NEW POEMS

[A work in progress]

AURORA FLOREALIS REVISITED

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*

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.

THE TIME OF OUR AWAKENING

Already it has been and gone -

the time of our awakening.

It left me without registering…

I was mostly in Monopoly jail.

The time of our awakening -

it should be an Ancient Greek afternoon

in the sunshine cherishing wine.

It should be a tremendous visitation of energy.

The Muses should smile upon you.

It has been and gone and mostly

went without being recorded.

It left me paranoid, deeply paranoid,

like waiting for the cops to come.

Now they say peak time’s over,

speak to the man caught in the midst.

We got a few things done on second thoughts,

but the time of our awakening is gone.

Playful in the scattered sun,

we invented soft games like poesy,

fell asleep in the long grass,

woke too late for lemonade.

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.

THE FACE OF CALLIOPE

The face of Calliope 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.

At least when I look through them,

they look really good.

THE MUSIC

The music on repeat

in my head tastes sweet

but then you listen in

and it gets emotional

because it is futile

and mouthless.

So you imagine the Irish

crying into their pints

at the end of the night

when flocks of notes

have migrated.

When it starts up again

after you’ve brought it

through the comedown

it can be annoying,

but then again,

to keep singing through

the delicate operation

is not a bad thing.

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.

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.

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.

FIELD OBSERVATIONS

Already Radiohead is a field

with a river down the way

where mad children splash and play

unaware of the guilt and the shame

unaware of the praise and the blame

unaware of the end of the game.

Their tender playfulness extends forever

as they splash and play in the water,

moving stones to change its pitch,

not quite minding which is which,

free to do just as they wish,

and on the river bank languish.

NOT THE NIRVANA BARCODE

I

With recent publications, I attained

Bush instead of Nirvana… but

imagine if I had attained Bob Dylan!

I picture him standing there, singing

“a hard rain’s going to fall,”

live and electric, putting his soul

into the show. But no -

I have merely attained Bush.

Bush were never a bad band though.

Their first album was great,

then they got a production genius

in Steve Albini for a producer,

and the second album wasn’t as good,

but it was still not bad.

It was called Razorblade Suitcase;

and we did find out what was inside

the razorblade suitcase at a later date.

II

As for some of my own follies in the alchemy of perception...

The <BEE> one was good, meaning Soundcloud Rain, just songs structured on the new da Vinci circle, but the About The Author section showed I still didn’t know what I had gone through as a boy.

The Sunset Child, my boyhood book, worked, back in the day, if inventing the net was the efficacy, but not knowing that, I sold it to you as the homework of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures.

The love poem book Breath Trapped In Heaven said “stop the war,” letting all else but love fall away, so that’s good, but it didn’t end up with a happy family.

Brave New Tense looked at the condition of water at the foot of the fell in terms of a contract on universal human rights – or something like that. It was about writing off the top of the head to discretely “do the beck” in the back garden here where the Plough alignment is viable. It only meant “Long Foot Disease.”

Yes You May was about not using force. I did it with my sister who is born on the 25th May. I think she was trying to say “it’s so bad you’re charging too much.”

And then we had Let The Jews Win – and it worked… it preceded a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. As if the poet truly is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. So it didn’t matter that it repeated a few bits and bobs of my extant oeuvre because the point was peace. But some said if it includes the Nirvana barcode it’s still gone wrong.

III

This morning I am thinking of a Leonard Cohen line:

“love that is graceful and green as a stem.”

Then I imagine attaining Leonard Cohen instead of Nirvana.

He was a good poet, that worked with his secret chord.

IV

The dawn was awash with blue today,

and I was grateful for it after last night.

Now a plane screams overhead, tearing

the sky in two as it goes. Downstairs

mum is in the kitchen. Today

I have my anti-psychotic injection.

Now I imagine attaining Syd Barrett’s

solo work instead of Nirvana.

V

The thing is I’m not really an airhead

and read a lot of philosophy.

I have something big in mind,

in terms of the poet dreaming

big, trying to change the world,

to have courage and persistence -

but I feel up against a wall.

It might be that I am the one

who needs to back down!

My father after all was employed

by a Russian bloke once upon a time.

Then again he did warn us of

the dangers of just putting

anything in, so to speak,

like it were an O. D. attempt

about two decades ago, so

my proclivity is not necessarily inherently Russian.

