HAMLET IN FLAMES

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 after 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.

READING MATERIAL

If there were paper under my heart there would

be writing on it and at last it would be red

like the blood-orange warning of dawn-burst

or nuclear-fall-out-in-reverse-of-dusk, whose

scattered, tattered-knicker clouds conceal

real live U.F.O's, and non-exchangeable

for a bus-ticket when the fiver-river’s gone.

That page, my wage, an underground organ,

with its meta-fictional shorthand and triplicate, 

something like the opposite of a bus ticket,

in taking you on an inward journey forever:

surely it would feel shocked to not be legal tender?

[Silecroft Beach]

KOPSICHE

I am the deadman you killed my son.

My car took a train across the boat

over the bus through the tram and

via the telephone on the aeroplane.

I've seen wit. He's got grit. I can

beat the Germans five to one baby one

in five. Love is the hope the heart

literally needs in order for it to survive

without which it can stop. Emotional

balance is more the gift of the liver.

I can drum up a drum bigger than a 

dream bound in the leather of a

Jim Morrison trouser. I can whip up 

a frenzy as easy as cream. Pretend

it's still a dream-with-open-eyes-er.

Death is H suspended in deafness,

not the frozen abstract angel of

tangential angles of light thawing in

emotion you want me to mention, but

Death is H suspended in deafness.

Hover like the dragonfly over the

pond that codes the kiss of the wind.

SOLILOQUY

(a psych-trance number written on returning from The Secret Garden Party)

Who do you think’s the indivisible king?

His name is writ on a butterfly wing

A fireface moon and a frozen rock sun

Collide in a dream and the dyes start to run

But Hamlet’s been healed by a shaman with spells

And vowels are our souls and words can be cells

You are who you love and not who you are

So set the controls for the prettiest star

The wings of a butterfly will bear my weight

One can be savage and one can be great

My temple is simple it’s inside your brow

Each day is a new religion now

To sleep on the ceiling with feelings of love

Or sleep on the feeling with star-tracks above

Say is the wick worthy of the flame?

And as play dies and becomes the Game

Is ecstasy mc squared or a dove?

Is numbness to love just as painful as love?

And while I’m uttering crushed butterflies

If you ask no questions you’ll hear no lies

THE GREEN BLUES 

I read through the news, 

that gives you the blues,

a chimney falls under my head.

I stomach the wood 

that tastes very good, 

better than Jesus’s bread.

I glow for the coal, 

don't bury your soul, 

backwards in spire I get high.

I'd go for the house 

that's quiet as a mouse 

and emblazon my name in the sky.

I'd slip through the skin 

of a thesis as thin 

as the Rizla it's in and be there.

You’d light it and write it,

you’d burn and unlearn,

you’d even tend to your hair.

I'd make you late

when you insufflate, 

and dream of 360 vision.

I’d dance and entrance

with a hundred tongues

and be perfect in every decision.

WHICHAM VALLEY AS A SCRATCH ON A CD

If a place is still its own mind,

this one quietly dreams to itself

and falls ever further behind.

No, there is no Tourist sign to tell

how rich in natural and human history

is this valley by the oldest fell.

I heard the church is built on the foundations

of the oldest stone built monastery

in the whole of this fair nation.

Black Combe’s foothill Sea Ness (I hear)

was once named Seer Ness after

the trance of some kind of mystic seer.

Nature’s scales are all diatonic

and from all background static depression

here is her sonic, spiritual tonic.

The beck runs its hand smooth through

an angel’s hair in the garden and

assuages the soul when you’re blue.

On Sunday the posse of motorbikes

comes for the valley’s curves,

the flowing of troughs and spikes.

I could report on more, much more,

but shall just impart that down the beach,

waves still make gentle love to the shore.

ERASING THE DEBT

My father told me he smuggled fine art,

told me big things way back near the start

of my life and I was surprised – but it didn’t hurt.

He told me he smuggled art o’er the Berlin Wall,

sold his business when the Berlin Wall fell,

told me he donned faux Australian accent

and code name “Blue” – but in time I went

and found out that (as I had suspected)

it was pollen he smuggled. The story he told -

it was to keep his young family protected! -

art was but recourse to euphemism for pollen!

He didn’t charge the Germans for the return

of Russian-plundered, pastoral paintings

but had a pollen farm high in the Moroccan mountains.

My private schooling was funded that way.

Now I’m trying to think of something Romantic to say!

Blue was his nickname, Blue as the sky today,

through which a docile cloud-change migrates -

and he shipped tonnes of pollen to the States!

Now that he’s gone I can, yes, I can impart

what my father really smuggled when he said art:

tonnes of pollen, containing mascara bruise,

peacock feather, velvet flare, butterfly wing, whose

effects make me laugh at Flarf, snooze to News…

inducing tangential-thinking and demotivation,

it’s non-conducive to old-fashioned concentration.

We dreamed we could legalise it, make it free,

use it as currency or to cross the Irish Sea,

but came across the wall, the wall we adorned

instead of breaking down and soon it dawned

on me that like Michael Hofmann I mourned

my father before he even went and died,

which is called proleptic mourning, then he did,

left me remembering him saying “life is one”

under a bleached, wide, tired, madding, English sun.

