beautiful

they can be sharp-elbowed too

they think when we discern their beauty

we are being blinded by love

love is a banana custard to them

man’s highest emotion to me

but single is my jingle these days

I sleep on a single mattress

if I ever do sleep that is

the dog’ll be beside me

he’s a symbol of gravity

and humour and katabasis

it’s been a while since I’ve been in love

and what lovely dresses they can wear in summer

ones with floral patterns on

that come all undone -

it’s winter right now

winter has her compensations

I’m sitting in a coffee-cake dining room

there’s a Christmas tree

adorned with baubles and bright white lights

I suppose they should come down

it’s the 2^nd of January

Bertrand Russell’s History of

Western Philosophy is on the table

some chocolate from Finland

some baccy some papers

some of my mother’s driftwood art

Quality Streets which my dad

used to call Quantity Streets

and what else I don’t know

a toothbrush that hasn’t been opened yet

CHAPTER EIGHT: ‘THE ALARM CLOCK’

This final album in the new da Vinci circle has myself sitting in a room with the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen for a cover. While my dad was dying my screen just bloomed this numinous, purple light. Its colour was co-aligned with mystery, sex, suadade, longing and shame thus to incorporate every vowel-sound into a feeling. I am holding a guitar, my brother James’s red guitar, though Dr. Bob took the photo that forms the cover of the album. The album contains one of my best lyrical pieces – ‘Skunkfoot’ – that reads like a manifesto from my New Beat youth. Indeed there are those from my New Beat youth who would only have kept ‘That Black Natural E’ from the previous album and ‘Skunkfoot’ from this one. I like to think though that the <BEE> thing should contain more information, that it could be about packets of information. It could even be seen as a movie! This then is the final of the four in its cycle. Since the original which is now being remastered, I have had the idea to add a new song on the end, but it’s only an instrumental (‘Black Flake of Infinity’) so you won’t notice unless I tell you.

A POINT FIVE

“I was going to pack it with content… a clock is only as fast as a cheetah. I said that at seven. I got to the end and realised I hadn’t pressed the right buttons on Ableton. You have to press the right buttons in life. That’s more like it. Previously on this program oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain. Also I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. Lucy in the soul w/ demons might happen to be an actual substance. And if a flower-press ending on cannabis could = a dialysis, a love poem hoping to impress Flora could = more a motor. That was it. Then I realised – see I was trying to put Jimi’s amp guitar on the vocal and it was full of feedback, squealing like an electric donkey. Then I realised the vocal hadn’t gone down at all. I’d pressed the wrong buttons. I am hoping I pressed the right buttons this time. You have to press the right buttons. And now we’re going to have a typing solo. I’m noticing the space bar is like the snare drum. I type with two middle fingers you know, like William Carlos Williams.”

TEST MONKEY IN B

We’re aliens looking for life on Mars

aliens trying to make life in jars

aliens homesick for the stars

trying to find home in the all-night bars

in a world with no more la di da’s

the sunset silts its knickers and bras

the night is bright with white guitars

the fat cats smoke their fat cigars

the wall inside is still the Tsar’s

I watch the passing of the cars

I’m through with reading inveterate scars

in a room resounding with loud hurrahs

SKUNKFOOT

(spoken word narrative to go over a drone of E)

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.

(2002 - 2003)

THE WISH OF NIGHT

Madness swirls deep in the heart

A butterfly resides in you

A tragedy of feelings lost

surrenders to the wish of night

& in this world I can't explain

I know exactly where I am

Inside a crevice of desire

In the dreamy air of a lover's scent

Wherever you take me, that's where I'll be

In the weeping skies my mind gives up

& falls into the arms of sleep

I'd fade to know I thought of you

& the world has risen to my hands

& the earth murmurs beneath my feet

& the light of all that's good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams

I guess that I'm afraid to tread

The purple skies for the risk of a word

But at least I'm sure of fear

As she gives me the strength to feel afraid

A whisper fathomed deep in mine

Well I don't even care to cry

& I don't care to face the edge

& plunge into the oceans dead

& the flame of love has lit my candle

& the sky has echoed my desire

& all the air is drawn into my lungs

& I know the secrets of the shade

& I know the wars that come from peace

& I know the mystery of love

& I know the resilience of the soul

& I'm sure that knowing you is true...

FIZZY POP

I’m a clown, I’m a clown,

a clown in the circus of death.

I had a mate who sent the words

“Liquid Crystal Meth”

into space, into space,

and I was underneath it,

shower down, shower down,

make me feel alright.

No-one knows, no-one knows

what I went through in life.

The sadness shows, the sadness shows,

the trouble and the strife,

but under the stars, under the stars

I dream of love eternal,

shower down, shower down,

make me feel alright.

Fizzy pop, fizzy pop,

gets drunk in Monopoly Jail,

time goes slow, ever so slow,

as slow as a garden snail,

but ecstasy is a teddy bear

back in the garden of Eden,

I don’t mind, I don’t mind,

if you let me off my chains.

INSTANT TRAVEL

[warning: contains voices]

Not far away in Magic Faraway Land,

there’s poetry written on the bank notes,

sadness gene is smitten with dreaming gland,

the God Particle foreseen in the dust motes...

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the soul with demons,

H20 stands for your hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for Extra Sensory Allowance -

so how about we take a long holiday there?

You buy yourself a ticket with the opposite of bling.

You’ll see through the frame of angel hair,

and might just need a love-song to sing.

Yeah yeah yeah, our love is the answer,

spinning in a circle around the tired sun,

waiting for the cure or vaccine for cancer,

seeming to be dreaming of the mid-day moon…

POETRY BUTTONS

Smart guitars between the stars

allow the ladies burn their bras

I don’t ask for whom the beck

puts a necklace on her neck

let us have a go then, you and I

when we are tired of getting high

piss on the dawn when dad is dead

poetry buttons are in my head

poetry buttons for endless revisions

and helpless self-derisions

got to keep the quavers at bay

got to make the monster go away

the monster is not me

he lives beneath the deep blue sea

when all the air in outer space

is consumed without a trace

through a prodigious systematised

detuning of the strings we rise

would you compare me to a tramp

now my face is on a stamp

the poet makes himself a tea

now he’s a mystic visionary

poetry buttons for endless revisions

and helpless self-derisions

got to keep the quavers at bay

got to make the monster go away

the monster is not me

he lives beneath the deep blue sea

voices voices everywhere

and yet not a drop to think

think of England when you’re on

drink of physical hyperlink

all the world is on a page

where we spend our petty wage

engage with the dark night of the soul

that dreams in meaning like a troll

poetry buttons for endless revisions

and helpless self-derisions

got to keep the quavers at bay

got to make the monster go away

the monster is not me

he lives beneath the deep blue sea

TEACHER OF MY HEART

I have found you you're the Teacher

of my Heart there's only one one

and though my mind is endless old

my tender heart is foolish young

and my timeless impassion'd battles

of emotion have sooooon begun.

You have lost me in a Teachers

whisky bottle drinking down down

down the shipwreck IS the treasure

harboured in my pirate undertown

where visions of the real Unknown

await us there when we drown.

They have told me it's a T-shirt

that's the body worn by the soul

O to have to discorporate and wash

our eyes in the Fairy Liquid bowl

it's good for you to know a goal

there is no music from a black hole.