VI

I wonder if my brother’s <BEE>

– and the notion that it might

come after @ in the

international language alphabet –

can be implemented

to bring about peace. But

I fear a minor poet, bringing

out a minor publication will

just fall on deaf ears.

VII

Imagine attaining Megadeth

instead of Nirvana. Not

a band I listened to much.

But there is a cave on the face

of the foothill Sea Ness;

and at the back there is a portal;

and the portal leads to a tunnel;

and the tunnel is lined with free

beer dispensers, torches

and fruit machines; and

the tunnel leads to the old U. S. S. R.

VIII

Imagine attaining rave music

instead of Nirvana. They

already used to say raves

were spiritual gatherings.

I’ve been to some myself.

One was an illegal gabba rave

in a field in Cambridgeshire.

But what this has to do

with what I am trying to do

I do not know except to say -

imagine attaining Dylan.

IX

What I am still writing for I do not know,

for it may be a trap, but I am thinking

of attaining Stravinsky instead of Nirvana.

At the first performance of The Rite of Spring

the audience pulled out the seats

at the end, so new did it all seem.

I also like Stravinsky’s The Firebird

where he applies containment

to Grieg albeit with darker inflections,

which you can notice in the rhythm of the notes.

X

I imagine what it would be like

if a young boy wrote the line

“I have a scar+ that is the new colour,”

with a plus sign for the F,

and then counted up the numbers

from one to his own age, say, seven.

XI

Hannah makes a great cup of tea,

says the boyhood book

is still the best one I’ve done.

Therein I imagine attaining

Bob Marley instead of Nirvana.

That would be quite something.

XII

In the end we see, even I

don’t have the power to stop the war,

am just a feckless citizen

of a different country,

a little, witless blip on the ground,

a minor poet which is a cool thing to be,

who likes the words “ostranenie”, meaning

de-familiarisation, from

Russian Formalism, and also

“halatnost” meaning dressing-

gown-ness or detachment.

XIII

It could be she that says to me

if I need something to do

I should redo the wet.

It is through <BEE>

which is therefore definitely real

that I hear such a pow-wow

of telepathic proportions,

all tuned in to the same moment.

But the wet, that refers to

the motif of Brave New Tense -

to write off the top of your head

about your current situation,

to discretely “do the beck”

in the back garden where

the Plough alignment is viable.

XIV

When Paul’s daughter was born

I sent him a hyperlink

to the song by Peter Blegvad

about his daughter. Blegvad

once said my songs were Barrett

and my poems Rimbaud.

He should be as famous as Dylan himself.

Now I imagine attaining

Peter Blegvad instead of Nirvana.

IF I AM HONEST

If being a poet in love with Flora

and yet who can no longer

ejaculate is what you want

to be you should mourn a woman.

She was tastier than potatoes

but I say that only for sound-sex.

Sound-sex is nice but real sex

ineffable so much better it is.

So I think it would be better

if I was still able to come.

So it’s not what I want to be,

only what I find I am, you see.

I already did the one where I

fall out with my chums and try

to terminate my own existence;

but I think it would be better

to still have friends and to live.

Having been close to death,

I can declare death absolutely vile,

and love the reason you want to stay alive.

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 =

THE MAD MATHEMATICIAN

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 non-white 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.”

ANYTHING CAN COME OUT

Anything can come out,

even a talking toilet…

but I hesitate to probe

the artistic side of things

in case it tempts the mental illness.

Instead I sit and contemplate

unheard music hidden in the shrubbery

which is an image from Eliot

whom it seems, in 2001,

was decreed a repressed

homosexual in The Sun.

Even the tree outside the window

can come out as it were

when observed through

the aleatory pattern of

purple germs on the window,

down the bottom of an

evolutionary corridor, for

in Infinity the tarantula

and the cathedral are one.

Even the lightbulb above you

can come out, even the

drip in the shower room.

DREAMWORK NOTATION

Adder-less, frictionless, I have no soul,

artificial are my wings of air.

I travel light, in ways digital,

remembering dreams of beauty so fair.

At the party, everyone followed me around,

watched me for moves, on the dance floor,

sometimes a movement, sometimes sound,

and the words I spoke were never a bore.

Gone when you wake, the whole tapestry,

the blissful feeling, the entertainment.

I didn’t touch the ground, was that free,

and the words were ample containment.

I wish to have no nastiness inside me,

sitting here drinking coffee, in the day,

stealing a moment from Infinity

thinking to myself “go away! Go away!”

SILENCE

What gets me about the 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.