[reconstructed]

HALATNOST IN A CRISIS HOUSE

My bedraggled crow’s nest splay is Portable in all directions…

oh no, oh no, the Spirit of Music has been lost forever,

down on beautiful, heartbroken, sentient, rosethirsty earth,

where the wetness is jealous and the witness is smitten,

went the Spirit of Music when we thought it lost forever,

and money is not for drying your eyes in the queue for medicine

and these rude, Nirvana-barcode fingertips did not touch her

and the full moon wears the ultra-scan of every baby

and the silver forest is enraptured by the fanny of a bee.

(London)

THE GREAT ESCAPE

“You have to write one about running

away from the acute ward,” said my father.

“It’s absolutely hilarious.” Well,

on my first escorted walk I legged it,

crossed a field and a busy motorway,

found a trainline, serpentine, followed it

to the station in the town, got on

a train to Scotland. I thought there

would be a different jurisdiction

there, but the cops found me, and

took me back to the border, where

I was taken back to the acute ward.

“It was a sign of your sanity returning,”

said my father, “and hilarious, but

actually rather sad because it meant

you’d now be forever in and out of hospital.”

BREAKFAST MADE BY MY FATHER

Breakfast today was two fried eggs, sunny side up,

on toast left to cool slightly so the yellow butter

didn’t break the surface, with a pink-rimmed cup

containing black coffee with a lump of brown sugar,

plus streaky bacon turned in the dark-blue AGA

and dipped in red sauce, all on a new, milk-white

plate with green rim, which, when eating was over,

and I was quench’d and sated, feeling alright,

I left to soak in soapy bubbles in the kitchen sink.

I belched quite crudely then, which was my food

popping up to say ‘hello,’ and drank of my drink,

the coffee from its pot, coffee which can be renewed,

and, grateful for plenitude, felt somewhat satisfied,

and took my leisure to the beautiful world outside.

PURPLE

Voices also told me to write of the

colour purple. In Steiner homes for autists,

rational but socially inept, the corners

of the rooms are round and purple

because it's less threatening than the geometry

of rightangled corners. My room

turned out a little like that when,

as my dying father lay in the attic,

my screen bloomed a numinous purple

light daubing the walls until the

bedroom, an anagram of boredom,

seemed like a featherlite love poem shop:

a little girl's lava lamp of a room!

Sometimes the seeping foxglove aura

vacillated back and forth between

purple and its normal screen light,

refusing to settle for any long period of time.

My bro said I'd caught some virus;

the computer programmer down the pub

just said dying, and he was right,

for by the time Blue passed away,

Blue being the art-smuggling codename

dad used in his shady occupation,

the computer broke down. R.I.P. data-tree,

and farewell luminous dark of half Denmark!

Now all I can think to say on purple

is this: I would put it in my mouth.

And I would chew on it like a cow

grazes on grass, mulchy and blind.

And I would ingurgitate it fully

not spit it out like a child his dummy.

I would taste it like her name. It's

the colour of mystery and sex and

saudade and longing and shame. And

it's the colour we associate with depth.

When I first looked at the colours of the vowels

I noticed the presence of its absence,

as if you'd expect it there because

it's the colour of deep things.

POINTLESS ACTIVITY

Now that University is long out

I wonder what it is I am to do.

Now that I know, say, The Great

Gatsby is an infradiegetic heterotopia

pertaining to panchronic and

panoramic overview, like

a chronotope turned euchronia,

or else a word-world gone

polysemic with the multifarious

possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy

through whom the esemplastic has fled

away with the quadlibetical -

now that I know the lesson

of post-structuralism is twofold,

meaning a) the condition of being

a text can extend to any object,

any quotidian ephemera and b)

the condition of being a language

unto itself can extend to any

text – I wonder what it is I am

to do. My father, after his PPE degree,

under Karl Popper at the LSE, learning

of things like falsifiability and

of P1 to TT to EE to P2, well,

he turned back to Winnie the Pooh.

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 blossom mellifluous on the carnival's street,

That blossom 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.

//////////

REMEMBERING MY FATHER

E’ en three days before he died of cancer

my dad was out working in the garden.

He was trimming the beech hedge.

He was never shy of work, and

there was always work to do if he

was to upkeep the Plough alignment house.

He was not an evil man, even though

he told me little about his job.

The way he paid for our school fees.

Even when he had Hep C, which

was hardy his own fault, he would

rise with the sun every day, and

go outside and work, climb up trees

with a chainsaw to make logs for the fire,

so the woman whom he dearly loved

could be warm when the house was cold.

He fed me and groomed me for writing.

He brought in snippets of radio,

(he listened to the radio all night long),

clippings and cuttings and samples from

publications, newspapers, magazines.

I reckon he named us after the Doors and

that means William Blake as well,

and didn’t tell mum, because she

might not have allowed it, but

he still wasn’t an evil man. He

was an original hippy with organic values,

and always used to say “the hippies were clean.”

His values were much like mine own.

He had a love of nature, had

what he called “the horse gene”

and was keen on sport as well.

He took us on holiday, provided for us,

the best things, everything we needed,

osteopathy, dentistry, and stuff like that.

We were given a lot of love by dad.

