YES YOU MAY

AWAY WITH THE FAIRY LIQUID

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

A HAPPY KNACK WITH THINGS OF DIRT

I had a happy knack with

musical concepts back in my youth -

one was to do with Nirvana…

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 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 chanting

“another, another, another fucking joint.”

My mnemonic for the strings became

Even A Dick Gets Big Erections.

I recorded a little album on binaural earphones,

said on the record I would

“plug my senses in the mains.”

I wrote a paper about whether or not

Lucy in the soul w/ demons

happens to be an actual substance

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.

There was a call 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 -

but still it wasn’t mine

because I didn’t lay it down.

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

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 it an essay,

while my brother-poet Dedalus

was writing of how Autechre

is the heir to Wagner.

I look back and consider

the road of rock n roll cliché

as leading only to sadness.

It is a wanker’d planetarium of ego -

but then all of a sudden

and just like that

only songs can survive

the shipwreck of the soul -

because songs are Portable.

ENJOY YOUR FOOD

M & S Food, says the empty carrier bag

discarded on the bedroom floor -

does that mean Karl Marx

or Howard Marks?

Either way I no longer puff

the evil weed anymore

which back in the day

some Londoners labelled “food”

as if all the labels

in the cupboard swapped round...

and do the giggling stars

themselves not swap places

when no-one is looking?

O glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling!

How nutritious you can seem!

A shimmer, a glimmer,

a salesman’s pitch!

Speaking of which,

it is pitch black outside.

No stars illuminate the garden.

The dark garden was once alive with eyes!

In here, wilted daffodils

that once signified peace,

love and happiness

in the very texture

of their yellow petals

now should be thrown out,

stoop down, instead of pout…

it must be sad to have to

stoop in funeral robes.

I look about me at other things

between myself and the walls -

a calender, a cork Notice Board,

a wall-chart listing the names

of the plants of the redolent meadows…

there is a dead telly wearing

mother’s black, funeral hat,

and a work of art made of wood!

There is more, adorning

the room but all of it is indomitable.

Anyhow I was talking of food,

in the traditional sense;

and there is little of it

but Baked Beans on toast is good.

It shows consumer culture

even stretches this deep into the sticks,

where finding sticks for the fire

is a prominent concern…

here at this monastic retreat

I would rather feel cold

than not have enough to eat -

but others are the other way round.

Earlier I had the crumbling cheese.

Before that a bacon butty for breakfast.

Now I am quenched and sated,

but like a fast car, made

to best drive above the limit,

the lusty engine drives me on.

I think it is water I should cherish -

that I should carry and sip a pint.

Already compress sans sugar,

I like to be, but find I can’t.

Even the Baked Beans have sugar in them.

Still, under the surfaces

hides the diary of a saint.

BACK AGAIN

Back again – at the honeytrap

of the flat, anti-Romantic laptop screen -

venting my spleen – but

to what purpose may I ask?

Is anything from this age going to last?

Is it all “use just once and then discard?”

I’ve been eating Take away pizza,

(vegetarian hot), bought

from the local Take-away joint in town.

I’ve been drinking Diet Coke.

At 42 the best would be done;

for peak time is over by now;

but maybe there is yet room

to incorporate the number 3484?

As if to arraign and inveigh against

the way even breath is costed

in totalitarian capitalism?

Sirens are calling from the rocks.

It’s time for my evening medication.

Any glance at the clock

around this time is a reminder

like the whole business

of writing is a machine

for remembering to take my meds.

The pills are not sweeties though,

in a sugar-coated world.

They are for srs difficulties -

to placate and suppress more

than address things in talking therapy -

for the paradigm of psychoanalysis

has been replaced by neuroscience

where all illness is seen as

chemical imbalances in the brain

which some think is rather crude.

So I ingurgitate my chemical food.

Now it is later. My brother has been down

for some cereal, cereal in the night.

He polished off the Shreddies,

but left some Weetabix.

It is I that was the seer

associated with the oldest fell, but

by now meds weigh heavily down on my soul.

Nothing by means of vision

nor wild hallucination either

has passed by these senses for a while.