THE STAIRCASE

Once upon a time I was spiked

and thought I could fly

jumped right out of a window

and fell through the sky

somehow managed to land

on my smelly size 12 feet

seven stories below on

the heaving city street

now I tour the public schools

giving talks to forewarn

all the youths about drugs

in the world where they’re born

taking LSD can change

your innate personality

take it from me please never

take the drug they call LSD

Splinter was the master of

the Turtles in the kids cartoon

and now he’s dead and he’s gone

beneath the morning moon

and I’m so sad to hear of that

for loss is painful in the heart

so may we all remember

him in our chosen art

Sitting at the back was a

boy whom I instantly knew

would do everything which

I had pleaded with him not to do

puffing on a cigarette

making all the others laugh

maybe he’ll grow up to be

a kind of talking giraffe

When I fell I broke both legs

and did some damage to my spine

but I can walk if only slowly

and am in my headspace fine

I can still sing but not dance

which I never did much anyway

and I sing about health over

wealth at the dawn of this day

WHISPER

(originally by Black Hole Myths when we were still called Funnelspirals)

I wanted to hear musac from a black

hole by Judas Priest but the guys

sent a parrot after a carrot and

through the conch to outer space

singing 'I won't always be an orange

just because you've sectioned me,

no I won't always be on Orange

just because you've sectioned me

but at any given time I'm working

in a crane' and Jesus said 'Syd by Ray

in a way Spiderman's handwriting

has been too obscene, I rake the

blade over the wishbone of my

legs Breakfast All Day/ gay

teachers can still lay eggs and

I won't always be a lemon just

because you've sectioned me,

no I won't always be on Lennon

just because you've session'd me

but at any given time Oedipus

is spying me up in the shower,

why I'll break the speed of speed,

rendered squander never priceless,

I'll never speed againe, at any given

time I'm a rare aquatic insect.'

(Hackney)

CHAPTER NINE: THE EFFERVESCENT MOBILE PHONE

If James’s <BEE> presents an hypothesis, I have something that presents a Point of Arrival. This refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

I actually did have a mobile phone that buzzed off before it rang, through every technological inlet in the room, telly, stereo, laptop, air. So I wrote that down – that monochromatic drone – somehow - and it became a song that falsified the Nirvana barcode through bastardisations and mishearings of other people’s songs, that nevertheless worked as a piece of music unto itself, sustaining narrative, meaning and musicality all at once. It has been called as good as Rachmaninov and goes as follows...

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.

(2015)

CHAPTER TEN: AGAINST JEALOUSY

Who knows why your phone goes like that when it does? Imagine if it was a present from someone to reward you for helping invent the net at seven. I don’t wish to enter a trance about my condition or blow my own trumpet. I wish to upload the songs of the new da Vinci circle onto Bandcamp as they are structured in this book, but am reliant on my brother fixing my old computer where the recorded material is stored. Even if it isn’t possible to get the albums back online, it’s still the best book I have done; and I can only blame myself for taking them down in a fit of vanity. My bro is actually in the kitchen with me putting tomatoes in a toastie with cheese right now. Some people might be jealous of what he has done, or I, but the whole point is, there is nothing to be jealous of, it’s not a competition. It’s not about better and worse those vain, materialistic, Western concepts. It’s not about Darwinian values. Poetry is the unique expression of the unique individual. If I felt like I was losing some battle, some race, and if I wanted, I could easily go on about some of the things I have done with my life: at 7 I helped invent the net; at 8 took care of The Lords And The New You Know Who twice; at 11 went through an experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark; at 15 attained the face of stars; at 18 so many things including speaking against September 11th in 2000 and writing an English Literature A-level exam marked at 100%. After school I recorded an album on earphones, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First, built the Tower out of magical books as an instrument of philosophy, worked at a numinous purple bleeding screen, continued an experiment into a tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, discovered the sheet where pictures grew, falsified the Nirvana barcode, attained visual radio and more. They have given Nobel Prizes for less; but the point is I still don’t know, or, rather, we still don’t know, quite whose the new da Vinci circle albums are. I (largely) wrote the lyrics, melodies and guitar but there is also the structure being James’s to consider. Not just that but there is an influx of voices in my system plus the help of real people involved in my work of late. If the 4 new da Vinci circle albums go back on my Bandcamp page, because I ostensibly wrote and recorded the songs, I would still feel happier this time round calling it by Various Artists. Then we would have a nice machine, an un-categorisable machine, marrying image, word and sound, into the co-imaginative operation of the new da Vinci circle, online, and I think it would advance the cause of the net too. But after all this, something tells me the dead computer where the songs are stored might not be salvageable, is forever dead – and that this might make me wretch. Even if we can’t get the recorded music back, at least I still have a guitar and a voice and can play the songs. The best ones for a solo acoustic set up are ‘I Knew That She Loved Me,’ ‘Dream With Open Eyes,’ ‘Air Raid Shelter,’ ‘Sad Hypochondriac,’ ‘The Ghosts Lament (The Guzzler Men),’ ‘Oceans Smile,’ and a few others too. I am often to be found playing a gig to no-one at the foot of the oldest fell in the night-time, like a black bird performing from the end of a branch. Sometimes staying up at night takes me back to my Gap Year, occupying a haunted, empty warehouse zone of the psyche, trapped in a bad, anti-social, un-natural, vampiric sleep pattern, sliding out of responsibility, growing dangerously detached. I spent the formative years of my life on drugs and all five minute glimpses of what I wanted to do with my life, for example be a scholar, were ruined by drug-taking. I became a failed musician, like Syd Barrett said of himself. Now it is too late to “make it” for at 42 or 43 I am not likely to be the one to bring the people the new music – but I gave it a good go back in the day. My day was a day when CD shops all closed down on the verge of our potentially making it; my time was a testing and troubled time. It’s why I hope to put it right and further the cause of the net with this present experiment. Back in the days of The Flood I would write the bulk of the material and go on missions to get weed but otherwise didn’t pull my weight so it’s nice to fork out some money to include them in the present textual flourish. I like now to stand at the foot of the oldest fell on a summer night when there is still a remnant, fleeting, evocative evanescence as a backdrop to the darkened fell in the foreground; and to stare at that patch of sky until it is brought home to me how weird everything is, how magical and mysterious the universe. I call it the Silken Veil Effect, that remnant light while the fell has darkened; and it makes me think of aliens, the magic of the 1980’s, how life could be a computer program, and as I say I stare at it until it loses meaning, and life becomes detached, naked, and I remember how weird everything is, how magical and mysterious the universe. Now the stars are out – they sleep in the open like Boyscouts. You see them at the ends of the tree-fingers. The tree-fingers point up to the stars, the heavens, the firmament. I only absorb so much then come back to the kitchen. Right now I have two files open – one the present songbook, the other philosophy. It’s hard to know which one to write in. James has said he’s going to try and save my hard-drive tonight. Mum’s irate with me for letting her vegetables burn still. I’m thinking of picking up a guitar and playing ‘Flower-press Love Poem Music,’ to try and cajole my bro into doing his magic with the hard-drive of the dead computer. Ah, there are other songs, but I might say they got away. So I go and say “goodnight” to James and he says “come in” and shows me a device where he’s captured the hard-drive, says it works, sends me away to plug in and get busy. I have teething troubles so seek his help a few more times but am eventually alone in the solipsistic kitchen of fiction uploading the songs, at last, four albums onto Bandcamp. It takes two hours. I have a cup of tea and a Vape pen. The final, finishing touch is to put “Various Artists” for the band name for the new da Vinci circle albums. Then just like that it’s done. My musical career is complete. Now we just have to wait until someone says the song for Flora was the best, and was James’s even though he wrote it through me; then we’ll have to kick in with the promise that Flora’s pretext is best when nearing endlessness so we’ll put all the other countless songs online as well; but I hope not. I believe in the new da Vinci circle as a unit of four. Otherwise it doesn’t feel like we got it done. The reason it’s so good is that the new da Vinci circle bit is about dissecting a bar of light. Light knows no jealousy, and we would do well to copy it. Quite who is in the band ‘Various Artists’ I am not sure for I hear soooooo many voices that I don’t even know the identity of, but I’d say at least my brother and I, and also my mum. So it is that it’s like a document signed by Einstein’s value for light-speed, c. That could be what Professor David Morley means by the prism on the forest floor. He says we come at words aslant as creative writers. The band Various Artists could be just me, but the Flood were a bunch of other guys as well, and Black Hole Myths is a definite duo. I think I am freer behind the mask, a bit like a timeshare salesman, if I do use Various Artists as the band name, and I take it back – it is honest in that I am not the only one. It shows humanity too. So often I am there trying to remember a line and someone else gets in there before me and something that started as mine becomes ours. So we get the ball wide to the wing – it becomes a team effort and drags us into dreams as well, where many texts are stored. Still, I believe the songs I put in to the <BEE> collective if that’s what is happening are good songs. At least some good songs went in from me. I am being a good comrade. I am showing camaraderie. Mum can still smell burnt soup – a flower-press ending on cannabis was her contribution. Also a line or two. “We’re going to be pissed off for weeks about the burnt smell,” she says. She sends me to bed. It’s past 3 AM. The house is silent, the road outside empty of cars. Soon it will be dawn and I will hear the birds chirruping in the trees. They’re mine. Fly left.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: A RECAP OF THE BEST BITS SO FAR