He bent over backwards to accommodate us.

AN ADJUNCTIVITY TO LOSS

Before I knew dad’s list of French vocab was a code,

before I became inveigled by the tidy scholarship,

I used the pad because I had it lying around

to note down something I was thinking,

thinking something about a former band

called Secret Chord H, though my dad

would say it’s not a secret with a name like that,

a name that is a metaphor for something beyond.

I calibrated a scale of thirteen words beginning

with C, the twelfth being cannabis, the last Caliban,

and so it is written in dad’s green notebook

as if I were trying to wish him well in Heaven.

Secret Chord H were supposed to be like the Doors.

We even had a keyboard player for the last gig,

where they said my song ‘Dream With Open Eyes’

was the best number, and Doorsian enough indeed.

Now my eyes are wet with a few water droplets.

They have also been opened to the truth. For

I think if my dad was sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness from Jim

Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures,

he was wise to hide it from me, keep me ignorant,

but in thinking this I realise I know even less

about what his job was, through an extra option,

than I did when he was really alive and here.

His irrevocable loss causes suffering still,

for who can I ask to no avail about their profession,

even though it is clearly none of my business,

and misunderstand and blame and treat badly?

I loved him though and sought his approval.

I bought him a car with my first proper earnings,

even though it was only an old banger which

he used to say was a Cornflakes box. For myself

I bought a tent, so I could live a nomadic lifestyle,

but it went missing at a festival, not to be returned.

So it is we get inured to losing things but

when it is a much loved parent it’s really hard.

However bad things got and are still I must

remember saying “we all love you very much,”

“dad you’re the best,” and “I thank you for my life.”

I thanked him also for helping me get my degree,

and said “night night sweet Prince” up the attic stairs

feeling abashed and drunk and like a fool.

Things needed to be pragmatic to guard against

the feelings that inevitably still came anyhow.

The last words I heard him say, on his deathbed

were “have nice lives” in a reed-thin whisper.

MY DAD

When I see beer it reminds me of my dad when he is drunk and when I see a police man it reminds me of the time my dad lost his drivers license. When I see shoes it reminds me of my dad's smelly feet. My dad is the sort of person who tells you not to put your elbows on the table when he does it himself and my dad tells me not to ride my bike on the garden flowers when once he reversed the car on them. My dad helps me with my prep and most of the time I get it wrong. Sometimes my dad acts as he is three years old but he is really forty-one. When I say “I should play soccer for the England team” he just says “some chance.”

[aged 8]

A FURTHER FATHER POEM

What you’ll find hard is leaving the what-my-dad-did-bit out. That his office was the pub still doesn’t clear anything up. That he smuggled paintings over the Berlin Wall, I learned when James and I were sitting in the grey Ford Granada, two little boys with two little toys, and I asked him dad what do you do… but I still, still don’t know the truth and know I will end on a note of radical incertitude about it, like expanding my threshold of Negative Capability. I know he was also the star player in the rugby team at school, went to a top University from State School to read philosophy under Sir Karl Popper in the 1960’s, back when it was still hard to get in but his business remains incognito. I know that after pressing on to get his degree he hitched twice across the States with his mates – but not his job. I know that at first an original hippy, he still cut off his long hair and stopped writing before he had children. I know that by the time he was my age, he owned not one but two houses outright, one in NW6 and one where the Plough alignment is viable, also had four children in private school, for he only wanted better outcomes for us than he got for himself. I can tell you also that the sad bit was when he got sick - with Hepatitis C - before the virus was even discovered - and the liver affects emotional balance, cleansing and purging the blood of noxious toxins like TS Eliot would the languages of the tribes - but still am unsure of his profession. I still believe he named his children after the Doors without telling mum, if that means anything to you.

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!

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.

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)

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER

A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.

Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.

Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.

Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.

The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.

The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.

The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

When you lose your concentration you die.

Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.

There are too many words in the world.

Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.

You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.

All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.

Without difference no contradistinction.

Everyone is my brother and I love them.

The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

There is no more mapless space.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life.

Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card.

Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.

It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself.

Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.

All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.

THE DAWN

Dawn leaks out, its light slipping

through the dark fingers of the trees.

If I bring this to publication,

it will mean wood.

The woods are a traditional

testing ground in literature.

These days things are wireless.

I might’ve gone right

when I asked Paul

what colour is white?

What is a while?

Is this where the truth

flies or the truth fairy?

In the past, being the witness

from The Lords And The New Creatures

I might’ve been burned at the stake.

When you’re gone we hope

the doors will

open up enough.

Maybe we can

do the new creatures again.

A LOT

When the psychedelic treasure chest of dreams

is opened, perfumed sunset will streak

like water colour across the canvas-sky

and will be beautiful even if there is no-

one to look at it, so we need someone

who can open that psychedelic treasure

chest of dreams and release whatever

may be inside it, be it brand new or ancient.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, ACT ONE

I

Last night, I was up late re-reading A. I. Idiot,

thought of timeless ideas transmitted across Time:

that there’s no such thing as “almost infinite”

might well appear to be one

that seems to confute the tenet of faith

that there is no immutable truth

unless I am mistaken. Now it is dawn.