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the floor up at mormor’s here

and find in sharing room to cheer

for we have written this new Proust

and with my hands which can attest

to weathers all about my head

that mean the sharing of the bread

which have been here since the start

of finding salvation in art...

at the moment Flo’s just the noise

of playing with her baby toys

but soon she’ll sleep and then wake

and later eat a fairy cake

and one day grow to be a mum

but as for myself I cannot come

and without the ability to ejaculate

I may have grown a little late

and can’t continue singing of

women in the wind with love

so I should say “That’s All Folks,”

it’s impossible to mend your broken yolks,

e’ en when you sit with smokes

and tell your friend some dirty jokes.

AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

One day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”

“They might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt below.”

John was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.

They were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a game of football in the field near their house.

They lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It was a big, ancient mound of land.

Their dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed “Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly cleaning or baking.

There was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a second like it could’ve gone on forever.

John suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up the fell?”

James said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”

Robert always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went in and asked if they could go on an adventure.

“First pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they got in trouble.

“Are you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.

Ossie was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm. It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead and bring him back.

Seeing all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child, especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by nature.

The family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off to.

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

So they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.

They did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane, taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the large fronds of bracken.

It was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided against it.

So they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.

“Watch out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools, and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.

It was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the summer heat.

They walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.

Then the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into it to cool down on such a hot day.

Ossie was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of going over a bridge.

As Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!” he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.

“We should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because he was the eldest.

You had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess what they found?

There was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in the fell.

“Imagine if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no money. It didn’t matter though because as John said

“there’s no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”

He himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.

They could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,” and it was true, it was.

James now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.

“What could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.

The mystery was a strange one.

“Maybe someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.

James was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.

They were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess what he found?

“There’s a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit up and the fruit machine made a musical sound and it turned on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at the back of the cave. There was a tunnel inside!

John shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at least a few feet in front of them.

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

They did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.

“I dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what is done as a Giant Day.

NOTEBOOK REVISITED

It was for peace that I wrote my last book, (Let The Jews Win), for “truce between old friends fallen out like fools,” as I said, and for the larger world as well. People said I was Nash after it, the mathematician. I can elaborate on it, use it as a template for furthering my work.

I was trying to write white. In the first of the two poems ‘Notebook,’ the opening line “il faut que je m’en aille” is a quote from Arthur Rimbaud, an archaic French subjunctive meaning “I too must go.”

The second line (“Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and”) is Go-Beat-stricken.

I was trying to confer a special message through the white space in-between, and sheer insouciant faith, like a counter to the red on black JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS which I read at the top of the Pompidou Centre’s conceptual ascent through the ages.

The original album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob which I was rewriting in ‘Notebook’ included a song called ‘L to the Pregnant Snorkel’ and one about Ossie the dog going round and round chasing his own tail. If ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ contained inflections of my father’s education at the LSE under Sir Karl Popper, who taught of of P1 to TT to EE to P2, Ossie the dog’s song was more John Lennon. It never got as far as V, in the Utilitarian Martianist slowspell of the word “LOVE,” indicating that my heart was broken, but I made amends in the recent rewrite.

The trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.

There is an upturned canoe for a drum.

There is a dog for a frontman and

there are poppadom hi-hats in the band.

We have a family friend called Rafe who was also in the band, like a brother he was and is still too. Dad always used to say “you always change when Rafe’s here John. It’s called pack mentality. You start to misbehave. You’re weak.”

With Rafe on board, we were named like the Doors (almost). John, James, Robert and Rafe we were. But we also have a sister called Hannah.

Traditionally what comes after The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is Hannah, the blonde palindrome from the 25th of May.

That means H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart.

The band started as 4 siblings born in a season each, spiralling Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer, marching right left right left in the handedness – and yet this might mean that anyone can be in the band.

The Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory...

whomsoever they’re looking for it’s not me.

Light shafts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?

It was me, I'm he who dared disturb.

Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement

but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.

We have seen this all before, time

tumbling away into sleep, seen

this darkness drop and these ruins murmur

and now we are gathered to appoint the gods

and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves

and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

It took a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, to write and record the original album The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; and we indeed sang of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail; but the original cassette (a one off) was later recorded over with a Blur gig on Radio One.

That isn’t the end of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob either, for it surely goes on and on.

I have said it before and would say it again that God is a game, and that a game is based on permutation, or at least can be, and that a permutation game can be a rehearsal for death.

