TRON REJECTS

APOLOGIA

The guys left it so that my best work was all in and around the time of the tron. The tron was the album we recorded on binaural earphones in Cambridge, when in the wake of September 11^th melody became embarrassing, singing in tune a heresy, a sin. They thought I was a musical genius. There were also some creative writing pieces around the time like the poem ‘Instant Travel’ that got me onto the course at Warwick; and the creative non-fiction piece ‘Lucy In The Soul W/ Demons’ about a road trip with Paul. These have now been turned into songs that can be heard under the name John F B Tucker on Bandcamp, and read in the volume Soundcloud Rain. There is already on my blog a full discography of my musical position, showing you where you can access the music, including the tron. What I thought I would do is make a blog entry of a selection of poems and songs from around that time that didn’t make it onto the tron. If you like you could look at it as a creative writing portfolio that is decades late. 

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.

THE HORROR OF BREAKFAST TELLY

Jerry Springer has run to rot, breeding

Cameramen that descend like vultures, swooping

Down to a corpse in the desert, eating

The soft, lamb-like eyes of the deadman.

Breakfast telly kept us well fed, covering

Minds with an abject horrorism, feeding

Little children their pancakes and porridge.

It did not surprise me, coming to my feelers

In the year 2000, but I still stopped

My Summer of Love ethos, as the war

Of ego-parade and misplaced vengeance

Leaked in my brain-pan and the Simpsons

Became more accurate than the News.

And when we were children, visiting New York,

My father took me up to the top of the world,

And I was excited. He said, John,

John, hold my hand. And up we went in a lift.

In America, there you feel free.

I read TS Eliot and eat against the cold.

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…

HYPERTEXT

No worries, lost lover,

Science has the answer,

all wrapped up in its

rubber-gloved hand

and they’re soon

abolishing altogether

sadness gene and

dreaming gland -

for Science has told

us many of the stars

you gaze at tonight

are not really there

but illusions of the

light that takes so long

to reach the beams

of our glistening eyes

that for centuries

after the star has died

it still appears to

be hanging there,

a little, glimmering

crystal tear, in

love with the dark,

as bright and beautiful

as it would be if

it were really there.

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is enquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

(2002)

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.

SKUNKFOOT

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

STET FOR YET

I

If I dare call this

the beginning

of anything at all

then I shall begin

until uncertainty creeps in

the cracks in the walls

& the room spins

to a brand new view

from the window pane

maybe rain pattering

down like a piano-piece

splashing to the ground

gravity found it

(& I’ve been found)

mute, translating thin air

This shall stand alone & dare

dictate its own

time & place

in infinite headspace

“I Am, I Can,”

said the suddenly free man

warned before about

getting a conviction

getting found out,

I am suddenly arrested

now driving

w/ daredevil exhilaration

in an open top car

leaping between seats

in a race to death

w/ my rampant shadow,

inescapably involved w/ the inviting,

pulling fragrance of orgasm,

playing again in chambers of water

& under the bridge w/

the angel’s daughter,

semen spills like silver water,

splashing w/ laughter

in a moonglow chamber,

moon-light veiled to the walls;

I remember

vast imaginary worlds,

as real as

Oh.

You can read in a book

about the Tachyon Particle

firing out the gun

just before you press the trigger.

“Well, you never know,”

they reaffirm

I take responsibility for saying

of course,

as long as rumours

or an insidious virus hasn’t

imbued our brains

w/ dreams & fevers

it proves everything & nothing

to be true;

nothing we may even

think of as true

So butterflies embroider a dance in the sky,

butterflies dance

& multiply

like scattered sunbeams

discovering your eye

There is much to be done,

glorious pyramids built to the sun,

much to be done

It seems

I have forgotten you again,

absent-minded-

what-of-audience

waiting in the rain,

dividing the dancers from the damned,

what of the perpetually

fresh new land,

sparkling clean sugar,

let us go,

let it stand.

II

So tell me what “a life changing experience” is.

You’ve missed it already,

& again & again.

If you’re ready for now,

then I might begin,

Imagined real & dreamt awake,

on the verge of everything,

(I found half-a-butterfly

& a wing.)

III

Vodaphone, alone, in total unknown,

Well maybe Maybelline, I make-believe,

I find you, a million butterfly queens,

I’ll fall into a fever & dream,

seen all the adverts I’ve seen,

Nokia, block her, privately unlock her

maybe we’ll fleetingly meet in the aisle?

Instantly convince me to smile

CCTV & spy cameras in the brain

you need an injection of fear & pain

well, tell me what you mean

by “love” or by “hate”

better get the law to investigate

IV

Trying to translate mute shapes of befuddled colour

in the head, trying to render them in word-forms

is such a frustrating business.

Invocation. I want to want nothing.

Catch a train that carries me always up to date

w/ the moment. I see it fluctuate

& flicker, gone.

To be utterly modern in every way

is the goal, yet to be a mediator through

which the entire history of literature

& criticism finds its newest development.

Finds its development manifested.

It shall never find its resting place, its

dwelling point. Each moment renders anything

fixed obsolete, the fluffy, dissipating

trail of the aeroplane, w/ which you can trace

its current position & its flight path

until the wind fragments its

history. We cannot hope to preserve or cling to

that untenable inconstant dissolution.

V

Here they come, back, the runners,

round the final bend again.

Forward to the place from which they came.

Here they come, the infinite angles of change.

Summing up to circle,

the orbits my pointing finger pins down,

immeasurable orders spin around.

The starting gun still resounds.

Fingerprint dancing pressed under the eyelid.

It’s never the safest way to blank it.

Run for cover as safe as a blanket.

In darkness, your shadow

hidden under your eyelid.

So hug me like a womb, I’ll hide from the world.

(Warwick University, 2002)

DOWN

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

WARP RECORDS

The plane exists on 2 dimensions including Time.

The pyramid exists on 4 dimensions, including Time.

To turn a plane into a pyramid is a 1 dimensional step.

Therein discover new dimension of the words

‘1 dimensional,’ meaning stupid – a dimension

which could also be called a separate plane -

and did I mention that I wanted to die?

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

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