I too was a poet and might still be, accruing

a virtual Brainforest, a teeming data-tree,

an inchoate morass, a digital Alexandria Library,

venting my spleen at a slinky screen,

all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage,

my mood made stable on a sterilised table.

To light it and write it, to burn and unlearn

was an aesthetic philosophy of my youth,

but a thesis as thin as the Rizla skin it is in,

and wayward of the property truth.

I danced in a sensuous graffiti of blind, white light

in the basement at the Bloc Party that was a big

office block with internal walls removed,

and every floor a decade in drugs, music, fashion.

The music was penetration, of the is-ness

of reality, and meaning in it solipsistic,

like faces in the fire or seeing three

creatures in a cloud-change. Now it is birdsong

that enters the Byzantine conduit of my

inner ear, rattling tiny bones in there,

recognised as soundwaves, a recognition

which qualifies a species. Birds are

trilling with thrilling laser-flute in trees.

Re-reading A. I. Idiot over the night

took me back, back, back, to a Gap Year that

was characterised by waves of terror and

E comedowns that had no value in maths,

to when I first explored A. I. Idiot’s verse.

It also took me forwards to new realms,

with things I had missed last time I read it.

And the voice on the automated conveyor belt

of poesis flowing from room to room, looking

for body and form, explained that this is why

they don’t do poetry anymore: because

the Modernists knew what to do and we don’t.

We did (they said) however seem to conquer it

in my last attempt, but the urge persists.

That is why I re-read A. I. Idiot over a night.

I like The Copy And Paste Land and that

is where your Modernist course begins, but

his later work really stood out and I expect

to the trained reader my response smells of it.

So far so good. The dawn is awash with blue.

Maths without answers. Me over you.

Love over gold. Times by Telegraph.

Self-undermining. You have to laugh.

II

I live between the letters of the word OK

but sometimes escape the shape of the paper.

I look at the dawn now the sky is grey,

think how I’d be no good as a rapper.

It’s true that I don’t know what to do,

yet sometimes conjure 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.

Now I am faced with the Big Glass Day,

I think of sliding through a mirror,

an alchemy of perception, in a way,

that brings us ever closer to Nature.

Now, wishy-washy, cement-mixer clouds,

amorphous in formless continuity,

obscure the new light of spring

and that reminds me of something…

I recently took an O. D. the likes of which

it was genius to survive but coming

back down lost the ability to ejaculate.

O pulchritudinous nubile sylphs!

O women smiling from adverts with your curves!

I must remind myself that never again

will I know you and how much that hurts!

So the question on my mind is whether or not

I can still sing in the Oral tradition

of the bardic child. Already I pumped

my friendly A. I. co-pilot full of questions:

what would John Nash make of the face of stars,

September 11^th or the Plough alignment?

Can the maths of the new colour be used

in our finding the cure for cancer?

Is there an equation for the ratio between

light speed falling and gravity pulling

on the sheet where pictures grew?

One might hope my poetry does not

dissolve into endless A. I. read outs.

But to rewrite A. I. Idiot as I re-read last night

would also not be true and quite,

maybe attract the literati a little bit,

and that was my plan which now I indict.

The room is filling with light as my thoughts

empty out. I have done my best and don’t yet like it.

III

Dr. Robert says nobody is interested in new creatures,

that the future of A. I, the possibility

of other dimensions, Pullman-esque portals

are more interesting. He says spirals

of epistemological doubt are out

and Love in the Age of Facebook in;

that nobody cares for poetry anymore

like they did back in the Modernist period.

I should live in London where I am king

and use words like “compress sans everything.”

But it would be too brutal for me…

I have this mental illness, you must see.

Helping invent the net at seven,

storing the idea of it in writing

in the attic here to give it a chance

to grow even further away than France,

I called it the “ire ii net” because

I used to play pirates with my black friend

on the shed roof at four. That

was down in town where we lived before.

I’d like to just say, there you feel free.

I moved up at five. We don’t all live in the city.

Now war leaks in the head from afar,

speeded by the self-driving car.

War comes through the mobile phone

but friends through the marrowbone.

An Informationist, faced with death

might send a text saying LIQUID CRYSTAL METH

into space, as a work of art

or even PUT ICE CREAM IN YOUR ARMPIT…

Starting with a party is no way to start

when we’re perched on the edge of WW3,

and the dawn has faded in my heart,

which is where it rises if you’re free.

Now I shall ask my friendly A. I.

for a post-Eliotious experimental spiel,

now there are blue patches in the sky,

and I am stumped and can’t unspool.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, ACT TWO

I

The sad rag I drag across my vision.

When it’s over we don’t lament, don’t cry.

There is no catharsis, in the denouement.

No journey from tension to resolution.

As far as the map goes, we are nowhere.

The map could be an App, in the strange case

of my mother’s flower-press ending

on cannabis. When it is mirrored in words,

sometimes only death is a valid full stop.

Maybe, it isn’t until the cannabis stops working

its physical poem on the body that the flower-press ending

on cannabis starts to = a dialysis. And

if a love poem hoping to impress poor Flora =

a motor it could be best when blind,

before you have the system or pretext framed

in your mind. The fittest is a she and

she is the Real E more than street ecstasy.