I mean if I detailed a list of every access

of wonder, every inscape

of wings, every visionary

proclivity, every piece of

pollen in the pollen count,

it would take ages…

instead I start to think about a rose

poking its redolent nose

and its redolent pose

through stolid concrete…

micro millimetres of birth-push

will bring it standing

before an audience of waves

even though it is only an image.

Clap for the rose,

O audience of waves,

for it could dissimulate

the mating queen

from the green

pages in the flesh...

and we could do well

to pursue her fume

into a moon-glow chamber!

HALF OF IT

A river running through variegated ages of rock

seems to contain many ages at once

like the books groaning on the shelf.

A rock star meanwhile can change costume

many times during an exciting performance

and still somehow resound as himself.

It isn’t the river or the rock star, changing

gear, that so amazes the soul, though,

but something more globular and holistic.

The Rolling Stones became The Strolling Bones;

and then the art teacher said to put more

pink in the shadow to make it more realistic.

GUTTERBY

Nowhere in my knowledge is it any more evident

that Nature is a great art exhibition

than down on Gutterby Beach

where I walked with my love…

there is no map to follow,

from Alex Garland’s famous novel,

for a curved A to B trajectory

will take you down to Silecroft -

but you can follow the procession of natural

monuments of rock as you go:

the first is Dark Fortress Rock,

barnacle-clad and casting a shadow -

for we liked to re-name things

as we wandered in animistic trance,

and booted the bruised football,

and noted the usual, single washed up shoe,

the pebbles gleaming but dull,

the gulls circling overhead,

the driftwood smoothed by hands

of mermaids under the waves,

the way the waves make

gentle love to the shore…

and what scent to the air as well!

The other rocks I cannot recall

the names of, but they were not fixed

and formal, merely impromptu appellations.

If you are lost and need directions,

following the rocks is in order

but I’m sure you’ll know how to navigate

the ragged beauty of the beach.

WALL IS SHIT

“Wall is shit,” as she said in a dream.

Or rather when I woke, feeling

befuddled. I soon found my way

downstairs and drank a cup and

took my morning meds and got back

to the wall. She’s right, it’s shit.

I’ve got wall-cancer or had it.

Rearranging regrets in permutations,

like bricks, won’t help anything.

MY DIAGRAM DIAGRAM

The sheet where pictures brown and blue

simply bloomed or maybe grew

was not the work of Winnie the Pooh…

I discovered it when my father passed.

Down in the smoking den in the barn,

smoke made ancient ghost-faces in the dark.

The pictures themselves seem to depict

the lyric to a song I wrote, way back

in a teenage band called Oedipus Wrecks

but the sheet is not my sheet. I concede

it is my younger brother’s, for he

is the one that laid it down. <BEE>

might well soon ensue from @

in the international language alphabet

according to him and his cutting wit.

The rest for me is but mere consolation

prizes for God’s unwanted children

whom it seems are still glad to be born.

ENTRANCE

I got a First from Lancaster University in a time of difficulty created by mental illness. Last time I wrote one of these was nearly twenty years ago and I was at the time reading Proust waft into elaborate sub-clauses and privileging the language at first hand, whatever that meant in its New Beat fashion. Because it’s a tried and trusted measure I can report that by now I am reading Wittgenstein. What a philosopher! In Wittgenstein I believe I have found ‘my philosopher.’ He says a lot of pain is caused by misunderstanding the logic of language, and hopes to remediate it with a process of elucidation. I myself believe love is grouped with language not God, and so we should tend to our language-use. This is why I wish to further pursue literature on a course.

BECK VARIATION

Standing in my wellies beside the beck,

I note its most mellifluous applause,

how it falls two feet

into a sound as sweet

as a kettle drum’s metal petals

of silver bliss that blossom

on a carnival’s street.

Further to distil the air in the mind,

I wait, to obviate not titivate,

and notice the green kingdom all around.

A squadron of nettles guards the wild.

It must be so different from living

in Norman Nicholson’s Millom,

down the end of Rottington Road.

A lone bird pipes a bar in a tree.

Then I notice I need to pee.

So into the heavenly nectar I do.

H20 might stand for Hypothalamus Tattoo.

