WOOL

APOLOGIA

I heard somewhere in the voices I suffer that despite my going through the channels of self-publishing and vanity-press-publishing, the only poems I wrote that will still count when all is said and done are the ones individually published in a reputable monthly, online, literary webzine called Snakeskin because they got past the discerning, critical hat of an editor. My mother hates them, thinks them horrible; my sister hates them, thinks they monopolise indigenous wisdom in regimented metres; and still I augment my pile of quiet triumphs from time to time, sending them off to the editor, even if I am on the wrong track. When I consider making the poems into a book, I forget that one should never trust the judgement of someone whom you have never met, selecting the poems for you. Not only that but I quite disagree with the Snakeskin policy of poems not retaining a meaning from the reader. I believe the poet should delight in a wilful opacity, obscurity, purity, bats, black magnets, encryption, firking and code, and yet the publisher disagrees so if I wish to be published at all, I must forget about those Joycean principles.

I think the Snakeskin poems are alright (or some of them are) but to think that it will be all that remains of my writing fills me with horror. The poems are old-fashioned because Snakeskin is a wilfully old-fashioned webzine. The Snakeskin mandate is to provide a digital portal for thought-provoking poetry every month and that seems noble; but they don’t like anything postmodern or avant-garde and to think I will be remembered for these poems alone doesn’t sit well with me. Most of the time I ignore the Snakeskin file but sometimes helplessly self-propagate and send some poems off to the Snakeskin editor, who judging by e-mails seems a reasonable man. Snakeskin are a bunch of retired English teachers and I am still young, not quite as young as when I first sent them one, but young enough to feel out of place. I get that the people involved are old and past it, have had their careers, their successes and failures. I don’t really want to present the Snakeskin poems, for they are dull, dull poems, but to be fair I have to remember when I first had a poem about my numinous, purple-bleeding screen published by them I was overjoyed. Then another success – a three-line poem from when I was seven years old and involved in an experiment into the maths of the new colour was published in a special edition on mathematics.

Then there was a lapse, an abeyance, and then during Covid-19 I started sending them poems again. Someone I had never met, only met online, recommended that I did and I trusted them. I found myself writing especially for the job, employing rhyme a lot as Snakeskin like rhyme, as people in general do, but also freeverse sometimes. The editor whom I have never met helps me overcome problems of quality-control and lack of objective editorial overview; but to only keep poems selected by someone you’ve never met would seem mad. What I was going through when I wrote the poems was difficult too: I learned that I was cursed by a maniacal hypnotist before I could even finish my degree and begin in life, and that he hid it, disguised it saying he was healing my intelligence, put me in a trance, even lead me to believe he was using his magic to set me up for a good time, just prior to my becoming acutely mentally ill back at University. Actually as it happens my mental illness may have pre-existed the curse (which is why I bought into the idea that my intelligence would be healed); but being cursed never helps anyone or anything. What the stranger with the curse did to me was absolutely hideous and by now I don’t want it documented, but it is, in little ways, already documented and online in the poems, and then you get that you can’t really change that now, nor control which poems are viable.

I would be surprised if you can get through them, dear, gentle reader, or at least without feeling sick. I do have other poems: the one about the purple-bleeding screen belongs in a different batch, and the seven year old maths one a different batch again – and I also write songs with a guitar, which some prefer to my awful poetry. I say it’s awful but it’s published and that means someone must like it. I remain grateful to Snakeskin for being the only people I have found who will publish me for free. Still, to give you an example of the problems I am faced with take the following instance: a snippet of my teenage poetry goes as follows:

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.)

I wrote that in a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer’ as a 16 or 17 year old and I like it still because it has something behind the words: it is about the bet: the bet that the next guy to attain the face of stars will still write the line “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain,” like I did back when I attained the face (before the snippet I showed you). Snakeskin would prefer the line itself, even if it is an old saying, to the encrypted version, and I prefer the encrypted version in just about every instance of truth under the sun. I actually have quite a few “snippets” just like the above which I have superimposed on photos to make templates in a neo-Blakeian way on my blog, on Facebook and on Write Out Loud but it doesn’t qualify as a success. The point remains that in the Snakeskin poems, I more or less eat all the food in the house just because it is in keeping with the demands and desires of a publication.