But what I mean is when TS Eliot comments

that Hamlet has no Objective Correlative

he might as well mean that Ophelia

is one of the most beautiful women in literature

and it is not believable that Hamlet eschews her.

But he’s got work to do. He’s got things

preying on his myriad mind. Anyway,

here I sit on a fresh spring day, plinking

buttons as if it were a naff Casio keyboard

and it still isn’t working. I tried death

and that still wasn’t working. I took, if you

will remember, a new overdose, of 200 anti-psychotic

pills at 10mg each, where they say just 200mg

is enough to kill you, and yet I survived.

The dose I took was too extreme and might yet

come at me again in a second wave, have me

trapped in a dim and evil in-between world

where you can’t even hear your own prayer

in your own head, between earth and sky.

It doesn’t even bear thinking about.

II

Images that remain extant and roots that clutch?

I am a magpie bladder filling in the dark

with details, up a ladder, guarded by a spark.

I have collected metaphors for years.

Everyone thinks that when I renewed

Jim Morrison it was the best I have done.

I am but an iron filing firked to the moon.

I see the candle not the Bunsen-Burner still.

I am travelling into the filament of bird.

Once I discovered perfumed moonlight

in a clearing in the centre of the wood.

I remember days we used to smoke pollen.

It can propitiate a state of hyper-vision.

Also see demotivation, tangential-mindedness,

the way it is non-conducive to hard concentration.

But I love the sense of peacock feather,

mascara bruise, butterfly wing and velvet

flare under my thumb, as the lump crumbles.

Sometimes they put petrol in hashish...

a petrol spillage is not without its own rainbow.

I am hoping I am at the end of despair.

That I can buck up and have a happy life.

III

I don’t think we should make war

on Ronald McDonald even here, where

we find the telluric, magnetic, gravitational foot

of Black Combe but no McDonalds or DogMuckels

as my father called it… no, I rather think

one should use one’s time at the cryptic crossroads

to denounce all violence, even cartoon varieties.

Between the daybright and the twilight,

when the sky is drunk on molten gold,

may your life suddenly become perfect,

and out at reality’s starry faultline.

TS Eliot’s compositional method has antecedents

in piracy and grave-robbing. In Modernist

times they really cared for poetry. Our

time is said to be postmodernism though

even he is getting a bit long in the tooth.

Whatever Modernism means, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. If Modernism

is a crisis of authority, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. If Modernism

means Reality is Untenable, postmodernism

is an exacerbation of that. They say

the only major difference is that while Modernists

did away with all the grand narratives,

and stopped believing in anything, they

still believed in art; but postmodernism

even renounces fidelity to art itself.

They even lose faith in artistic representation,

that is, and start to further embrace weirdness…

it was when I wrote an essay on postmodernism

in the first year exams that the faculty

knew I would get a First. But in other areas

of life, time’s arrow is out of joint.

I remember saying to Tommo from the band

I would have no problem getting a job

because by now I had a First Class Honours degree,

and that was at the alignment, which concurred

with a rhythm change in the White House,

meaning 2008 for sure, but I hadn’t yet

even got my First until 2009. I wonder

what is going on and whether Gravity

has actually torn the fabric of spacetime.

It could be just me and my melancholy moods, misremembering.

In the first year we do three subjects

and I elected politics as my third instead of

a very popular course on outer space,

and I sometimes wish I had done the latter.

I seem to recall we read both Hamlet

and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

in the first year, that Hamlet was declared

Shakespeare’s autobiography as a young intellectual.

If I said “I fried my brain,” would it seem

more aesthetically pleasing? My father

ended a poem on the words “Hamlet in flames,”

to convey Hamlet’s madness. I inherited it from him

like a family business. Love’s language

is that of heat, flames of desire, burning

passions, et al. Hamlet in flames might

default to science, or love, or even smoke.

The Lake District is Nirvana Unplugged in New York.

Go write about spring as the sexual union of earth

and air, go write of the effects of global warming

on the unicorn, go write Bart Simpson’s

suicide note, go write about a breakfast

that contains every snooker ball colour.

Go write The Love Song of the Circle And The Square.

I told the men in the Ambulance when I was on

the brink of death some crazy shit about my rationale…

I genuinely thought I was a gonner, and couldn’t even

operate pen and paper. I’m amazed that I survived.

IV

Everything became a bit of a blur.

I lost the ability to walk, talk, write.

I am growing to be quite a connoisseur

of pharmaceutical pills (a bunch of shite.)

Now Hamlet in flames is back at the foot

of the oldest fell and will get better,

eating warm salad and mum’s summer food,

beautiful dishes cooked by my mother.

If you want to see some acting try Paul.

We shared a tremendous creative empathy.

We drifted apart, though, a bit like Sal

Paradise and Dean Moriarty, you see.

V

It’s about a man’s right to dance, dance

in a sensuous graffiti of blind white light.

A man as cool as my dad, who may

or may not have been sponsored by

some philosophers to provide

the real human witness from The Lords

And The New Creatures – should still have

the right to dance. I mean if he is not dead.

For my father lies some one hundred yards away.

Under the earth in the churchyard. My

father – he might’ve been an art smuggler,

or maybe art was a cover story for pollen.

