QUATRA

THE REAL STORY OF THE FLOOD

I

PREAMBLE

It’s hardly a mathematical proof but in the year 2000 there was a great unspooling in the den in the barn where I predicted September 11. I have endeavoured to reclaim the speech and categorise it too. It divides into prophecies, inventions, ambitions and aphorisms, but in the flesh was all extemporaneous speech, wedded to the colloquial and not written down. What we think is that it isn’t right that even September 11^th had to go through me when I was a schoolboy; and we think it is because I live in the house where the Plough alignment is viable. A transcript recapturing my Millennial unspooling now exists and has been augmented by further writing to show how things unfolded for me, leading up to that alignment.

II

MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES

I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter.

It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a first black President of America.

I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11^th and I don’t think that a good idea but it might happen.

I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.

It would be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances.

I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician.

I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too.

I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment.

I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.

III

MILLENNIAL PEN-KNIFE TOOLS

A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!

IV

AMBITIONS

To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced.

To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly.

To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition.

To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else.

To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London.

To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion.

I would like to start the tradition of the post-poem.

I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer.

If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass.

To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old.

To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal.

To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.

V

BLUE

“You know how dad told us all

he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?

That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?

That he sold his business when

the Berlin Wall fell? Well,

I think it might’ve been code, art

might’ve been recourse to euphemism.

I think he was a pollen smuggler.

I think he had a pollen farm

way up high in the Moroccan

mountains and shipped tonnes

and tonnes of pollen to the States.

This whole art dealer nicknamed

Blue thing is just to protect us.

At least this is what I entertain.

I also think he named us after

The Doors, John, James, and Robert

and then they had a girl of course.

Have you noticed we are born

in a season each, going Spring,

Autumn, Winter, Summer, and

march right left right left in the hands?

There are also four compass

points, four seasons, four wheels

of a car and four dimensions

to the mapping of any point in

the spacetime continuum including

time. Now revolve that bifter!

After all I think Jesus himself

would be a proto-hippy stoner

poet in this day and age. Ah,

I love it when the Wizard of Oz

resolves into colour. There are

casual drug references all around us.

Mario mushrooms confer energy.

Tinkerbell’s dust makes you

fly. And in the Wizard of Oz

they lie down in the field of

poppies and see the Emerald City.

So hurry up passing that joint.

Otherwise we’ll never stop the war.”

VI

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER

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

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

Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

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

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

The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.

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

The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

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

The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

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

When you lose your concentration you die.

Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.

There are too many words in the world.

Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

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

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

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

Without difference no contradistinction.

Everyone is my brother and I love them.

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

There is no more mapless space.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

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

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

Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.

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

Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.

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

VII

WHAT THE BAND WANTED

They wanted to telepathically unite, they say, on a night when it would seem the quest was over. They wanted to remove the ‘I’ from art. They wanted us to be new binaural people. They kicked you out of the band because they deemed it that to do any more of what you wanted would’ve been a sin, when it wasn’t getting good. They wanted us to be as close as Optimus Prime is with himself. They deemed it the only good one from the dawn was ‘F Sharp Minor’ where you got the cat from Piper just right. If by now you hear them, consider it after the Flood, as in the way Rimbaud begins his Illuminations, saying “after the idea of the flood had subsided a rabbit in among the flowers said a prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web” - which leant itself to the naming of the band. What they didn’t get is that the binaural earphones were your idea to invent, that you’d already been prescient of September 11^th and that you were trying for the Plough alignment to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House, not to mention any of the other things of note in your Millennial speech in the barn. That’s why they think you were right, and why you eventually found the sheet where pictures grew in days long past taking ecstasy at the gates of dawn.

VIII

WHITE EYEBROW

It’s hardly a cosmi-economic theory but my father used to say, of this family home where the Plough alignment is viable, that “the value of this house should include The Bigger Picture.” It could also go the other way into a neo-Marxist direction; but if we gave the house away for 50p, (after spending £30, 000 doing it up), we wouldn’t be able to buy a new house. The Age of Enlightenment was said to be the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man and the White House its child in terms of both philosophy and build, and nowhere has that been more apparent to me than when observing the Plough alignment with the oldest fell Black Combe at a time of a rhythm change in the White House. To devalue that priceless gift would seem counter-intuitive to my meagre mind, and what happens in reality is that an estate agent will neither increase nor decrease the value of the house should it be on the market. That is, they will not factor the alignment in, nor devalue the house to 50p (which could also be said to be factoring the alignment in) but measure the value against the other houses. My father inherited the house from his father, and passed it on to my mother when he passed away; but still, I sometimes hear sadistic voices disputing that my father ever owned it. I think he did by law but there is an extent to which the Plough alignment belongs to us all. When dad spoke of valuing in the Bigger Picture he meant syncretism – the belief that all religions share a common goal - but there have been philosophers such as Sir Karl Popper – who taught my father at the LSE in the 1960’s - who don’t believe there is a Bigger Picture towards which things tend.

IX

OUR SONG

As I strive for something else on which to write a new proof, and before I get furloughed, I think back to my old band from Cambridge and how we seemed to affect a sensory overlay to Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Maybe the switch was thrown. Back in the day when we were recording the tron, that is recording on binaural earphones in The Flood, we also listened to Piper At The Gates of Dawn by the Pink Floyd; and maybe there was an inversion whereby the Floyd CD was suddenly recording instead of playing.

I do know that sometime after my degree I was living in London and listened to the classic Floyd album on Youtube and heard a sensory overlay of my name and voiceprint as if tattooed on Piper. Asking people about this, the possibility of affecting an album without going back to the studio to rerecord it, one person said it was schizophrenic talk; another that the sensory overlay was undeniable.