When I originally used the line about the ocean’s smile it was in song and seemed like natural ability, my true self and voice, when I wrote it, and that on reflection is where the line should stay – but these Snakeskin poems – for some reason I try and lend them power - which means I monopolise indigenous wisdom in regimented metres for the sake of gaining favour with a publication. This I don’t like, and to be fair my world is peppered by voices telling me what to do at an alarming rate and frequency now, but it’s no excuse. Maybe as the guy that attained the face of stars I won the line in a bet and have a right to use it, but I prefer the mysticism-tinged version, which I duly provided after I wrote the initial song, and yet Snakeskin don’t go in for anything like that. They don’t approve of a poem retaining a meaning from the reader as I have said.

If Snakeskin have a point in that stance (I tell myself) it is like Wittgenstein says: a lot of pain is caused by misunderstanding. Actually Wittgenstein, who is possibly my favourite philosopher, says a lot of the problems in philosophy are caused by our not understanding the logic of language – but the point stretches out to include suffering in life created by communication breakdown. So maybe there is some merit in making a poem self-evident, focussed, clear.

Anyhow I have likely said enough, and offended everyone, though I was just a young poet trying to realise his dream. Once, I was deemed one of the most promising talents in the country. Before Mssrs Drugs Curse Madness Suicide took control I won a place to read Creative Writing on the most prestigious and over-subscribed course in the nation at the time. My promise has not been fulfilled, and I fear that being so easily hoodwinked, tricked, trapped by the stranger that cursed me, my potential for genius will be ignored and overlooked and I will go down as the fool. 

THE LOCAL TRAIN LINE

You can go backwards to Christmas on a train

and often I would, and sometimes doze.

Squirrels can fly if perceived in the caravan

of trees sailing past through railway train windows -

windows that taste like an old copper coin.

I remember taking the train on schooldays

from the local village’s request stop station

to the industrial town they call Barrow-in-Furness,

round the estuary which Norman Nicholson

mapped in a poetry that remains matchless.

So many birds can be observed when on

that journey, already feeling semi-famous.

The gentle arrhythmia cajoles you into a lull,

the sound of the wreckety wreckety wreck.

When you get on it’s empty, but it is full

at the end of the journey like a swollen beck.

I would already smoke pollen at school.

At the end of the schoolday I would travel back.

Now as I write I hear the train toot its horn.

I won’t get on it anymore, not since COVID,

and since becoming so paranoid within

that I prefer to not venture all the way outside,

into the town, that is. So here I remain,

survivor of a pathetic attempt at suicide.

Tiny engines may rev up on pellucid glass,

augmenting the sense of cosiness you feel,

when heading for school, for an A-level class

about the meaning of Caliban and Ariel.

The Sixth Form girls would giggle at me as

I sat there reading a book of Robert Lowell.

Going to the private school meant I never

cheered up and joined in with the human race.

If there is a difference between being clever

and having what they call moral compass,

we should all sit together, and endeavour

to unite while keeping intact our difference.

The telegraph poles went flowing past.

Counting them I never picked a favourite.

I’d hope for the flow of the day to go fast.

If the weather was rubbish I’d get used to it.

Achieving my dream of being the best essayist

was easier when I put my sober mind to it.

A boy I was, mewling and puking to school,

feigning High Indifference when there.

Back then the currency was in being cool.

Exciting was the license to scent the air.

The music I collected was the sacred pool.

I was in love with a girl with brown hair.

Sometimes we’d bunk off and go walking

in a kind of pantheistic or animistic trance,

or sleep in caves; or stay up talking -

but never once did she see me dance!

To Amsterdam and Paris we went gallivanting -

to see the museums – to not waste the chance.

At the end of school I went down south

and broke off the relationship in doing so,

started to let ecstasy pills into my mouth,

worked some boring jobs and went with the flow.

The train was a gullet, gulping back and forth.

Sometimes we’d travel under a rainbow.

TO REDEEM A DREAM OF FREEDOM

Once again it falls on me to be the one to say

that biding my time from here to eternity

to see if the lawn has sprung a flower

watch out for the Honda lawnmower:

for I mow the grass where the Plough aligns.

I try to keep to neat, symmetrical lines.