As requested by James, a recap of my best bits might run as follows…

I enjoyed the way the earphone album starts, with math-rock written in the garden shed; and also that jam in F sharp minor de-tunings, the latter because we got to encrypt a node in musical truth without words.

It was good when on the binaural earphone album I sang:

“Going to meet with the Otherness,

best go get a party dress.”

I also enjoyed including background static and feedback from the amp in ‘Voodoo Echo,’ so in other words not-playing. Of course I still think it good when on the earphone album I climbed up and sang:

“I’m going to get your freshness back,

plug my senses in the mains.”

There is still even now the temptation to augment The Flood’s stuff on Soundcloud with a new solo acoustic album. For it was said after the “plug my senses in the mains” episode that (1) it was a good riposte to Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures where he talks of 360 vision; (2) I should follow up with just myself and an acoustic – but whilst I may do that, there is a reason why The Flood’s work didn’t move seamlessly on, and that is my mental illness. It would be false to get to the end of the new da Vinci circle and go back and retro-impose a continuity to the Flood from this late vantage point in time.

So it is that our nice machine is still ‘on’ and I am not harbouring ill feeling unto those that robbed me, or cursed me, or blamed me, or hypnotised me, or drove me mad, or operated on me in my sleep, or tried to remove a portion from my brain, or persecuted me, or made me walk naked in the capital, or shopped me for the fire-dance, or dressed me to look like Hitler, nor dwelling on that side of things.

Nevertheless if I am to incorporate my brother he will tell you in the Flood I was robbed: that to invent the binaural earphones was my idea; that they tried to remove a portion of my brain; that the rich man who popped up with the earphones was the true thief, who gave the music I wrote away to another, and swanned off with his inherited wealth; that they treated me like the drugged up brother in the Russian Roulette scene in The Deerhunter; that they pretended the spliff was my willy without letting me know; that I was indeed driven nuts by it all whereupon I was kicked out of the band in a state of disrepair and the rich man swanned off with his wealth. That is what my brother would say was the true story of The Flood; and they even had the cheek to call me an evil Nazi! Me whose idea it was to invent the earphones!

When I came home, and embarked on a program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading, self-help and exercise, that was when someone had the vision to place me under a curse, or worse hypnotise me. I can’t imagine someone being so vision-flaccid as I call it that they would dream up an idea like that. This is why there is no seamless continuity between the Flood and the solo album made with Grant. That moment, the result of plugging the senses in the mains, the continuation of it, was all, well, in life not art – all in the hallucinations I went through on the road to becoming diagnosed mentally ill. As I say I am not 100% sure of this but I thiiiiiiiiiink to retro-impose an adjunctivity or continuity to The Flood from all the way in this present tense where I’ve already been through the rest of my career would be false.

So it is that we arrived at the solo album Grant recorded for me: I liked making the first track because it’s beautiful and the second track, which is a dark instrumental, and which Jess, of the Cambridge days, listened to online and declared “amazing.” It was also ingenious to get my bank card number into a song as the chorus and I think I was the first person to do that.

Then the new da Vinci circle.

On this, I liked revamping ‘Air Raid Shelter’. This was initially a song by The Flood, recorded on earphones, but left off the album. I got the idea from the air. At the time I was best mates with Paul. I later found out the actual Beatles themselves had their first rehearsal in an actual air raid shelter! So I am partial to that song. I remember one time I played it at Glastonbury stone circle to Agent G and my second brother Dr. Robert and his mates – they all said I should be doing music professionally, going on tour andcetera. I think that was the year I met Thom Yorke in the queue for a burger van, shook his hand and called him a genius. I think that was also the year I walked past Kate Moss and Pete Doherty while I was on LSD.

Finally putting ‘I Knew That She Loved Me’ to music, on Songs In G, was another breakthrough moment for me, and now when I pick up the guitar in boredom and project myself into the role of an imaginary performance, I have an extra song to play. As stated the lyric to that was written when I was but sweet 16 so it’s been knocking around a while.

On the new da Vinci circle albums, I also liked reworking the old Oedipus Wrecks number ‘The Ghosts Lament (The Guzzler Men)’ which is the one we mean when we say the sheet where pictures grew depicted a lyric. For this number, which has substantially changed since Oedipus Wrecks, I overlaid some haunting and ethereal synth with just one guitar and one vocal, removing the beat. It’s one of the strongest numbers I have done.

In the new da Vinci circle series I especially liked the sprechstimme of ‘That Black Natural E’ and also of ‘Skunkfoot’ which both rewrote poetry from my Warwick University undergraduate days. Two of my old cronies from those days which were mainly Cambridge days, Mark and Jez, who were in “the other band,” Tea With The Behemoth, said they would only keep ‘That Black Natural E’ and ‘Skunkfoot’ of all the recent recordings, but then it wouldn’t be enough for the new da Vinci circle to be real.

Likewise, there is still the matter of the solo acoustic album I could add to this but then we’d have overstepped the mark. We’d have done it good and yet be facing the endlessness of it all. That’s why discipline should be upkept in terms of containment of the new da Vinci circle to four albums, however crap they are.

The best thing about the new da Vinci circle series is the sense of sharing, of being at one with my brother, and my mother is also involved too. Some of my better pieces had to be h-a-n-d-e-d down to James, like ‘The Switch Thrown’ for example, but when you’re together, the sense of collaboration is enough to get high off, and is better than the awful loneliness I would otherwise feel.

So it is that I look forward to meeting my friend Grant tomorrow, and maybe having a jam with him, who has just got back from holiday. We play to an audience of my mum and Grant’s wife in the sitting room at the foot of the oldest fell where the stars re-align. One of our favourites is ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ by David Bowie. We also like to detune the guitar all the way and go astray, have an impromptu jam in de-tunings for half an hour, but the women don’t like it as much.

Grant will tell you it’s better to show yourself striving for the light than struggling with the dark. He’ll tell you all sorts. If you have schizo-affective disorder it means when you’re up it’s symptoms of psychosis associated with schizophrenia and if you’re down mood-based symptoms associated with manic depression and bipolarity. Grant will say open a third category and call it spirituality.

James comes down and gets some cereal, cereal. We speak about him and his writing. It’s not ready to read yet but will be one day. I trust he’ll be good. When I tell him there is no sweet cereal left, he says “Special K’s are alright.” In the context of the conversation about the international language alphabet it seems a great comment to make. He takes a bowl upstairs and eats of the Special K.

CHAPTER TWELVE: ‘ETERNAL FULL MOON’ BY BLACK HOLE MYTHS

This is a guess that Grant and I will organise the already-recorded album of spoken word pieces according to the running order we have agreed upon over the phone. This means largely me reciting Grant’s poetry over music we’ve put together. It means spoken word, sprechstimme and twelve-bar rap too, with no melodic singing from me at all. There is a difference after all between an album and a collection of songs; and this album as we have agreed upon it is a proper album, made in a studio, with a spoken word theme that binds it together. Grant’s lyrics are great, and he plays drums and sings too, also plays bass and makes videos and paints.

