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.
(Anon)
FOUR POEMS FROM THE SUNSET CHILD
I
TUM TUMPTY TUM
Tum tumpty tum
The cat is playing the drum
Four little mice
Are shaking the ground
Dancing merrily around
Tum- tumpty- tum
The cat is playing the drum
Three little mice are dancing
II
EVERY
We had a snowball fight with the Widgets.
Go and wait with Boris at Ash Rock. –
The rocks fell from the cliff.
Amanda and Rodey built a snow shelter.
Rockets fly with a jet of flame.
A train puffs a cloud of steam.
My dad dug an underground tunnel.
My dad was mentioning something about Christmas.
We are going to do fractions in maths.
I got on a train at the station.
The first one is a boy’s name.
This one is a lady’s name.
This one is the name of a seaside town.
This one is a doctor’s name.
This one is title of a man.
This one is a question mark.
III
[NO NAME]
Colour circles red. How many circles?
Colour triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?
IV
[NO NAME]
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
THANK
YOU
Thank
you to the people and the State alike
for
allowing me the chance to write poems, granting
me
the gift, even if I have been abnormal,
which
judging by my CV I certainly have.
Not
long before I was told unless I rewrote
my
lost boyhood album called The
Road
To
Heaven by Noj And The Mob,
as
a paper, nobody
cared
what I did. So I rewrote it, but now that
I
have
preceded
this with the Nirvana barcode, as
is
also
contained
in my little rewrite, I
don’t get
to
augment
this
with
the Nirvana barcode as
well.
PREFACE
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.
NOTEBOOK
Il
faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes
you’ve just got to hit
the road and.
Start
learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from
some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass
the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of
the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul
and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the
speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees,
birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a
smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.
The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…
Seeing
as we can travel backward in time, seeing as we have equalled the
speed of light, I thought we could revisit some choice excerpts from
my boyhood and beyond.
Teacher
rite elephant nite
everything
lite lesson love
learn
tell everyone Esso orange.
2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1
In
the picture of the airport
I
can see… a runway,
a
cloud, two planes,
a
control tower
and
the ire ii net.
In our new pogrom there is a Vetacore.
A bomp explodes.
I
faded my work.
I have a scar+ that is red and black.
I
found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I
saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full
of dead skeletons.
He
has spines all over him.
Colour
circles red. How many circles?
Colour
triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour
oblongs orange. How many triangles?
Hot
July brings cooling showers,
straw
berries and gilly flowers.
It
was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards
the sofa.
MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,
MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,
HE'S GOT THREE EYES
AND A BIG FAT NOSE
AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED
WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,
HE ONCE TOOK A PILL
THAT MADE HIM ILL
AND EVER SINCE THEN
HE'S
BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.
Squawk
squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Folder
graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us,
God made hash to help us. The
system works quite well. The
grass is always long on the Other Side.
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
sun
hanged
himself
from
a
length
of
daisy
chain.
Clocktick
clock being clocked off by clocktick.
Clocktick
clock not being clocked off by Time.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.
Break,
bird with the skin of snake.
God
rushed into the cold cod quick.
Behold!
An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!
Barnes
has scored a chicken
and
wingers are allowed bikes!
Maybe
a
tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except
a swear word in every box, to
go at the end?
Even
A Duck
Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings
of the electric
guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say,
but
my mother has changed it now.
Hey, my name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...
I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.
She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.
She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.
She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.
She slides the stick of it out of the pack.
She puts the stick of it into her mouth.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She puts the packet back in her bag.
She swings the bag about a little bit.
She walks past a little pub long shut.
She might go check out a flower shop.
She loves to chew and to suck the taste.
She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.
I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.
A glance
A blink
A fault in the stars
Her mascara slips into pools of black
A chance
A second
of Infinity
She flutters her eyelids
like spring’s first butterfly
The stars awake to notice love
she waits with open arms.
But all is well if I only think
& sigh of the dreams of dusk
Images before I sleep
Dancing, escaping memory
They seem to have no cares at all
They seem to know the name of love
They seem to be my sacred friends
Ancient messengers, waking at night
But I will forget them & never care
About what I saw in love & alive
What? Oh, I guess it’s love
Just us & love Forever...
Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:
The light of all that’s good is true
if believing is the dawn of dreams.
Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Soft
and
loose
like
yellow
pencils
scribbling
dreams
as
they
arrive.
Semen spills like silver water,
under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,
splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.
Don’t escape at night
into a heightened dream
from a dull and longing sleep.
Her breath a poisonous magic.
Sometimes perhaps
down opening quiet
I am drawn down
long and alone and
my friend and my foe
recede into deep sleep
sudden and still
like a dawn behind
a screaming veil
where silence is born
and all that’s loose and tight
and all that’s light is light
like first morning
with no night
and wend my way
so slow to Freedom
and soft Infancy-lunacy
with harp-sure eyes
so I can live
the last poet’s
last poem.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but like butterflies.
My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?
Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.
When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:
[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].
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).
