BREATHING ROOM

[a new collection in the making]

COLLECTIONS BY THIS AUTHOR FROM CHIPMUNKA

Soundcloud Rain

The Sunset Child

Breath Trapped In Heaven

Brave New Tense

Yes You May

THE DAWN

Dawn leaks out, its light slipping

through the dark fingers of the trees.

If I bring this to publication,

it will mean wood.

The woods are a traditional

testing ground in literature.

These days things are wireless.

I might’ve gone right

when I asked Paul

what colour is white?

What is a while?

Is this where the truth

flies or the truth fairy?

In the past, being the witness

from The Lords And The New Creatures

I might’ve been burned at the stake.

When you’re gone we hope

the doors will

open up enough.

Maybe we can

do the new creatures again.

A LOT

When the psychedelic treasure chest of dreams

is opened, perfumed sunset will streak

like water colour across the canvas-sky

and will be beautiful even if there is no-one

to look at it, so we need someone

who can open that psychedelic treasure

chest of dreams and release whatever

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

MY FIRST

The best one was when I went through

what I went through and

was still homeless on the street.

I had helped invent the net at seven,

been the witness from The Lords And

The New You Know Who at eight,

had a mad mathematical experiment

into the new colour mark my body,

attained the face of stars,

forewarned of September 11th in 2000,

written the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation,

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,

become mentally ill but still

pushed on to get a First, writing

a portfolio of defaced bank notes for example,

hosted the Plough alignment for

a rhythm change in the White House,

and found myself homeless,

sleeping on a park bench in London,

looking at the satellites mixed with the stars.

There was a fox hunting, looting

bins in the park where my bench was,

so I departed, afraid, and went

to the steps of the local church,

where the last guy before me

had left some cardboard boxes to sleep on,

to have between yourself and the ground…

but it was still so cold, I woke

with a viscid mortar in my throat,

shivering, penniless and set about

the near impossible task

of getting housed in a

council emergency hostel

and when I was there

there was a corridor

with a lot of spare rooms

even though the streets

were filling with tramps.

That was when the riots broke out.

I wasn’t aware of them at first,

then someone told me

to leave my room, and I did,

went out onto the street,

saw the shop windows being smashed,

the city looted and burned,

and after a minute, I returned

to my bed to read poetry…

I did not participate in the riot.

But I carried on living

at the fringes of a wasteful society,

cycling around “food”

for a black dude

on a riot-stolen bike.

Eventually, I told my dad I missed

the air in the north

and asked him if I could come home

and he said it was fine.

And when I came home

my story would continue…

I worked at a numinous,

purple-bleeding screen

in an experiment into post-humanism,

built the Tower as an instrument

of philosophy, conducted

and experiment into a tape

with a pause where cut and re-

sealed in the flimsy reel,

and upon my father’s death

discovered the sheet

where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew.

Then I felt like I was being

just in surrendering the sheet

to my brother who designed it,

who laid it down, felt

like I was all about

democracy and freedom and fairness.

I still didn’t earn a penny

throughout the whole list

(and know I am leaving other bits out

that were also miraculous too)

but at least I had a home

even if it was just my mum’s.

INFLUENZA BUT NOT FLUOXETINE

Here I sit in the kitchen, insufflating

the fume of a Vape pen whose

switch is so often thrown,

making me dismiss superstition,

and hear a sound like a bowl has been struck

by a key, a note, resonating,

and think it the same old switch,

and the rest of the pollen count on that

front is swiftly behind it in my mind.

Then a car passes, making a noise.

It is Night and summer too.

Objects are strewn around the table,

like we are marooned by stuff and things.

I notice that I know less now

the true meaning of the word “metaphysics”

than I did when an essay-writing schoolboy,

which is a time long gone, even if

I hear it and think it at the same time.

THE MYSTIC

Take out your guitar cables and see in all directions at once.

People don’t like being told what to do.

Permutation is how the inner game of music operates. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade the gay maths teacher stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone when announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight. Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe. You don’t need a knife to achieve it.

Wittgenstein says there is no one thing common to all games, not even the idea of death.

Naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor, woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

It takes all four of the seasons to turn to deliver the true fruit and have health. That’s why this bit about the ship is a bit shit.

Bats there are bats in the locked attic, breeding;

and gas satisfies their longing for omniscience:

to piss on others from a great height and angle

and expose strange, salty worms on the eye.

Clock on which Yogi Bear dies. To break out of frames. To trespass into forbidden gardens. To wash the poison from my eyes and see the secrets of the skies. To break Sum Hymen. To make the cops turn in their badges. To go over all the edges yeah.

“The universe is a projection of the mind,” spills Dr. Calculator Ptom with innocuous vision. He says gnomic things like “the G note is green on the guitar fretboard.” “Born Slippy is evidence dance can have a soul.” “Poetry is untranslatable because of the music.” “I was doing some thinking and realised Death is God.” “Early Oasis is good for bittersweet, comedown energy.” We boarded a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London. By now he is Dr. Calculator Thomas and the song is ‘Born Slippery.’

Soft pollen from the Muslim World was once a magical sacrament, a sop offered for working in the fields, a currency in an atemporal microcosm. It makes you demotivated, is non-conducive to hard academic concentration, but propitiates great realms of heightened sensory perception, prolonged orgasm. It helps to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, renounce fidelity to surface-gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance, touch the texture not name side of life.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob (Revisited). Yes, it contained numbers such as ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ and ‘Ossie the dog’ who went round and round chasing his own tail. He escaped to the farm a lot did Ossie, snuck away, went chasing bitches.

Wear an emotional condom before you fuck my mind, man.

“I’m a big lad,” said new daddy Seb. How he would love to get lost in a black pair of tights used as a new poetic form - a nacreous Poohbear dial upon which you can ascend the echelons to Heaven. She lay back and said “do the lines.” It was the nearest thing to a vision for a long time.

Gloved in sleep we love one another. When we wake, no seaweed crown, words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds weighing them down hopelessly… and then it is time to crash your face into water and for your morning poetry buttons.

If the windows were washed – every one! -

we’d still see nothing through them

except the same white mirrors reaffirming

the quiet interior of the kitchen.

By now we’d need to prior the owl

but seem to have landed on the other side…

the owl is full of warm, Holy eyes

that illuminate the skies with resplendent silver.

A layer of frost crisp underfoot… this wintry image from Neil Curry seems a dilution of the esemplastic fled away with the quadlibetical. It seems, that is, to be more to do with quotidian consciousness than “crisp, hot whiteness” in Jim Morrison; and it could be instructive here to consider Huxley. He said there is a Reductive Gland in the brain reducing Infinity to digestible bytes and portions.

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.”

APOLOGIA

WHEN the one with the gov was still out there, meaning before it was retracted, there was a plan for a new collection, where I would go down as the new Rimbaud, leaving behind a net-book with the sheet where pictures grew for a cover, a cover you’re not supposed to go beyond, and as an heirloom for my sister’s baby girl. By now we know we cannot use the sheet where pictures grew for a cover, and have only the words of the book.

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.

SPLIFF-LONG POEM

What’s the most obvious donk around you

and how many donks deep

and did the donk not descend

to get to the donk on the end of it?

The train goes wreckety wreckety wreck;

its metal parts expand and contract;

I’m on the way home from scoring,

and had a quiet joint at the station.

I happen to believe postmodernism

is not an extended metaphor for

the effect of cannabis on the brain

but it’s not a proper thesis.

The journey now is only as short as

smoke long fiction from Japan and

it is nearly my stop, so I will stop

and ride the wave of paranoia home.

FLEE HAS SEEN A BEE

So, Flee, you may have seen a bee

but I don’t want you to see a rat.

It isn’t right, if it’s according to me,

that one should have to die like that.

The bee would sail across the ocean

as you lie back on the sunny green.

It would be cross-pollinating the garden,

extracting pollen for the mating queen…

once my copy of Neil Curry’s volume

started to smell of redolent perfume

so I built the Tower in my bedroom.

There were other books, a few of them

that also exhibited signs of natural

magic - for the smell was not a spillage in

my Gap Year bag, of aftershave, but actual

magic. I hope that when I am gone

someone reads the Tower as I built it,

tall and strong, lines left to right,

for it wasn’t aftershave, I never spilled it,

and you can take my word as true and quite.

GOLDFISH BOWL UPDATE

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,

the local, parochial headline wants to read,

and crossed the water to the Other Side,

left behind my almost ascetic greed

so I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,

knowing not why the goldfish is dead,

knowing only that God is good,

hoping its soul ascends Heavenward,

imagining the newsflash on the TV,

or online for anyone at all to see,

but as the goldfish becomes history

I see it could be worse for you and me

for if it was my brother’s <BEE>

there would be damage in all Infinity.

THE DREAM FILM STORE

A sad and seductive female voice is saying things to me. I cannot focus or see her face, it refuses to appear in my mind.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve finally come, I’ve been waiting for you for lifetimes.

- Welcome at last to the Dream-Film Store, I can’t believe you’ve awoken here after so long -

Did you have a long day? What can I find for you tonight – that’s right – anything you can imagine – a Thousand amazing thoughts preserved – or perhaps just a bottle of red wine and a dream about the swaying sea will rest you well tonight?”

Of course in dreams you never know you are dreaming. That is why they have control. Certainly this dream harnessed control enough to disturb me & leave itself lingering behind the back of my mind when I finally awoke.

In my sleep I was wrestling w/ heat & the covers, & frightened by the lady’s continuing voice. All I could see was blue.

“I know you can understand what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid” -

I felt her stretch out her arm towards me and I jumped in panic.

All around me I could see blurs of deep colour merging & swirling, a moving chaos of images and shapes. Still I could see no face.

“I know you can hear me, please, I’m your friend, look! I couldn’t bear to see you waste this now. You know me already please just trust me.”

********

II

I awoke shaken and wretched, grappling with the duvets, rubbing my stinging eyes. Already the terrible fear of my dream had subsided considerably; simply because waking instantly cancels out what was previously merely dreaming. Now I just had a headache & a longing to return to that strange scene and assuage the curiosity that always accompanies fear. I suppose the fear when you dream is because you don’t know you’re only dreaming. It seems real. I lay there thinking.

What troubled me most as I lay there in bed was that I never saw the woman’s face, though I could sense it was desperate to appear. Oh well, just a dream, as they say.

Refusing to let a dream trouble my thoughts all day, as had happened before I decided to get up and wash my face.

The flat was crazed by disorder & rubbish. Clothes, papers, books & boxes which should’ve been locked in some attic were at war w/ the floor. I trod w/ care to the bathroom & stood looking in the greasy mirror at a face full of grease; the eyes that once rewarded me w/ strange smiles were laden w/ sleep, heavy with the impurities that sleep had filtered. The Drain in my Brain.