On the album, which is made under his guidance, he plays to what was one of my strengths as a schoolboy – public speaking. I also do the guitar and there’s an instrumental at the end called ‘Seclusion’ which I wrote and played on the piano. That’s if it all goes ahead. It should go ahead because it’s a fine piece of work. Just look at the song where we put Blake to music for example: it could be the best I’ve done. Grant sent me off to put Blake to music so I married a guitar part I knew with ‘The Laughing Song’ from Songs of Innocence And Experience and it was a perfect match. I recited the poem over the top, and Grant put down some gorgeous vocal harmonies and also sang the poem outright too. It’s a fine piece of work, a fine collaboration.

So the only lyric I contributed is from a bipolar song called ‘Hope’ that works by presenting my angry, distorted, dissonant guitar to start with, over which I read some of Grant’s fine poetry; and then it finds a second moiety comprised of Grant’s harmonious guitar as the piece journeys from tension to resolution. It’s the second half of the song that I contribute the lyric to. I wrote the lyric in Grant’s living room.

I’ve actually been reading about real black holes, but none of it went in. That’s only tonight, a night after a day when Grant came round. We’re still not sure about the album because a lot of the numbers are integrated into his solo work, and merely feature me. It’s a puzzle, when you have free reign on the net, and with self-production, not to repeat things. Stephen Hawking meanwhile said radiation could escape the event horizon of a black hole which seems an upbeat message but none of our songs are about that. The article I read was about whether or not the universe is a hologram, a simulation. “The implications of the holographic theory are murky at best,” claims the article. It was looking at black holes as evidence for or against a holographic universe. Their surface area is 2D but their volume not.

At the present moment there is a 4-song E. P. version called ‘Eternal Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths on Grant Aspinall’s Bandcamp page – but as I say the other four songs of the eight we agreed upon are also integrated into his solo career, and I think he’s lost his passwords too, so we may never see the full spoken word album as it should be. Nevertheless the songs are all online, on Grant’s Bandcamp page, just integrated into different projects, like ‘Self-Portrait No 357,’ where you find five songs I am “involved in,” some of which might be transferred to ‘Eternal Full Moon.’

The name ‘Eternal Full Moon’ came from Grant, whose vision the album is. I believe he also made a painting called ‘Eternal Full Moon’ to use for the cover – a massive painting on a massive canvas, depicting a rainbow coming from a black hole (as in a song lyric I had written). Grant is a very skilful and accomplished painter who paints largely the portraits of the faces of the pantheon of rock and jazz musicians, with the music on and in mind. There is something synaesthetic going on w/r/t/ his work that I like, and it seems to blend the emotion of Romanticism with the postmodern readymade (the latter in the fact that he often goes from photos). The painting ‘Eternal Full Moon’ appears to be an exemplum of what they call “the Eschatological Imagination” meaning of or relating to the end of the world. Beneath the rainbow that carries strange notation, you see the sea of the apocalypse, and remember that music is made of waves; and in that sea there is an Evian bottle of water floating around, like saying the apocalypse is man-made, made through Man’s greed, and consumerism. The attention to detail on the Evian bottle is nice, because you can even see the crumples in the plastic. The moon is also present in the painting, which sees Grant graduate from the portraits of faces to doing something more abstract. I am happy to have collaborated with him, and hope that the spoken word album still comes together, even if I only did one of the lyrics this time round. As my mum would say it is a good feeling to be able to share, and Grant says this album is as much about me as it is him.

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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ‘UNPLUGGED AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS’

Have I not done enough already?

And if so what of my solo acoustic album ‘Unplugged At The Foot of Sea Ness?’

I can know where it goes in the book but not where it goes online… there seem to be three options. (1) If I augment the new da Vinci four on Bandcamp I spoil the fact of there being four. (2) If I go for the same Soundcloud page where my solo album that Grant made for me is, it’s not ideal and messes up the chronology. (3) If I go for the other, empty Soundcloud page, that puts it in a loop with The Flood, then I no longer succeeded the Flood with what I did with James.

So it is that I might need to leave it out!

I would say the best place to leave it online of the three options is Bandcamp, and that by not calling it “Various Artists” I am showing people that it’s a different thing.

So there we were only a minute ago with everything in the right place, and now I’ve gone and put Unplugged At The Foot of Sea Ness on the end of the new da Vinci circle four on Bandcamp.

In a way, I think it might be alright if I do that, now that the 4 are “Various Artists,” and this new one is just me and a guitar. As I have stated, after the “plug my senses in the mains” episode in The Flood it was said that I should do an album of just myself and a steal string acoustic guitar and now I have. I feel it is better placed on Bandcamp than in the loop with the Flood stuff on Soundcloud, because if it was in the loop on Soundcloud I wouldn’t have followed up the Flood with <BEE>. This way, at least I got to follow up <BEE> with an actual album, because the ongoing spoken word album with Grant might never materialise.

THE NEW SNOWMAN

We are the velvet e’s,

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the valley road below,

beneath us as we fly.

We are the velvet e’s,

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the valley road below,

beneath us as we fly.

Blissful Lovingness is

where all religions meet.

On the corner of the street.

I am the Burger King,

I can eat anything.

Especially a Double

Whopper with cheese -

and in reality the killer

stayed up all night.

STAVING OFF THE WASTED YOUTH

Please wait while you are on hold,

your secret world will not be sold,

and while you work out what’s gone on,

we’ll treat you to a song.

A cow has sat upon the throne,

and said to travel by Smartphone,

for all connection should be long,

and the maths you do is not wrong.

Thank you for waiting while I love you,

thank you for searching for the truth,

there’s only one God above you,

w/ medicine for a wasted youth.

You’ve been placed in a long queue,

but everyone’s in love with you,

procrastinate and find your crest,

I think your love is best.

The mashed potato that you ate

could sell for millions in the Tate,

and London renews sensation’s quest,

to put your mind at rest…

Thank you for waiting while I love you,

thank you for searching for the truth,

there’s only one God above you,

w/ medicine for a broken tooth.

ECSTASIA

Ecstasia, it will find you,

ecstasia will track you down,

wearing your bro’s blue T-shirt,

somewhere in a different town…

a comedown can be difficult,

a comedown can really hurt,

but it’s going to be easier

in your brother’s blue T-shirt.

Love, it will wound you

then forgive you all the same,

and one day death will find you,

and nobody is to blame...

I’m waiting at the foot of Black Combe,

I’m waiting for my true love,

and E has no value in maths

when you come down from a Dove…

FULHAM F. C.

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the best

we are the best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the fucking best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the best

we are the best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the fucking best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the best

we are the best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the fucking best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the best

we are the best

Fuck you fuck you

we are the best

we are the fucking best

FABLE

How much is that druggie in the window,

he’s washing off Steve’s holographic beard,

in the totally powerless shower,

he’s making me feel pretty weird,

blah blah black sheep

have you any wool?

Yes Sir, yes Sir,

ten fucking kilos…

How much is that druggie in the window,

I think he’s gone beyond the pale,

they made him a living art installation,

and he wishes he’d stuck to the ale,

blah blah black sheep

have you any wool?

Yes Sir, yes Sir,

ten fucking kilos…

How much is that druggie in the window,

the vision I had has grown dim,

I can particle accelerate Nothingness,

but I can’t write a poem like Jim,

blah blah black sheep,

have you any wool?

Yes Sir, yes Sir,

ten fucking kilos.

HEY MAN HEY

Hey man hey what do you

have to say about today?

These new pube-shaving,

lecky-saving times?

The air seems slightly strange

to me in all honesty,

but I’m just a guy

that plays hide and seek with rhymes.