V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the streetname for E becomes F sharp minor!
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
ENGLISH
JOHN TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.
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.
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 inquiry 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.
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.
If
you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning. I can run you
through a series of life events in terse
precis
that meant I arrived at such a culmination.
Well,
at
seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed
storing in writing in the attic here to
give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, I
was the one to write it. By eight I was the witness from
The Lords And The New You Know Who
twice. By eleven who
knew what was going on?
By fifteen I attained the face of stars which
may have been scripted in the Bible.
By eighteen I forewarned of September 11th
in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked English
Literature A-level
exam essay in the nation at 100%.
After
school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, had an effervescent
mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every
technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough
alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite
the onset of mental
illness,
worked the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, built the Tower as an
instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette
tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discovered the
sheet where pictures (seemingly
depicting one of my own song lyrics) grew.
I
went through all that without earning 1p. Then
as a summary of all of
that
which
I had done,
I invented
and falsified
the Nirvana barcode and in doing so attained visual radio,
broadcasting dreams that
swirl in digital, purple swathes about the head of the deranged
seer...
So
you see that it has been fast indeed! That Subaru Impreza! And Time
does not pass but evaporate! And things live inside onions of
themselves! And galloping water would be a cool thing to say!
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.
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.
If it makes any difference to you,
my little bro is a genius, who
designed the sheet
where pictures grew
and says <BEE>
might soon ensue
from @ in the international
language alphabet…
he did it for Flora,
subject of many a love poem of mine,
and it turns out
he had her, did her, loved her,
won her, got her,
in time past.
But who kissed who
is playground stuff,
and jealousy is a wasted emotion,
and I am proud
to be my brother’s brother,
and my mother’s son.
I would never begrudge my brother something I would want for myself or my mother either.
THE
FACE OF STARS
The
face of stars was a Holy night,
if
we don’t take flight
then
we’ll seem quite bright.
It
doesn’t matter about the plot,
for
the plot is grot
and
can go to rot.
What
matters most in life is love,
if
it comes from above
then
that is your dove.
We
were three gathered in the name,
if
you find it a shame
I
can take the blame.
THROUGH
THE FRAME OF MUSIC
When
perceived
through the frame of music,
the
horizon is
a drone,
the
apple blossom a dulcimer.
If
the apple blossom made a sound
it
would be tintinnabulation.
Already
the beck’s tumbling
down
a mini waterfall
resembles
a kettle drum’s metal
petals
of silver bliss…
already
the trumpet wears
his
foreskin on the inside.
Already
there
is an upturned canoe for a drum.
Already
there
is a dog for a frontman
and
there are poppadom hi-hats
allowed
in
the raggedy
band.
BLUES
WHILE IT’S RAINING
The
war leaks in the head from afar,
speeded
by a brand new car.
I
can’t work out when it will end,
but
it’s no game of let’s pretend.
Tonight
the rain is fairly hard:
in
rain, in pain, as saith the bard;
and
all the way out in the Lakes,
we
claim
“no nukes is good nukes.”
The
rain types on at the window
with
fingers frigid,
wet,
staccato,
then
eases off, like war should too,
before
the dawn is a wash of blue.
BROKEN
DOWN HERO OF THE WESTERN NIGHT
Before
I was hypnotised,
as
before my skunkosis,
I
was a hero. Now
look
at me. They
make
you look out.
So
it is that I live with my
ma
and bro, skint,
single,
unemployed,
mentally
ill, carless,
over-medicated,
just another
broken
down hero
of
the Western night.
MY
SILVER SISTER
My
silver sister reaches me, chinwagging
over
the treetops, over the distance
that
is closed. My first voice
was
heard when I was in bed with her,
bruising
the blue futon with shapes.
This
body is a terrible bean pole of
negative
sexual energy, but she
saw
a free pint of Guinness in my words.
Only
apt then that it should be like this, hearing
the
scorched earshot of voices resound, including
her
attempts to drive me to the heart
before
the others drive me to the grave.
THE
INADEQUATE TRANSPOSITION
The house-pipes glugging a guilty gulp
from a big, culpable jug of the “ug” of “drug” or
“smuggle”
or Ugly
Truth
Revealed
Inside.
The
loose, Betfair jingle of shingle
lifted
from the big, flat bird-table
when
cars arrive in the drive or if they leave.
The
singing of the upstairs Tap too;
and
the scowl or frown of the downstairs
toilet
flushing and its cistern refilling:
I
imagine them as a part of a specific song.
I
imagine them transposing a specific hit.
I
guess that yes, you can get this.
PEERING
THROUGH THE DIMWIT WINDOW
I live between the letters of the word OK
but sometimes escape the shape of the paper.
I look at the dawn, its cement-mixer grey,
think how I’d be no good as a rapper.
It’s true that I don’t know what to do,
yet Let The Jews Win was a pleasing number.
I do like the phrase “A. I. am I. A.”
because it’s redolent of Julius Caesar,
the moment he says “et tu, Brute”
which
I saw long ago when I was a nipper.