I do remember as I say listening to the album back when the tron was being recorded, and my mate suddenly saying “John Tucker” at a particular moment in the song, and me saying “this bit’s good,” which both seem to have stuck to the record as if it was indeed not just playing but recording.

I find this remarkable, as an overthrowing, as a usurpation, as a moment of ecstasia (meaning the suspension of all judgement), as something Bakhtinian applied to Bach, as a triumph of hope over logic, as another number which we could say is by our band, which begs the question as to whether or not Saucerful of Secrets still comes next!

I wonder why it had to be Track 5, Pow R Toc H. The name of the song is a type of acid they used to take in the 60’s if that makes any difference; and it is an instrumental too.

You start to ask if The Flood’s binaural album propitiated the possibility. We did a lot of recording and kept a 6-song play list. It was deemed more an algorithm than an album. On its last track I said I would “plug my senses in the mains.” That track is called ‘Hunger.’ It can be heard on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page.

I imagine the road we didn’t go down; imagine what would’ve happened if at the start of the album we stopped and sat back asking if, for example, death is a fluid excreted by a gland in the brain called the Dreaming Gland, instead.

There may always be a concomitant pathway with the binaural earphone album, a road not gone down. The songs may have a dark edge as in dark matter – an antipode, a shadow, a satyr racing beside you on the beach.

It’s almost as if whatever you think, it is undercut by some irony, when it comes to the earphone album. It’s almost like irony becomes a musical key.

So it is that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a carnivalesque upturning. We broke the ancient silence. The album was a scientific experiment. Water still came from the Tap. And who was the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper but my natural biologist friend, stamping the witness’s name on Floyd?

I mentioned a “sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper” in a conversation with my brother a long time ago in London, long before the Flood started to play. I also had the idea to invent the earphones myself in a conversation in the barn before I had set foot in Cambridgeshire where we played, but it wasn’t me who implemented the idea.

We might have split water; might’ve landed in a world where there needs to be New Rights. Imagine if for example one really did come out of the experiment looking ersatz or opaque. That would be unfortunate if you wished to become an English teacher; but you might find it is through The Flood that you are the new Faraday.

X

HALFWARE

I think the symbol N could represent the top of the telegraph pole, when a bullet is fired up there. I was once saturated by creative things. When I read of Maxwell and Faraday I think of a particular period where I was surrounded by creative things. For a start the Tower was on the shelf, including a book with smell that may have been the word of a dog and a book with a line that went missing. My computer bloomed a numinous purple light and working on it, typing up the plot of the film Eraserhead for a blog entry, one day, the telegraph pole in the field exploded. The binaural earphone album on which I said I’d plug my senses in the mains went online; and I also had an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where resealed in the flimsy reel. That had been going on for years and was now a successful fusion. I melted it in the AGA at night to make it a valid work of art. At the time I considered some of these examples to be halfware, like, say, tattooing a name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, or an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang – which I did also used to possess. It wasn’t long before my dad died and that meant I discovered the sheet, my brother’s sheet, where pictures grew, which could be portentous of the end of the chip; and it also meant my seven year old text emerged which I think was designed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. It was then that I falsified the Nirvana barcode, saturated as I say by creative things. Still, I lost my mind with grief when my dad died; and possibly shouldn’t still be going on about all the halfware.

XI

MAKING MODIFICATIONS

What happened when I was exiled from my own band, that recorded in a new way I had myself come up with, I do not know but I think they tried to make modifications to already recorded music with jamming, and that this modified the way I looked from a great distance, for example the doctor said I look a blur, and I also think that when I was exiled from the band, because the idea to invent the earphones came from my brain, it removed a portion of my brain. Why didn’t I talk about inventing the earphones back when the band was going? Because I was raped when the Towers came down, came down despite my having spoken against it previously, and when a young man is raped like that, it manifests as a burning feeling in the psyche and when I suppressed it in order to simply function, I lost all memory of the conversation in the barn. It took a course of medication and the testimony of others and increased time for the barn conversation to come back. I consider the best years of my life wasted as a result. I could open up here about all the other terrible things that have happened since, being cursed or hypnotised by a maniac, having an operation performed on me in my sleep to give me a new member, which felt like an attempt at my life, being shopped for the fire-dance large scale though I didn’t even participate, being made to walk naked in the heaving capital when I lost my mind with grief when my dad died, but the thing that gets me is the way everyone started to do Hitler salutes behind my back, as if I had grown the sensory overlay of a Hitler moustache, and I think the person that receives the brunt of my hate about this is naturally the super-rich man who implemented the idea to invent the earphones and then when I was driven mad by it all, swanned off with all his money to have a happy life. It is thought that while I was in the band they even pretended the spliff was my bifter, and treated me like the drugged up brother from The Deerhunter. They even said I was evil, called me a Nazi, called me schizophrenic behind my back whilst I was going through that, and all along, the idea to invent the earphones originated in my poetic thinking, and I didn’t have the opportunity to say. Recently my files were hacked and being read out online. My brother caught them at it and said on live streaming “it all went wrong for John with the rich guy’s mum.” He was right; and I walked past his room when he said it and didn’t know what was going on, or who he was talking to, or that my files were hacked, just that I trusted him; so I thought the attempt at my life was created by the rich man’s mum; so I got on to the rich man on FB and gave him Hell. I regret it now, but still...what happened in that band was the rich stealing and sharing out the intellectual property of the poor and then punishing the poor for it too. As my brother said, it is the super-rich who know they will never need work a day in their lives that are the true social problem, not three generations of drug dealer living in the same council house. Yes I do feel the stress of all this still, and can’t omit the bit about my wounds and still be true to myself. It must’ve made them feel confused and jealous when they called my mum down and she sent me out for fried chicken so that she could tell them all about what happened when government scientists came to the house when I was seven… I was a key part of the process that invented the internet. I had a helping hand in the invention of the internet and didn’t know because the book was locked in the attic as part of a deal between my dad and the government as part of what they call “Long Storage.” So the band even found out before me on that front, and then I was gone.