A man as cool as him, as I keep saying

should still have the right to dance, dance

in a sensuous graffiti of blind, white light.

And it’s clean inside a flame. And

it is green inside a flame. And what was

he into in the end but the ash of yesterday’s

fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper

and put out in the right green bin?

And what were his feet but black unicorn feet?

And what was his art but people, people

on the roof fixing the TV aerial who have

been up there for months in all kinds of weather?

VI

When smoke spoke I went into a dream.

Back then, I thought the band name

‘Open Poem Opium’ was a good one,

and was but a handful of copper coins.

Visions have stretched across the board,

staggering insanity, boggling the mind.

There was even a real inscape of wings.

But what smoke said when it spoke I forget.

It slipped away, through my fingers.

My saturation levels have been high.

With smoke speaking it was more

the wilful assignation of a voice to

the psychotic episode, arranged from

the most nearby and portable materials around.

It was partly superimposition but

it was real, real at the same time.

So we opened up a whole new chapter.

HAMLET IN FLAMES, ACT THREE

I

Ah these dog-eared, bog-standard days,

waited on by sheer cold terror,

often leave me feeling lofty in the Night,

reconfiguring some kind of error.

I have never been found guilty of rape nor

murder and am my mother’s kindest child, but still

horrorism gets in my bones and it’s like

the Night has seen my mind all o’ er again.

In September in 2001, melody became embarrassing,

singing in tune blasphemy, music a sin.

What would I do to be sitting on mum’s bed,

as she reads from Roald Dahl all o’ er again!

Something went wrong with my psyche

in the year I left school. Being prescient

doesn’t pay off, for I spoke against

September 11th in 2000 in the barn, a fool,

and when the Towers still came down

despite my speaking against it I was therefore raped.

This manifests as a burning feeling in the psyche.

The word ‘psyche’ incidentally derives

from Ancient Greek etymology, the word kopsiche,

meaning “ghost.” Ghosts of course can

travel back in time, one scholar visiting

Ancient Greece finding the Greeks tremendous

actors who wore long cloak, buskins

and Native American Indian head-dress.

They must’ve looked tremendously impressive.

But when the Towers first fell there was no

time travel backwards, only Hell in my mind

and I downed whisky to suppress the feeling

and read TS Eliot in the night-time and

tried to keep my hand in a scale as it were

but I lost all contact with my memory

of even speaking against September 11th

in the year 2000, by suppressing the burning.

I still had to carry on and I did write a piece

called ‘Instant Travel’ for an entrance portfolio, also

‘Hypertext At The Gates of Dawn,’ also

‘Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,” whom it seems

may or may not have been an actual substance.

And we recorded in a badass, Rimbaudian band

called The Flood on a pair of binaural earphones.

That means they had tiny mics inside and

were simply laid on the floor where before

there may have been need for a studio, so

we explored dark music, irony as a musical key.

And I don’t want to ruin it for you now

but I did climb up and say I was going

to plug my senses in the mains. Our

Floyd was very Freud indeed, and I stole

quite a few books I did not read, and

I fell behind with my reading but so did she,

as we smoked too much gorgeous green GM skunk,

and I tried to put it right and went round

the bend and yet have got a degree since then.

One minute you’re thinking about TEFL,

next you are 44, fat, single, unemployed,

carless, mentally ill, medicated, living

with your mother and brother in the sticks.

II

But what we need is a parrot sent to space

through the conch as in fantasy more than

a patch of blue denim kept taut as in realism.

Having said that my days of green skunk,

paroxysm-inducing and potent, are over. I could not

hack it with this mental illness anymore.

Anyhow it is dawn and I have been up all night

in vampiric, anti-social, Gap Year habit.

I don’t know how people can send signals

but I believe I am being helped sometimes

by holding a telepathic conversation

with a father poet whom it seems knew

I had helped invent the net before I did.

What’s needed is more and much more again

on the post-Eliotious masterpiece for then

I could augment my rewrite of Jim Morrison

with another collection of ink droplets

trained in squad-drill formation, prefigured

in stars as much as flocks of starlings.

III

David Morley says poetry is the opposite of

money, echoic of James Joyce in the Tower.

If he picks up a poem and a bank note and

burns them we feel different about the fiver.

It’s all just paper and metal to me who

once upon a time kept the net free and

perception is ready for alchemy. To distil

intelligence into truth is the key, and it

might not be me that says this but sadness

is the musical key of intelligence, hence

Great Danes are shapes that make me sad,

sad as cats and dogs in the hay when

it rains on a Saturday. Yes you hear me:

sadness is the musical key of intelligence.

IV

Things are looking at the point of turning

from something promising to something

too right-wing, so I contemplate my grand-dad Don,

who was a military man all his life, voting

Conservative every time, apart from at

the end, the very last time, joining in

the celebratory genesis of the Labour Party

under Tony Blair. It didn’t make him

a hypocrite or an evil man to explore

the left as a sudden otherness, to the norm,

even a beautiful, compassionate emotion.

My first thought is of giving something away

for free even if it’s just 2p but I can’t

afford it so my next thought is to turn to music.

“I’ll play the swan and die in music,” as

Shakespeare says. He knew love is the answer.