“I’ve been swimming

in a sea of sleep,”

I began singing to myself in a hoarse groan. Wanting to give myself a shock, I dunked my head in a cold basin decorated w/ floating limescale, pubic hair (for some unknown reason) and toothpaste. How I could call that much of a wash I don’t know. Nevertheless, I felt fresher; so, as always, I started to prepare my morning spliff, which helped me decide what to do today, or if to do anything at all.

I used to take great pleasure in rolling huge reefers, just for the hilarity of seeing something unusual & absurd, I suppose. Recently though, since moving in to the flat, I’ve been rolling the swiftest & easiest joints possible, & filling them w/ more weed than the big old ones. Being stoned now fits into the same category of Time & Tedium that it once was the escape-route from.

As I lit the spliff, & fell softly back into the sensuous web that stonedness weaves, I felt a longing for the fantastical times I used to have w/ friends & girls & laughter & ideas – whereas now I just felt numb, in a blunt trance. Not wanting to linger on the past, I took a deep long drag, like the spliff was a sacrament, & pulled some stolid clouds of darkness into my lungs. Holding it down, I imagined counting some numbers but couldn’t get it together, so just waited - & then exhaled, releasing the smoke in a grave grey sigh, watching it fumble, disperse & vanish into cushions & curtains & air. My head was heavy. I knew what I needed now more than ever. To get out.

********

III

After dressing in some jeans & T-shirts, I took my weed, some skins, a pen & paper & various other articles of minor importance, & hid them in places in my big jacket. I’ve never been too bothered about what I wear on top - trousers, I just wear jeans, so I’m not fussy there either. Shoes, however, I’m very particular about, seeing as I have to walk in them etc. Shoes are rare allies in life. Also, I have a tendency to turn a jacket into a home.

So, finding a particular pair of boots, I left the flat w/ a feeling of the promise of the Day.

But where could I go?

I’d abandoned my friends a few months before, fallen out with them all except one, Gabriel, who I don’t speak to anymore, anyway. It was a strange series of incidents involving my previous band & some magic mushrooms. The details escape me & give me pain trying to remember them. We were called ‘Open Poem Opium,’ & we split up; that is all.

(“Beat through the veins of the city in madness

Revolving doors in your mind & sadness

Cities crawling in your brain

streets of mystery and of pain,

I’m leaving town on the underground train.”)

I put my hands in my pocket to instinctively protect myself from the knuckle-gnawing cold that hung around outside. Feeling what I thought was a £10 note in my jeans, I pulled it out to find only a little scribbling of lyrics written some days ago in a dull hash-induced trance.

I often scribbled things. I enjoyed the freedom of scribbling & doodling. The pen can move exactly where you want it free of direction, w/out the obligation of having to form restricting letters & words. I have pages & pages of doodles, strange shapes, & occasionally some lyrics appear in the mess. That’s what I did for the band – wrote songs & sang, though I don’t play any instrument.

Noticing a growing rumble in my stomach, I felt that food & coffee were the best options, & would give me more time to consider how my day of activity could be filled.

Rounding a corner, I saw the parade of shops ahead, dead faces facing me, w/ cheap dimestore smiles. In the middle was the cafe, called “The Rat & Vessel” to my amused bewilderment. I opened the door. Inside it smelled of sad people, old times clinging in smoke to the walls, sad paint and sad light. The door was still ringing from those crazy bells that crash together on opening , & make me cringe every time. Those bells should be banned from sad cafes. They exacerbate the dead silence that awaits you inside when the door slams shut & the bells stop clanging.

“A large strong white coffee please, & a Danish.”

£1. 90. I couldn’t believe it. I realised then that left me w/ only 10p for the day – a rare day of Activity. Oh well.

The coffee was bitter & the Danish was over sweet. I was fairly stoned & therefore felt a heightened sensitivity to things like taste. After a few mouthfuls, I realised it wasn’t quite late enough for breakfast yet.

Well, what could I do? Where could I go? 10p is less than having nothing, because it just irritates you with niggling little time-consuming questions.

I decided I’d be freer if I threw it away my last change. Why I didn’t bring any money w/ me I haven’t a clue – pen, paper & weed must have seemed like a more useful currency to remember this morning.

So On discovering that I finally had something to do (albeit only disposing of 10p), I thought I’d turn it into a ritual & perhaps waste an hour of the day. I was finding it increasingly difficult since realising this money shortage to tell myself that I was even capable of activity this morning. Spending an hour of one’s morning throwing away short change, & taking an hour to decide how to do it in particular to add a pretend sense of ‘fun…’ I realised a dead-end frustration possessing me. The town was in abeyance, time was trapping, what could I do to rid me of the cruel bindings of post-youth, expulsion from university, confusion, unemployment, & worst of all, sheer boredom? Where could I go, & with what purpose?

The 10p dilemma had started to annoy me. I thought in vain for ways I could make a ritualistic point of getting rid of it, but soon realised this sort of time-consuming thought was exactly what I wanted to get rid of the 10p for – like I said, to be free of it. This realisation of my own frustrating, mind-cycling stupidity annoyed me greatly. I decided I’d give it to the next tramp I saw.

It was now 11. 00. Which meant nothing to me, because w/out anything to do or anywhere to be, it didn’t matter what time it was. The street stretched ahead of me crawling w/ insect-cars & insect-people, all busily rushing around swarming sick and feversome. I often wondered exactly what the term “crowd-neuroses” means, & laughed that I felt detached from the clinging time-table lifestyle. Walls of grey rose either side of the road to complete the dull-grey prison of the street. People flocked & assembled, briefcases merged into madness, mute timetable agony, flaccid lovers limp by, smiles fail, children congregate in backstreets to escape, everyone around thinking they have something to do & somewhere to go! I felt dizzy so found a bench to sit down upon. Watching the parading fools & this procession of sadness brought out a sadness w/in me too. I was sitting motionless on the bench, feeling the flux & thrum of the city, the dead beat of London; & I heard the beat of my heart clash w/ the rhythm of the streets. I felt suddenly cold and alone. If London had a voice, it would be a blunted and dead-pan voice like Lou Reed’s.

I must have sat on that bench for about 2 hours. The time was spent coming to terms w/ the fact that I felt estranged from my environment – the first time I’d realised the alienation of being poor in a city. Perhaps if I lived in Cornwall, say, I’d have a job, a community in which I was known, maybe even some friends. The city is a great culmination of sadness & alienation. No-one in town is conscious of their extreme self-consciousness. Everyone in town is homeless.

Pleased w/ the thoughts I had accomplished this morning (& thinking was my poor equivalent of a morning’s work), I decided to roll up another spliff & go for another wander. My hands were cold & it was too windy sitting outside, so I went to look for the nearest phone-box. Phone-boxes were excellent for skinning up in, because a) you were off the street & out of people’s way b) there was a nice little platform bit to rest the Rizlas upon c) no-one disturbs you in a phone-box, because they assume you are looking for change, or about to make a call etc. One felt a slight degree of safety & protection inside.

The nearest phone was just across the road. I loved crossing roads, felt it like a game, a dare, a thrill. One of the things I felt most confident about in life was dodging traffic & crossing roads w/ what I liked to portray to the driver as being a fearless & disdainful nonchalance. I’m constantly occupying myself w/ little challenges & wars, that I suppose I create for my own amusement. Walking along a pavement, I often ask myself a question of importance then tell myself that if I reach that lamp-post over there before the next car passes me, the answer is so & so, & if not… I’m sure everyone plays the same game, just ask different questions. It’s amazing how something as utterly pointless & unfounded in anything apart from my own mind has the power to excite & possess me.

I can honestly feel a terrible suspense sometimes as a car grumbles & groans & approaches blind behind my back – I walk quicker, desperate for the answer I want. Sometimes, if I fail to reach the object in time for the right answer, I change the question or say I meant the previous lamp-post anyway. It is by no means a game I enjoy playing. I become frustrated w/ myself after a while, but at least it distracts me from frustration of having nothing better to do.

So crossing the road, I reached the phone-box, & entered its heavy door. Inside I felt how truly separate I was from everything else around me. There is a certain mysticism about phoneboxes & telecommunications. I remember having a fascination w/ Dr. Who, & the way he travelled throughout space & time in the blink of an eye. How I longed for such possibilities now, standing stoned & alone in a phone-box surrounded by strangers & the dizzying thrum of life. I wanted adventure, change, discovery – but I was stuck. Where was there to go?

I emptied my pockets on top of the phone & extracted the various bits of paraphernalia needed for skinning up. The spliff I rolled was terrible, due to what I noticed was a growing distraction in my mind.

Standing there pulling on the spliff, I tried to locate the exact area of my mind where the negativity was emanating from.

‘Right,’ I thought.

‘I know I don’t want to be here, but where do I want to be?’

Something was certainly on my mind, but I let it go as the smoke melted into my blood & sent diamonds rushing up my neck.

I started to gather my belongings, & noticed among them the 10p which I’d forgotten about.

“I’ll leave it here for some lucky person to make a phone call w/” I mused.

‘Or, I could make a phone-call myself..”

I didn’t own a phone & the thought of making a phone call was quite big news to me. Who could I phone? I had no friends.

Except for maybe Gabriel. It had to be Gabriel. 0171 385 6603. I only had 10p, so I had to plan carefully what I would say. Even better, I thought, I could invite myself round to his.

I don’t know why I suddenly had a desire to be w/ someone. I don’t know whether I even liked the guy. I alienate myself. Perhaps the guilt that loneliness brings, had stirred me finally into communication.

“Hello?” came the cautious, questioning voice.

“Gabriel, man, it’s, uh, Franco, could I come round?”

I spoke nervously & stuttered a little, out of practise w/ conversation.

“What! Hey Franco, how’s it going? What are you doing? Come round!”

“Yeah, I will, I’ve got 2 credits left, so I’ll - “

The line went dead & the dead sound came up in my ear & hung around in a tone of despair.

“Shit,” I thought. “Where the fuck does Gabriel live.”

Typical, that for once I’d actually wanted to do something that involved someone other than me - & it wasn’t going to be possible.

I left the phone-box still sucking hard on the joint. “I suppose I could go home, get some more money & - “

The phone was ringing. I lifted it. It was Gabriel.

“Man you should’ve just said & I’d have called you back.”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know – shit, sorry. You know how I am w/ phones, clueless.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha – well, shall I meet you somewhere then?”

“I have no money & I’m down to my last few smoke’s worth.”

When I said earlier that phones fascinate me, I also meant to say that they terrify me. I’d probably prefer telepathy.

“I’’ll tell you what Franco, where are you – I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Um, well, I’m in a phone-box in Baron’s Court. I’ll meet you outside the Oddbins.”

“In 10 minutes, I’m close.”

“Alright man, that’s perfect, cheers.”

“See you then Franco.”

“Bye-bye.”