When the first, fresh, redolent, enervating

scent of change begins its fermenting

on the ego-loss breeze it is my duty

to the Natural World and all her beauty

to mow the grass – a foot high with neglect,

it was today, but owing to my respect

it’s been cut down, mowed over. Well,

I love the smell of petrol more than the smell

of a fresh Christmas tree, and to do

something with my life is also new

reward in itself. It’s not like I get paid -

but it redeems a dream of freedom in my head.

Now when my mother looks out the glass,

she doesn’t have to look at foot-high grass,

but sees her plants in all their little pots,

their little de-institutionalisations and bets,

and the dog rolls around like he’s found

Paradise down there on the ground.

0

RANDOM ACCESS CO-IMAGINATION

Simon says The River Goyt

might become the Styx in Heaven.

Will says something about who you

think of touching yourself in the shower.

I say maybe all I need is a length,

need is a length of metal chain.

Dave says it’s rude to repeat

the shift of feet down the corridor.

Raymond says let’s have one more

crumble from your dad’s pollen.

Jesus sits at the right hand

of the Lord God our Father.

Paul asks wear an emotional

condom before you f**k my mind, man.

Mother says imagination is a

muscle and language a creature.

Hal says I know you spoke

against September 11th in 2000.

Mark knows that I said a clock

is only as fast as a cheetah.

Andy says “I know the chords

to this tune by Bob Dylan.”

Dad said Dylan was religion,

to listen to on Sunday when younger.

Mandy says the main attraction

of drug-taking is the connections

you make with other people -

but I for one will just have butter.

Bex says I'm right it's impossible

to remember a new yellow line.

Mother says I must remember

when I go out to shut the door.

Dexter says I was right that

my dad used to smuggle pollen

and that the art smuggling story

was just an elaborate cover.

Mark says something like there

is no virtue beyond fashion -

or was it no vice I cannot

quite remember anymore.

THE MYSTIC VISIONARY

(For Robert)

The bond between a mother and her son

should be one of unconditional love,

not limited by language barriers,

different appellations for the light.

Under the moon, I love my mother

as I loved my father too, whom

it would seem would deem it jolly good,

the food we ate in Italy recently.

Orange is the sun when it sets there too and

then in the clouds Heaven’s bars

sell upturned jars of sunset, making

you claim that even plastic can grow.

The colour of a red toy car with my

fingerprints on it could then seem to be “detuned”

like a guitar string, and counting numbers

seem steps down into the earth...

I love the bones my mother grew

inside her warm womb long ago now,

before the trauma of birth separated us,

and I face the music, dreaming big.

Wow! I can’t believe the things I’ve

touched with my own fingers but my

fingers have crashed, I type, and my

mad, crashed fingers have connected.

SQUALIA

These are excellent: Squalia, (as opposed to Qualia),

they could seem the status life details of a katabatic

descent towards Rock Bottom: a bed in a shed;

taking notes on receipts, Rizla papers, train tickets,

the backs of packets; wearing naff tracky bottoms

lifted from ASDA and splattered with white

emulsion paint from doing up the band’s house

like a badge of honour; eating discarded Danish pastries

from the Co-op supermarket bin at the fringes of

society. Still, Squalia could also be revamped with intensity.

For example, what is the street-name for Ecstasy

when the band detune the guitars all the way down?

F sharp minor is the answer and the name of a number

by the band. It being recorded on state-of-the-art,

binaural earphones, earphones I tell you, with

tiny mics implanted inside, on that very weird album on

which I said I would plug my senses in the mains,

may be the reason I now hear soooo many voices.

They may be Squalia re-defined as squatters,

people who pay no rent or electricity as I didn’t

back in the days of said band. I was kicked out

of the band for weird behaviour; for instance I came

home from the pub, intoxicated on a cocktail

of noxious toxins of deleterious self-derision and

launched into a speech in an imaginary language

no-one could understand, keeping it up for half

an hour, ad-libbing it, impromptu while rolling

around like in a neo-shamanic ritual on the ground.