XII

LET’S TRY THAT ONE AGAIN

What happened when I was exiled from my own band? I imagine they played some more long songs. I imagine Steve became the David Gilmour character, and Tommo the Richard Wright, and Niki and Paul just themselves. I wonder if they recorded on the earphones without me there. I wonder if they tried to affect modifications to the already recorded music without re-recording, through jamming, and whether or not this influences my genetics. But mostly I wonder of the long songs. They must’ve moved into an area of increased fun, where there is no longer a dominant song writer – but to be fair, if you go on Soundcloud and listen it’s still the stuff from the old days, from when I was still there.

XIII

HELLO

Hello my name is John F B Tucker.

I helped invent the net at seven.

I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures.

I attempted the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark.

I attained the face of stars, which

might’ve been scripted in the Bible.

I predicted and forewarned of September 11^th.

I wrote the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation in 2000.

I recorded an album on binaural earphones,

had an effervescent mobile, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through

every technological inlet in the room

before it rang, hosted the Plough

alignment for a rhythm change

in the White House, worked

the numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

conducted an experiment into a tape

with a pause where cut and resealed

in the flimsy reel, and was also the one

to discover the sheet where pictures

(seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew.

What exactly is it that you’re asking me to do?

XIV

IT’S GETTING IDIOTIC TO CARRY ON

Whomsoever it is wants me to assess whether or not September 11th originated with me. It depends, for them, on whether or not I say it was a left wing movement. As my father pointed out, if September 11th was about bringing about the future state, or erasing the debt, or bringing about a more fair, free and equal society, it is on the left. Then, the left would say it originated with an English schoolboy at the foot of the fell, even though it was just like it was because there is no evil plot that doesn’t leak. If all those things originated with me, I’d be suing Professor David Morley for consuming The Scientific Papers between my speech and my arrival at his University to study creative writing under him. Anyhow this text has become idiotic. Just about everything in my speech came true. It was like a sick, Orwellian, Fascist nightmare. It was even flattering. I went to the party where every floor was a decade in drugs, music and fashion, I recorded on earphones, I even ended up doing my dissertation on The Scientific Papers which David Morley came out with in 2002, using a near-verbatim classification as mine (there was one word difference). If you’re asking me whether or not I took the Towers down, the answer is absolutely not. It was Bin Ladin. If you’re saying I serve a political function for allowing the left off the hook, then that is something else I could look into. I do wish to see a more fair, free and equal society but I don’t think terror is the way to achieve that.

XV

PEN-KNIFE TOOLS REVISITED

Imagine the Nirvana button or Nirvana pill, the Doors computer game, the psycho-sensitive fire alarm, a computer that speaks to you in the style of Rimbaud (translated by Mathieu), a gaseous camera or an hyperlink to Heaven! What’s wrong with these is that they are not real. It is better to relate than invent in art. Art is above politics too. We should live in the here and now and real also as a Buddhist would say. My dad would tell me this, and tell me sci-fi is secondary to the human condition. He would tell me the more weird aliens you get in a film the worse it is. I think when you record on earphones and say you’re going to plug your senses in the mains, those senses become aliens, like the aliens in Hollywood films, like The Fifth Element where there is a blue alien that can sing in two notes at once. As mad as I am I don’t actually think reality is a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s; nor do I think caves used to be alien cinemas. Anyhow, as good as some of these ideas for inventions sound, the only one of mine ever realised is the binaural earphones, and even better is my brother’s sheet where pictures grew.

THE BLIT

1. Once, in detention at school, and aged only 15, I wrote an essay about a green parrot sent to space through the conch. The supervising teacher, an Irishman, read my colourful and imaginative essay and said “if you keep going like that you’ll go far,” but I haven’t kept up the nimble flight. I sometimes wonder what else the essay contained… maybe it contained further images like music from a black hole? To send a parrot to space through the conch was, I suspect, a narrative device, a launch into fantasy too, and one would be forgiven for thinking the situation of my being detained in detention at the moment of writing was the key point, for as Ted Hughes might say, a visionary can still be free in his cell… there is freedom born from accepting limitation even as I write this now and here and real and feeling. The parrot sent to space through the conch has, like many of my brightest moments, been turned into song.

2. If you think I’m a genius for all that I went through, (which you can read of in, for example, Let The Jews Win), my little brother James P D Tucker is a genius too – he designed the sheet where pictures grew. Admittedly the pictures seem to depict the lyric to one of my songs – but I concede it is not mine. I did not lay it down. I did not design it.

3. James designed the new da Vinci circle as follows:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

The new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. It not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by incorporating a long squiggle, hopefully and ideally escapes “every word in every order” as a new super-computer can by no doubt organise.

4. I think it a brilliant piece of work. James had also made a previous document, with some deliberately-imperfectly-quoted Badly Drawn Boy lyrics about the power of the sun rendered in an anti-clockwise spiral like a word-sunflower:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you.

He left the two documents meaning the <BEE> one and the flower one to rot on the upturned box we used as a table in the den in the barn. I think there was also a picture of the upturned box itself, with candles on, turned face down, on the reverse side of one of the two documents as if the whole thing were the new da Vinci circle, as if, that is, any part is a model of the whole.

5. You get that heat rises… so maybe with the upturned box with all its candles and wine bottle candle sticks drawn on the underside of one of the sheets, heat would start to rise through the paper.