Wow. I’d never known anyone so efficient at phones. If I’m ever forced into using one to make arrangements, I faff around for hours being indecisive & calling back & hanging up.

Gabriel was a person of admirable sagacity for his age – 2 years older than me, 22, but w/ a sensibleness that empowered him to be utterly assured and self-confident. Decisive & wise, the kind of friend everyone wants & fears abusing.

I could already see Oddbins. I approached feeling slightly ridiculous still for my telephonic incompetence.

‘I could have done any number of things,’ I thought

- ‘reversed the charges, borrowed 10p off someone… oh well, I’m just useless, no matter.’

My thoughts were interrupted by Gabriel’s voice.

“Franco, jump in!”

Elliot Smith was playing on the stereo. I didn’t like Elliot Smith very much. He finds it too easy to write fairly good songs. I couldn’t respect that.

Gabriel had a spliff going. “Have a smoke on that man,” he urged. “How are you? Tell me about your life.”

“Well, I’m O. K I suppose. To be honest I’ve been quite dazed for ages. I don’t really know what’s going on man.”

“How’s the band?”

“We split.”

“Oh, why”

“Dunno, just crap really.”

“Just crap sounds about right. So what are you doing w/ yourself?”

“Oh, nothing much, nothing at all really. I’ve got virtually no money, & none on me.”

“Any girls?”

“Ha ha ha you must be joking.” The thought of me having the time, money, energy & effort for a girl was hilarious. I was not ‘boyfriend material’ – I never have been.

“Man, I’ve met this amazing girl, she’s at the flat at the moment – you’ll meet her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, amazing man, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

“I’m not sure if I want to believe you or not. I mean you know how sceptical I am about girls. If she’s not perfect, not the Absolute One, then she’s not worth any waste of time bothering w/.” This was my arrogance. Suffice say, I had never found the One Perfect Girl.

“Franco, I’m telling you man – if you’d just stop being so fucking particular & arty farty, & just accept things, you’d be happier. You’ve probably already met your Perfect Girl but were too busy moaning about existence & lack of money & fucking weed to even notice her.”

“you think?”

“Yeah, I do think. You can’t get perfection, so then take what’s best.”

Elliot Smith was starting to annoy me, so I turned it down. The car pulled up & stopped.

“Here we are then, this is the new flat.”

“Cool, which door.”

“Here.”

We entered.

I stood waiting inside the door wondering what I was doing. A blond girl w/ a subtle face & medium sized breasts came to the bottom of the stairs w/ an open smile on her face. She was attractive. Very. She wore only a long robe-like dressing gown that revealed tempting patches of skin when she moved. She looked at me for a strange second, then Gabriel & her were full of kisses & smiles. I felt a little bit small, an outsider. Gabriel introduced me, & we went through to the lounge for a smoke & some coffee.

I always admired the way Gabriel could mix women w/ friends. We shared a flat at University, so I knew him well & had witnessed many of his previous ‘mistakes’ & ‘successes.’ I felt rather uneasy being in the room w/ my old friend & his beautiful new girlfriend. I felt alone.

We sat for a while & Gabriel & Mary inevitably drifted into the usual fresh-lovers type of conversation. There was certainly a silent communication between them, a sign of their genuineness perhaps.

I looked around the lounge. Shelves groaned w/ the slow old weight of books, heaving piles of books, pages of words compressed & preserved together in slumber, long centuries of books. Gabriel had no doubt read them all. He thinks books hold the answers. I think they only hold the questions.

I became distracted from the books by the sudden movement of Mary putting on some trousers. She stood up & had to jump & pull them up quickly while she was in the air. I caught a glimpse of her pussy through her knickers. & then I was hooked. I couldn’t help but cast glances at that soft pleasure-triangle that women posses, knowing there was a cunt lying in her lap, just lying there unattended. I felt an angling, wincing agony.

Uncertainty and mystery was what sustained me, kept my curiosity strong.

I wanted now to solve the cunt-mysteries hiding in Mary’s knickers.

“Franco! Wake up man. Where’ve you been? Cloud cuckoo Land?”

“Shit man, sorry, I’m a little bit stoned, well quite stoned actually.”

Everyone laughed.

I suspected that Gabriel was feeling excellent about himself now – it was obvious that I had been staring at Mary.

“Yeah & I’m a little tired as well. I had a really strange dream last night.”

Gabriel & I often discussed our dreams when we were stoned.

“Yeah? Tell me about it.”

“Well, it was terrible, frightening. There was a woman.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes! That sounds just like Franco – terrified of women, even when it comes to wet dreams!”

Mary gave me a look of intrigue. Gabriel laughed at me more.

“You couldn’t understand unless you were there in the dream. It was terrifying.”

“What did she look like?”

“I’ve got no idea. I couldn’t concentrate enough on her face. It was everywhere, all around me – lots of deep blue green colours swirling & all the time there was the Voice…”

“...and what did it say?”

“something about the Dream-Film Store or something.”

“Wow. ‘The Dream-Film Store’. Sounds exciting. & what happened that was so scary?”

“I don’t…. I don’t really know…. It was just…. Um….”

I trailed off into oblivion. The T. V. had been put on & it flickered its bright ugly faces around the room. I felt dizzy & needed suddenly to lie down. Chaos was swarming in my head, I took a deep breath….

& a strange blue colour pervaded the scene.

“I’ve been calling you all day, why haven’t you been answering -

Look, there’s something we should get straight now & here: you WANT to be here, w/ me, so please make it easier on us both.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh you already know all this, it’s the same questions every time – in time you’ll remember everything, but I need to -”

“Where am I?”

“Why, you’re at the Dream-Film Store of course..”

I felt the softness of her presence, the lure of her maiden’s voice, a strange sense of having been here before in another time – still I could not see her face, just an oceanic blur.

“Is there something wrong? What is the matter?

What is the matter?”

she kept repeating

& repeating

her voice dispersing

& drowning as I

floated away

slowly upward towards

the surface again

through the big blue

until…

---------------------------------------------

IV

I awoke panting for breath on Gabriel’s sofa, w/ 2 impending heads above me – stoned expressionless faces.

“Man, what the fuck happened,” I joked.

Their smiles told me they were relieved.

“You suddenly started hyper-ventilating, & moving your limbs manically, & then you feinted & just lay there looking still & peaceful, &, uh, almost… dead!”

“Shit, that’s never happened before, I never feint, that’s weird.”

“Probably just the weed.”

“& the crap company,” added Mary w/ a smile. “Let me get you some water,” she continued.

“Please,” I agreed.

I watched the ripe shape of her body as she moved away, watched her casual motions sway. Disorder Lust & Loneliness. ‘There is no room for love in my life,’ I thought ‘or perhaps all I have is room for love.’

“Gabriel,” I slowly asseverated, suddenly snapping back into the room, “when I feinted, just then, I had the dream of the scaring woman at the bed of the sea.”

“At the bed of the sea?”

“Yes, yes, it was at the bed of the sea first time as well. I remember. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I haven’t seen the woman yet but I spoke to her.”

“What did you say?”

“’Who are you?’ & ‘where am I?’”

“Ha ha ha ha ha. & this was supposedly a nightmare?”

- “Um, well, no, not as such, no definitely not a nightmare, just a strange, scaring dream.”

“’Who are you?’ and ‘Where am I?’ That’s what people in 3-rd rate Hollywood PG’s say when they miraculously arrive at some fantastical place. Sounds like pure cheese to me man! I can’t believe you’re letting yourself get bothered by a dream as cheesy as this!”

“No, it wasn’t cheesy, it was crystal clear & pure blue & cool on my naked skin….”

Then there was an uncomfortable silence that hung around waiting to strangle me.

“Gabriel shall we have another bifter, I could really quite do w/ a J to sort my head out.”

“Yeah, man, that’s a sound idea. I’ll skin.”

I turned my head to look out of the window.

Grey streams pervaded the sky. The street outside was full of sadness, lined w/ windows, desperate & nothing. The street goes nowhere. The pedestrians are going to places that I refuse to call anywhere.

Mary had returned now w/ a glass of water & a cup of herbal tea.

“Oh, cheers, that’s perfect, thanks.”

I was never myself w/ new people. Strangers gave me a nervous edge. You could say that they excite me – or perhaps that was just Mary.

She sat down next to me on the sofa. I always sit forward w/ my hands clasped. (My mother used to say I sat like I was praying & I used to tell her that I was.) Mary sat back relaxed & full of presence. This made me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t see her face behind me, & now felt sure she was sitting back so as to look at me w/out me noticing.

My stoned mind focussed out & dispersed & my thoughts began to spread into detailed crevices of indecision.

If I lent back it would be blatant that I’d either noticed her, if it’s true that she is looking at me, or, if not, it would be either a nervous action or a rather full-on, arrogant one; so I shouldn’t just sit here & feel comfortable w/ her looking at me from behind.

I considered my position w/ Mary agonisingly behind me, & Gabriel, my friend who was beginning to bore me a little, reading in front of me, quite engrossed. He had the spliff & wasn’t even smoking it. I didn’t want to ask him for it, because it was his, but the rude bastard hadn’t even passed it once.

Suddenly, in a moment of decision I sat back next to Mary, our bodies pressing. At this stage, w/ the threat of Gabriel there & the tendencies of my edgier thoughts getting carried away, I began to feel excited – I began to get an erection & my jeans were tight. “I could really do w/ leaning forward again,” I thought. “Though what would Mary think of me rocking back and forward like a monkey?” Paradox. The only solution I felt was to ask Gabriel for the biff & lean forward to take it.

“Gabs man, the bifter has extinguished itself in the absence of you smoking it. Have a light.”

We often spoke to each other in burlesque tones using highly pretentious diction to mock the people who assume we are being serious or genuinely ostentatious. A silent cruelty, & a disdainful one. We enjoyed deliberately confusing people. I know that of course it’s a manifestation of personal insecurities, or something like that. Enigmatic people, though, have to cultivate their enigmas, play on people’s curiosities. If people knew this, however, the enigma, the mystery, would cease.

I suppose you could say I suffered from a dreadful arrogance that played games w/ my autonomy.

W/ all this thought taking place & consuming my stoned mind, my erection subsided. & Gabriel passed me the joint.

“Cheers man. What you reading?”

“Turn of the Screw.”

“Henry James. I’ve read it.”

“What do you think?”

“Frightening. Frightening to think that the entire novel is related through the eyes of someone so subtly mad… psychotic… that she doesn’t know it and neither do we…”

“Yes, yes, the scary thing is that when you’re insane of course you wouldn’t know about it.”

“Where are you at?”

“The Governess has just been visited by her second horror.”

“Oooooooooh… it’s just getting good. The insanity accelerates from then on.”

I often spoke of insanity. The idea of it attracts me. It’s in the same boat as all the things which attract me like dreams & angels & myths & magic, symbols, Mystery.