I would also say The Lords And The New Creatures is a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I would also say it is a media compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun, maybe to expose the germs of dictatorship on all hands. It churns up evidence through the operation of a game. It tests the place where evolution is controlled, monopolised. It asks if he who controls the media controls evolution too. It is a good test.

If God is a game what are the rules? Some say God is a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Some say God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Some contend God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become. Dedalus says ultimately we all have the same definition of God.

Going empirically from personal experience I can say that praying before an LSD trip will mean a safer trip than if you don’t pray even if there is no God. So God could be a placebo. Still, I don’t wish to go on about God too much.

I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with Satan for so long before we recognise he is evil. He also builds up through pages and pages of poetry to a moment of terse concision:

“She plucked. She ate.”

In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven. He is like one of God’s security guards! Traditionally it is the Muslim faith where we find the warrior-poet, so Milton might be suggesting “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”

I am also interested in God Simulations. Before The Lords And The New You Know Who seemed to get real in my boyhood, there was a lightning storm in France so epic, sublime and prolonged it was a God Simulation – it was Nature herself tearing up the rule book to let the games commence.

This doesn’t seem to be the subject matter of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob though, where there is as yet all too little mention of sex. Martin Amis says a single pixel of sex is ineffable, impervious to the workings of the pen.

Voices have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar.

If Forgiveness were a fine white powder, a chemical cure, they might with-hold the cure until the price is right but seeing as it is not I am prepared to try and forgive the guy that hypnotised and cursed me.

I used to say the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the dialectic of sickness and recovery, the language of sterile medicalese, that one’s illness is more congenial than one’s health unto those that are in charge of one’s health, for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies that can with-hold a cure until the price is right, but now I see the illness is not a conspiracy, that the science works, that I should plug in.

In my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head wound. The nurse in A and E put a bandage on. I went to touch the bandage to see if it was paddy and it was. I went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air while I sat still in a chair. The nurse had to put a second bandage on.

I was not just put in mental hospital but the acute ward. This was in the middle of my undergraduate degree. This is my story. I have been on heavy, neuroleptic, soporific, homeostatic medication ever since and had several hospital admissions. When I went back to University after that initial admission I got the highest First in the year and was a beautiful mind.

I wrote sooooooo many pieces, defaced bank notes, creative non fiction, rap, and one piece was about how there is no such thing as mind cancer. Hobbes and Descartes sit on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to the nature of the human mind: for Hobbes the mind was just a part of the body but for Descartes the mind was separate from the physical world. When I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind, and using it as ontological proof of God, and I turn inward my eye to investigate, I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns seem to be grammatical.

You could say that because there is no such thing as mind cancer the mind is definitely separate from the material world but it could just as easily be the case that there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.

The universe is indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order. Life is essentially meaningless.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob may be about Energy as much as Faith. In fact I may have lost my faith long ago although have blips. Some contend the idea of it is a pseudo-efficient, government-sponsored idiocy, others that it could unite us all. It was never supposed to be a post-Einsteinian comedy, nor about Backward Liquid Maths or Miltonian theology. I suppose it was more about Mr. Bean. The original was a bunch of young kids, the oldest of whom was 12, singing, as I say, about the dog going round and round chasing his own tail.

During my degree it was proposed that we scrap Trident and use the resources to explore space more instead; but without Trident we could be held to ransom by someone like Iran.

The nuclear submarine factory is only down the road in Barrow-in-Furness.

My brother is round there at the moment… I am home alone. I think how the nuclear sub factory in Barrow is enough to qualify it as a city, because the factory is a cathedral in the modern age.

I go out into the garden and look at the shape of the fell. The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob seems to contain a separation that corresponds to the geographical/ geological shape of the fell and its foothill Sea Ness from here at the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot.

I often wonder about M-Theory in correlation to the shape of the fell… I wonder if the qwerty keyboard ends on ‘M’ for the reason of the alignment of Plough and oldest fell, as is only visible here, being “the last thing.”

You have to beware perfection, and beware making a text so good it could be used as Fascist propaganda.

My heart is a bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.

I am interested in the dust that lies at the bottom of things.

As my father passed, Dr. Robert read to him from the Book of John. When he was newly gone, though he’s only gone up the road, I was h-a-n-d-e-d a stack of books I wrote at seven years old and one early piece says:

“On Tuesday there was a magic car in Form 2 and it had flashing lites all over it… and we crashed on a ship REC… and since we were under the sea the whirlpool pulled on top of the water.”