I lost my teddy in the void

when I was paranoid,

now all I am is all I owe...

at least I dared to dream

unlike a mechanoid

of love the likes of

which we still don’t know…

Well scream is bad,

when you go quite mad

and you lose your dad

and the magpie gets down

into your bones…

and you can’t come down

from the under-town

like a decaying clown

and you know the truth

which nobody owns.

So you must obey the dust

in which you trust

and which lies at

the bottom of everything

and bore the Lord

with your secret chord

and your word-hoard

knowing not just what

tomorrow will bring.

LIQUID MIRROR

The night is alright under the electric light

and I am thinking of you

how we used to love each other

black and blue forever and ever

how I used to watch over you

while you slept and when you wept and

when we leaped and love was fire

now the light comes fair and even

hyperlink to very Heaven

just like it was when love was open

and it is still full of hoping

full of groping full of dreams

love has not gone stolen pollen

lustful London lips are swollen

and liquid mirrors still run to the sea

where the fish swim without insanity

even though they have fucked eyes

we already went there,

we already did that

sometimes you’re a willing dupe

and sometimes a doormat

PHET ACCOMPLIS

Love, love, good for the brain,

the more you eat them,

the more you go insane.

Love, love, good for the heart,

the more you eat them,

the more you break apart.

They’re dissipating energy

with spiralling entropy,

falsifying vision with

indoctrinated feelings,

colouring perception

with vague mysticism,

you’ve been plugged in

to the mental health system.

Love, love, good for the brain,

the more you eat them,

the more you go insane.

Love, love, good for the heart,

the more you eat them,

the miracle will start.

They’re dissipating energy

with spiralling entropy,

falsifying vision with

indoctrinated feelings,

colouring perception

with vague mysticism,

you’ve been plugged in

to the mental health system.

HIGH, HOW ARE YOU?

Oh high, how are you? I’m high and I’m new.

Oh high, how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.

Here you come with your candle eyes

and your big horizon and your higher skies

here you come with a beautiful smile

I’m going to talk to you for a little while

oh high, how are you? I’m high and I’m new.

Oh high, how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.

Here you are with your hopeful stance

and your lucky star and your backward glance

here you are in the eye of my mind

let’s hope we don’t go completely blind

oh high, how are you? I’m high and I’m new.

Oh high, how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.

There you go, with you angel tear,

and your brand new car getting into gear,

there you go, with your perfect skin,

can’t wait until you come back again

oh high, how are you? I’m high, and I’m new.

Oh high, how are you? I’m high, and I’m through.

[reconstructed]

SNOWFLAKE SONG

Snowflakes are falling to the ground,

that’s why the door-mouse makes no sound,

I could sing in an imaginary tongue,

but I find Klingon is best for song...

then it’s up to birds to saaaaaaaaaay,

“hope you have another blinding day.”

There are no footprints out there yet,

but I might go out and lose a bet.

Sometimes I dream of mapless space,

a little place without X tattooed on its face.

So then it’s up to you to saaaaaaay

“hope you have another blinding day…”

snowfall was injecting smack

into the Universal Mind a while back,

and now I’ve nothing left but tea

still I think you’ll find it’s well enough for me...

so now it’s up to me to saaaaaaaaay

“hope you have another blinding day.”

I COME FROM THE JUNGLE

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I am a giraffe, I am not Bungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle,

I am a giraffe, I am not Bungle,

I come from the jungle,

I come from the jungle.

EVEN A DREAMWOMAN GETS BEAUTIFUL ELECTRICITY

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in

can lead all the way to the loony bin

and make you forget just how to spell

Winnie the Pooh and get unwell...

but even a dreamwoman

gets beautiful electricity -

come with me, come with me.

The way she hugs my myriad mind

I’m flying through colour but colourblind,

I wish to escape the shape of the paper,

I wish to taste the waste of a flower...

for even a dreamwoman

gets beautiful electricity -

come with me, come with me.

Come with me love away from the violence,

I don’t want to take a vow of silence,

don’t want to have to conceal this feeling,

for feelings are not meant for concealing...

and even a dreamwoman

gets beautiful electricity -

come with me, come with me.