I often used the word ‘insane’ as an adjective. I’d never told Gabriel (& he was the most likely person I would tell anything) that I don’t actually believe in sanity. Or intelligence. I just believe in minds.

I needed the loo.

“Mary, where’s the bathroom please.”

“Upstairs.”

That’s all I needed to know. Bathrooms are self-evident & usually exactly where you expect them to be. Still, you’ve got to ask.

“Right. Do you want the rest of this?” I offered the joint.

“Oh, yes please. Thanks.”

On leaving the room, I realised how much I’d wanted to leave it since entering it.

“I’ll take my time,” I thought.

Halfway up the brown carpeted stairs I heard Mary & Gabriel exchanging aggressive but hushed remarks w/ each other. They were squabbling. Shit. Was it something to do w/ me? No, don’t be arrogant Franco, of course not, they just waited for privacy.

I reached the top of the stairs slowly, straining to hear what they were saying downstairs.

“Don’t be so nosy Franco, go & take your piss,” I said to myself, imitating the sense of morals & responsibility that I recognised I inherently lacked.

Four possible doors faced me at the top of the stairs. I chose the one I was sure was a bathroom; but it was a bedroom. “Shit, oh well, another one of my immaculate notions ruined. Bathrooms are not self-evident after all.”

The door next to it was the right one. As I pissed, I looked around at all the fancy bottles of sprays & scents & creams & whatnot. My bathroom, in comparison, was utterly empty.

I decided I’d stay in the bathroom a little longer to give the two downstairs a fraction more privacy. Their relationship, on first impressions, was strange. They possessed a silent communication which I’d seen in other couples, but never experienced.

In front of me, they ignored each other. & Gabriel had definitely changed. I realised then, staring blankly in the mirror, that Gabriel was not a friend anymore. I no longer needed him for the public confidence he inspired in me. I no longer needed any public confidence. I had no friends. I had to get out, leave as quickly & politely as possible. W/ as much of Gabriel’s gorgeous skunk as possible.

Returning downstairs it was clear that all the fuss had subsided. Entering the living room, Gabriel had now moved to sit in my seat next to Mary on the sofa. He had his arm around her. The skunk was on the coffee-table, where Gabriel was previously sitting. I moved over & sat down. The couple were full of smiles.

For the next ½ hour, we chatted idly (except for Mary), & I was given the opportunity of rolling a spliff. Little did Gabriel know that it was also an opportunity for me to steal about ¼ of his ounce of skunk. Having convinced myself that there was no longer the same connection between us, that he wasn’t a friend, & that it was his fault as well, I reached a guilt-free state of mind, which excited me. Ah, the potentials of being guilt-free, amoral. All you needed was to be good at lying to yourself. So, skinning the J, I subtly spilled the bag under the coffee-table while the couple were smugly engrossed in some embrace. Under the coffee-table, I put a substantial handful into my left boot, then brought the rest up in the bag, laughing and apologising.

“Gabriel. After this biff I’m gonna cruise.”

“You’re going? Already?”

“Well, I’ve been here ages &… to be honest, I still don’t feel too good after that feinting episode.”

“I thought we’d do something today, go to Camden maybe.”

“Gabriel,” I joked like a friend would. “You know we never do anything if we’ve got enough weed.”

He was reluctant to agree. I knew it was because of Mary. Being w/ her changed him.

We smoked the spliff, & talked some more. I couldn’t be myself w/ him. He had become a stranger. The way he was so – insensitive about my dream as well…. That was what first alerted me to his new persona. Oh well. I managed friendly chatter, & by now had realised he probably wanted me to go anyway, & was probably experiencing the same friendship crisis between us that I was. At least he had Mary there when I left. What would she be like then? What were they really like together?

“So,” I said, standing up, “I’m off, man.”

“Cheers for phoning & coming round, it’s good that we’ve retained our friendship and are still in touch…” etc, etc,

Bullshit.

After the crap & the strange half-falsity had finally gotten too crappy to bear on both sides, I smiled at Mary.

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said looking at her intensely in her sea-green eyes, as if to communicate something more than my words actually said.

“you too,” she smiled,

“see you again.”

& then that was it. I doubted if she ever would see me again. Or Gabriel for that matter. It didn’t matter.

The door had closed behind me. I faced the street. I was free.

********

V

W/ my confidence fuelled by the safe knowledge of having something to smoke in my possession, I strolled briskly away. “Even if the worst comes to the worst,” I thought, “I can just get utterly cained & escape, pass out in a miserable gutter.” But I could not accept this as being the outcome of the day. “Decisions must be made,” I said decisively out-loud, to no-one. “I must choose.”

I turned the corner, not knowing where I was, or where I was going to. A woman w/ a pram passed me & deliberately averted her eyes from mine. I don’t know why but this fuelled my sense of drive further. My stride began to extend.

A moment later, a fragment of sun scattered through the clouds that had lay in the sky all day. A ray caught me in the eye. I began to feel quite exultant, happy to be alive, & to be me. I continued walking in a strong rhythm. My feet penetrated the street.

I started to hum; then I fitted words to the tune. I was walking directly into the beam of sunlight, which seemed to be exclusively shining on me. ‘Wow,’ I thought, light-headed & dreamy, ‘I am indeed a very special person, blessed.’ As soon as I’d felt this elated sensation float through me, the grey clouds covered the sun again, as if to punish me for my arrogance, or simply just to ruin my mood.

Angered by this, I felt like getting myself involved in a conflict against the sky & sun. I decided, in the mess of my mind, that I would will the sun back out from those clouds.

Soon my concentration faltered, though, & my thoughts maundered into silly crevices. I had turned onto a little side street, & at the end of it, I saw there was a fenced grassy opening w/ a gate. A cemetery. W/ my thought now on a level of confusion, it would be a good idea to sit down & think for a while. Maybe I could write a song.

The cemetery was virtually empty. Furthermore, it appeared to be more like a park than a cemetery. Nicely mowed lawns. Cosy gravel paths. Each tombstone lined up immaculately & forgotten about. I couldn’t believe for a minute that any of the people lying under this ground had specifically chosen this cemetery as their place of rest. Of all the places of rest on Earth.

I wandered down to the bottom of the path & sat by an unusually small gravestone under the trees in the corner. Leaves were scattered around me, fragile and crumbling.

“In loving memory of

Mary Calliope,

died 2^nd April 1882,

aged 26 years.”

That was what this curious gravestone said. It was faded & looked out of place, tucked away at the side under this tree. It seemed almost lonely. I leant against it, sitting on the damp ground, forgetting to respect the dead.

I noticed a robin hopping around the base of the nearest sycamore tree. He, or she for that matter, looked rather impoverished, skinny & tired. I immediately took pity on this little robin & felt helpless that I couldn’t give it something to eat. Instead, I smiled at it, & said “hello” in the tone of voice you’d use w/ a baby. “You can be my friend” I said wistfully, trying to put some genuine enthusiasm into my voice. I sounded false. Almost inevitably, the robin bobbed away. ‘Oh well.’

I sat there engrossed in an evolving day-dream, unable to find a single thread of productive thought, wallowing in whatever arose.

I was beginning to feel nauseous. My guts felt like sludging snakes writhing inside me. “Shit,” I thought “I haven’t eaten yet today.” What time was it? I hadn’t a clue. How long had I been sitting there? I began to panic a little, & feel light-headed. ‘Shit, I’ve got some weed, shit I forgot, wow, I’ll have another smoke and calm down.’

W/ my face down to my lap, & my fingers absorbed in the process of rolling a spliff, I did not notice the elderly woman approaching me w/ a little joke of a dog scampering beside her. Just as I lit up, & lifted my face up, she was there.

“Morning,” I said, slightly shocked.

Her face was heavy w/ old skin but could have been attractive before about 50 years of weathering set in.

“Why are you sitting on that grave?” she said abruptly.

“Well, um, actually, I am here to mourn my father’s grand mother.”

Her nosy rudeness annoyed me, & I was in the mood for retaliating on the offensive.

“She died while giving birth to my grandfather,” I continued, enjoying the freedom & spontaneity of lying, enjoying the fact that I had gained the upper hand.

“Oh,” she said solemnly. “Oh I am sorry,” she continued humbled and apologetic. I was suddenly hit by a great wave of guilt, at seeing how easily I had defeated his poor old woman, who was in the right anyway. I wanted to tell her that I was lying, & had actually stopped to roll up some illegal substances, & that yes I was a typical youth, & that you were right to question me… But she had already tottered off, w/ her little tottering dog. Oh well, no point in pitying the weak, I thought.

W/ this incident over, & seeming to have taken place hours ago, I continued with the spliff.

Slowly, I began to enter a state of mind that I’d never encountered before. My stomach seemed to expand & expand into space. I closed my eyes & felt the walls of my stomach moving outwards. I felt as if a universe was being created inside me. I felt a huge space within the entire of my body, which I felt no longer existed. I imagined seeing stars explode & planets being born &

********

VI

& I plummeted to the Dream-Film Store again…

“Here is where dreams are stored on disk,” said the friendly female voice as if on autocue. “Anything that can be dreamt, any dream sequence, it’s stacked on the shelves here in The Dream-Film Store, this shop beneath the waves.”

I felt less afraid than before.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I can explain.”

Her face, her physical form now appeared, a nubile and pulchritudinous sylph.

“Hi,” she said, resolving from the colour.

“Hi,” I said back, breaking that rule that women don’t like you copying them.

“Your loneliness, disorder and despair leads to LUST. Your agonies are self-inflicted. ALIENATION is one of them. You have escaped into The Dream Film Store. You have accidentally slipped into a crevice of your own mind and landed awake in the subconscious.”

“Really?”

“Either that or you have created a world here at the bottom of the sea symbolising mystery, women, penetration, drowning, hallucinating, dreaming, the subconscious.”

“Well which is it?”

“Your LONELINESS is a fantasy world that is the subconscious reaction to and sanctuary from the alienation, waste & disorder of your waking life. You are at war with yourself. Your subconscious is offering you peace terms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come with me while we plummet,” she said; “plummet with me while we sleep.”

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.

DEAR FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?

Dear Fliss or is it Flee?