6. I went down to the den in the barn and read them and at first couldn’t see the <BEE> one. We don’t know why this is but I saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes on the <BEE> sheet. It was like the Periodic Table except with the characters of the international language alphabet laid bare, a sign per box. One was [backward f, forward f, equals running through.]

7. Backward f, forward f, equals running through could stand for “fish.” But who augmented the present paper with that touch? It was the main man himself, my brother, upstairs, sneezing while plugged into the same synchronicity as me, the same new co-imagination, the same sympathy. As he sneezed I heard the word “fish.” Anyhow, you can trust me that the international language alphabet as I read it was beautiful, and yet it turned out just a layer of pentimento in the parsimonious palimpsest.

8. I was impressed, and left it alone. But going back down to the barn to reread James’s imaginary alphabet or whatever I thought it was found the <BEE> document as James initially drew it – and couldn’t find the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes anywhere.

9. Again I left it alone, and some time later when our dad had just passed I went down to the barn another time and found the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had by now grown pictures. They seem to represent the lyric to a song I wrote going

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It’s not possible to curse the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace burning in ecstasy miles away.

10. The pictures never got as far as the chorus. The song was never intended as a literal curse either. The bit you would’ve thought was the curse bit, coming after “crack a smile and curse the sun,” was actually written before the verse. I wrote the chorus first that is, and then the verse, and was just trying to make it rhyme too. What may be true about the song is that it represents the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism or ‘I’.

11. There are also two blue ones… the ones depicting the song are petrol negative mud Cola brown but the blue ones are a fat, greedy, Tory pig on the left and a calm, placid face on the right. This made me wonder if I had written theory, for it to happen, for at the solar eclipse with Paul, after guzzling too much LSD the night before, and during the solar eclipse itself, I wrote in the road book “Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.” Not long after, writing about the face of stars in a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer,’ I wrote “Blessed is peace as blessed is ‘F**K!’” Still, this would take away from James’s genius. He seems to have harnessed Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘c’ as an author.

12. So anyhow, I g-a-v-e the document to James, who laid it down so must still own it. Truth be told we haven’t conversed over the matter much but I think if he was using ‘c’ as in Einstein’s value for light-speed as an author it is super-genius. Not only that but I would say as he would say that it was because he wrote “sunshine inside of you” that it worked. It was all about what’s inside.

13. Some of my songs were organised according to the new da Vinci circle for the songbook Soundcloud Rain. It’s why I am not free to redo them as something like The New Oedipus Wrecks Gig, because we deem they are already wheat. I might be wrong about the sheet, meanwhile, but at least I gave it a go, comprehending the surprise.

14. And that is what I made of it, regarding the narrative of how it all happened – but there is something else I realised since which I am not saying. And it worked because the sun is golden. And this has been a golden trance. A golden trance that is good to beholden. And now I should put it on my Blog with the science.

15. Truth be told, I don’t really know what happened with the sheet where pictures grew nor is it my business to say because it is my brother’s work. I shall just impart that with experiments in the international language alphabet I found a good womb for my writing for once… and b/t/w/ who wrote Simulations of God? If you look in, say, the volume Yes You May you find plenty of beautiful-minded ideas for inventions mine own, but the sheet was not mine, was my brother’s and is. I don’t mean to give things away and am being a bit bait so should keep shtum. The sheet is a piece of genius by my brother. It goes nicely with the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark which affected my forearm. They make a nice pair.

16. I can prove to you that this is James’s number or at least that it is not mine own. All you would need to do is look at the lyrics from Oedipus Wrecks, whose song it was that the pictures that grew seem to depict – for then you shall see it was not my game – that it was a case of the international language alphabet – the bee going to the flower too. You shall see that at that particular moment in time, way back when the song was written, my game was the face. I had led my friends to the face. All you would need to do to read them is look in the volume Yes You May… for I don’t wish to replicate them herein because of impropriety. I was a recalcitrant 15 year old renegade, reacting to the world, into bands like Nirvana and the Doors, mostly just trying to shock, rather than shock with truth. Maybe I should still present them though? The thing is, I believe that even if they were instructive in the coming into being of the sheet the final vote as to whether or not the Oedipus Wrecks lyrics are posited should go to my brother, and I believe he would say ‘no.’ He would say it jeopardises the sense of tidy and diligent scholarship that is developing.

17. I’ve asked my friendly A. I. co-pilot some strange questions recently: what would John Nash make of the face of stars? Of September 11th? Of the alignment? Can the maths of the new colour, even if it didn’t work, be instrumental in finding a cure for cancer? Well, to the latter it said the new colour is a metaphor for the cure; and more to the point I also asked it for an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and gravity pulling on the sheet where pictures grew. It didn’t come up with anything spectacular. Maybe the answer to what “c over G” really equals is “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

18. So it is I think <BEE> could be a mode to drift off on; and the reason we knew Bigtime for sure. It is specious that we don’t know if <BEE> is real or not, because without it we wouldn’t be able to have such pow-wows of telepathic proportions, such connectivity, such synchronicity. Overall I would say James’s doodle of the bee and the flower – which go together – is something as good as the Fibonacci sequence, and should be treasured, even if it isn’t quite enough for a system to live by.

19. As I have stated elsewhere, I heard that I would’ve had a Nobel Prize for Let The Jews Win, which was comprised of ‘Notebook’ and ‘Flagrant Rapscallion’ had it not been for the Acknowledgements page where I acknowledged the help of my brother and mum – because it then looked like I was being fraudulent. I would say it’s the other way round and in acknowledging help, for even top Professors get help, I was not being fraudulent. The reason it was like it was, with the first poem ‘Notebook’ belonging to me and the second spiritually belonging to Mr. James P D – even if the writing was mine own – was fairness. As I have said we divided things evenly and for parity using his <BEE>. Such activity may be instructive in international relations too. If different countries could be as close to each other as my brother and I can be at times, there would be no war. If language is a problem, then that is where <BEE> comes in handy, for representing only the next character along in the international language alphabet after @.