MUM’S MEASURING STICK

My mother took me out

on a mother-son bonding trip

- oh, only down the garden,

to the veg patch, where I,

as if gallantly, dug her a trench,

and after she planted

her potatoes, raked it over

again too. Here she comes now

into the kitchen, saying

“this dry weather is good

for the door,” because the door

used to swell, because it is wooden,

and offer much resistance

to being closed. I am out of

breath from working. I left

the veg patch first, carrying

two paper packets in for the sitting

room fire. I was in hospital

yesterday or the day before

after another O. D. and

don’t feel up to much work.

Still, when mother says

the dry weather is good for

the back door, she might mean

working with soil is good for the soul.

And she is mostly right.

She has a lot of magic sayings

hidden in the treetops, does mum.

You can drown in a puddle.

Language is a creature.

Imagination is a muscle.

In politics there are no wrongs

or rights. Just because someone

is good to you doesn’t mean

they are right for you. Actions

have consequences. The brain

only heals when it’s asleep

and even nightmares are

healing. Giving makes

you feel good. Poetry is not

the entrance and exit of life.

Of course she was the one

who made the flower-press ending

on cannabis that might = a dialysis,

and I was the one that made

the love poem for Flora

that might = a motor, and who

spotted the system, beginning

with ‘if.’ That system, I would

think of as my Equilibrium,

but it is on second thoughts mum’s

Equilibrium. I don’t like cooking

vegetables in the kitchen, or digging

in the vegetable patch after all.

So it is that when I sit here ( )

in the kitchen, because it has

a good table, a good chair,

and internet access, writing, and

mum comes in to cook, it augments

any work on Flora’s pretext

if I just write down what she

says, about preparing food.

Now I’ve made mum a coffee

for her flask, from the instant

espresso machine, her second

of the day, and she has gone

back out there, to the vegetable

patch, leaving me indoors.

And the bluebells are out

and some have more bells

than others, but all of them are nice.

And mother comes back in

with some layers of clothes removed.

And the dishwasher is still going

round and round like dreams

in the recycling bin. And mother

goes back out again, back

to the veg patch because

her work is not yet done. And

the dishwasher has stopped revolving.

And the fridge’s drone is heard.

And in the fridge I have a sausage roll.

And the sausage roll comes

from the local butcher and is made

with real, Cumberland sausage.

And out there, the fresh, spring air

sings that love is not dead.

EIGHT PRECEPTS CONVEYED IN ORDINARY SPEECH BY ‘BLUE’

My dad was a failed writer himself. Like Rimbaud he stopped writing and took up smuggling, art smuggling in his case. Before he died he managed to do away with all his writing except for a little green notebook containing a list of French vocab as I shall show you and also conveying Eight Precepts in ordinary speech to help me with my own writing.

1. All writing is fiction.

2. It is rude to write of the living.

3. A standard of truthfulness should come before the need to the sell a story.

4. A writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

5. “Why not?” is not a good reason for writing a poem.

6. You’re supposed to get the ball over the other guy’s head.

7. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

8. Literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness alone.

I like them all apart from the moral compass one, because it could be seen as being a bit reductive and old-fashioned. One of dad’s examples of “sheer cleverness alone” was William Burroughs because of the cut-up method, but Burroughs was found on Ted Hughes’s bookshelf and Hughes would definitely appear a writer of moral compass to me. So things are not so black and white.

DAD’S LIST OF FRENCH VOCAB

Ma fossette dimple

(Steak) A Point medium

Saignant rare

Deux converts? (deux personnes)

Veilleuse (petite lumiere)

CODE (grand lumiere)

la cote Rating, letter, number.

Un chien mechant - vicious

dog

La pourboie - tip

greviste de la faim - hunger strike

gacher (fig) bungle

parvenir a - arrive

pouisuivre - pursue

s’ agride - to be about

la hausse - rise (prices)

loisirs - leisure

Londres – cette cite meconnue (unrecognised)

une ville ou le pictoresque et l’ insolite (unusual)

le guettent a chaque pas

(lie in wait for)

des flaneurs lounger

lavabo -

etang - pond

brasserie = brewery/ beerhouse

atelier - workshop studio

(lit) occurrence

l’ incident = avec un autre eraducteur

l’ accident = mishap (he backs into

me while I’m on the

beach)

from a carpark attendant. Correct?

de l’ essence

Mettez 20 litres…

Remplissez…

ebrilles

erabe-crevte

huitres

pommes vapeur (steamed)

Limandelle meuniere

equenelle

paysanne

prune

epine - thorn

corail - coral

le lievre - hare

lapineau - bunny (rabbit)

shapes at Gritte du Grand Rue

l’ elephant et la trompe - E & trunk BUT le tronc d’un autre

l’ oreille de pire

le crinoline - crinoline

l’ aile de papillon - butterfly’s wing

l’ ile de puigouins - island of penguins

le sapin - fir-tree

la trousse - truss

le mammoth, le rhinoceros, le cheval,

le bison, le bouquetin (ibex, wild goats)

le nid d’ ouns - bear’s nest

______

charcuterie - pork butcher

papetrie - stationer’s

unblock - pad

brulene (coffee)

la digitale - foxglove

la fougere - fern

l’ ajone d’ or - gorse

le puits - well

quincatlerie - ironymongers

hardware

une planche decouper

- chopping board

en hetre (made of) beech

le gite - house, shelter.

deguster - taste, sip

cedre bleu - cedar…

bon apetit

bonne soiree

bonne nuit

un briquet - lighter

le medicine done

non-aggressif

parallel

MY TRANSLATION

Break, bird with the skin of snake,

it was but a little mistake,

to be or not to be that is the question.