WAKING AT MIDNIGHT

It’s not nice waking at midnight when you’re me:

dead to the world on Western medication,

you look the Night in the eye and find

the world might’ve quietly passed you by.

There might be a snake on the patio too.

Then again it could be your imagination

grown over-wrought, inspecting shadows.

Still it’s safer to stay in than go out.

The moon is a drunkard above the yew tree.

You see this from the kitchen window.

Telly through the wall leaks in from another room:

it’s where the lion from the heart of Poem

Records originates, when you’re a child,

listening in to telly through the wall, in

the inner city, hearing its whiskers dipped in News.

But childhood is gone, as seems the city -

here we have a pretty place of artistic retreat.

The loneliness rots in the whole, human heart.

At least in reading the voices go away.

I’m on The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell.

LIVING IN THE LAKES

Living in the Lakes I am often struck

by the sensation that life

is going on within the pages

of The Lords And The New Creatures.

It could be just a slant of light

that gives the game away,

the remnant evanescence behind the fell

when the sun has set and the fell darkened.

It’s either that or Nirvana

Unplugged In New York.

For that I think of rivers,

such as the River Esk to the north.

In the summertime, we like to go

outdoor swimming in the Esk.

Today the weather has cooled

so it is not a good time to go.

So I could speak of a “storied” world,

a mythographic universe intact,

an infradiegetic existence

saturated with inter-textuality,

or I could talk of sheep and cows,

the way the rain falls at a slant,

the green-ness of the grass,

and all of Nature’s abundance.

It is a pretty place to live,

which Jim Morrison himself

intended to visit on one of his trips,

but never got round to in the end.

The fell overlooks with its bald,

blank forehead. Driving from town

it appears a great, slumbering

diplodocus come to fat and die

by the Irish Sea; but nearer

the foot you see it could be Buddha,

Buddha levitating. Walking

up could be Western meditation...

but if you mention the slow

ascent up flat, gradual paths,

I think more of a bullet to the top

of a telegraph pole, or even the kettle

that rises to its silent scream,

its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s

chain. No, I have not been up

the fell for a long time now; so

it’s like I am growing into one

of the locals! But to the fleeting,

evanescent backdrop of dying light

behind the darkened fell at perfumed sunset

I often turn, stare until life grows

detached, naked, until I remember

how weird everything is, how

mysterious and magical the universe.

THANK YOU JARVIS

Thank you Jarvis Cocker

for the best first LSD trip

anyone could ask for.

It was taken with a prayer

at my first Glastonbury,

when Dylan was on

at smouldering sunset

and we squelched in

the good, glad mud, wearing

bin liners over our boots

and huddled together

for a heartbeat-to-heartbeat

then you guys came on stage

at Nightfall just as we came up

and it was electric, the

way you kicked in

with The Fear, the

lights, the music…

it all left you feeling

Glastonbury should be free.

Those were happy days,

writing 12 poems for Natalie

on the roof of the house

where the Plough aligns,

playing gigs in Oedipus

Wrecks, in London pubs,

not to mention

the essay in detention

about a green parrot sent

to space through the conch.

The leather jackets used to

hang round Camden Town

and once we came up

north on holiday and

attained the island of penguins!

Already love was grouped

with language not God,

already love was

a choice of words.

And where are we now?

And what happened when

we were supposed to

meet up in the year 2000?

People can change

beyond recognition fast -

a bad trip, a school too far -

then old friends are discarded -

and forever lamented too.

VORTEX

A tear-jerking violin

in a rainy rugby match

wants to be Arthur Rimbaud

but cannot make the transaction

for all that it dreams

that the heartbeats are stars.

Cigarettes hold it back

from running too freely

as you may well know

and even homemade LSD

that makes movement leave traces

like the pollution of cars.

Its sunset comes in upturned jars.

It has been with the ocean.

It has been with the shapeshifter.

It has been with Nintendo.

And it knows that science

would soon have little to counter,

and it knows that imagination

doesn’t make it unreal,

and it knows of the vortex

where its song resonates.

It knows.

THE BEST ONE I’VE DONE SINCE I WAS A STUDENT

Your pretext extends beyond

emptying space of the human form.