Just when they thought they had lost me forever,

I went and had sex with the shed’s cold, concrete floor

on Ecstasy, and it wasn’t long before I was booted

out of my own band. The Flood we were called

and were a Cambridge-based jam band who only

recorded on binaural earphones. By the time

I got home to the north I was angry and walked

up the fell, ranting in the cassette tape wind. I

did not know who had phoned my mum, concerned,

and had her collect me. I still don’t, but no longer

care, for all I embarked on a program of meditation,

detox, dreamwork, reading and exercise, and

despite a mental illness kicking in, still got

a good degree as if I had wilfully walked away

from music to pursue poetry and become a graduate. -

I conceived of Lancaster University as a type of word-guitar

made by Fender whereupon the voices came to me.

They said among many other things that I should

“lose the book or the guitar” which is a very difficult

decision to make and one I still have not made absolutely.

WHEN F LEFT THE ALPHABET

“When F left the alphabet albeit temporarily

I got the results of my test, proving

I’m autistic, an high-functioning autist.

My brother then set up a recording studio

in the posh, coffee-cake dining room, whose

digital buttons and layers and codes even

entered my dreams at night after a while.

I recorded many numbers old and new...

when Baxter the dog walks on the laptop

funny things come out, like the names

of electronica numbers; and the sound

of typing can be used as percussion in

non-metred Sound Art, I also found.

There was even brief relief from voices,

‘onjects,’ quavers, syllabubbles, sonic

machinations at the periphery of sound,

while I faced the music, while I recorded.

Still, I came back to the silence of the

blank page where I might hang life like a coat

in a primary school cloak room, just because.

I wanted to say any word can be spelled in

any way, any guitar solo played any way,

that all discipline boundaries have dissolved,

all the subjects become one thing, life,

whereupon one might turn to philosophy…

but now everything has returned to normal and

I am glad for while F had left the alphabet

there was no longer any word for Freedom.

So to try and write in wrinkled and crinkly

Christmas wrapping paper becomes a good

game all over again, and food for thought

a priority, and the translation of feelings.”

HALF OF IT

A river running through variegated ages of rock

seems to contain many ages at once

like the books groaning on the shelf.

A rock star meanwhile can change costume

many times during an exciting performance

and still somehow resound as himself.

It isn’t the river or the rock star, changing

gear, that so amazes the soul, though,

but something more globular and holistic.

The Rolling Stones became The Strolling Bones;

and then the art teacher said to put more

pink in the shadow to make it more realistic.

MY BROTHER’S POEM

I didn’t help invent the net at seven,

try the maths for the new colour as a skin cell,

separate the pollen from its very name;

didn’t deal with Jim Morrison twice as well.

I didn’t attain the face of stars,

forewarn people of September 11^th

in 2000, prophesy the Plough’s

alignment, the God Particle from looking

at dust in a late ray of light angling

in nor get my future tutor-to-be’s

scientific paper just right as an

ideal for a book I might myself write

before I had even gone and met him.

I didn’t pen the highest-marked A-

level examination essay in the nation.

I didn’t have many arcane musical

experiments on the go all at the same time:

the effervescent mobile, the healing

of the tape that was cut and stuck together

in the flimsy reel, the recording

on binaural earphones, the tattooing

of Piper At The Gates of Dawn. I didn’t

host the alignment of The Plough and

the oldest fell Black Combe upon

Mr. Obama’s democratic election.

I didn’t attest to large-scale skywriting,

find the pint glass exploding from

thin air in the capital to be but a piece

of pollen in the general pollen count.

I didn’t build the Tower, work at a

numinous, purple-bleeding screen.

I didn’t, upon the loss of my father,

make the discovery of a sheet of

paper that bloomed or even grew

pictures probably depicting the lyric of a song

I wrote with my own doing hand.

I didn’t falsify the Nirvana barcode, then;

didn’t do whatever it took to attain

visual radio, broadcasting dreams,

dreams that billow like a weeping

willow in the wind, and swirl in purple,

digital swathes about the head

of the deranged seer; and come down.

I don’t think the “gestation chamber”

T. S. Eliot writes of in which the poem’s

“dark embryo” grows has now become

an inbox to empty in the Digital Age.

I don’t find it hard to have my story known.

I don’t hope that through some kind of

irony, some kind of ironic self-

distance, I’ve finally cracked it.