I
myself could be living in a play
with
a name like John F B Tucker.
It
could be a mini Shakespearean poem, say,
for
which I have to thank my mother
and father.
A
CANOROUS CHIME
Someone
gets in the power shower.
It
reminds me I don’t need power.
Flower
power is much better.
Writing
Flora a long love
letter.
You
could even call her “flower.”
Down
at the bottom of the Tower
I
looked up and saw her hair,
it
was dangling down everywhere.
I
climbed up it into her chamber.
She
was locked in by a protector.
He
was a tyrant, I was better,
I
was the one she wanted as lover.
I
took out my sword to free her,
defeated
the tyrant, had a breather,
took
her by the tiny hand and led her
down
the stair, her knight in shining armour.
In
the garden we heard some laughter.
It
might’ve been the film director
saying
this could go on forever,
flowing
like an endless river,
but
what was
needed
more than water
was
to cut her hair a bit shorter,
so
that we did, while a motor
drove
past on an unknown hour.
CHIP
I
was a good boy when I helped invent the net at seven
but
I didn’t get to find out until the
year 2025
because
the Feds made my dad lock the book in the attic
for
long storage, to give the net a chance to grow round the world…
when
it emerged I no longer knew if I was a poet
or
a scientist and spent years rereading the book
and
trying to understand what had gone on.
It
seems the algorithm in
it became
cellular:
that
the maths that helped invent the net was indebted
to
Einstein and became an experiment into
the
maths of the new colour as
a cellular mark
(because
it was all about room for growth)
before
anyone
even had the net in their cosy homes.
It
might be that ever since the
seven year old book
which
I wrote with the government,
I’ve
been
operating under the guise of Anon
without
knowing it has to be Anon or wanting to be Anon.
It
might be that I am only just starting to write.
BARNES
Barnes
has scored a chicken,
but
the chicken isn’t real.
It
is for an instant and
then
it is not. It seems
like
a hoax but still exists in meaning.
It’s
what we mean when
we
say for God’s sake.
It’s
news that stays news
even
when Barnes has retired.
You
notice though that it wasn’t Barnes,
wasn’t
a chicken, and wasn’t a goal:
so
what Barnes has really scored
is
a hat-trick on his comeback
from
injury against Crewe
in
the League Cup. One
was
a header, one a penalty
and
one was
a back-heel.
So
a quantum field of intelligence
is
opened, and in it Barnes
is
a great bringer of happiness,
the
reason to go outside and
kick
a ball against a wall.
Really
if I told you what it was
and
what it did, you would
agree
Barnes
has scored a chicken.
WHEN THE BECK TURNS TO ICE CUBES
On our first night up my dad took me out
In the back and asked me what I could hear,
And I did not know, so he showed me the beck,
Showed me the beck to open my ear,
Showed me the beck to open my ear.
/////////////////
We traced its source up the fell one day,
But found only bog and marsh, no fountain,
And the fell itself I should say by the way
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain,
Is twelve feet short of being a mountain.
/////////////
Down as gravity and katabasis require,
Beckwater travels, always choosing the course
Of least resistance, scentless and cold,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse,
Bold to be long, as long as a horse.
//////////
It's laced with ecstasia, the bright, deadly beck
That flows down from the fell’s striated way,
Underlaid with Technicolour unicorn hooves,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me,
Brackish to Blue and dimpling to me.
//////////
Prof. Paul Farley would pee in it like a punk,
But I like to stomp in leaking welly boots,
On a trance of green, THC-free stalks,
And let the wet water get in at my roots,
And let the wet water get in at my roots.
//////////
It’s like a long necklace of notes and stones,
Laid over a lucky lady’s milkwhite neck,
And whatever the southerners say of a stream,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck,
It’s also the truth for a bright, northern beck.
//////////
Singing with longkissing sweet-throat BBC birds,
It falls two feet into a sound as sweet
As a kettle drum’s metal petals of silver bliss
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street,
That tinkle mellifluous on the carnival's street.
//////////
It babbles down into a double-barrelled tunnel,
And disappears for a mile or more underground,
And bubbles up singing in a farmer's field,
For all the world a round map of sound,
For all the world, a round map of sound.
//////////
Optimus Prime leaves once blocked the tunnel
And water leaked in under the back door
To float a massive, abstract archipelago
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor,
Of our tasteful vinyl on the black-flagged floor.
//////////
Poor Ossie the dog was marooned in his basket,
Barking on the store sign for a gone HMV,
And record stores close and folk heroes pass
But the beck still lucid dreams down to the sea,
And by the BBC tears we do mean the sea.
//////////
So it laughs to itself, over what we don’t know,
As it makes that tear-clear journey down,
A fountain pen for all to write with – O! -
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain,
And sometimes gets so swollen in the rain.
//////////
TRAVELLING
HOME FROM MILLOM BY
TRAIN
What’s
the most obvious donk around you
and
how many donks deep
and
did the donk descend
to
get to the donk on the end of it?