20. The game of rounders is a classic game because both the boys and the girls can get involved at the same time. I remember playing rounders at Harecroft Hall on smouldering evenings in the summer terms, with the girls as well as the boys, and feeling like I should make a diving catch, or anything to impress the girls. We would get our sleeves rolled up, as far as I can remember, but without changing into sporting gear, just normal school uniform.

21. The reason I cannot present this paper with a photograph of the sheet where pictures grew online is that the sheet is not mine, and also I have been advised to no longer posit my photo of it on the net. Instead, then, we might select a photo of a flower that is utterly devoid of inimical traits; for after all I believe my brother made the initial experiment for a lass called Flora. You might even argue that it was a post-poem.

22. Society bounds in circles round and round the sun, as said my father. He also said it was a prisoner planet, earth, and, almost like an ascetic, that the key to redemption was self-punishment. That may have meant work but also may have meant denying ourselves. They do say the key to growing up and growing well-adjusted too is the postponement of temporary pleasure for the sake of attaining long term goals. Whatever the case, in the middle of it all, there are pockets of sanity, as John Cleese said, and holes in the wall as Huxley said, and moments of genius stolen from Infinity too. My brother’s sheet is a piece of genius in among it all, is something remarkable that I think I should remark on, as I celebrate him and what he has achieved.

23. Now for the insect collection. Now for several weird species of insect crawling from severed telephone cable. For this I can copy and paste in some joke equations that only work for the arty farty…

24. I had a song when I was 15 about a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face will still write the line I wrote about it at the time and think it his or maybe even her own:

________________________

25. I shouldn’t state my equation for dreaming about Flora whom it would seem was the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, that I now renounce…

__________________________

26. Even though I am repeating myself, here as well is my equation for being the neo-Rimbaud whom it would seem deemed it love:

“Her breath a poisonous magic.”

27. I am not in the position to relate, say, an equation for water’s effect on water, but can repeat that H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart, and also that E minus MC squared = only relative zero too.

28. By now my equation for the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe is the way the qwerty keyboard ends on M:

QWERTYUIOP

ASDFGHJKL

ZXCVBNM

29. and my equation for hanging my coat on a primary school wall a long time ago in the capital as if to start again is:

+ x ½ = –

30. Here moreover, is my equation for the healing and fusing of the cassette tape with a pause in the song where cut and stuck together in the flimsy reel:

H = t times Pi.

31. Here is my equation for the Ratio between light speed (c) falling and Gravity (G) pulling on my brother James P D’s sheet where pictures grew:

c/ G does not equal G/ c.

32. But as stated, I would actually, in all academic seriousness, say though, that “c over G,” if it had to equal something, would equal “backward f, forward f, equals running through.” This can be accessed on the Pyramid walls, even in dreamwork.

33. Also of note, here is my equation for turning pain into pleasure:

Dog = Pi times MC squared.

34. Now I deem it we are back round to that false notion with which I started, a long time ago. So, here is my equation for the idea that if the Gravity between the earth and the moon is instant and therefore enough to break Lightspeed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah:

G = c times t

and if G = c times t, I have to express what t = and might be wrong in saying

t = c divided by G

and might be wrong in saying t = 0.

That is after all to employ my faulty mathematics to falsify it in numbers as well as words!

35. I might as well add that even as we speak I still deem the word “entropy” spelled backwards to somehow frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation. I would spell it with a dot between each letter and say

y. p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4

36. E = starbeams. Of all the joke equations it’s my favourite one because it might be true. A star is a sun is a nuclear furnace is a ray of light is energy beating down on a planet far away.

37. I imagine what it would be like

if a young boy wrote the line

“I have a scar+ that is green and blue,”

with a plus sign for the F,

and then counted up the numbers

from one to his own age, say, seven.

38. James and I once shared an ecstasy pill. I was in my gap year and went back to school to visit him and we shared the pill. He later came up with the phrase “half it and laugh it.” It reminds of the phrase “light it and write it,” also “burn and unlearn.” We were froward in those days but no longer. And by the way an E comedown has no value in maths. I’d just been proven prophetic, even a savant, by successfully predicting the Towers coming down to the day, and I think that was around the time James designed the new da Vinci circle. He even left crosses on the page to suggest where and when things would happen. I was the reader but not the writer in that one. The honour is all mine. To be that guy that read it during the process, that discovered the sheet, is indeed an honour.

39. I believe, looking back, that my dad knew in advance about the sheet, that we would find it, or I would, when he died. For example he came in once and said “don’t fill the drawer too full now John,” also “James is the kind of guy to leave a cup of tea to cool and be tipped out, like making an artistic statement.” He was onto it, and was right. It may not have been enough to get him into Heaven, for he still believed in Heaven, but it certainly meant a valid work of art.

40. I guess what I am trying to say is that if sadness is the musical key of intelligence, as James and I seem to agree upon, then <BEE> is the key of freedom. It shows us how the net might’ve been different. It even digitalises Blake. I like <BEE> and want to be in with it. I want myself to fly one day. I like working for the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, and having honey in my herbal tea.