I hope you are well-rested, okay, secure of direction, comfortable, eating well. When I wrote this to you, the one we call H was walking round, moving from the kitchen to the sitting room where mormor awaited with little baby girl toys. I had just made a few touches to my Morrison mirror, and got coal in for mormor, after a night with no sleep, only staying up tending to my soul at a slinky screen. Mud outside was minimal, as I made my avowal, still victimised so badly I cannot confess to it, still wishing to be doing nothing else but write poetry. If this missive ever gets through to you wake me up, for the dawn is strong with James, and we feel in love despite the gypsies and the government who loom. By now you might know me as pirate, who wanted to get that line about the ocean in there but recognised it belonged in a song, a song I wrote myself, after attaining the face, in about 1998, as if some kind of proof, the result of some bet, the end of the quest, the treasure chest of dreams. So it being a song I decided I would no longer mewl and puke to school. Even though it seemed to land fair and square with me, the line about the ocean in the song when I was but 15 or 16 and a new Rimbaud, by now they had me down as Sid Vicious, who was making something that was ours, though not quite sure if “our-ing it along” was allowed in the proper vernacular. Voices are not sweeties. Mormor went for a pee. Suicide is a shelf. I am so sick with fear I may have a morning beer, even though it’s only 9 AM. I could pretend it is gravy. Mormor comes in the kitchen, says it might be too windy to do a barbecue today though she has it all ready apart from the coal. The carrots and potatoes are ready. You’re in the room now, on the way out into the field, a beautiful little girl, whom I call “madame,” whom it seems is getting ready to go out into the field, while Seb is running up the fell, and it’s only 9. 30, still breakfast time, time for eggs, eggs not likely to cause an adverse reaction, but not before you go out into the front garden for some action, and not before H puts a hat on, and I try to see the light on a fair, springful day. It’s just a shame I need to read up on Trump every morning, for it disturbs me, as I try to see the light, imagining sunlight blowing my hair about, and now you’ve got your hat on and your wellies and are totally ready and can go out.

Love,

John

(who might soon be snow or under the sleet)

SIBLINGS

Brothers are nice and sisters too,

always there’ll be something to do,

but they can elongate the queue

to use in the morning the upstairs loo.

There are also sibling rivalries,

to please the parents, and to please

the beauty queen who brings the bees

down onto their humble knees.

John Cleese says it like a brother -

no-one is any more clever than another -

that goes between your father and mother -

and your brother and sister and any other.

It’s boring not having a family,

and I do have my brother living with me,

but sometimes think in a different key

about what’s likely to never be

and yet with mother’s new grand children,

at least she’ll get some satisfaction,

and we are a tribe bonded in emotion

even if scattered across the ocean.

I hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays

on the piano for them in multiple ways

that mean the brightening up of days,

like a way to cure a transient malaise.

Siblings often squabble and fight

but judging by mine own, it’s right

that I would die for each of them tonight,

and leave them playing in the light.

SHAKESPEARE’S LITTLE HELPERS

The poet turned up to the reading

in a suit, said

“sorry I turned up like

a scruffy c**t.”

Now he is beset by Shakespeare’s Little Helpers.

They are impeccable in their

timing. You

finish a tome,

or think you have finished a tome,

they get back to you

within a minute

to tell you

what needs be done.

A new Feudal System was breaking

out, with Shakespeare

the man upstairs…

I believe in

Shakespeare’s Little Helpers,

how they are faster

than a phone call.

They travel

faster than the speed of

love, straight

to the place where the bleeding is…

They can wear strange

disguises but are

not a shamanic mythos.

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 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.

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.

LOOKING THROUGH THE DIMWIT WINDOW

I live between the letters of the word OK

but sometimes escape the shape of the paper.

I look at the dawn 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, away,

to bring us ever closer to Nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I REMEMBER

I remember waking in my top bunk bed in the London house with a feeling of butterflies in my stomach for the weekend ahead, maybe meeting up in Camden or Kentish town with the gang, a gang of intellectuals, doing their GCSE’s.

I remember after Lower Sixth going on a road trip with Paul to take acid at a festival celebrating the solar eclipse and how we kept a road book which in the end I bequeathed to him.

I remember liking The Lords And The New You Know Who, in Sixth Form, but already then branching out to further poem books, such as Little Johnny’s Confession by Brian Patten.

I remember listening to Muse on minidisk, the first album, that year I finished school, 2000, in my brother’s bedroom, on his stack, and liking it much more than my latest listen all these years later on Youtube tonight.

I remember awaiting Paul’s arrival in the north, for a holiday after school, writing of the poet as pilgrim to Parnassus, deep-sea diver in the collective unconscious, psychic map-maker, alchemist of perception, liver-function of language, and translator of feelings.

I remember writing a New Beat Manifesto with Paul when he came to stay for a week after school had finished, upstairs in the old pollen smoking den in the barn at Cumpstones.

I remember when Cumpstones became an atemporal microcosm where dad’s soft pollen was the currency, a reward for working in the fields.

I remember for my Gap Year going on a big, Rimbaudian adventure to Cambridge, sleeping on floors and sofas, learning to detune strings, first taking E, forming a band that recorded on earphones, but I don’t remember taking a crap for all those years.

I remember telling Paul who lived down there that we isolate moments of history to form a narrative whereas in reality, back then, Everything happened.

I remember when, sometime between school and University, my copy of Neil Curry’s Walking To Santiago started to smell of redolent perfume.

I remember when I got to University, reading the line “history is a way of thinking about history without thinking about history,” but have since not been able to find it in the book.

I remember visiting Agent G in his student digs in Leeds, and watching A Beautiful Mind, and feeling like I wanted to cry hot, salty, redemptive tears of sheer humanity at the end of it.

I remember taking E with my new friends at Warwick and coming home to the kitchen of our student house and my putting my arms out wide like I were a plane and sailing round the kitchen and what a happy and beautiful moment that was, which lead to the kissing of a girl.

I remember also at Warwick, my mate Luke telling me “memory is the golden ray,” and then reading in Morley that memory flatters.

I remember going to Glastonbury instead of Morley’s office hours, and him writing to me to say my decision to do that represented “a de-radicalisation of a unilateral contract.”

I remember being given two books by my mate’s grand-dad, one WH Auden’s The Dance of Death, with a black cover, and another, a James Joyce rarity with a silver cover – but not being aware at the time he was giving me a mirror for the soul.

I remember I first played ‘Hunger’ to the Gap Year band, The Flood, when I had left Warwick and returned to Cambridge, and how Tommo really liked the way I climbed up and said I would “plug my senses in the mains.”

I remember when I then attended my local University, Lancaster University, instead and how at some point I lost my mind, and thought hearing voices was a result of A. I. Companies, which at the time hadn’t even come into being yet.

I remember writing, like it was a play, on all the packets in the cupboards of the student house, and how soon it took me to be sectioned after that.

I remember trying to exchange a paper on A. I. which I had written for a 70p bus ticket to get from town to campus but finding the bus driver couldn’t allow it.

I remember thinking of A. I. a lot when in that liminal space between sanity and losing my mind, and yet how no clear paper has been preserved from that little period.

I remember my dad saying at one point when by now I had my degree that “you’re not going to like this meat,” and my not understanding what he was saying, nor asking him to explain himself either.

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 =

UNDER THE PLOUGH

In sentient air I picked up the title,

apt for anyone down at the foot,

that felt like a good container for some

experiments I made and had underway...

if the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland

and the ecstasy pill under the green hill,

then what has gone under the Plough?

Maybe nothing but Duff Beer!

Really under the Plough the dancers

have not gone, nor the houses, where

from time to time, resting from

the dance, the workers sleep…

ah, it is their land, those tireless farmers,

who drink port down the Miners Arms,

and farming is the most noble profession

unto the Ancient Greeks. I have

stood under the Plough before alone

though The Plough is below as much

as it is above. It would be better to be all one

than alone, and love one another.

Because of the shapes she is made of,

I trust her way with wheels implicitly,

and the man on telepathic walkie talkie

who surrendered the title alike.

We are the workers, we dig the soil,

turning it over for the future plant.

We are the future we want to see.

We are the changes we want to happen.

We are the new creatures secret among us.

We are not accidents or mistakes.

We play Head Snooker and pot the black.

We are free and we are without debt.

THE HEIGHTENED DREAM ALL OVER AGAIN

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.

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, 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. Although for multifarious reasons the book has been retracted from publication now, 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. My truth is that I am ill, very mentally ill, and shouldn’t elaborate on it more than that. To be a scientist would be nice, and what I find I am sometimes, but I also dabble with philosophy, maths, poetry and music. It is seen as an illness, the way I have 1000’s of files. I have 18 books in print at the moment and quite a few albums or long E. P’s online too, but apart from a run of poems in a reputable literary webzine, which I don’t even rate very highly, it’s all been amateur, DIY, never going through a proper or formal channel. I don’t really wish to be Anon in anything I do, and so, threatened with Anonymity every time I go to poetry, to science I turn, where you don’t generally hear of the work of Anon, Anon’s famous equations, Anon’s new theory. I think with a subject matter like mine, meaning the things I did with my life, on my CV, the subject matter is science, which might explain why my poetry is failing to take off.

43. When we did Soundcloud Rain, organising many of my songs according to the new da Vinci circle, in terms of making 4 albums, the implication was lost on me at the time: it was that there are more than 4 Points of Difference in the new da Vinci circle. This reminds me of the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, which I already saw and in fact read before I could even see <BEE> on the same page. The pictures that grew collectively form the shape of a ‘J’ as if to quote the Dude from The Big Lebowski who keeps asking “can I do a j in here man?” It could also stand for John or James or both at once. Personally I am only just starting to see that Soundcloud Rain might be an alright book. At first I was just going to put some songs in, then decided on using James’s <BEE> as an organisational principle, then after that very few decisions were made by me if any. It all just happened by automated conveyor belt. There was a succubus who swooped down and got me to arrange things. They didn’t know I didn’t want to be Anon. Of course I don’t want to be Anon. Who would? Imagine I was your Boss and just never paid you because I didn’t know you didn’t want to be a slave. Of course I don’t want to be Anon. That’s my life in song writing that’s been tossed away by some woman swooping down. It’s causing a lot of problems and a lot of resentment and coming between my brother and I. It was never my idea to go Anon with it, and if I’d known that was how it was going to be read I wouldn’t have agreed to it. I take the attitude of John Stuart Mill who says a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality and think it particularly relevant in the case of my own life’s events that I am not forced into Anonymity. I believe like my father that a writer has a Right to a name otherwise an exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you. I believe going Anon or not should be up to the writer in question and I certainly give nobody any permission to use material I have written as Anon. It is against the law to make someone go Anon because there is something called The Right to Attribution so I expect my wishes to be upkept even when I am dead and gone.

44. How long, furthermore, did the pictures that grew on James’s sheet take to burn and rip to feeling? Was it instantaneous? Were they like a Strange Attractor in Chaos Theory born of spontaneous self-organisation? I think if I could only slow down I would become unplayable! ‘The Blit’ is James’s but let’s not forget I am the person, the human being that discovered the sheet and read it through its process of becoming what it is. I suppose it is impossible, an art unmade from the human. I suppose four light sabre strokes quoting the drum intro of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana in the middle of a teenage rock song might have come into play. I suppose after all this talk I still know so little about it and can’t find out any answers either.