BARNESIE

Barnes’s goal against Brazil

it is the best I have seen still

it was not born under the hill

Barnes’s goal against Brazil

Barnes’s horse got on the course

they said to have more intercourse

so Barnes’s horse flew to the sun

when it got back it was no done

Barnes’s name is not in vain

for I’m the one who gets the blame

inside the flame when the game

has gone insane and is quite lame

Barnes’s nose I don’t suppose

objects to the way her garden grows

and the redolent rose strikes a pose

for the garden hose that no-one knows

Barnes’s wait is just for Kate

whom it would seem is Head of State

went on a date with a mate

and came back home so very late

CHRYSALIS DAYBED MUSING

If you said to me

I would’ve fancied you

had you not let it be known

that you want to eat my bones

then I’d say back to you

girl I don’t want to eat your bones

but of course all the while

I want to eat your bones

but I’ve not thought it through

for if I’ve eaten your bones

yummy as they may be

then I can’t make love to you

but if I suddenly said

and this is coming from me

I don’t want to eat your bones

it would be the saddest thing

so what I really mean

is you are in my heart

you are in my dreams

where there are no bones

pulchritudinous sylph

you’re the reason to hope

like a primrose in Hell

through whom I would traipse

just to hold you again

in my slender long arms

quench these insatiable

fire alarms

and that’s when we’d kiss

that’s when we’d glow

that’s when we’d shine

that’s when we’d know

HOW TO BREAK THE LIGHT SPEED LAW OF NEUROPLASTICITY

You're The Juggernaut that's what you are

walk like an Egyptian and wriggle your little wing

like a winged chainsaw flying up in the cloud

swoop down and seal my soul and everything

For I'm the witness of this scene

I've read the pages of orange and green

I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean

otherwise I'll offend the mating queen

On Grand-darth's Ship I went off a-sailing

suffice to say your horror-packet is served

and when I get back I think I'll give you a ring

for it's the least that you my demon have deserved

For I'm the witness of this scene

I've read the pages of orange and green

I've got to keep my new yellow T-shirt clean

otherwise I'll offend the mating queen

and when you score such a radical goal

it stays with you in your open, Holy soul

and you get no money and get no headlines too

but you've done what someone's just got to do

TEAR-JERKING SENTIMENTAL ENDING SCENE

The friends I’ve made

I’d like to keep

and brush their hair when

we get to sleep

I think this illness

is a monster

chill with the stillness

and love yr brother

the severed notebook

went on for ages

with no connection

in all its severed pages

I hate these voices

these infernal voices

I made my choices

they were not James Joyce’s

now I want to stay free

I want to stay me

I stay calm

in all uncertainty

and I want to stay cool

and not be the fool

who was the Smartest

kid in school

O crossroads of

all inward spiral

I hope your smile

does not go viral

the severed notebook

itches with skunkosis

in my back pocket

pre-diagnosis

and I now look back on

youth that’s flown

over the houses

into the unknown

today it’s snowing

there is no knowing

if the creative

juices are flowing

and I want to stay free

and I want to stay me

and I want to stay calm

in all uncertainty

yes I want to stay clear

as a morning beer

now that you know

I’m the ancient seer

and I live for you

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SELF-REFLECTION THUS FAR

Without the <BEE> albums my songbook would be obscurantist and neo-phobic, making me look like a cultural heathen, a remnant, unoriginal hippy lost in the modern, Digital Age; and with the <BEE> albums you might even be forgiven for thinking it is (at least in part) my brother James’s book. It does contain the collaboration of the new da Vinci circle, but it is largely my musical journey that is depicted, in my words and music. Still, the only original idea as such in the whole book appears to be my brother James’s idea: that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. So it’s as if I was, for those four new da Vinci circle albums at least, loaned my brother’s guitar to see what I would do with it. I think it at the moment the best book I have done, proceeding as it does chapter by chapter through the albums I have made that are available to listen to online, which lends the book a sense of order, a sense of organisation that I greatly appreciate. If I had done this and only this I would be happy… one of my old friends, Dr. Calculator Ptom, said of my writing “it should’ve just been one book about the band.” Although I haven’t included much of the material from the band he himself named – Oedipus Wrecks – because it’s not recorded – this would be the book in question, if I had to have done only one. My sister thinks music can be 4D, and prefers song lyrics to the monopolisation of indigenous wisdom in regimented metres. Indeed, my other brother Dr. Robert (who is the truly musical one in the family) says my lyrics are “meant for wiping up semen” and that “art is tending to the Low not High end these days.” So it is that on a sunny morning in Cumbria I feel okay about this venture. I am not claiming to be the new Bob Dylan or John Lennon, though I know someone in the music world (Mike Eccleshall) that once declared me better than both and the most aloof artist since Nick Drake; I am just setting my lands in order. It is good to sing, masculine even, in the Oral Tradition of the bardic child. I am of the school that says if you belt it out loud enough nobody will care if you can’t really sing. My guitar meanwhile is quite good but they come much better still. I would say the higher you climb in the branches of the tree of academia, researching the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark et al, the more you appreciate music, that universal language, and the less you appreciate academia. Now I would appreciate input from my bro who I think is asleep upstairs, so I can only ad-lib in impromptu fashion while I wait. Now he comes downstairs as if he heard me think! “Thinking?” he asks as he steps in the room; then we speak about the new, glass chopping board I got for mum – that has four bees on it. He asks what I did with the old one, but already I notice that if I try and record everything of our one minute dialogue of only a moment ago, most of it got away! So now he goes back upstairs to his bedroom, and now I think of putting the sausages on, because as James pointed out they go past their sell-by-date soon. Well, we have been called Shaggy and Scoob before, and often talk about food. So I put the sausages in the AGA and realise this book is a correction on a former songbook called Soundcloud Rain that went wrong at some point; for after all Mrs. Zadie Smith says us writers write to correct previous work. Jim Morrison pictured a wall with a scratch on it and said we try to perfect the wall with further scratches. While the sausages sizzle, I reflect on what it means when your work is not your own. One’s work should always be one’s own, not a Communist ego-loss experiment, a poetry hive-mind or an omnijective interface of random access co-imagination. But what when you hear voices? What when you collaborate? What when other people are trying to use you? What when your brother and mother want it to be one pool? What I don’t like, is when I can’t get away from influence. I believe in individual genius, and I believe in my own individual genius too. As I have said I don’t feel like going on about it, but am someone who helped invent the net at 7, took care of The Lords And The New Creatures twice at 8, was marked by an experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark at 11, attained the face of stars at 15, forewarned of September 11th at 18, in 2000, and also at 18 among other things got 100% in an English Literature A-level examination essay. You also know what I went on to do after leaving school, including recording on earphones, hosting the Plough alignment, getting a renegade First despite mental illness, working at the purple screen, building the Tower, conducting the experiment into the tape with a pause, discovering the sheet where pictures grew, falsifying the Nirvana barcode, attaining visual radio broadcasting dreams, and all of it was not for a penny. I think if I was a neutral and someone described someone like that to me I would believe he was a genius, and now the sausages are sizzling and I gather the CV is why they had to do <BEE> through me, and so on top of it all, I came out as a fifth rate musician who was completely misguided in going into music. So: that’s why the book is alright: it’s not high and mighty, elitist, exclusive. It’s something any old person can do, and do at least as well as me. It’s egalitarian, it’s Amateur, it’s Hobbyist, it’s D. I. Y. It neglects to turn any situation in my CV to my own personal advantage. So I eat a cooked breakfast and settle on this; and afterwards make mum her morning coffee as I do every day. She wants James to turn the AGA down a bit because it’s so hot; so I go upstairs, see that he’s eaten the full English breakfast I made him, tell him she wants him to turn down the AGA; and he asks why I can’t do it; so supposing it will make no difference if it is me, I turn it down, turning the notch slightly, a CM, clockwise, which might suffice as a whole plot where I am coming from. As my dead dad used to say when he was a kid: “I’ll do it my lone.” So I did it my lone and now here I am, thinking of investing some money into publishing the present text. I rather think it would make me happier. The Flood meanwhile – now that they know it was me that had the idea to invent the binaural earphones – don’t even wish for me to be the “seer” associated with the foothill of Black Combe, Sea Ness. The locals up here know me as the seer. I was walking past a house once and there were two people in the front garden; and as I walked past, one of them said to the other “that’s the one that’s the seer.” Why The Flood would want to take this away from me as well I have no idea. But I have thought of something else to say. It is about the barn conversation where I for one first mentioned the earphones.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE PROPHET AND THE LOSS

I have recently had the revelation that upon leaving school I was raped. If you speak against September 11th in 2000 and it still goes ahead you were raped. So that is my revelation: I evolved, and was raped. So now I would like to take you through the speech in the barn, which has been reconstructed.

Yes, in the year 2000, in the old smoking den in the barn, I was making pretty speeches, and some present there remember that I actually founded a new religion, in ordinary speech which to recapture is difficult, but I can break it down. There were inventions, prophecies, ambitions and aphorisms, all mixed together in fluent speech but which can be categorised now. First let me reconsider the 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 of a corrupt politician. 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. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!

To recapture the prophetic aspect (an aperture on rapture) is another challenge but I was basically saying: “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, maybe in India. I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11^th and I don’t that a good idea but it might happen. Meanwhile, 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 also 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.”

Ambitions were also laid down. 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 invent the post-poem is another 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 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.

Then fourthly there were the maxims and arrows that came hand in hand with ordinary speech. 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.

There was also the seemingly minor matter of dad’s art dealing business. I was saying it was code or recourse to euphemism for a pollen smuggling business based in Morocco. He told us he was an art dealer nicknamed Blue that charged the Germans for the return of their Russian-plundered pastoral paintings, but I started to entertain that it was a lie to protect his family. Still to this day I don’t really know the full story!

Anyhow, I was also saying Jesus was a proto-hippy-stoner-poet, who would’ve smoked pot in our day and age. I was going on about how I liked they way a sprinkling of Tinkerbell’s magic dust makes them fly in Peter Pan, how a Mario mushroom confers energy, how they fall asleep in a poppy field in The Wizard of Oz to attain the Emerald City. It was a good conversation, where I also pointed out the four of us are named after the Doors apart from when they had a girl of course, and how we are born in a season each, going Spring Autumn Winter Summer and how we march right left right left in the hands. Of course there are four compass points too, seasons, legs of a horse, wheels of a car, sides of a table, and even dimensions in the mapping of spacetime in Einstein. My speeches for there were probably a few were often punctuated by the word “revolve!” which meant we had to revolve whatever we were smoking round the circle. If I had written it down it would be like notes on hyper-vision.

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.

The speech would have sufficed as a written text, or the start of one, had I written it down. That’s not just the cannabis making it seem better than it was. Indeed, it was like wasting a good book on the air; and there were so many things in it that started to come true – like the earphones, The Scientific Papers, the office block party, the God Particle hunt andcetera. It was as if the rape was going on on all fronts. It starts without cognition, just a burning psychosis in the brain when the Towers fell, that I tried to douse with whisky. You then have to try and translate the mute, befuddled shapes of the preverbal into words; to acknowledge the stranger; to negotiate peace terms with the unruly unconscious. At the time there was a war of misplaced revenge and ego-parade waged against the wrong country, and Paul kept a list of scurrilous oxymorons bandied about on the News, like the War on Terror and the peace-keeping missile, to hold the authorities to account. I was in a daze, and we were still trying to make it work as a band, a band that recorded on earphones. Now that people know me they think I am more a Nash character.