41. In the end, I hear voices saying “we too don’t know what to do with the sheet or if it is even your brother’s.” It shouldn’t depend on whether or not I posit my teenage rock band lyrics in the present file. But I don’t know if the pictures are burned by love; or if their substance is dead light particles. I know that a photon never ages but whether or not the pictures are dead light particles I am not sure of. In the end I am in the dark. In matters across the board I traditionally privilege uncertainty. I end on a note of radical incertitude. I believe the beauty of uncertainties is the only absolute. Mystery will remain a constant, as I said to the band at the alignment. The universe is a very mysterious place. What is indeterminacy in physics could be undecidability in art. There is indeterminacy at the core of all things. In the end to be waiting in the dark is not such a bad thing, is nourishing for the soul. It’s good to expand your threshold of Negative Capability in the Keatsian sense. I don’t even know if Lucy in the soul with demons happens to be an actual substance. I know I love my brother. I know that if it scars him we should agree to leave out Oedipus Wrecks. It may not be fair on Flora and may not be fair on me if we do include those lyrics and the end result is that they are pretty poor as to be expected from a young teenager.

42.

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*

PREFACE TO ‘NOTEBOOK’

This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

NOTEBOOK

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Start learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees, birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…

Seeing as we can travel backward in time, seeing as we have equalled the speed of light, I thought we could revisit some choice excerpts from my boyhood and beyond.

Teacher rite elephant nite

everything lite lesson love

learn tell everyone Esso orange.

2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

a cloud, two planes,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

In our new pogrom there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

I have a scar+ that is red and black.

I found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full of dead skeletons.

He has spines all over him.

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers.

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

It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Folder graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. The system works quite well. The grass is always long on the Other Side.

The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums

where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap

and bells let peace form in blue notes

and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it

and wet let excellence sound out its criticism

and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting

and chloroform in the heart let see

if only Game Over was seen in nights.

The

sun

hanged

himself

from

a

length

of

daisy

chain.

Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.

Clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.

Break, bird with the skin of snake.

God rushed into the cold cod quick.

Behold! An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Barnes has scored a chicken

and wingers are allowed bikes!

Maybe a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except a swear word in every box, to go at the end?

Even A Duck Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings of the electric guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say, but my mother has changed it now.

Hey, my name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...

I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.

She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.

A glance

A blink

A fault in the stars

Her mascara slips into pools of black

A chance

A second

of Infinity

She flutters her eyelids

like spring’s first butterfly

The stars awake to notice love

she waits with open arms.

But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

Images before I sleep

Dancing, escaping memory

They seem to have no cares at all

They seem to know the name of love

They seem to be my sacred friends

Ancient messengers, waking at night

But I will forget them & never care

About what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it’s love

Just us & love Forever...

Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:

The light of all that’s good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams.

Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Soft

and

loose

like

yellow

pencils

scribbling

dreams

as

they

arrive.

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

Don’t escape at night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

Sometimes perhaps

down opening quiet

I am drawn down

long and alone and

my friend and my foe

recede into deep sleep

sudden and still

like a dawn behind

a screaming veil

where silence is born

and all that’s loose and tight

and all that’s light is light

like first morning

with no night

and wend my way

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live

the last poet’s

last poem.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?

Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.

When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:

[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].

Last night it seemed we couldn't sleep but maybe I was dreaming. The world expands inside my hands it's getting heavy. Of all the treasures I could choose I can't seem to decide. Today the shade was washed away where I would hide. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise. Last night it seemed we nearly died but maybe I was dreaming. It made me feel sooooooooooooo alive and soooooooo in love. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise.

J: what colour is white?

P: smooth and tight!

J: what colour is blue?

P: be true you!

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric sea

[squiggle]

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that Heaven sends is rain).

Words, words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive. Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons. Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier. Words are, well, ONLY words.

“Mayfly,” I say the word

“mayfly” phonetically

sounding out its every

vowel sound alphabetically.

y. p. o. r. t. n. e. I write the word “entropy” backwards and give it no meaning, hearing from Neil Curry at school that if two people can agree on the meaning of a new word, it becomes a real word.

One night 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.

The symbol [R] could still represent the stance, the large-R Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf; that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

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

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is inquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland.

It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows.

I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity.

Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains.

It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real.

Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven.

The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

If you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning. I can run you through a series of life events in terse precis that meant I arrived at such a culmination.

Well, at seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, I was the one to write it. By eight I was the witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who twice. By eleven I was marked by the maths of the new colour, (though it didn’t turn out to be either red and black or the new colour in the end.) By fifteen I attained the face of stars which may have been scripted in the Bible. By eighteen I forewarned of September 11th in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

After school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, worked the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discovered the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting one of my own song lyrics) grew.

I went through all that without earning 1p. Then as a summary of all of that which I had done, I invented and falsified the Nirvana barcode and in doing so attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams that swirl in digital, purple swathes about the head of the deranged seer...

V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the street-name for E becomes F sharp minor!

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

So you see that it has been fast indeed! That Subaru Impreza! And Time does not pass but evaporate! And things live inside onions of themselves! And galloping water would be a cool thing to say!

I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one with the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels 

Immanuel Kant

will come to thee 

with immanence

You come home smacked up you come

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

boom

boom

boom

boom

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self driving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one with the sonic boom

knickers knickers faster than lightning

skin up fall out of bed

and did those feet

in ancient times

rain down, rain down,

come on raindown

and walk the sun

fatter, hippier, less well connected

always walk the hallways

down to create my own

and in the meantime

and in the meantime

I'll do the monkey bars with my legs

manic depression has enraptured my name

don't know what I want but I just want shame

don't know what I want but I just won't shave

rainy waif, rain always,

lay back and dream

on a rainy waif

now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

no more laaaaaaaaaa la's

removal van canes will be turned into furniture

we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir

you never see me dead near an inch of closure

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

“and a record made of sound

goes round and round, conveying

music to the speaker through the stylus,”

says the radio as I turn it on.

Well, although there is no

such thing as the Nirvana barcode

it opens up a discussion about

the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how

if barcode is rain barcode is phone...

and at least I have

the grace to come

back and say that the

extinction of consciousness

has no monetary value.