45. Maybe someone like Dr. Calculator Ptom decided to throw a fire-ball at <BEE> and that is where we get the first picture, of someone throwing a fire ball to the left? Then we have someone pointing a gun towards a portal. Then a dead skull with a fireball above his head. Then a face with a big fat smile. I might repeat here the lyrics of my song:

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 has crossed my mind that the pictures needed to have been done by someone that knew the lyrics. James likes it best when I simply say “your doodles were so beautiful it reminded me of Flora and so I had a bad acid trip on the page.” For all he designed the experiment for Flora, and didn’t have a precise plan as to how things would turn out, but as I say did even leave crosses to say when and where the pictures would grow. I think you’ll find that he who did them would’ve been given an awful fright to see them and that wasn’t me, it was James.

A SUMMARY OF THE MATHS

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

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

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and to continue with a second text called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

“but then again who knows.”

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

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

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

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

“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”

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

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

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

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

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

And the 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.”

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. And then I had it retracted, for multifarious reasons too numerous to mention, meaning for a moment there were only five...

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 to making war.

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.

EXCERPTS FROM A GIANT NOTEBOOK: 09/ 06/ 2026

Woke up this morning,

felt glad to be alive,

wished I could see things,

through a Sega Megadrive.

But therein my blues cuts out…

perhaps some Star Wars writing would’ve been better?

I’ve just had a book I did with the government retracted from publication. Now it is a case of seeing what I can do when cutting the gov one out. I sip tea here in my homeworld, my Shire. And I contemplate the methodology of William Carlos Williams, which was simply to “cut!” for then things grow back. It will all grow back if it wants to.

Somewhere in the eco-system I mean insect collection there is maths! I attempted the maths of the new colour at 7 years old in The Sunset Child. I wrote The Road to Heaven by Noj And The Mob at 12. I predicted September 11^th in ordinary speech in 2000. I invented the number !00%, explored the form of defaced bank notes, falsified the Nirvana barcode and more… I dreamed of a number sequence that leads to Heaven. But nowhere do you find a proper proof.

Yesterday I had 18 books in print,

today there are only 17.

I wish there were more but I’m skint,

oh well, at least my pants are clean.

Of the 17 books, it is the collections with Chipmunka I really count, of which there are 5 out there now. My life has been like John Barnes’s goal against Brazil, my writing more like John Cleese in the Knights that say ‘ni.’

Maybe my best bit was the mnemonic for the guitar strings:

Even a dick gets big erections.

I’ve just been helping my mother carry some soil to the greenhouse. She shows me the orchard afterwards, tells me what needs chopping down.

Yesterday I wrote a haiku:

“Darkness bulges...

soon it will be night.

A butterfly has gone astray.”

As I lay in bed last night I contemplated the moody atmospherics of the song ‘Set the Controls For The Heart of the Sun’ by Pink Floyd.

I thought about the hash I used to smoke, propitiating a reverie.

Telly through the wall leaked in.

I was free of the government super-computer.

Today is a notebook day, a nothing day, a day characterised by dressing-gown-ness or detachment. I had to un-publish the one with the government for multifarious reasons, including that I was told it still wouldn’t be allowed if I imparted some of the basic facts of my life.

Woke up this morning,

more like this afternoon,

reminded myself immediately,

just what I’d undone.

Of course if you wanted to be a beautiful mind, in there with the government scientists, you shouldn’t have done away with Let The Jews Win. I was coerced into writing it and coerced into getting rid of it because I was coerced into writing it. People should be free to write what they want.

Mum comes in looking for a gardening glove,

then gets back out there once again.

When they say “we are in the garden” they mean “in love” -

the message tacked to the neighbour’s window pane.

Or was my best bit when I put a + sign for the ‘f’ in the line:

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

?

My hair is too long and lank, my physique too ungainly. I read the room, its objects scattered around. My phone, some scissors, a delivery package from Amazon, some post it notes, an old pizza box, my five Chipmunka collections in a pile, my wallet, my coffee cup – I ask if matter is not just energy vibrating at a certain wavelength and frequency. There are so many flies in the room too. Traditionally that has two meanings, meaning how windy it is at my screen, meaning voices, pests, but they have quietened down if only for now.

The reason I don’t wish for any of my work to be Anon when I am dead and gone is that I side with John Stuart Mill who says a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in individuality. I think particularly in the case of my own CV, which I nevertheless am urged to leave out, that it is important I am not Anon. I also believe a writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you. More to the point it is against the law to make someone go Anon against their wishes, for there is something called the Right To Attribution.

The reason this new collection originally started with a bit by Hannah (contained in the poem ‘That’s It’) is that the initial idea was to present the book online as a net-book with a photo of the sheet where pictures grew as a cover, and the point therein was that the audience shouldn’t go beyond the cover. It was also to be left online for Hannah’s baby girl Florence as an heirloom. However, since then, we have learned that we cannot use the photo of the sheet where pictures grew as a cover, so my next best bet is a photo of a flower.

James says whilst the government one might’ve seemed alright it became terrible when you realised they were trying to cut out the woods.

Since we did away with Let The Jews Win, even though they say it was my best work, there has been a flowering, a flourishing of psycho-sensitive plants. Mum has been in the greenhouse again. I haven’t heard many evil or sadistic voices. The point is that it frees me up to write a new one. I didn’t get it quite right, the book I had retracted.

I think there is new breath afforded by the retraction…

I think the new Left approve of my binning it.

Now I just have five Chipmunka collections.

If there was a prize I wouldn’t be winning it.

I hear that Let The Jews Win was special precisely for its treatment of what happened on the last E… but it was still plagiaristic of Jim Morrison in its form. One of the only things I learned in the whole of my education about the matter was to not copy the same shapes as Jim Morrison.

I hear Let The Jews Win was also commissioned by the New Right without them telling us and also hear it meant our collective quest ended with the government.

What most bugged me about it was that the first poem of the two simply quoted excerpts from my extant oeuvre which everyone I heard said they preferred in their original contexts, so that gave me a killer headache, trying to work out what I had done, what was the real work.

Anyhow, it wasn’t my decision to go ahead and do it, nor to go ahead and bin it. I am still almost happy with the five Chipmunka collections left behind… I mean the maths I was doing was mostly contained in the book from seven years old, so I still have the original when I think about it.

I heard someone else say they thought “the new genius one was a trap.” That’s Let The Jews Win. I was aiming way too High… for it is better to aim Low in art. Art tends to the Low not High End these days.

Already it’s ten to eight, my birthtime,

a time that followed my father around.

He wouldn’t have thought my birth a crime,

but more in line with the broken ground.

The day has proven a fistful of dollars torn from the dollar tree… another sit back and invent brave new schools type of day, with colouring in, joining the dots and spotting the difference, with defaced bank notes, with maps of sound that stretch for miles, with eking out an aesthetic philosophy, and scoring a question mark on the musical scales, and all that Homo-Ludens talk.

21. 23. I am threatened with death for undoing Let The Jews Win. We cannot quite make out who it is or what they are saying.

I should be building up

to the World Cup

getting in the mood

but instead am a lost Dude.

I’ve not been following the football much since dad died, crossed the water to the other side, on a boat rowed ashore, by Michael, as saith the song dad used to sing James and I when we were boys in bed at night.

Darkness is falling.

It rained today.

The plaintive quest

of the sailor carries on.

Something like Romantic

hyper-charge is in his soul.

It could be another template

for the mating queen,

but without the ability

to ejaculate I’m gone,

no more to chase her,

still to no avail and

yet the day was good,

a day of drifting apart

like tectonic plates

underneath the table cloth.

Now I’m not sure what to do… in fact you could say I haven’t a clue. I’d better not repeat bits of the one with the government in case I need to put it out there again! It’s all in a mess, all in a knot, but probably better for the retraction of the one with the gov. I’ve made it even better now but still hear a voice pipe up on magic alphabet radio, strict and stringent too, to say she cannot let me renew the one with the gov.

EXCERPTS FROM A GIANT NOTEBOOK: 10/ 06/ 2025

Woke up this morning,

feeling so dead,

just longed to go

straight back to my bed.

The medication is just so strong, even the meditators couldn’t get through the thick wall it presents, to tell me things. As for meditating myself, for a year or so it was trendy among some poets like Simon Pomery, Paul Inman and myself – perceived as a way of realising your creativity.

I was writing about A. I. long before the Revolution, putting my voices down to A. I. Companies before they were heard of.

What a long big summer that was, full of outdoor swimming, when I came home from the Cambridge band (The Flood) and went on a fitness campaign in Cumbria. That was before Drugs Curse Madness Suicide.

Dad would’ve said

don’t go back to bed

but now he’s dead

and I’m not glad.

As I write a preppy kid pipes up to say unless I do Let The Jews Win first, I’m not allowed any further writing. In case you’ve only just tuned in, Let The Jews Win was retracted from publication recently – my beautiful-minded paper. It’s got better since then, adding a few new lines. Another voice pops up to say they still don’t think I should be doing the one with the gov. The gov got the idea for the form from observing me in the first place, then fed it back to me years later.

I’m waiting for someone from the psychiatric team to pay a visit.

James and mum have gone in the garden with a chainsaw.

I actually already got up at 5 AM, then went back to bed and now it’s 11. 22. The meeting came and went. She said not to focus on a governmental proof, but to write some children’s literature instead, something less heavy and more fun.

I’ve written about the figures and tropes of adolescence. What from boyhood? As a child I remember the bouncing ball in my head at night – it would only bounce when you said stop, and only stop when you said bounce. Only through inverse logical could you control its wilderness.

I also remember repeating the word “kangaroo” in my head, over and over, until it went numb, emptied itself of meaning, hopped off to become the mad, kangaroo king.

There was a state of “relational undoing” I would get myself into, when lying in bed under the covers with my eyes closed, where you suddenly lost the room, forgot where the wall is, which way you were lying, where the bed was in relation to the room – and it was delightful.

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died, I said, to mock the parochial local rag, before the birth of the blog.

“Farting out of the wrong orifice” became a movement in British comedy.

One of my observations was that it is impossible to make a cowboy film in space… I heard it reiterated by an Irishman walking down a street talking to himself in my twenties.

The phrase “Barnes has scored a chicken” might also date back to my boyhood… also see “the bird in the wood, it was definitely a horse.”

It’s good to crash your face in water at dawn...it’s what they do all the way round the world. But to go back to bed is bad. So it pleases me to sit here writing that I have just spent an hour or so helping mum in garden, lugging cut down branches to a big pile.

What is the difference between the Tower and the pile?

Here I’d like to weave in a bit of Spanish magic – a poem by Brossa where he collects signatures in order to take the paper to the local authorities… the work still went down as his in the end.