It’s a good job I kept writing, if it lead me to the truth. Very often writers don’t know why they write until it gets to the end. To heal the soul of the world is as good an efficacy as any. If it’s true I had the idea to invent the earphones as my brothers assure me, I was raped on that front as well, and even the old band would agree with that. What a time to be young while all that was going on, the Age of Terror, the war of misplaced revenge and ego-parade. And in among it all Prof. Morley took The Scientific Papers which I was going to write, even with a near-verbatim classification. It’s literally the case that almost everything in the barn conversation became part of my being raped after September 11th still came true. It’s taken me a long time to see it as well. At first there is no cognition, just a sensation of burning psychosis in the brain. Yes, I was downing whisky to douse the flames in my Gap Year when I was living at Paul’s house, so bad was the psychosis, and one might imagine that it was what rape feels like. That is, I think it makes sense if I was raped, and if that was the gateway to mental health troubles that I would go on to experience. We have to eventually translate that pre-verbal thought-pattern into words. We have to acknowledge the stranger, negotiate peace terms with the unruly unconscious, before healing can begin.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE NEO FLOOD ALBUM

So, now all that remains to be done is drink herbal tea compress sans sugar, read philosophy and cogitate on finishing off The Flood. That is, it strikes me that we could add a new album by The Flood to the mixture. Agent G and Tom from the band have okayed it for me to organise a new Flood album. I have the material recorded, or at least some material recorded, but where would it fit in? I think it should go on the empty Soundcloud page so that it is in a loop with the first Flood album and the songs of Mark’s new outfit Candyblasta. Then it’s like there is an on and an off function; because this second moiety is not recorded on binaural earphones.

After all some thought our experiment would result in a new creature. They didn’t know I had already “done” The Lords And The New Creatures when I was 8. The first was a breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom. The second was a living spreadsheet: a flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff splurged on top in an un-naturally regimented fashion in the lining of a jacket. I disposed of the latter on account of it being hideous; but that is something like what the guys thought we’d end up with in the Flood, either that or the air swarming with visual radio which I have also known.

So it is that I upload a second album or even “play-list” by The Flood onto the empty Soundcloud page so that it is in a loop with the binaural earphone stuff. O is the key of the babbling unicorn. Back in the day we started the O language, which was putting O’s on the ends of all words. You can double your vocabulary with but a single letter that way! So it is that things end up alright. Whatever I say in this book, I love my friends from the band and the other band and without them I would be a fresh vegetable. I recently took an O. D. the likes of which it was genius to survive and during that suicide attempt, my friends visited me in voices which can be real people, and without them there I would indeed be a fresh vegetable of the dusky dawn. So I hope to still be on good terms with them whatever has been said in this book, for we were the only guys in town who were listening to The Velvet Underground at 16. We were bohemian aristocrats, Beatniks, renegades, wild-cards. I still remember, for example, when we played ‘Come To Daddy’ by The Aphex Twin on the organic instruments, as two bands become one, in the studio room upstairs at the abandoned primary School in Cambridge. I was on the drums and they were walking across the floor so hard I was hitting them. I was said to be a badass guitarist and a force of nature on the drums by Agent G later, but what I was most after was attaining lyrics that could work as poetry. Early on in Oedipus Wrecks where I wrote “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain,” I was said to have attained poetry. It’s great when someone says your lyrics are like poetry. I would say the best lyricists include Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Morrissey, Ian Curtis, Nick Cave, Thom Yorke, Tricky, Billy Corgan, Nick Drake, Syd Barrett and probably a handful of others, maybe even Noel Gallagher unto some people. If I have attained poetry in my lyrics herein I would consider that a success.

In short, I don’t wish this to be an invidious thing. I wish to still consider my old friends real friends. Alright, there were certain hometruths my awesome brother needed to point out to me – for example I had forgotten it was my idea to invent the earphones – but at the same time I don’t want to fall out with everyone. Music is supposed to unite us. It is a time of war in the world at the moment, in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip and it leaks into the head from afar, so there’s that to consider.

We had a pact back in the day that if any of us made it they would take the others along with them. When I went back to University at Lancaster, Mark, who had dropped out of APU to pursue music, and Jez with whom he shared a tremendous creative empathy kind of made it with a new outfit called Candyblasta. Rather than give you a long poem on their sound it would be better to give you an hyperlink. The point is we should still have to honour the pact, which was sealed with drinking Guinness in a Cambridge bar originally, and Mark’s idea. Please let us lot not start fighting or else what hope is there for world peace? Musicians traditionally fall out with each other, over matters of ego and intellectual property and we did, but let this be a setting straight of the record. Let beer be free in the future, let music be 4D, let souls be not forgotten, let the soul of the world be healed.

The new Flood album is called ‘Wishlist’ because I wish we were still together as a band and making music at the Lock Up in the dead of night, the vampire hours, on that old industrial estate, smoking skunk, detuning strings, operating earphones with mics in that record. So it is that I leave you now with the lyrics to the new Flood album. They are all numbers from The Flood’s original days apart from one or two which are “about” The Flood. There is an instrumental on it in a de-tuning which I wrote back in the day. I’d say it’s quite strong but that may be the acid talking!

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR

(recorded on binaural earphones in The Flood but not used on their album)

Love your neighbour till your girl gets home

I’m fleeing the town in my neighbour's clothes

love your neighbour in her underwear

I wonder what goes on under there

and you’d better repent

for all the money you spent

now you’re dove has been sent

Love your neighbour when you're all alone

I left my message on your answerphone

love your neighbour with her tricks and lies

ask no questions hear no flies

and you’d better repent

for all the money you spent

now you’re dove has been sent

Love your neighbour till the war is gone

I think they think that’s not fair on John

love your neighbour when the war is over

treat your neighbour like your long lost lover

and you’d better repent

for all the money you spent

now you’re dove has been sent

ALAS THE DAY

Alas the daaaaaaaaay doesn’t matter anyway

for there is a Night and heartbeats are bold

and hold me tight and Night is blessed

and filled with questions can not guess

what will happen next O maybe death 

then of course we’ll lie under fertile loam

but for now we’re miles away from home

O electric street I’m feeling New Beat

I feel the heat within my sensory atrophy

so many things are all happening at once

the infinite cocks are fucking the infinite cunts

then of course we’ll know who sees something strange

and he will know when it’s time for a sea-change

MOVING ON

When you record on earphones and say you’ll plug your senses in the mains they become aliens, aliens from Hollywood films, like the Fifth Element where there is a blue alien that can sing in two notes at once.

When I hear the sound I think of Jess and her impeccable taste in musical tunes.

I’ve got a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face of stars, to be enraptured and enthralled, will still write the line I wrote at the time and like I did too think it is his own.

My father knew the line and sometimes I think of him – he hasn’t gone so far – is only up the way – lying underground.

When I was a boy and we first moved up he took me out the back and asked what I could hear and I said I didn’t know so he said it’s the beck.

SPACE IS BIG

Space is big

space is big

space is big

space is big

space is big

space is big

space is big

space is big

and the edge 

is the middle

and the middle

is the edge

is the middle

is the middle

is the edge 

John is gone

John is gone 

John is gone 

John is gone

John is gone

John is gone

John is gone 

John is gone 

and he left

his pink pyjamas

pink pyjamas

pink pyjamas

and he left

his pink pyjamas

they were on 

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

find a bridge

or we’ll never

live forever

live forever

or we’ll never

live forever

live forever

SNAKE BLUES

Amen/ hello

let’s go for a ride

do you believe in life before death?

Amen/ hello

let’s go for a ride

do you believe in life before death?

Red is the guitar

green is the grass

grey is the sky

don’t say goodbye!