When you went back in the wood it was not there,

and that is your petite lumiere,

then you would need a law

to make your General Theory.

You went wrong with the maths

of the new colour as a cellular mark,

and became vicious, no son of mine,

but helped invent the internet

for nothing as a little boy.

That lightning storm in France,

so prolonged it was a God Simulation,

through which I drove for hours,

that was Nature ripping up the rule book

to let the game commence.

You still don’t know about my art deal,

but when I die will find the sheet

where pictures grew down the barn.

The State think the uprising

was to do with the house

where the Plough alignment lives.

London, it is a city unrecognised,

a place where the picturesque

and unusual lie in wait for the flaneur.

The garden up here meanwhile

is an eco-toilet. Thanks for helping

dig the pond. I find with James

that still waters run deep.

There is a difference between

an incident and an accident meanwhile.

I hear you jumped out of a moving

vehicle, is this correct? If 2001

was about the Future State, I

would say it was on the left. I myself

think Nature the true architecture

of State, but still dream of

things like steamed apple juice.

My sons are named after the Doors,

and then the fourth was a girl of course.

You are born in a season each, spiralling

spring autumn winter summer, marching

right left right left in the hands

as if military zeal will always win.

Of five shapes I could mention, one

is your trunk, but the trunk

is an autre trunk. The face of stars

is better called the island of penguins.

Trust the fire-dance. The order

of the colours of the vowels is

scrambled because they are wild animals.

French for a bear’s nest is le nid d’ouns

but some things are universal in

international language, like equality

and liberty for the blacks, with which

I align the unblocking of my notepad.

Tell them flowers made me unwell

on a chopping board made of beech.

That we will burn down the house

where the Plough alignment lives

should we get in any trouble for any of this.

I haven’t had a drop of booze for years,

and it’s not wrong what happened in the wood,

and now I bid you all farewell and prepare

to smoke a spliff in a parallel universe.

THE FALL

Well, 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.

SUNSET TO THE WEST

I was swimming in the Irish Sea

at sunset with my mother,

watched from the stony beach

by my poor, dying father

when I realised

my place is in life is lowly.

I was languishing

in salty expiation

as a laughter of seagulls flew past

wearing shark mask replicas

when I realised

my place in life is lowly.

I turned my body away

from the beach towards

the peach-stone of

a black hole, being slowly

sucked into the sea’s

watercress hives and drowned

and realised my place in life is lowly… and

the setting sun is bought and sold

and silting gold, leaking

out in all directions

like MC squared =

A SUMMARY OF THE MATHS

The encrypted node in the boyhood work was that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break Light-speed a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah.

I see now that it was possibly government scientists who, for the sake of long storage, when the idea of the net needed storing in writing, got me to begin encrypting that with a text called

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and to continue with a second text called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

“but then again who knows.”

The split was not even but asymmetrical like one was on and one was off. It was like spotting the flaw in Einstein. It was like saying if you write Einstein backwards it implies the breaking of light speed. It was even like saying if we invent a time machine that can equal light speed we can only go back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet.

At some point, after the Einsteinian bit, and when I had had the vision of what I called “the ire ii net” myself, a + sign was put in for the F of ‘scarf’ in the line

“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”

Then there was a discussion of the struggle between ‘Good and Evil’ in a piece where

“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”

In other words the first person pronoun and the time 1 o’clock were being contrasted.

It is not clear if the splitting of the two books happened next, for the number two in the sequence, but I think so. In terms of the number three, there was also my maths book where in among the numbers you find a three line poem going

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

To read it all you’d only need to go and get a copy of what by now I know helped invent the net but which at the time of publication I did not know helped invent the net. It’s called The Sunset Child. People have said the best one in it is called ‘My Dad.’

The counting continued. 4, 5, 6, 7. Then when I got to be the age of 11, I received the mark up the underside. It isn’t red and black, nor the new colour as such. It’s what I mean when I say “I’m fine.”

And the nurse in A and E last time I took an O. D. said “you looked twintone when you needed to pee. We would deem it that you have re-invented the human form.”

SILENCE

What gets me about our Plough alignment

is the silence. It’s very silent

for something of such immensity,

something so magnificent, so awesome.

It looks like a million elephants, lying

down, and to look at is like eating

a million LSD trips for breakfast.

But the silence, it is what gets me.

Surprisingly quiet is the whole, hulking,

great mammoth universe when it falls

at your feet, hardly a flower

curtseying discrete and petite.

I make more noise walking

round the kitchen in purposive, 4/ 4

rhythm than the whole of epic space,

that vacuum where no sound travels.

But the alignment is most marked by silence.

False, then, to call it a secret chord,

unless the chord is a silent one, like Y,

which does not register on the bright equipment.