The
train goes wreckety
wreckety wreck;
its
metal parts expand and contract;
I’m
on the way home from scoring,
and
had a
joint
at the station.
Sometimes
it seems postmodernism
is
an extended metaphor for
the
effect of cannabis on the brain
but
it’s not a proper theory.
The
journey
now
is only as short as
smoke
long fiction from Japan and
it
is nearly my stop, so I will stop
and
ride
the wave of paranoia home.
FALLING
I
fell out with the angels. I fell.
“I
felt a leaf, I fell out of life,”
as
saith the poet at the reading.
I
fell full fathom five. I fell to Hell,
where
I feel the flames.
I
found my feet at the foot
of
the oldest fell, but it’s Hell, to be
here,
hoping. Hoping for
a
happy life. For
hope
implies cognitive
dissonance
in the present tense.
We
should be here and now
and
real and feeling but
Time’s
out of synch. I fear I have
contracted
a disease of consciousness
anyway.
Being
but a
fool, I fear,
fearing
fear itself, e’ en though
I am
supposed
to be the
seer of Sea Ness.
Falling
is natural, as
gravity and
katabasis
require. One
of these
days
I
might get up again.
WORLD
VOICE DAY
It’s
World Voice Day, according
to
my laptop, celebrating
the
human voice, but in literary terms
I
haven’t found mine yet.
Admittedly
my story
has
been told, and it’s history
now,
but instead of “Voice”
I
found hearing voices.
Voice
is the Holy Grail
of
the writer, but as I say
I
found an arena of them
out
loud in the mind’s ear.
I
suppose it is part of
the
new, synchronised word,
the
automated conveyor belt
of
poetry, flowing
from
room to room, looking
for
body and form, all
the
magic alphabet radio
stations
you can imagine.
I
suppose in the future, hearing
voices
will be difference
not
illness as happened
to
homosexuality between
Rimbaud’s
day and our own.
Already
voices could be
onjects,
quavers, syllabubbles,
sonic
machinations at
the
periphery of selection.
Already
they seem proleptic,
already
part of the new
co-imagination,
already
they
are but real people
on
the intercom. So
it is
that
with difference I sing
of
the sights and sounds of the isle.
NOTES FOR A SMALL PLAY
Thought A: All the auditorium is a skull maybe taken for neurosurgery later too and all the players on the stage merely thoughts inside that skull.
Thought B: I figure I have done it all already, poetry, music, philosophy, science, maths, photography… I even tried writing a novel though I didn’t get very far. One thing I haven’t tried though is drama. I did once write a radio play about some people trying to change the name of life to ‘knife’ but it got lost.
Thought A: So let’s go with my idea: that the auditorium is a skull and the actors thoughts. Then maybe the skull gets taken for neurosurgery.
Thought B: we could call it Hamlet in Flames. For after all dad ended a poem about Hamlet’s madness that way, on that image.
Thought A: maybe it could be a plate more than a play.
Thought B: and it could shatter, like a mirror.
Thought A: I had better reread university books like Waiting for Godot and also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Thought B: maybe the protagonist is asleep in bed?
Thought A: he must be a giant. When will it be dawn? Are we to race through the valleys of a dream?
Thought B: we could have a sword fight indicating psychosis.
Thought A: we could have a conversation indicating synaesthesia.
Thought B: maybe we could kiss indicating inspiration.
Thought
A: if only you could get both your brain cells to combine!
Thought
B: the double act is well established as a tradition in comedy.
Thought
A: but through thesis and antithesis there is synthesis… we might
forge “Thought C.”
Thought
B: I am happy enough with the way things are at the moment.
THE
BROKEN SOUND-MIRROR
Take
out your guitar cables and see in all directions at once.
People
don’t like being told what to do.
Permutation
is
how the inner game of music operates.
Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade the gay
maths teacher
stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone when
announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight.
Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to
make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of
knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we
are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe.
You
don’t need a knife to achieve it.
A game is a rehearsal for death.
Naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.
It takes the seasons to turn to deliver the true fruit and have health. That’s why this bit about the ship is a bit shit.
Bats
there are bats in the locked attic, breeding;
and
gas satisfies their longing for omniscience:
to
piss on others from a great height and angle
and
expose strange, salty worms on the eye.
Clock on which Yogi Bear dies. To break out of frames. To trespass into forbidden gardens. To wash the poison from my eyes and see the secrets of the skies. To break Sum Hymen. To make the cops turn in their badges. To go over all the edges yeah.
“The
universe is a projection of the mind,” spills Dr. Calculator Ptom
with innocuous vision. He
says
gnomic
things
like “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.” “I
was doing some thinking and realised 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.’
Soft pollen from the Muslim World was once a magical sacrament, a sop offered for working in the fields, a currency in an atemporal microcosm. It makes you demotivated, is non-conducive to hard academic concentration, but propitiates great realms of heightened sensory perception, prolonged orgasm. It helps to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, renounce fidelity to surface-gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance, touch the texture not name side of life.