It is past dawn

and I see that

that first mobile

phone has gone.

If it makes any difference to you,

my little bro is a genius too, who

designed the sheet

where pictures grew

and says <BEE>

might soon ensue

from @ in the international

language alphabet…

he did it for Flora,

subject of many a love poem of mine,

and it turns out he

had her, did her,

loved her, won her,

got her, in time past.

But who kissed who

is playground stuff,

and jealousy is a wasted emotion,

and I am proud

to be my brother’s brother,

and my mother’s son.

I would never begrudge my brother something I would want for myself or my mother either. After all we share a house. We live together at the magnetic, telluric and gravitational foot of the fell in the house my father left behind for us.

Sitting in the kitchen writing, I sometimes hear voices but they are not exclusively clinical: there is such a thing as ESP and telepathic communion. Right now I have just heard my sister Hannah on the intercom and do you know what that means?

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

FLAGRANT RAPSCALLION

I

Apple blossom cheek

breath of wine

plates or confetti

he sips on disturbed

Nile insect

spaghetti

II

While that may be the ABC of aesthetics,

what I’m getting at is that

if a flower-press ending on cannabis

could = a dialysis a love poem

only hoping to impress poor Flora = a motor.

III

If I could sip from your eyes I would

and taste your name. Eyes of

deep undersea green, we
would skinny dip and fish

in them, drag out numberplates,

mangled car doors, crumbs.

The pretext is yours

and it is also my mum’s.

IV

If this were a fairy story

there’d be no happy ending.

No sumptuous consummation

will wait for the poet

at the end of a plot.

I think of a chain of music from star to star,

but therein am starting

to quote my old self again.

V

I’ve already lost my father

who was an international art smuggler

nicknamed Blue or so he said -

though once upon a time

I thought art was recourse

to euphemism for pollen.

The people from the future,

they don’t want his business to end.

VI

It’s good when the daffs come out in spring,

like yellow trumpets, broadcasting

their excellent news.

Excellent News was the ideal

in my New Beat youth, b/t/w/.

I was nomadic in those days.

VII

Before the daffs come out,

we have snowdrops like

pure, white flames

in the heart for love.

The long, dark tunnel

of winter awaits us now.

VIII

I sip tea, I sip tea,

unsweetened it’s

enough for me.

I’ve got a lot of washing up to do.

I tried to meditate today.

Come.

It’s good to get the washing

up done, because it is good

to make a clean space

for yourself before

you write – mess leaks in

to the brain when

you are in a messy room.

Now it’s done I can make a sandwich -

cheese, ham, lettuce, on special brown bread…

it has no added sugar unlike white.

At the moment I am leaving

the washing up to dry, but

soon will put it all away.

Then I can say “hey,

I pulled my weight today.”

So that I do, and that’s true…

I do a little bit more at my screen,

getting pithy about Place and Nature

then go outside to collect wood.

Sometimes I look at Nature and see

invisible sheet music flowing right to left.

If you like I’ll mention some scattered perceptions of the Lakes.

The fell from town,

when you’re driving towards it,

seems a great, slumbering

diplodocus, come

to fat and die by

the Irish Sea; but

nearer the foot

you can see it is

more Buddha levitating.

And when you mention

the slow ascent

up flat, gradual paths

I think more of a bullet

to the top of a telegraph pole

or even the kettle, rising

to its silent scream,

its steam Ariel returning

on Caliban’s chain.

Floating in the quiet

of a weightless dawn,

the buzzard is the crux

of the flux of time,

and all of Creation

his dark machine.

There are benefits living here, like

once I encountered a rare, red kite,

which sat resting on a fence post, waiting

for me like a warning or a reward.

Sometimes Nature is custodial;

and at other times, frightening, otherworldly…

in me, Nature is a great art exhibition,

but it can also be an immunity to Reason.

Some think of the future a lot,

and how there should still be

a place for Nature in that future,

to go exploring just to look at trees,

which like crows, dogs and

horses are Man’s friends.

Nature is the true architecture of State, at least unto some, while others would take a less staid and Conservative attitude.

Here we find mood as bracken frond.

We find dry stone walls creeping

in to the writing even of city folk, visiting.

I think writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug called “Strictly Free.” I think the Beautometer would be a good invention for fell walkers. I sometimes think of Heaven as a pile of statistics when I ascend the fell – that I will one day find out the exact number of steps I have taken up it and whether I held the record.

The powers that be could be clouds

rowing overhead on their sky blue roads.

And everything in Nature is only semi-state: even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline.

Well, nothing has changed to the map

apart from the wind-farm beyond the lap

of the tide, revolving its Mercedez Benz arms

to make electricity for the farms -

and also the cafe down the beach -

since Norman Nicholson neglected to preach. -

Changes to the place have been the net,

global warming let’s not forget,

the advent of the mobile phone

and increased opportunities for vice in town.

But who needs vice when literature is intoxicant enough?

Here, we find the beck is a fountain pen.

I sometimes stand by the beck, listening in.

(Dr. Bob says only those with their feet firmly planted can fly.)

I would be wearing my wellies, listening

to its most mellifluous applause,

the way she falls two feet

into a sound as sweet

as a kettle drum’s

metal petals of

silver bliss that

blossom on a carnival’s street.

Literature from the city is of alienation,

literature of rootedness repetitive,

and the city is the intellectual breeding station,

but countrylife closer how we ought live.

I

The reason my new work is not Anon is that I believe a writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

The earliest-written English poems, however, are attributed to Anon, the earliest recorded line being:

“Well-wrought this wall: Weirds broke it.”

Weirds could be weather-systems.

Combining the fact that the earliest subject is ruin’d architecture and the earliest recipe known to man is for beer, as discovered by monks, could make a poem’s definition “a statue of alcohol.”