In short though I only give you a fragment it Taps the Book of John for the televisual age.

Around the time of my father’s passing I was thinking, yes, my heart is a bass drum stuffed with a pillow. It could be an image from the renewal of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; but I don’t want it to mean I die of a heart attack! Traditionally my heart is strong, ocean-going, a liner.

Sometime after my dad’s death I falsified the Nirvana barcode. As I said in Let The Jews Win, if you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning.

Mum said it was a trick of grief.

When 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 and took it to her

she said “there is no such thing.”

The shape I mention only works

in Times New Roman, thus:

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 & 693 are wings

and the armed winged may well make

millions out of the new Nirvana barcode

as brought in by John F B Tucker but

upon writing it down I cast it on the fire

and got my mother to photograph it in flames.

It became smoke filing out of the chimney, and the smoke dissipated into the north wind, that great disseminator of seeds.

Out in the garden, where it is returned to the elemental realm, maths is the language of Nature.

Now, seeing as my dear friends Agent G and Mark too whom it would seem has a finer singing voice than me might need to see some maths, I should just say, in this system E = peace.

Starting with L to the Pregnant Snorkel, E = peace.

We could likewise start with, say, L to the stare of 3 o’ clock twice, and O needn’t be Ossie the dog, going round and round chasing his own tail, for there are many senses of O. For example O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

As for V, we could have the peace sign made with the fingers, or V to the wings of a bird.

The reason I have chosen ‘love’ for this Utilitarian Martianist slowspell is that love is as WH Auden says “a choice of words.” So many problems in philosophy and life alike are down to communication as Wittgenstein said; which is why it is good to further focus on language-use.

If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.

So it is that we arrive at Backward Liquid Maths, where E minus MC squared = only relative 0, but not being good at numbers, I deem that piffle, when everything is devoid of evil, went the hen.

There’s a piece missing from Let The Jews Win, about our retrieving the dog from the farm. It goes in the first of the two poems at a point after ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by Secret Chord H and before I mourn the loss of E.

We were having a Scrotbag Party in the caravan. That means drinking and smoking. And suddenly I got a preternatural sixth sense that the dog had run off and was trapped on the fence at the local farm barking. So we walked up through the fields, our tombstone-shadows looming tall beneath the moon in the church field; and we found the terrible goat which was tied up in the triangular patch of land past our field; and we noted how its eyes gleamed a baleful green colour when a lone car passed; and we made it past the terrible goat and to the farm where we indeed discovered Ossie the dog trapped on the fence, barking. I was wearing a fur coat and had a bottle opener in the pocket and used it to cut the dog free. Then we made it back to ours and told the dog he was a bad boy for running off and continued with our Scrotbag Party.

So that’s a missing piece from Let The Jews Win.

Nevermind, I still got it in.

And what about that time I sat in a room without moving for three days and three nights staring at a pint glass of water before me on the table untouched, taking notes on whatever went through my myriad mind? That’s a notebook I would like to reread but they are all gone.

I might also have mentioned my grand-dad Don’s motto.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English

and growing outside in the wild.

My grandfather Don lied about his age at 15 to stow away to the Second World on the bottom of a sub, later won the Sword of Honour in the R. A. F. and became their youngest non-commissioned officer.

18. 49. I have just polished off a massive portion of sausages and Yorkshire puddings with delicious onion gravy so rich and thick it was like soup.

In Noj And The Mob, soup was called “moop.” Toast was called “boast.” I was Noj; James was Semaj but became Semgas because he didn’t like drinks with bubbles; Dr. Robert was Trebor; and Hannah was a blonde palindrome so I said she could be “Rannock.”

Mum was often “mumphis” as opposed to mumbo and dad was “Badmunch.”

I used to call “muppet!” up the stairs instead of “supper!” and everyone understood. I would also say “moonrag” instead of “morning” in the morning, and again the message came across.

It was like there was a charming dyslexia going on; but in my writing I could be deadly clear.

It seems to be a Nintendo innuendo that

her breath a poisonous magic.

Then you’re faced with Hanif Kureishi,

a bit of The Buddha of Suburbia.

The anatomisation of the female

could extend for longer and longer…

her ankles are delicate ornaments of ivory.

You’re also faced with Pinchbeck

whom it would seem, in Breaking

Open The Head, talks of the division

of people into those that like

and those that don’t like mushrooms

as the most ancient division in civilisation.

