PREFACE TO THE PHOSPHORUS TRILOGY

PREFACE

By now I have brought out many books in a vanity-press and self-publishing capacity but have started to look back to a time when I only had three and they were all online. One was my boyhood book (which is science from when I was seven); another rock songs; and thirdly some poems. They were on my blog for a long time, and kept changing names, and going up and coming down as amendments were made, like it were all a bunch of waves, or the FTSE 100, or cardiovascular heart readings like the hills. My Blogspot page where they were exhibited was tucked away and quiet like I was tucked away and quiet, in my attic bedroom in the Lakes. The Blogspot page also boasted photographs of the sheet where pictures grew (which is not mine, only something I discovered), the tape I cooked in the AGA when its small pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel healed and was gone, a further photo of the numinous, purple-bleeding screen, maybe a hyperlink to the binaural earphone work of my old band The Flood, maybe also an hyperlink to a Pink Floyd song on which we affected a sensory overlay; but apart from these few cool and sometimes psycho-technological things, the three books were my offering and were essentially net-books.

I had a well-earned First from a top ten University (Lancaster), was signed off work with mental illness, and knew how to get sorted out in terms of noxious toxins too. So I would stay up all Night and tend to my Blogspot page where these three net-books were posited, and what a blank canvas I found, and what a palette I have too and how many 100’s of World Class poems I have written and binned. By now I wish to re-publish the three net-books and think of them as forming a singular book called The Phosphorus Trilogy. The early boyhood book is called The Invention of Wallpaper and Other Miracles. As I have stated in the individual introduction to that it may have had something to do with the invention of the internet. The rock songs are entitled Soundcloud Rain. Some of them are good enough to work as poems like ‘Dream With Open Eyes,’ ‘Bad Day At The Office,’ ‘That Black Natural E’ and ‘Skunkfoot.’ Then we have the poems, entitled Bunchapoems (which by now begins with a short story from Sixth Form).

For a while I toyed with the idea that one was a Jim Morrison, one a Syd Barrett and one an Arthur Rimbaud. It was not watertight, though, not so clear cut which was which and who was who. I thought it clear that the songbook was the Barrett but it could just as easily have been Morrison or Rimbaud. Likewise the boyhood book could be the Rimbaud because I was “le poet de sept ans” as if from the Rimbaud poem about seven year old poets; but it could likewise be the Morrison by warrant of removing the pollen from its name, or the Barrett by warrant of it including an actual experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark that is echoic of my dad’s cultural history in terms of Piper At The Gates of Dawn by the Pink Floyd.

I also toyed with the idea that the three net-books were my brothers and I. In that formulation, I would’ve been the seven year old scientist, James the poet and Robert the musician, but again it was not clear cut and just a way of thinking about some literature that was essentially my own work. More recently I had a dream of Professor Paul Farley, who generously awarded me a First back at Lancaster University, who did three things in the dream:

1. make me say a prayer

2. make me sing a song

3. make me pass a football about between himself and I.

I puzzled over the meaning of this dream, because it seemed like a dream-meet, more than just the bureaucratic work of the unconscious of the writerly mind; and I think now he was saying present the boyhood book, then the songs, then the poems in that order and stick to it. I really respect and admire the work of Professor Paul Farley, who has more going on upstairs than a mere pop artist or concept artist. I don’t know if he knows about the dream-transmission but that is what it was like on my end. So it is that I give you what I am calling The Phosphorus Trilogy; but I am still not sure of the order. It strikes me that my brother James – who is after all the genius that designed the sheet where pictures grew – would start with the songbook first. That way the boyhood science would come second and we’d end on “the Dude of poetry” who gleans clues and is on the case but miles away in cannabis land. I think, b/t/w/, that the poems show promise but become an insect collection after a while, and could’ve gone on and on but I spared the reader. Anyhow that’s enough of my Introduction for now, so I turn your attention to the work.