The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob (Revisited). Yes, it contained numbers such as ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ and ‘Ossie the dog’ who went round and round chasing his own tail. He escaped to the farm a lot did Ossie, snuck away, went chasing bitches. Please see Let The Jews Win for a fuller rewrite. We needed to falsify the Nirvana barcode therein to make it a win.
Wear an emotional condom before you fuck my mind, man.
“I’m a big lad,” said new daddy Seb. How he would love to get lost in a black pair of tights used as a new poetic form - a nacreous Poohbear dial upon which you can ascend the echelons to Heaven. She lay back and said “do the lines.” It was the nearest thing to a vision for a long time.
Gloved in sleep we love one another. When we wake, no seaweed crown, words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds weighing them down hopelessly… and then it is time for your morning poetry buttons.
If the windows were washed – every one! -
we’d still see nothing through them
except the same white mirrors reaffirming
the quiet interior of the kitchen.
By now we’d need to prior the owl
but seem to have landed on the other side…
the owl is full of warm, Holy eyes
that illuminate the skies with resplendent silver.
A layer of frost crisp underfoot… this wintry image seems a dilution of the esemplastic fled away with the quadlibetical. It seems to be more to do with quotidian consciousness, and it could be instructive here to consider Huxley. He said there is a Reductive Gland in the brain reducing Infinity to digestible bytes and portions.
Words,
words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this
epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the
instinct to survive. Man
is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across
metaphysics and words make connections between first and third
persons. Words
are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in
order to make life easier. Words
are, well, ONLY words.
“Mayfly,”
I say the word
“mayfly”
phonetically
sounding
out its every
vowel
sound alphabetically.
The
symbol [R] could still
represent
the stance,
the large-R
Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse
gulf; that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
When
you renounce the quest for meaning you find it, fall back on
meaning-by-proxy.
TWO
LOVE POEMS, WRITTEN AS ANON, IN LOWER
SIXTH
I
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.
II
INFANT JAZZ POEM
Sometimes perhaps
down opening quiet
I am drawn down
long and alone
and my friend and
my foe recede
into deep sleep
sudden and still
like a dawn behind a
screaming veil
where silence
is born and all that's
loose and tight and
all that's light is light
like first morning
with no night
and wend my way
so slow to Freedom
and soft Infancy-lunacy
with harp-sure eyes
so I can live
the last poet's
last poem.
FLAGRANT RAPSCALLION
I
Apple blossom cheek
breath of wine
plates or confetti
he sips on disturbed
Nile insect
spaghetti
II
While that may be the ABC of aesthetics,
what I’m getting at is that
if a flower-press ending on cannabis
could = a dialysis a love poem
only hoping to impress poor Flora = a motor.
III
If I could sip from your eyes I would
and taste your name. Eyes of
deep
undersea green, we
would skinny dip and fish
in them, drag out numberplates,
mangled car doors, crumbs.
The pretext is yours
and it is also my mum’s.
IV
If this were a fairy story
there’d be no happy ending.
No sumptuous consummation
will wait for the poet
at the end of a plot.
I think of a chain of music from star to star,
but therein am starting
to quote my old self again.
V
I’ve already lost my father
who was an international art smuggler
nicknamed Blue or so he said -
though once upon a time
I thought art was recourse
to euphemism for pollen.
The people from the future,
they don’t want his business to end.
VI
It’s good when the daffs come out in spring,
like yellow trumpets, broadcasting
their excellent news.
Excellent News was the ideal
in my New Beat youth, b/t/w/.
I was nomadic in those days.
VII
Before the daffs come out,
we have snowdrops like
pure, white flames
in the heart for love.
The long, dark tunnel
of winter awaits us now.
VIII
I sip tea, I sip tea,
unsweetened it’s
enough for me.
I’ve
got a lot of washing up to do.
I
tried to meditate today.
Come.
It’s
good to get the washing
up
done, because it is good
to
make a clean space
for
yourself before
you
write – mess leaks in
to
the brain when
you
are in a messy room.
Now
it’s done I can make a sandwich -
cheese,
ham, lettuce, on special brown bread…
it
has no added sugar unlike white.
At
the moment I am leaving
the
washing up to dry, but
soon
will put it all away.
Then
I can say “hey,
I
pulled my weight today.”
So
that I do, and that’s true…
I
do a little bit more at my screen,
getting
pithy about Place and Nature
then go outside to collect wood.
Sometimes I look at Nature and see
invisible sheet music flowing right to left.
If you like I’ll mention some scattered perceptions of the Lakes.
The fell from town,
when you’re driving towards it,
seems a great, slumbering
diplodocus, come
to fat and die by
the Irish Sea; but
nearer the foot
you can see it is
more Buddha levitating.
And when 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, rising
to its silent scream,
its steam Ariel returning
on Caliban’s chain.
Floating in the quiet
of a weightless dawn,
the buzzard is the crux
of the flux of time,
and all of Creation
his dark machine.
There are benefits living here, like
once I encountered a rare, red kite,
which sat resting on a fence post, waiting
for me like a warning or a reward.