15. 32. Mum’s gone shopping for ingredients for tonight. I have been file hopping, back to a work of philosophy. They got me, those overlooking voices, to re-use the first poem of Let The Jews Win as a preamble to the philosophy… I thought about it and then heard someone say it would be even worse than it was in Let The Jews Win. Sometimes I don’t think I have been treated fairly and that I do deserve to have a good book out there. It doesn’t seem to me that there is one as yet. You can’t imagine what it’s like having to hear an irritating voice at every single turn of mind.

JUVENILE DEMENTIA

“Juvenile dementia” is a term I invented for a condition that mixes teenage angst and youthful idealism.

I don’t need to go over it all again: in Lower Sixth my teenage philosophy in a nutshell was sensus praecedit cogitationem. 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].

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea

[squiggle].

Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.

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.

Also in Sixth Form, in my word-science notebook I wrote the word “entropy” backwards and tried to give it meaning:

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

Reading of ancient alchemists in The Lords And The New You Know Who by Jim Morrison I wrote “waves make gentle love to the shore.” Reading of a schoolboy contemplating getting stoned on milk in Little Johnny’s Confession by Brian Patten I wrote “homework tonight is to remember your dreams.”

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

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

AURORA FLOREALIS

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.

*ketamineguitar*

THE DREAM FILM STORE 2026

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. The nubile, pulchritudinous sylph of the Dream Film Store was no longer beside me. I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto.

Anyhow, I lived quite close to a pub called The Queen’s Head and feeling a bit thirsty went for a lager and lime. The pub was quite empty apart from a few afternoon deadbeats washed up, the likes of which I was probably destined to become unless I could sort my life out. After taking a few sips of my lager and lime I downed the rest of it and went for a rollie in the pub garden. In the vision of the future I had had in the dream in the cemetery, they even did away with smoking sections on trains. Maybe it was time to give up smoking, to lead a healthy life, to flourish?

I went back home to my flat, feeling the effect of only one pint, had another bifter and guess what?

Down

down

down

down

down

I sank into the Dream Film Store once again. Coral staircase in the key of C. What images rise or try to rise in your mind?

“Welcome again to the Dream Film Store,” she said.

I looked her in the eyes and smiled. She had a beautiful face that resolved in the corner of the dream. I needed to know what was going on, all that science, so I asked her what was going on, which it was, real or dream and she said

“do you want to have a coffee to talk about it?”

I said okay, and she made some instant. The Dream Film Store looked like an old HMV – remember those? – except the CD’s that were stacked up were dreams. There was a stack behind the counter and a door leading to the backrooms.

She said “you’re right, the legality of the science depends on it all being a dream.”

She took me through the door into the backrooms of the store and she said there you found a network of infinite corridors containing rooms full of infinite dreams stacked up in disks. We went into the first room and sipped our coffee in the shop at the bed of the sea. She said

“it is all a dream.”

I asked her why. She said it was an erotic fantasy, where a nubile sylph was dominated, and through whom we look. There were a whole stack of similar such erotic fantasies to my left.

“I chose you because I need someone down here to help me with the smooth running of dreams,” she said. “I was trying to allure you.”

She then offered me the chance to stay in the undersea below and attain the real dream, live any dream I want and for it to be real.

“All you’d need to do is give up cannabis,” she said. “It’s your choice. But I am offering myself to you.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. The content of the dream we had been through was quite heavy, quite scientific, and necessitated it all being a dream. If I could have asked my author what he did it for, he might say to keep all the science and maths of his boyhood in the same compendium. To consign the illegal matter of the wood to history and mythology. To falsify the science and replace the lost boyhood book. To allow it so that what I went through can be renewed when my body is rotting underground if someone wants to renew it and can. To make the shape of supplication towards the future state. Even to supply Simon Pomery with another number he can translate in his post-poetic and psycho-technological way. In other words for light.

I thought about it but said no thanks to her offer and she said that was fine and let me slip back to the surface.

II

I sat in my flat which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, asking myself what was real and what was dream. I wasn’t much of an amateur psychologist so couldn’t interpret my dream very well. Maybe I needed to see a psychiatrist? As far as I understood I had been privy to the boyhood science of someone called John. Or rather, should I say, “that was what I did when I was a kid.” For it already wasn’t clear if that ‘I’ is Franco the character or John F B Tucker the real human writer. That means things are still quite dreamy and unstable. Maybe what I needed was to go to the library, be it to look for psychiatrists online or read up on the science and maths of this bloke John F B Tucker whose name I dimly remember from the initial dream sequence? The library was ten minutes walk away, an old red brick building, up the hill a little bit and to the left when you get to the main street. I had been there several times and was a member. I was quite well-read even though I never finished my University course. That I was still dreaming didn’t cross my mind. But I remember feeling like becoming a scientist or a mathematician at the moment I thought I had awoken from the dream sequence. Maybe to still be me, Franco, would be holding up the traffic… the rock re-invents itself and that is for sure. The first thing I needed to do was skin another bifter for the walk to the library. Hopefully I would get there without any further “sliding into the Dream Film Store.” And when I get there I can access the computers, get online, maybe read up on some maths and science.

III

I took a right out the house and another right at the end of the street, then up the hill, then took a left to the library, smoking my bifter all the way. If ever I was to design something like Nash’s Equilibrium it would be all about cannabis in a way. There was a poem back home in my shoebox that contained the idea without giving it away.

The poet delights in a wilful obscurity, opacity, bats, black magnets, firking, encryption and code. The poet also extirpates every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unlooses the mind of form, method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio broadcasting dreams. As I walked to the library I cupped the spliff in my hand so nobody could see it but the smell was Everywhere. It was Gabriel’s GM skunk, and he only smoked the best, be it cheese, trainwreck or whatever.

Not knowing if I was still dreaming or not I got to the library and got some computer time. I looked at first for therapists but none of them were even smiling in the pictures of their faces, which looked an ominous sign. I also Googled the name John Tucker to see if the dream sequence presented a real scientist and there was no sign of him. Whatever route I had taken to the library it seemed a waste of a journey. I went back home, only ten minutes to the flat.

When I got back to the flat I was feeling more myself… I, Franco, of the Franco-Prussian War, was able to then make myself a coffee and reflect. It must’ve been hard, for example, to go through so many schools, carrying that burden, of being the witness or not, from a young age. Maybe victories at creative writing were all that kept you going, be it the essay on the wood at Rugby School, from which you had to depart, or the book of verse you sent back to F-D, when you had to depart from Wellington College, or the band Oedipus Wrecks you started at Habs, from which you had to depart, or the poetry magazine you started at Oundle, from which you had to depart, or even the last year of Sixth Form, at Chetwynde, where after all the departing you wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation.

By now it was time to dream of something new… I felt like I had been through a complete scene and wished to do another. It might not be for me to decide but if I could select someone to give a Nobel Prize it wouldn’t be me but the guy who designed the sheet where pictures grew, even if it be only in dreams.

IV

Still in my flat, I made some beans on toast. Ever since I was a student it was a must have, fill-a-hole meal. It filled a hole even if not extravagant. I hadn’t any cheese to put on top. I was on the Dole (as it was still called then). Maybe soon though I would be on Sickness Benefits if things continued in the same vein? After I had eaten my beans on toast I stuck Nirvana on the CD player. It was Incesticide, an album of grimy B-sides and rarities. They never did a bad song, Nirvana. I loved Kurt Cobain’s voice, the light sabre energy of the guitar, the dynamism of the rhythm section.

In my flat, I was doing some thinking… of course it was all a dream, in much the same way as A. I. is programmed not to know about the Naturalistic Observations of Joyce, Hughes and Morrison, which were themselves but a dream, because that is the point: it is all a dream.

Rimbaud says “dreaming is shameful since it is pure loss.” Peter Blegvad used to teach that “in dreams there is no context.” I watched a telly program about dreams that said we are dreaming all the time except when asleep without sensory stimulus. It also said we inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors who had to rehearse for the real live situation. You can train yourself to lucid dream and then in dreams visit the local McDonalds and thus have a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment already went to Heaven where we all took particles of dirt that worked like wonder drugs, and chanted the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.”

You can also smuggle language out of the unconscious. Michael Hofmann says language smuggled out of the unconscious is a leather boxing glove protruding from the telly on a mechanical, metal arm. It could be that there is a book in the undersea of dreams below. Once I had to fly to the Isle of Man using any contraption I could dream up, to pick up a collection of poetry the shape of a remote control and made of chocolate from a white garden table. Another time an actual text down there in which I was dreaming and which seemed in the dream at least to have meaning was signed three times by Einstein’s value for light, c. Another time I held an actual book in my hands in the dream, and it was written by my friend; and it was amazing, inspiring great envy with its oneiric-textured and liminal phrasing.

My father said dreams are merely bureaucratic work; Freud took them more srsly, saying “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” I reckon if there is a book down there we can drag it out, like a shipwreck. I would therefore need to get down there again, into the unconscious so smoked another bifter and waited for ambush. I wasn’t sure it was going to arrive, because I was willing it to happen so it wasn’t like “ambush by the unruly unconscious,” as you hear of on English Literature courses, but nevertheless...

Down

down

down

down

down

I plummeted

down a coral staircase in C sharp minor,

to the Dream Film Store again.

V

“We’ve got some amazing things down here,” she said. She meant dreams stored on disk. It was only now that I asked her her name and she said “what is your best guess?” For some reason even though the odds were against it, because of its unusually high rate and frequency, I thought Mary, and she said that was correct! She said she had some cracking dreams. The Periodic Table arrived in a dream. She said if I wanted I could be anyone, on an experiential level while the dream lasted. She was trying to entice me down there to help her with the smooth running of dreams.

I told her I wished for my dreams to contain something be it science or magic. I was reading a book about a character who had a glittering and even insane CV. At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone 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, had his name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew. It sounded fantastical to me, like the author was trying to build a genius, a time-soldier, a meta-Finch, but that was what I was reading and I wondered if that was why I had the dream of science and maths, when we plummeted, or if I am getting confused and in fact the character is not someone I am reading of but that that was the content of my scientific dream… I also wondered if, knowing what I was exploring intellectually, Mary chose a dream of similar things to entice me. Now all the lights were on in The Dream Film Store.

“Franco,” she said “you are a Deus of Chaos and I want to suck your cock. May I please?”

I said by all means, starting to think, and got it out for her. She wrapped her lips around my bell end and cradled my balls and made sumptuous sounds, the sounds of sumptuous consummation. With something like that in your mouth, be it a gun or a penis, you can only make vowel sounds. One thing led to another and before I came, Mary and I undressed and made love. In the Dream Film Store. At the bottom of the sea. Where dreams are stored on disk. With all the lights on as I say.