I note how philosophy and poesis

differ on the notion of the system:

in the former we hear of the triumph

of so and so’s system, but

in the latter systems are not

to be trusted for they rule

with fear not with love.

Whenever I think I’m through

with all things loving you

my mother comes in the kitchen

and starts chopping vegetables.

As if for humour, gravity and katabasis

she makes me put asparagus

in a pint glass with water

at the bottom like flowers.

Then I might insufflate

the vapid fume of my Vape;

and then I might recognise

I left out the crisp packet.

So to love’s infinite, polyform permutations

I turn but have to turn away

where you love me not,

and all I haven’t got, and so

no longer do I cling to the dream.

I hereby temper the wild,

Romantic, impassion’d

proclivities of my temperament,

learn the falsehood of my opinions

and journey from idealism to pragmatism.

I hereby abjure nursing

the suffering of my ideals

if only to free you in spirit

which seems a gentlemanly thing to do.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in,

light it and write it, burn and unlearn,

can lead all the way to the loony bin,

make you forget how to spell

Winnie the Pooh. Or how

old you happen to be.

It was an endless sea.

I was knocked back

at a remove from

my own consciousness.

I was unable to see

the international language alphabet

because all I could see was

the international language alphabet.

It seems like hiding

from The Waste Land

inside The Waste Land…

and what a refreshing change it makes

to not be manufacturing fakes

in the land of flying fairy cakes.

YOU WERE COMING HOME

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.

SONG FOR LITTLE BABY FLORENCE

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

THE GRASS

I’m trying to find out the reason.

So far it might be because

I come from a house that

was once full of bats.

Could it be that what was done

to me wasn’t evil?

I remember when they told me

they needed to do it

to start the fire-dance

as I remember when they said

they did it because they knew

after what I had been through

I would still be the genius.

Now they’re saying

they did it because

to look at I’m so ugly

even my mum is looking

for a way to put a noose round my neck.

Now they’re blaming the fact

that I wasn’t very good at music.

Could it be their next visit?

When I get to find out why?

They say they’re not telling

me because if I found out why

I would have no reason to hope.

I did once admit to buying an eighth

off someone, and in tears

to the headmaster of a large

British public school

and the governors too

as they all sat round

in a grave circle

when I was but new.

Is that it? Is that the reason?

I do still want to know.

Now they say “we d’d it

because you didn’t

know you were famous.”

It all seems a bit hateful,

to do that to a young man,

still as yet to finish his degree.

Maybe they did it because

I put it on and took it off too quickly.

HURRAY

After Flora comes gay

in the international language alphabet.

After acid comes Bic

and acid is a bet with the mind,

the marriage of Alice and Pan,

a spirit-level for the spirit -

but after Flora comes gay.

It might be why I am so bored,

sitting here typing away

at the foot of the oldest fell,

skint, single, mentally ill,

medicated, car-less, unemployed, living

with my mother still in the sticks,

no neighbourhood, no amenities,

a pretty place nevertheless.

There doesn’t seem a place for me

in the overall Social Order,

except sitting in the kitchen, venting

my spleen at a laptop screen, supping

drinks like I were a chinwagging

tea-hag of Time like my dad.

My best work was all

about the 25th of May,

which is my sister’s birthday.

I contemplate the four collections

I still have out with Chipmunka

and am not too displeased,

though when they say

I should redo the now-retracted

Rose Petals In The Ashtray

I know it’s now too late.

I took an O. D. the likes of which

it was genius to survive

but coming back down

from the chemical equation of it all

I lost the ability to ejaculate.

Now the local lasses say

if I’ve not got the juice for them

then I am gay, and so

I think I am, but it might be

that I am cut off from the verb,

the doing word, that is love.

I have had a gay experience

or two before, but walked away,

wishing I were with a woman.

NOTE ON OEDIPUS WRECKS

My friend Dr. Calculator Ptom named the teenage rock band upon hearing my songs. He used to say gnomic things like “the universe is a projection of the mind.” “The G note is green on the guitar fretboard.” “Born Slippy is evidence dance can have a soul.” “Poetry is untranslatable because of the music.” “Death is God.” “Early Oasis is good for bittersweet, comedown energy.” We boarded a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London. By now he is Dr. Calculator Thomas and the song is ‘Born Slippery.’

THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG, CAMDEN TOWN, CIRCA 1998

I

SECRETS IN THE MUD

This is the sound of getting totally fucked.

Of when you first get your notebook sucked.

Of changing gold into Glastonbury mud.

Of lying down in a field with your bud.

This is the music through whom we aspire.

This is the rule book that is thrown on the fire.

This is the jam where the trousers are down.

This is the wine-shop on the edge of town.

Chorus: Glastonbury, you should be free, and all you have in your big city,

you hit my G, you make me see how I want to see,

lights go down, lights come on,

and all my sadness seems to be gone,

although I still love to be what I dream I am.

[guitar solo]

II

OCEANS SMILE

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)

III

KILL

My eyes sting,

my teeth are bleeding raw,

too much thought

to make me sick.

Stinky clothes

and mouth become

my skin and all

these fruits I want to kill.

Give my hope,

surrender to the tide,

you can take

my remains;

but I must go,

to wash the poison

from my eyes,

before, before, before I kill.

IV

SNAKE SNAKE BUTTERFLY

Snake snake butterfly, lay me dead & close my eyes.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

Give me your alibi; give me chains to stop me fly;

give me night to soothe my blinded eyes:

so I can see the secrets of the skies.

We must rise, freedom falling from our eyes,

unlock doors, it's a perfect time to die,

and it's okay ‘cause baby we'll go insane

but don't reach out too far for the flame.

Snake snake butterfly, lead me to the Other Side.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

V

VITAL SIGNS

Smile like a smile just to smile,

cast to Heaven for a while...

let's rip holes in the boat,

throw the captain overboard,

throw the angels off the bridge,

death comes and stops me getting

bored of life's soul-machine.

What we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs.

Back to Hell to plunder wings,

let the ritual now begin,

come and ride the waiting beast,

ride it gone into the fire,

ride it to the waiting feast,

my baby's waiting to get higher,

to get higher, to get higher...

what we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs,

yeah feel alive with vital signs.

Come again there's much to do,

don't you know that I love you?

VI

HEAVEN KNOWS

Heaven knows and walks away -

but what it knows it will not say.

It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space?

Heaven knows and turns its face!

Heaven’s filled with silver eyes.

Heaven’s hills all harmonise.

I hear its angels when they call...

Heaven knows and lets them fall!

[reconstructed]

VII

MURDER IS DEAD

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,

I wish that I had been there,

been there to saaaaaave Jesus,

I'm sure he meant to please us.

Murder is dead,

murder is dead,

murder is dead.

We're young and filled with semen,

we're going to break some hymen,

we'll make the cops turn in their badges,

we're going over all the edges yeah.

Murder is dead,

murder is dead,

murder is dead.

VIII

THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)

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.]

WHERE IS THE NET?

O where is the net?

Is it in the trees

and in the breeze?

At seven I wrote a text, encrypting

a sophisticated node to do with Gravity, storing

the idea of the net in writing

in the attic to give it a chance to grow

all the way round the world, also conducting

an experiment into the maths

of the new colour as a cellular mark, and separating

the object “pollen” from its name.

This was before the world wide web;

and the cloud is mentioned

before the net in the book!

The net already existed

in the American military,

but the net is ancient…

it appears in Lowell, as it

appears in James Joyce as a prophecy.

I even heard Shakespeare

had a son called Hamnet.

Yes I would say it is blowing in the breeze,

but also exists as a stack in California.

That’s where they eat acid-tabs

and come out with microchips.

WINDOW

I look out the window – two cars,

contiguous or co-extensive to each other.

Also the yew tree guarding the gate.

Above it the sky is unblemished blue.

The window is a narrow one too.

Leaves of Virginia creeper

have crowded its edges. I

also see how overgrown

Everything has become, the drive,

the ivy hedge, the flower-bed, the lane.

If my father’s passing galvanised us

to do up the house and build a patio,

we soon enough let the garden

go to seed in his sore absence.

The levels of green have gone obscene.