Sometimes
Nature is custodial;
and
at other times, frightening, otherworldly…
in
me, Nature is a great
art exhibition,
but
it can also be an immunity to Reason.
Some
think of the future a lot,
and
how there should still be
a
place for Nature in that future,
to
go exploring
just to look at trees,
which
like
crows,
dogs and
horses
are Man’s friends.
Nature
is the true architecture of State, at
least
unto some, while others would take a less staid and Conservative
attitude.
Here
we find mood as bracken frond.
We
find dry stone walls creeping
in
to the writing even of city folk, visiting.
I
think writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug
called “Strictly Free.” I think the Beautometer would be a good
invention for fell walkers. I
sometimes think of Heaven as a pile of statistics when I ascend the
fell – that I will one day find out the exact number of steps I
have taken up it and whether I held the record.
The
powers that be could be clouds
rowing
overhead
on
their sky blue roads.
And
everything
in Nature is
only
semi-state: even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline.
Well,
nothing
has changed to the map
apart
from the wind-farm beyond
the lap
of
the tide, revolving
its Mercedez Benz arms
to
make electricity for
the
farms -
and
also the cafe down the beach -
since
Norman Nicholson neglected to preach. -
Changes
to the place
have been the net,
global
warming let’s not forget,
the
advent of the mobile phone
and
increased
opportunities
for vice in town.
But
who needs vice when literature is intoxicant enough?
Here,
we
find the beck is a fountain pen.
I
sometimes stand by the beck, listening
in.
(Dr.
Bob says only those with their feet firmly planted can fly.)
I
would be wearing my wellies, listening
to
its most mellifluous applause,
the
way she 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.
Literature
from the city is of alienation,
literature
of rootedness repetitive,
and
the city is the intellectual breeding station,
but
countrylife closer how we ought live.
I
The reason my new work is not Anon is that I believe a writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.
The earliest-written English poems, however, are attributed to Anon, the earliest recorded line being:
“Well-wrought this wall: Weirds broke it.”
Weirds could be weather-systems.
Combining the fact that the earliest subject is ruin’d architecture and the earliest recipe known to man is for beer, as discovered by monks, could make a poem’s definition “a statue of alcohol.”
The A595 is the main road connecting
the nuclear sub factory in Barrow and
Sellafield up the coast. On Sunday
the posse of motorbikes come
to this bucolic valley because the road
has something in the golden sector #
to do with its bends, its elegant curvature.
I went walking up the rearside of the fell,
and some one or two hundred yards in,
up the path and away from the A595,
encountered a rare, red kite
with dawn-charred chest, resting
on the fence-post, waiting
for me like a warning or reward…
II
Here from this seat now
I look about the kitchen, painted
a plush, Mediterranean coral,
at the indomitable things on the walls,
the notice board of cork,
the dead telly wearing
mother’s funeral hat,
the calendar with local photos,
the chart depicting the plants of the
Meadows, the clock, my sister’s art…
It’s a country farmhouse kitchen
with an AGA, where most of the cooking
is home-made, not from packets.
We have no neighbourhood or amenities
and country life can be quite dull,
but recently I felt elated
for capturing a partial alignment
of the Plough and oldest fell
on my new Smartphone.
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.
III
It’s a myth that countryfolk are stupid
just because the rhythm of life is slower.
The region is an actual religion.
It’s why my dad didn’t take too kindly to racism.
I
was amazed the kite didn’t fly away,
as
I stood there gazing upon it.
It’s
as close to a bird of prey
as
I have ever got out in the wild.
Apparently,
the Vikings named the hills and the Celts named the valleys… this
should be easy to remember because you can picture a Viking being
able to see the mountains from the sea as they travel across; and the
Celts likewise lived in among the valleys so it would be natural they
named them.
Obviate
not titivate, sate
your
quest for meat and fling
to
your bright
ring, your
peerless
orbit, your wheel
of
hunting,
out-stretch
wings
to be
engorged
on air’s
ranting,
rock-strong
sockets
braced against crushing,
uprushing
rivers and sail.
Eventually,
it did fly away,
but
not until I made the decision
to
continue my walk, to leave
the
moment, the spot where I stood.
Seeing
its wings unfold,
seeing
it fly away, I took a left
up
the rear side of the fell, following
the
path beside the beck
and
– still not knowing
what
the bird was, only storing
an
image of it in my brain -
reached
the cairn at the top.
Down
down
down
down
down
deep
blue
below
“eh
up,
mate,”
says
my
mate
and
is
it
safe
to
say
hello?
When
I got down again,
and
back to my home on
this
side of the fell, I
looked
the bird up in a book,
and
found it was a red kite.
For
some reason I thought
I
had found the golden eagle…
there
was a rumour that a pair of them
had
moved into the area.
So
I was actually disappointed
to
find the bird was a rare, red kite,
which
it certainly, judging
by
the book of birds, was.
That
afternoon, I got a phonecall
from
my ex gf on my mobile.
I
told her: “I’ve just seen a rare bird.”