That’s why I didn’t feel it was a gaff

when I wrote the original, after

poring over a Ted Hughes poem in English

at the same table as fragrant Rachel.

She was never to be my cosmic bride.

It’s best when there is running light running through them but now they have been turned into a ruin because of the C. The train toots its hollow horn in the distance. Among the pheasants there was one not so pleasant.

It comes to my attention that my last book, Let The Jews Win, was commissioned by the New Right and that they want me to welcome them in, me being here at the foot of Black Combe, like we did to the Labour government way back when Soundcloud Rain was brought out. I suppose if I had known who it was commissioning me to write Let The Jews Win, my brother would’ve squashed it; but I also suppose that fair is fair. I attain a state of open-mindedness, if not High Indifference, and find freedom accepting limitation, and permit whatever wants to arise.

When I wished to have done a number like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I was told, in writing Let The Jews Win, I already had. It could be a bit proleptic to usher in the New Right, for we are miles away from election. The people that fed me the form of Let The Jews Win got it from observing me in the first place, years ago, and the writing I was doing around the time when my dad died. Every word of it was my own writing; and in the second moiety, for it was a binary-machine, I had structural help from my younger brother and mum. Again every word was mine own but it was done as it was done so that my brother and I could divide things evenly and for parity with <BEE>.

I even heard that I would have a Nobel Prize for it had it not been for the Acknowledgements where I acknowledged the odd touch, nudge or piece of redirection from my mum and brother, because then it seemed like fraud – but it is surely the other way round – to not acknowledge genuine assistance – for even the top Professors get help – would’ve been fraudulent. So here I am acknowledging that it was commissioned by the New Right, and, as I say, they wish for me to welcome them in like we did the left in Soundcloud Rain.

That is why the people I love want me to do another one, so that I don’t die corrupt.

Then you get that you already did welcome the New Right with Let The Jews Win, and wonder what to do next. It might take more action for example. Meanwhile my brother’s sci-fi epic is saved to the cloud. It is set over 1000 years in space. He doesn’t want anything of his writing kept when he is gone but without him and his <BEE> that may come after @ in the international language alphabet, my own writing wouldn’t be as good.

So we see things may have gone awry with the New Right, and with Rights, in a post-Brexit Britain.

Then we ask whether or not my dad had a deal with the New Right… and with that we want to have closed it.

They’ve left me nothing to do but renew the big white one. Meanwhile some people are living with cancer.

Paul says “when we started to share out your intellectual property from when you were a child, we were trying to make it so that it wasn’t just you who was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures… now we see you were right and it was already written of even in Michael Hofmann.”

While I could open up on this I fear it best to not go there, otherwise we might rue the day.

A DRASTIC HONESTY

Sometimes they throw the switch on my Vape;

sometimes the light batters and blinks –

the latter like the end of a movie

when the plush seat gets a hard-on.

Mine is not worth knowing about really –

marked by the maths of the new colour

which didn’t turn out the new colour in the end

and is the reason it’s only five.

HAMLET IN FLAMES

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.

ELSTREE AND BOREHAMWOOD

If I were to conjure an abstract out of certain boyhood Observations I would say I think to talk about The Lords And The New Creatures coming true, something “kinetic” becomes something “static.” It’s the same as John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. When we watch the action replay we know the ball is going in. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. Something “kinetic” becomes something “static.”

ABSTRACT

Once upon a time, when I first decided to “get scientific” about my life, I devised something called The Theory of Dark Evolution. It states that James Joyce also saw new creatures too, and that him writing Ulysses is therefore the reason Ted Hughes then went and saw a monster in the river, and Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain, about the nature of visionary experience, then becomes the reason Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert, and Morrison writing The Lords And The New Creatures then becomes the reason I met more than one specimen. The Theory of Dark Evolution therefore posits a Logical Bond between narrative and Naturalistic Observationism of a strange kind. It implies that what one man makes of the recurrence of strange Observationism influences the nature of the next observation in the line. I guess just because a theory is right doesn’t mean you should say it; but it is also better to have a wrong theory than no theory at all.

MORSE CODE

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.

FROM ‘THE BOOK OF WORDS’

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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 saith. He knew love is the answer.

NOTES FOR A SMALL PLAY (2)

Thought A: so where does that leave us players?

Thought B: I don’t know – but the other day randomly started rereading Tom Stoppard and the same weekend found out he had died from an article advertised online.