VI

I woke in my flat after sex. Things were intriguing but confused. I didn’t think they would ever be sorted out. I had penetrated a surrealistic fantasy world. I guess sometimes you need a green parrot sent to space through the conch and at others a patch of taut blue denim for realism, thus to calibrate a scale between fantasy and realism… as a private school boy I excelled at matters of creative writing… they were my victories. What was bugging me now was the character I read of or maybe dreamed of or maybe dreamed I read of and all the wonderful things he does. I looked about the flat. It would have to be a book. That’s why I didn’t buy them, all those wonderful things he does.

At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone 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, had his name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew.

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. I had definitely woken in the morning, left the flat, gone to Gabriel’s, passed out, left Gabriel’s… but what else? I had come to the cemetery. The gravestone of Mary Calliope was next to me, grey as grey matter. It suddenly struck me that to complete a scene I had to understand that Mary Calliope was the name of the woman in the Dream Film Store. I had a look to see if I had any weed still and I had. When next I saw the woman, in the undersea, I would ask if I knew her name correctly. But now I was in the cemetery. Things were unstable.

I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto. I had a taste for waste, for deep fried Mars bars. But all the old props were falling away, if culture is a set of props, I mean… they were falling away. There was nothing underneath, like in the Radiohead song at the same time, which meant an inescapable postmodern nightmare where there was nothing but props. As you know I never finished my English course but I did come round to thinking postmodernism is not a massive, extended metaphor for the effects of cannabis on the brain. I suddenly felt sick with what I was doing and went back to bed and drifted in and out of consciousness. That was when I sank down to the Dream Film Store again as if for the last time…

“Franco,” she said, and I, “are you the woman from the grave stone?”

She said yes, and that we were lovers in a past life.

I believed her.

She also said “you were in Lower Sixth when you took an acid trip too strong for anyone and never came back. You came back home, even though you had never come back from the trip, and started a grimy, dirge-like novel called The Dream Film Store inspired by The Beach by Alex Garland, also Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It was the year 2000, by the time you actually sat down to write it, and you wrote it well, all in a single, black, leather-bound notebook, which you kept in your green tuck box from boarding school, from which you had been expelled for substances. Your main character was based on Rimbaud.”

“Hang on,” I said, “am I not the main character myself?”

“Yes you are,” she said.

“Are you telling me I am but a character in my own fiction?”

“I am telling you you are dreaming as we speak, and that when you dream there are no rules, there is no logic. It’s like when you write about drugs – it’s a poor thing to write of because anything can happen.”

“What happens for the rest of the novel?” I asked.

She said “you only wrote about 20 pages then had to abandon it and now it is 26 years later and you’ve rediscovered it and are trying to extend it.”

“How am I getting on?”

“You’ll end up in mental hospital if you keep going like you are. You’ll hear the dawn chorus at midnight.”

“I don’t want to have these dreams anymore,” I said, and she “I will let you slip back to the surface then… but don’t come blaming me when you smoke too much weed another time.”

II

Where was I? Not the cemetery but my flat. I skinned a bifter for the journey, and then head out for the park. Things were confused and confusing still, but I could put it down to dreams. They were a license for ill-planning and impoverishment of the imagination. I was afternoon and I made it to the park where there was a band stand, a bench to sit on, a paddling pool for little children, a playground, a tennis court and acres of room for strangers to play football against each other – for all who said there was no community in the city?

There was an ice-cream van. Back in the days of Open Poem Opium we had a song called ‘Ice Cream Van’ about an ice cream van that also had drugs and guns on the reverse side of his menu. We tried to get the musical jingle of the ice cream van in the sound and made it heavy, dissonant, distorted. We believed distortion = clarity. We were into cleansing by chaos.

I went and got myself an ice-cream and sat down on the bench. I watched the parade of people, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families, football playing youths, young lovers strolling and felt bemused by it all. Then guess what happened next? I saw Mary Calliope! In the queue for the ice-cream van. I wasn’t sure whether or not to go up to her and say hi. So I pretended I hadn’t seen her but it was definitely her. I finished my ice cream and sat there watching. She moved further off with her ice cream, I believe pistachio flavour by the looks of it. Mine, b/t/w/ was salted caramel. It was good. It gave you brain—freeze but was good. I skinned a rollie and flicked ash on the ground, witnessed a red kite, with a fifty-butterflied tale, flitting in the high wind of karma, saw a kid lose his ice cream to gravity and the family dog lick it up, had a rush of nicotine clarity to the head, felt like I was passing through a colour while being colour-blind, maybe it was blue, maybe green, forgot for a while what colour white is, what is a while, if this is where the truth flies or the truth fairy, forgetting also how to spell “is” then suddenly, all of a sudden, awoke again in the cemetery, on the bench, same day as before!

Hello, my name is John F B Tucker and I was the witness when I was wee. I decided to get some sleep and wade out to get my books, but the sea came crashing to the shore instead.

THE ‘DAY IN THE LIFE’ PARAGRAPHS

Music is transport, offers a portal to a long distant time, triggers memories. My mum cleans her room to the sound of the Kinks on her Smart-speaker, and I think of when dad took us to Portugal and Majorca too, got us listening to the Kinks in the car… appropriately enough the song on now is ‘Death of a Clown.’ What happened to days like those, playing in the pool in the villa with James, Bob and Hannah? As long as we had a football it was enough. Did we not invent a game in the pool too, to do with a ball? Then in the evenings, eating out. Dad always used to say when he still had money things were alright, and not just money but energy too – his Hep C depleted his energy after a while. He had had it from before Hep C was even discovered and was too far gone by the time they found it. We noticed it is the liver not the heart that controls emotional balance, cleansing and purging the blood of noxious toxins of deleterious self-derision.

Now there is a lull between songs, and I am glad for it too. Mum calls me upstairs to admire her newly cleaned room… “it’s good enough to show people round,” I say. Then she – she gets me to take all her bags of rubbish down stairs. Now the music has gone up again. It’s ‘Sunny Afternoon,’ by the Kinks. Everything is making me want to drink a beer, the solitary, singular beer from the book Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I wash down my meds with unsweetened tea, then have a bottle of lager with lime top, then talk to mum some more. She says The Kinks are bringing back memories of dad for her, and I said “same.” Now I am on my second beer, thinking of him, how he continued drinking only for a little bit, when he found out about his Hep C. Hep C was not born of The Lords And The New Creatures – that binary-machine – coming true.

My bro doesn’t mind this meanwhile… we did away with the government book partly because it left no room for further writing, and still it’s okay to get the same information across in a different way. The second lager is delicious. I go upstairs and help mum measure the floor for a new piece of carpet in her newly miraculously cleaned room, and have to go rooting through several dead pens before I can find one with enough ink to write down the dimensions. There are two beers left in what was a four pack in the fridge. Dad would warn that I have alcoholism in my genes – “you may have the toxic gene inherited from your mum,” he would say. If ever there was a weakness in my character it would be mum’s fault. “You’re temperamentally just like your mum,” he would say.

The voices don’t care what I do as long as I don’t redo the one with the government that I retracted from publication. They think the government are stopping me from “breaking through.” The government would say the only good bits are the bits from the boyhood book and the bit about <BEE>. Now it’s “thank you for the days,” blurting out of the Smart-speaker upstairs. My kids would look back on alternative rock bands like Nirvana, Radiohead, Bush, Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins, and also on the Britpop bands. like I look back on mum’s music, if I had any, which I won’t.

It’s not just her bedroom mum does but starts with mine as well, leaving me to finish the job, while Leonard Cohen’s “music to slit your wrists to” is on Spotify on the Smart-speaker. She and James have left it so that I wouldn’t need to redo my wee one like I did in the government book. So they have got me to satisfy that requirement within. There is I think a general breathing hole created by the renunciation of the government book. I go by trusting others sometimes, knowing my own judgement is faulty, out here at reality’s starry faultline, where I pretend it’s a place in the Doors film, in Doors film weather, when sentiment spills like water colour paints, as you drink on your own under the summer night.

There is an abeyance between songs upstairs… I am waiting for the music to cease. Us Millennials who watched September 11th in the year we left school, or thereabouts, often pondered long and hard on how melody had become embarrassing, singing in tune a sin. Sometimes it is too emotional, music, to bear, like when the Irish cry into their pints at the end of the night, after flocks of notes have migrated. I’ve said it before but music is penetration of the isness of reality. Meaning in it is solipsistic, faces in the fire, creatures in the cloud-change. My bro Dr. Bob says guitar music is old hat, and I should do something contemporary. My dad was always trying to steer me clear of music, saying I lacked talent, that it was fair enough if you are intrinsically musical but I was not… for me, he said, it was just a vapid fashion statement suitable only for the rebellion of youth. He said the business of guitar music was over in the 1970’s, also that musicians used to be two a penny and poor, not seek wealth or fame at all, and that society might come full circle back round to the way it was then, which was more attractive.

Putting on CD’s has turned into operating a Smart-speaker through your phone. The album is dead and sorely missed. People used to really bond over the album. But they say vinyl is coming back, and that’s good because the known bonfire of static and crackle and hiss makes Piper At The Gates of Dawn better on vinyl than it was on CD. Now there’s some spoken word piece going on upstairs. It is past 11 PM, and I am glad my room is tidy, my bed made. If there is another beer left, which there is, I will have it. I like to have my lager with a dash of lime juice.

Now it’s “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, up loud and blaring all round the house at nearly midnight. I’m so glad when the song is over, but then there’s an annoying advert that is even worse. Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river, as sang Leonard Cohen. I’ve had four beers and am feeling fine.

Mum calls me up to the attic to help her look for a booster for a baby to sit on, on the chair. I am not sure what they are called, maybe “toddler boosters,” but we can’t find one, and she needs three, so I buy three on Amazon, as we approach midnight on another diamond day. Alcohol is a good friend and a bad enemy, and my mother who is a recovering alcoholic knows this… there might be something untoward that has tipped her into having a drink again, which might be something really trivial, trivial as hearing her house is too messy.

Whilst I was tidying up my room I found two unopened cans of Fosters left over from my birthday in April and put them in the fridge but now elect to have tea instead. It is just past midnight; and the music has died down; and my youth has flown; and my five collections – of which I hope there may one day be more - are on sale online in paperback and e-book, or free to read on my Blogspot page.

LOOKING BACK OVER MY SHOULDER

The <BEE> one will always be the best one I’ve done. Even though my lyrics are meant for wiping up semen. But the wee one from when I was seven is still good. I might, almost like advertising, run you through some of the best bits of the seven year old work:

The text begins with a book called

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and then continues with a book called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Some choice excerpts might run as follows.

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.

MR. BEAN

In the end, I think of Mr. Bean: that solitary wanderer of small catastrophes, moving through the world with a child’s logic and an adult’s bewilderment. He never speaks his way out of trouble; he simply is, stubbornly, absurdly, magnificently himself. And perhaps that is the final lesson worth keeping— that a life need not be grand to be luminous, nor coherent to be true. Even a man bumbling through the ordinary can leave behind a strange, unforgettable brightness.