I
also told her I had given up cannabis;
asked
her if she still smoked;
but
what she said and what she was doing
when
she said it, I shall not say.
Simon
says the River Goyt
might
become the Styx in Heaven.
I
say the rhythm of the River Goyt
beats
blood to my head like a cold muscle.
The
word ‘goyt’ might actually be Celtic thought-patterns meeting
Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.
Back
then I liked music by people such as: Boards of Canada, Squarepusher,
Aphex Twin and Autechre. I also still liked some guitar music by
people like Hella and Shellac, and my favourite act of
all were
Radiohead, ever since they filled the hole left behind by Nirvana.
All
of it was better to listen to when high.
Dr.
Robert says: “the brain actually releases cannabinoids naturally
for moments of signification like reaching the top of a mountain. If
you flood your brain with cannabinoids un-naturally, meaning and
signification become aleatory, a mess. There is suddenly meaning at
any point of intersection in the crazy palimpsest of memory.”
Kurt
Cobain sings:
“my
heart is broke,
but
I have some glue,
help
me inhale,
I’ll
mend it with you,
we’ll
float around,
hang
out on clouds,
then
we’ll come down,
have
a hangover.”
I
Now
we’re just enjoying the peace on a calm, autumnal Sunday.
It’s
a time for expanding your threshold of Negative Capability… I am
also taking care of my mother, who injured her arm on holiday. It’s
her birthday today, so I gave her a book, and like every other day
made her a fire and made her a morning coffee.
We
need to get some new Vape juice
because
there is only one bottle left.
Tesco
is going to be closed for a few weeks
after
today so we should stock up.
Apparently
they are going
to
redo the fruit and veg section
so
that the fruit and veg is stored
in
a series of closed compartments.
Now
for the
E as I
try and summon up a purpose for this. It is healing, of the self and
the soul of the world. It is truce between old friends fallen out
like
fools.
It is air for
the tortured soul to breathe. It
is an experiment into more advanced modes of being.
II
Sensation
precedes
thought in art,
chain is made from same as key,
waves make gentle
love to the shore,
homework tonight is
to remember your dreams,
and this we know,
there is no ‘we,’
I am the third person
immaculate, free…
you know the routine
by now, the score,
and more and many more,
but let’s not dwell
on school-made things
when outside birds
sing with their wings
and freedom flies
and freedom flows
and the music never stops.
OVERVIEW
OF MUSICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
So it’s the night, the night I deem it just the music… but my friends already said they liked my seven year old text; and the government would still require something written down from me, like when I had to keep the internet free as a boy. If I were to deem it just the music I’d copy and paste in a Discography:
To
listen to The Flood, whose
album was recorded on binaural earphones, 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
E. P. I made with Grant Aspinall back when we were still called
Funnelspirals, it
is called ‘The A and E. P.’ by Funnelspirals and can be found on
Soundcloud.
To
listen to the four albums of the new da Vinci circle, even
though they are not really meant to be listened to, only read in a
book, visit
John F B Tucker on Bandcamp and
look for Various Artists.
To
listen to other
collaborations with
Grant Aspinall,
including
the
song ‘Eternal Full Moon,’ including when
we put Blake to music, including
‘Seclusion,’ including ‘Snake Snake Butterfly’ 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.
The
best one was probably the binaural earphone record, in The Flood,
whom it seems I can sometimes hear sound out. The Flood’s binaural
earphone recordings might be enough, dark
music, breaking the ancient silence, an experiment into irony as a
musical key.
THE
PROBLEM
And
when they say it is to be Anon
and
when they say it is not to be Anon
that
could be how Shakespeare got away
with
something rich and strange.
Even
to this day there are claims
that
Shakespeare was a black, Jewish woman,
whom
it seems was robbed. But ultimately
love
is the answer to this quandary
of
ownership and possession, and
what
the writer we know as Shakespeare
contained
so very well in his 154 Sonnets.
And
if you helped invent the net
and
were rendered destitute by some
rich
fellow stealing your idea to invent
binaural
earphones, on
which to record
your
music,
things
would indeed
have
gone wrong with him and his rich kind.
And
when he says it wasn’t really you,
that
helped invent the net, you’ll
know he’s
wrong,
that
it
really
was
writ with your own right hand
and
is not bad for a right-handed Gentile still.
And
now ever since I told the
rich man
he was
evil
on FB I got the blame for someone
I
don’t even know dying and he is trying
to
even affect my death, to make it
so
that I am not free to die in peace.
And
from what I know of Hell it is
all
about the fear of being buried alive.
And
last time I tried to take an O. D.
the
likes of which it was genius to survive,
I
came back down and had lost the ability
to
ejaculate… which
I am starting to think
was
the work of the rich man, whom
it
seems won’t leave me alone. And
now
he
keeps nagging about how it is not too late
to
write a truce with him, but I hate
his
guts, hate, that is, the rich sharing
out
the intellectual property of the poor.