Thought A: he did some good work.

Thought B: it would be nice to feel the same.

Thought A: you’ve done some books and albums.

Thought B: so have you.

Thought A: imagine if one of us was Megalomania and the other Paranoia…

Thought B: interesting… they can go hand in hand I feel.

Thought A: but that’s just amateur psychology.

Thought B: indeed.

Thought A: when will the neurosurgeon bring out his tools?

Thought B: I don’t know, but neuroscience has taken over from psychoanalysis.

Thought A: the neuroscientists say “if it fires it wires.”

Thought B: yes, and that means the brain will make new synaptic branches when it encounters new imagery.

Thought A: if I peel back the plastic foreskin of a cucumber am I not a Martianist?

Thought B: maybe but you’re not much good at drama, unlike Stoppard.

Thought A: I notice too there is a distinct lack of Horizon of Significance – like in Godot.

Thought B: but haven’t we invented something like when Jim Morrison invented the self-interview?

Thought A: I want a real drip from the ceiling onto the stage representing time immemorial.

Thought B: and I want a spot of light on the back wall slowly expanding and representing cancer.

Thought A: I guess we get nothing but constellations of ink droplets organised on a page.

Thought B: what it’s got to do with Hamlet In Flames I do not know except that Hamlet In Flames should be a drama not a poem collection.

Thought A: I disagree with you there – I think because Giles ended on the image “Hamlet in flames” it’s like the poet inheriting the family business from his dad.

Thought B: I suppose half the job is cutting out the “wall cancer” of the recursive bits that already appear elsewhere in the oeuvre.

Thought A: I’ve got an idea, for traction and purchase between us.

Thought B: what?

Thought A: one of us is a green parrot sent to space through the conch. The other is a patch of blue denim kept taut. Then you calibrate a scale between fantasy and realism.

Thought B: it’s a nice thought but the green parrot is skunk, which enables a wafting into realms. Also it’s completely incongruous with what we are doing, here and now and real and feeling. It’s like this isn’t even a conversation.

Thought A: maybe we should leave it there for now.

Thought B: well, let’s just say it’s good to honour your father and love your mother as the Bible points out.

Thought A: and elide antagonistic elements like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Thought B: you mean there’s another side to Hamlet In Flames?

Thought A: I don’t know about that, but I meant yourself and me.

Thought B: if one of us was Heaven and one of us was Hell which should we present for the reader?

Thought A: when two song writers go after the same woman and one loses and one wins, it is the loser that writes the best song.

Thought B: quite and Tolstoy would never write of happiness… it’s just that I’ve got this other book in the wings.

Thought A: in the wings!

Thought B: what I mean is, we are the ones in the wings. Off stage. Contingent. The other book the poet has on the go is the main one. So we might fall between computer files, down a great digital ravine.

Thought A: I hear where the author lives there’s a disassembled bunk bed in the attic… should we try and build a bunk bed?

Thought B: I guarantee you all the nuts and bolts will have gotten lost over time.

Thought A: I think the author is an idiot with the syllogism of a flute.

Thought B: we can’t seem to get out of binary though.

Thought A: I don’t think the author’s poetry is going to last.

Thought B: is he lying on his back on skunk on a mate’s sofa trying to think of something poetic?

Thought A: he might be. I am not sure of the rules. Maybe there are none. Maybe we have tapped new, mapless space.

Thought B: there is said to be no more mapless space in post-modernism.

Thought A: so it’s a testament to your English and Creative writing degree…

Thought B: the steps of thinking are nothing like this in reality. We should plan them out, plot them, like the steps of a ballet, a ballet of uncertainty.

Thought B: I would agree there is something slapstick to what is on display here, at least in the author’s mind, if not on the page.

Thought A: if the auditorium is a cranium, the audience are also part of the author’s body and being.

Thought B: it’s a Big Symbolism I know, but I think a good one that hasn’t been explored before, and maybe we could call it neuro-drama. You’ve heard of psycho-drama, like Un Saison En Enfer by Rimbaud – what of neuro-drama? Would it not be more befitting for the dominant paradigm of the age?

Thought A: the brain is still 99% blood and 1% statistics… the doctors still know very little about the brain.

Thought B: I’m starting to like this conversation. This conversation is not over.

Thought A: and what if the auditorium were opened up – like some kind of trepanation – and it revealed the blue sky above?

Thought B: and what if we were allowed armchairs down below?