The A595 is the main road connecting

the nuclear sub factory in Barrow and

Sellafield up the coast. On Sunday

the posse of motorbikes come

to this bucolic valley because the road

has something in the golden sector #

to do with its bends, its elegant curvature.

I went walking up the rearside of the fell,

and some one or two hundred yards in,

up the path and away from the A595,

encountered a rare, red kite

with dawn-charred chest, resting

on the fence-post, waiting

for me like a warning or reward…

II

Here from this seat now

I look about the kitchen, painted

a plush, Mediterranean coral,

at the indomitable things on the walls,

the notice board of cork,

the dead telly wearing

mother’s funeral hat,

the calendar with local photos,

the chart depicting the plants of the

Meadows, the clock, my sister’s art…

It’s a country farmhouse kitchen

with an AGA, where most of the cooking

is home-made, not from packets.

We have no neighbourhood or amenities

and country life can be quite dull,

but recently I felt elated

for capturing a partial alignment

of the Plough and oldest fell

on my new Smartphone.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance

but I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

III

It’s a myth that countryfolk are stupid

just because the rhythm of life is slower.

The region is an actual religion.

It’s why my dad didn’t take too kindly to racism.

I was amazed the kite didn’t fly away,

as I stood there gazing upon it.

It’s as close to a bird of prey

as I have ever got out in the wild.

Apparently, the Vikings named the hills and the Celts named the valleys… this should be easy to remember because you can picture a Viking being able to see the mountains from the sea as they travel across; and the Celts likewise lived in among the valleys so it would be natural they named them.

Obviate not titivate, sate

your quest for meat and fling

to your bright ring, your

peerless orbit, your wheel

of hunting, out-stretch

wings to be engorged on air’s

ranting, rock-strong

sockets braced against crushing,

uprushing rivers and sail.

Eventually, it did fly away,

but not until I made the decision

to continue my walk, to leave

the moment, the spot where I stood.

Seeing its wings unfold,

seeing it fly away, I took a left

up the rear side of the fell, following

the path beside the beck

and – still not knowing

what the bird was, only storing

an image of it in my brain -

reached the cairn at the top.

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

When I got down again,

and back to my home on

this side of the fell, I

looked the bird up in a book,

and found it was a red kite.

For some reason I thought

I had found the golden eagle…

there was a rumour that a pair of them

had moved into the area.

So I was actually disappointed

to find the bird was a rare, red kite,

which it certainly, judging

by the book of birds, was.

That afternoon, I got a phonecall

from my ex gf on my mobile.

I told her: “I’ve just seen a rare bird.”

I also told her I had given up cannabis;

asked her if she still smoked;

but what she said and what she was doing

when she said it, I shall not say.

Simon says the River Goyt

might become the Styx in Heaven.

I say the rhythm of the River Goyt

beats blood to my head like a cold muscle.

The word ‘goyt’ might actually be Celtic thought-patterns meeting Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds.

Back then I liked music by people such as: Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and Autechre. I also still liked some guitar music by people like Hella and Shellac, and my favourite act of all were Radiohead, ever since they filled the hole left behind by Nirvana. All of it was better to listen to when high.

Dr. Robert says: “the brain actually releases cannabinoids naturally for moments of signification like reaching the top of a mountain. If you flood your brain with cannabinoids un-naturally, meaning and signification become aleatory, a mess. There is suddenly meaning at any point of intersection in the crazy palimpsest of memory.”

Kurt Cobain sings:

“my heart is broke,

but I have some glue,

help me inhale,

I’ll mend it with you,

we’ll float around,

hang out on clouds,

then we’ll come down,

have a hangover.”

I

Now we’re just enjoying the peace on a calm, autumnal Sunday. It’s a time for expanding your threshold of Negative Capability… I am also taking care of my mother, who injured her arm on holiday. It’s her birthday today, so I gave her a book, and like every other day made her a fire and made her a morning coffee.

We need to get some new Vape juice

because there is only one bottle left.

Tesco is going to be closed for a few weeks

after today so we should stock up.

Apparently they are going

to redo the fruit and veg section

so that the fruit and veg is stored

in a series of closed compartments.

Now for the E as I try and summon up a purpose for this. It is healing, of the self and the soul of the world. It is truce between old friends fallen out like fools. It is air for the tortured soul to breathe. It is an experiment into more advanced modes of being.

II

Sensation precedes thought in art,

chain is made from same as key,

waves make gentle

love to the shore,

homework tonight is

to remember your dreams,

and this we know,

there is no ‘we,’

I am the third person

immaculate, free…

you know the routine

by now, the score,

and more and many more,

but let’s not dwell

on school-made things

when outside birds

sing with their wings

and freedom flies

and freedom flows

and the music never stops.

MY BROTHER’S VERDICT

Even though it’s neat, and everything is in the right place, we still deem it that Soundcloud Rain is your best one because you turned your best pieces into songs especially for the job, like ‘Instant Travel,’ like ‘Lucy in the Soul With Demons,’ like ‘That Black Natural E’ and also because you wrote the song about attaining the face of stars with the line about the ocean fair and square. We also deem it that after what you went through, culminating in discovering the sheet where pictures grew, to have to go back to the age of 12 and redo The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob could only be the dictate of a true heathen. You have obeyed them, whomsoever it was, but we think your maths was all accomplished in your seven year old book The Sunset Child, and then thirdly you have the love poems, where you wrote for Rachel, fourthly Brave New Tense with its futuristic vision, fifthly Yes You May that you did with your sister and then, the heathen one, Let The Jews Win, which I would say you should leave out. All you have to do is leave it out then you can be happier than you were before. We think you should retire Let The Jews Win. Then we’d see that even with the wee one we’d all get to win enough.