SOMETHING LIKE A SONNET

If Freedom and Peace of Mind are what you’re after / you’ve made the right choice with BT Talk Together / with an unlimited number/ of local evening and weekend phonecalls / if sorrow sighs upon your shoulder/ find yourself another lover/ manoeuvre over backyard fences/ angel where do you hid tonight?/ I’ll make maps of the stars to find you/ soft caressing breeze to guide you/ if you can be in my dream/ can I be in yours too? / get rid of/ ad hoc/ remembering when we wandered round Amsterdam making up poetry about neon chameleons on the spot/ random dime/ random time/ don’t pour Pepsi on the bright equipment/ don’t piss on the cloakroom floor/ don’t fly with only a dream contraption/ don’t keep wanting more and more/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother/ I’m too loud and I woke my mother.

(co-authored with Paul)

ALAN THE BAT

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

*

Another, another,

another fucking joint.

*

Even a duck gets big erections.

*

Lucy in the soul w/ demons

might happen to be a substance.

*

To plug my senses

in the mains

might utilise

!00% of my brains

but it’s all gone

wrong at the plug,

just a dream on

an ancient drug.

*

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?

Hi dad!

I’m fine!”

*

Here I am as I write by night

furtive in flight

with the sprightly

hypertext-sniper

on Piper At The

Gates of Dawn.

*

And the sheet

where pictures

brown and blue

simply grew

was Winnie the Pooh.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DREAMWORK NOTATION

Last night in dreams I started writing a song with the line:

“I was walking through the clouds.”

The rest of the dream was an option for a second line. There were many options. I went back to University where the whole campus was out and crowded around and was offering help with options. Some of them came in the form of drugs. Some were written on the whiteboard. Whenever I chose an option, continued the song, everyone would find out. In another scene one of dad’s poet friends articulated two floating balls as the correct option. There were many scenes, bulging with options, bulging with medication, bulging with resolution in the dream. It was while I was singing that song in my dreams, a song which definitely elongated enough to be sung, that I felt free in dreamland. I did you know used to be a dreamworker, and a meditator, and an athlete, and a poet, and a scholar, and a self-helper, and a large scale reader, and more and many more. Dreamwork is great. Did you know we still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors that had to rehearse for the real live situation? Did you know in dreams there is no context? Did you know we are dreaming all the time except in sleep without sensory stimulus?

You can teach yourself to lucid dream and then take a further step towards a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment didn’t tend to McDonalds though, but Heaven or the idea of Heaven where people took particles of dirt like drugs and got high off psychoactive dirt and chanted the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.”

You can also learn to smuggle language out of the unconscious. I sometimes wonder if my best work is as Prof. David Morley says “lost on the shores of sleep.” The song in my dream last night, trailing its bulging offering of options for continuation, made me feel free and famous at once, like I was a star in the realm of dreams, like everyone knew me and knew my story, like I was a quiet household name, as familiar as dreams.

What happened last night was that I took a strong sleeping pill and started to write while it was having an effect of my brother and of <BEE>, very badly I think. I eventually got my anger off my chest and went to sleep and had one of those medicated dreams, full of homeostatic chemicals. I didn’t wake up until the evening and it is evening still. It was only a few hours ago that I woke and can only exclaim that I love my brother dearly, and that what I wrote yesterday was writing through the medium of the sleeping pill. We’re still Shaggy and Scoob, James and I, and talk a lot about food. I wish I could flesh out the song in question too, now that it seems writ and rehearsed in dreams. In fact I spend an evening writing a song for Hannah’s little ‘un, who is due to come here tomorrow for the first time.

GO WITH THE FLO’

I was walking through the clouds,

with a song against my ear,

and when I made it through the crowds,

there was reason enough to cheer,

‘cause you were coming home,

yeah you were coming home,

and I just want say “hey! Go with the flo’!”

for you are such a beautiful one,

as beautiful as the English sun,

which so often tries to hide,

and we love you deep inside.

You’re coming with your mum and dad,

protected by a red guitar,

and though you’re uncle has gone mad,

you’re still going to be a star,

‘cause you are coming home,

yeah you are coming home,

and I just want to say “hey! Go with the flo’!”

for you are such a beautiful one,

as beautiful as the English sun,

which so often tries to hide,

and we love you deep inside.

INTERMISSION

Now I’m supposed to write a song for my mother. At least voices say that so I think of how much I love her, how she wants to move, how she slogged her guts out in care to keep the house, and maybe a few things I might mention at her funeral too.

You remember when I helped invent the net,

but not Jim Morrison’s book which I’ll never forget...

No that is awful. My mother probably thinks my song for baby Florence is awful too so I am going to do another. I have a piece of music, a chord progression and melody, unused.

SONG FOR FLO’

It’s funny writing for you before we have met

but I’m the uncle that taught your mum the alphabet

now she types much faster than I ever could do

and she’s gifted the world with a beauty like you

it’s a celebration just to have you around

it’s a time for listening to The Velvet Underground

it’s a time for breaking into spontaneous song

welcome to the family which is where you belong

soon you’ll be walking and will make them proud

like I was once walking up on a cloud

and you’ll know the meaning of the verb to love

like I know it too with my excellent bruv

it’s a day of happiness to first have you here

it’s a day for cheering and for drinking beer

it’s a day for playing with the toys on the floor

and for going with the flow as before

- but voices don’t want me to carry on. They want me to do something different. What do they want? I can’t quite hear. Muffled word-chords in the mind’s ear. I shall obey them for now.

AFTER A DREAM

After a dream where the whole world was flooded and we were as a family trying to not get broken apart, I woke and started to check my tracks. I remember organising a singular album from the whole new da Vinci circle sequence, containing only the 8 best songs, so that when I looked back, I had only done 3 albums, like Nick Drake, meaning the binaural one, the solo album done with Grant, and the new one. I remember that before I went to sleep I listened to it and it was strong but not to be. I think I deleted it before the soporific sleeping pills dragged me under the waves like a problem so big I was dragged to sleep by it.

I had the dream about the whole world being flooded by water and when I woke, in the early morning, started to blog documents to see which is the most popular: philosophy, science, poetry, music and more: but it was settled on that I would sacrifice myself and my science to bring the new <BEE> sing-along out instead. Nobody even reads my books, or seems concerned that special perceptions are not being preserved in scientific records.

The other day, I played my new song for the baby Florence to her and her parents, and today her parents said it was okay to include it in my songbook. They even said they wanted me to play it at the Christening in a few days and video it for future record. Meanwhile I am reading a book about the life of Nick Drake and at the point where he was resitting A-levels after doing terribly badly first time round.

My sister and her partner, who are fans of mine, and their baby have gone out now to Eskdale with my mother leaving my brother and I at home. My sister and her bf are still really cool, fun-loving people that still go to festivals and care about what they wear, still go to parties, still check out the new music scene so it always rubs off on me when they come home. There is usually a new song on the go that I can play them. Meanwhile nobody is interested in, say, the wood, or why the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark failed even though it still left a mark. People wish for the <BEE> sing-along, even though I only really did the melodies, words and guitar. What I mean is, the whole idea of <BEE> is my brother’s idea. I would say if I put all my songs in a book and it becomes my brother’s book because they are structured according to the new da Vinci circle then <BEE> is no good, merely a way of raping intellectual property. It isn’t quite like that though, and I do believe <BEE> is a fine piece of work.

FURTHER LISTENING

To listen to The Flood, visit rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s page on Soundcloud.

To listen to my first solo album, ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3], visit John F B Tucker’s Soundcloud page.

To listen to the four albums of the new da Vinci circle, visit John F B Tucker on Bandcamp.

To listen to material by Black Hole Myths and other collaborations with Grant, visit Grant Aspinall on Bandcamp.

To listen to ‘Unplugged At The Foot of Sea Ness’ visit John F B Tucker on Bandcamp.

To listen to ‘Wishlist’ by The Flood, visit John F B Tucker’s other Soundcloud page.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.