And
when the doctor says you look a blur,
I
think of the rich man and that time,
when
the Towers fell, and how I only
wanted
to
be a scholar and even English teacher.
INVINCIBLE LOVERS
I’ll tell you how strange and wild
With wanton promise comes she
On an unknown hour
Like an uninvited guest
You’ve somehow brought to bed.
All night we’d
Sit and think of history
As if it hadn’t passed,
The great wars and the ancient peoples
And all the silly fears.
We’d think of how much we’ve changed
And how much we’ve remained the same.
We’d think of moments of mine
We somehow shared and how I longed to live
In circling illumination of all those moments,
Fragments gone.
And softly I wished
To expand history back into the past
And never to move again an inch forwards.
And to run through the memory of Time,
Ancient, timeless galleries.
Often we’d sit and think of speaking
Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.
Always we’d realise we never had
Time enough to waste or spend.
So we gloried in ourselves
Like invincible lovers,
Always boundless in new being.
And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,
She would turn and smile
As if to boldly offer
‘Come take my hand,
And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'
(circa
1997)
SYSTEMS
If you should not trust systems for they rule with fear
not love, fear would appear an epiphany of Hell
in the self, love Man’s highest emotion here,
where the dream of love meets the oldest fell...
to engender an aesthetic anti-system like the
old colours of the vowels in English you can
find pasta, tea, air, hair, clothes, loo-roll, water, that your ordinary
speech is surreal enough to qualify as an open-
air poem – quick get it down, get it down! -
your notes on hyper-vision echo in the air.
What wisdom you speak! Like Blake for the modern
ear… you remember when you had brains to spare?
For chatting in philosophy chat rooms all Night!
For
writing in a secret, alchemical alphabet or
not!
AURORA FLOREALIS
Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.
To make a flower-press would be womanly.
When our days still ended on cannabis
we would bemoan that flowers were legal.
To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.
I no longer puff the evil weed these days.
It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,
that separates the murk from the excellence.
I would need it to balance out my mind,
one homeostatic device for another one.
Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.
I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,
hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.
I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.
*ketamineguitar*
READING
DESCARTES
Note: When I read of Descartes on perfection and turn inward my eye to investigate I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.
*
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
*
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but
like butterflies.
*
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.)
*
Semen
spills like silver water,
under
the bridge with the angel’s daughter,
splashing
with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.
*
Down
down
down
down
down
deep
blue
below
“eh
up,
mate,”
says
my
mate
and
is
it
safe
to
say
hello?
*
Leaves that played on the surface of the water,
these are the leaves they have in Heaven,
these
are the leaves of love.
VISION
“Look Fufie I can fee feep.”
‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world.
There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn. When he opens his eyes he sees cloud-forms floating by outside but the rest of this no, not-so-special-perception is gone.
Something about being a Starvationist.
Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.
Still there is no such thing as Time.
Optimus Prime is a time when wasps leave fag-burns in the apples, apples with toe-nails embedded in their cores, and the air has a plaintive, melancholic, wistful, elegiac note and tone… it’s when the leaves start to fall down.
Down in London we only had a postage stamp garden. I used to sit out there with my brother and observe ants on the blades of grass. I would ask myself if I too were but an ant unto some higher God.
I remember having a love of hammers, also sticks. My brother and I played light sabres with sticks. It used to drive our nanny mad.
When we were down in the London house, sometimes dad and mum would take us out, maybe to the planetarium which filled me with wonder, or to the Natural History Museum. I loved to see the great whale in the Natural History Museum and imagine all the plankton he ate. The tone of mind of natural science was savoury as cheddar, not sweet.
When we were up north there was a sense of being free-range. John Barnes was my favourite football player, the reason to go outside and kick a ball against the wall. I had a Barnes poster on my bedroom wall. If we were listening to a match on the radio and Barnes’s name popped up I would awaken with a jolt and get excited.
At a young age I learned all the capitals of the world and knew them better than I now know even at the age of 43 in 2025.
I can also pinpoint my first coming to awareness, which is my earliest memory, the same: we were on holiday in a chalet at a place called Brockwood Hall in Whicham Valley because we’d come up north to do something to the house which was being rented out at the time; and I found not one but two plastic yellow submarines in a Cornflakes box. My mum said “you like ‘Yellow Submarine’ don’t you John?” to which I responded YES and just like that clicked on. Though I could understand my mum I couldn’t quite understand my dad. His speech was like microphone static, and I realised I would have to start trying hard to understand what he meant.
I think that day I was allowed only one plastic yellow submarine and sailed it through the air with my hand on a dank, dullshine day outside the chalet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks
to the voices I hear for help with the arrangement of this difficult
collection. Sometimes you even know who one is, like in the example
of ‘Aurora Florealis’ which is a co-imaginative effort between
myself and Dr. Tom Pollak. Something overheard by voices also appears
in the poem ‘Broken Down Hero of the Western Night,’ in that
instance the voice of Syra Sowe, so again thanks to her for helping.
Thanks also go to my friends and family and the whole world and the
universe and God. Without them the collection wouldn’t be the same.
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