Thought A: reading is the soft, luxuriant armchair of the soul.

Thought B: it’s only a noetic sketchpad really, not a proper play.

Thought A: and where in this skull can we find eyes, ears, mouth, and nose?

Thought B: maybe that’s the public toilets to the rear end of the building?

Thought A: or the foyer?

Thought B: or the bar where people buy drinks to make them more convivial?

Thought A: but what happens during the plot?

Thought B: the plot is a writer sitting at his laptop writing the plot.

Thought A: that’s quite boring, but then again plot is said to be the first recourse of the dullard.

Thought B: Stephen King said that.

Thought A: I know.

Thought B: and what if it were an “alas poor Yorrick” gag in Hamlet In Flames?

Thought A: you’ve got me there, that might be exactly what it is.

Thought B: and so the auditorium is alas poor Yorrick’s head.

Thought A: alas poor Yorrick… those are holes which once were eyes!

Thought B: on a long enough timeline, the body is a feast-laden table in the ground for soft worms below.

Thought A: death, death, clean as sugar, swift release into seamless peace.

Thought B: death in Darwin is Nature’s way of bringing new species into being.

Thought A: what about if we apply the ‘ot’ of French that makes any name into a clown’s name? Deathot?

Thought B: Deathot is Godot, as saith the philosopher Dr. Calculator Ptom whom it would seem dreamed of a word-chord synthesiser in the band.

Thought A: I hear Dr. Calculator Ptom went into neuro-science, as a researcher… he used to say I was an experimenter.

Thought B: we don’t have the time to go on about all the experiments, but poetry is also an experiment unto itself.

Thought A: poetry is not about better and worse, those materialistic Western concepts. It’s not a competition. It’s the unique expression of the unique individual.

Thought B: I quite agree.

Thought A: is there an aerial on the roof of the auditorium?

Thought B: yes and there are pigeons nesting too.

Thought A: the poet suffers an onslaught of voices while he writes at the screen.

Thought B: it must make him feel despondent.

Thought A: go away.

Thought B: no you go away.

Thought A: voices are just your thoughts.

Thought B: thoughts echoing, reverberating, bouncing back at you.

Thought A: I am glad we avoided gratuitous violence just then… I object to the amount of gratuitous violence on telly.

Thought B: the telly is a death box best left alone and avoided.

Thought A: literature is my only intoxicant now.

Thought B: there’s a lot more being written than there is being read still, which is the wrong way round.

Thought A: I think this is a schizoid dialogue now.

Thought B: it might be time to give it a rest.

Thought A: the opposite of hello is not goodbye but ‘okay.’

THE ANTIQUE FUTURE

I’m hoping you’ll let me take you down

to a place where laser lizards lounge,

and flying, faith-powered cars are the norm.

Of all inventions there, the spiritual or germ

X-ray that finds the germs of dictatorship

on all hands could be the most beautiful.

The river runs through this sacred land,

giving it the feel of the Antique Future.

Down to the boundless sea it meanders.

Meanwhile, the air is a drug called Strictly Free,

that is and makes you “strictly free” to consume;

and LSD is flung from the sun.

I’ve seen it through the open door,

when the door has been left ajar,

before the cricket got terminally sold to Sky.

A virtual death machine, a word-chord

synthesiser, a red-bleeding type-writer inside a

ping pong ball, an invisible square of air

called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on

like TV, an holographic horsecock

wheeled into the poet’s bedroom, a neutraliser

drink that sobers you in an instant,

the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey

protruding from the fell at ten to eight,

earphones with tiny mics implanted

inside them so you can record the band on them,

even a love-bomb exploding in a chaos theatre -

these are but pen-knife tools where I’m

coming from. Further only to note

the Nirvana button, or Nirvana pill,

the Doors computer game, the automated

conveyor belt of poesis flowing

from room to room looking for body and

form, the computer speaking to you

in the style of Rimbaud (translated by Mathieu),

the psycho-sensitive fire alarm, the fruit salad,

the gaseous camera, the hyperlink to Heaven:

what’s wrong with these is they are not real!

It’s better to relate than invent. Moreover

we should live in the present tense;

and sci-fi is secondary to the human condition.

The more weird, blobby-headed aliens

you get in a film the worse it generally is.

Stoner paraphernalia aside, the landscape

is a place you could easily call ‘home.’

That’s ‘home’ with a yellow ‘m’ like

in the word ‘them’ which would mean

something Rimbaudian, magnetic going on.