TO THE BROS IN THE DEN IN THE WOODS

I imagine now telling the bros in the den

in the woods my theory about the chain

of dark or even anti-evolution, that says

James Joyce, who also saw new creatures,

writing Ulysses is the reason why Ted

saw a monster in the river in childhood

who in turn wrote The Hawk In The Rain

which is then the reason Jim Morrison

saw winged serpents in the desert on acid,

whom we know is never quite flaccid,

and his writing The Lords And The New

Creatures is then why I saw not one but two

which I shall not delve into quite yet

but which I shall never again clean forget -

the bros in the den in the woods might well

fall in with my scoffed at, empurpled Hell -

and with freed minds start to write poetry

to read out under the fallen down tree

in amidst the empty beer cans and ends

of cigarettes dumped there by their friends -

but what their fair maiden female companion

would make of the chain of dark evolution

could be that it's a bundle of fairy tales

unlike the crawling of actual snails

whereas I know the whole thing to be real -

and if I could but show you how I feel -

would have you convinced that I'm right

but not well in the head, at least not quite -

which leaves me standing like a tall tree

in the wood where we used to read our poetry

which did, back when we were young,

and getting a foot on the ladder's first rung.

DEFACED

It’s actually a rather saddening story for now

I’d be in and out of hospital for the rest of my days,

still my father thought it hilarious, how,

when I was first hospitalised I ran away,

on my first escorted walk in the grounds,

through a field and across a busy motorway

and up a serpentine trainline to the station

from which I made it to Scotland by train,

thinking there’d be a different jurisdiction -

but oh how my athletic efforts were in vain!

The cops found me wandering that other nation

and took me south of the border again!

I’d been put under a curse unbeknownst to me...

forced to abide by the stringent rules,

I sat back in hospital writing poetry

in a waiter’s pad, inventing brave new schools,

smoking on the banks of the Styx of sweet tea,

calling the conspiracy of doctors fools!

I scored a question mark on the musical scales

in my writing, in that place so clean,

such a sterile-surfaced Hell, run by females,

while Rachel’s party far away on the green

summit of Parliament Hill went down with pale ales

and left me to dream of the space in-between.

I’ve got a degree since then. My feeling is

that the ill are capable of increased lucidity

but I rue the new remit: not to dream with open eyes,

nor await the future with rapt uncertainty,

not to plug my senses in the mains, but de-stigmatise

mental illness. It doesn’t come naturally.

TEACHING MY SISTER THE SILENT ALPHABET

In bed, at night, have you ever reached the point

where word and muscle meet – where you

attempt to think in words without moving

a muscle in your mouth and stumble

upon the secret, white, silent alphabet?

There are certain letters, certain sounds

you simply cannot think without

a twitch from your mouth muscles -

so you play dead. You lie there and

try and underwrite the thoughts…

some graphemes, phonemes, plosives

and fricatives are possible in silent,

white and secret thought alone but

no utterance seems completely pronounced.

The silent alphabet thus has several letters

missing; and by dawn you might still

be lying there, awake, trying and trying

to think the word “whisky” without

a movement of the tongue. It can

be done but is found further in

the mind, where hands can not go.

That’s why seeing in the dark is so tough.

THE LADDER TO THE HAYLOFT

That a clock is only as fast as a cheetah,

running round and round on the stones

seems to be a young kid’s scientific finding.

That a clock is only as fast as a wounded

cheetah, struggling with fifteen balls in

the air, seems more artistic, subjective too.

That oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill

themselves with rain could be hypertext,

hypertext of Verlaine’s famous credo.

That I. T. may stand for Instant Travel too

could be nothing but a bone-idle pipe dream,

dreamed up on pot at a computer screen.

That Lucy in the soul with demons may

be an actual substance is almost chemistry,

almost musicology; and then I’m gone.

That Portability is the Apotheosis of Form

could be nothing but the modern narrative,

and apply across the board when you’re away.

That if flower-press ending on cannabis

could = a dialysis a love poem hoping

to impress poor Flora could = more a motor

seems to be an aesthetic anti-system

and satisfies the desire for something

like the colours of the vowels in English.

That the effect of acid and the effect of acid-rain

on an imaginary species should = the same,

nothing, is not necessarily true if there

can be no more proof of something being

real than saying it was imagined, which

seems both Blake-like and Cartesian too.

That the effect of global warming on the

unicorn is a postmodern id is eco-poetic,

eco-poetry being all about an awareness.

That it’s impossible to remember a new

yellow line, under the madding sun, could

be the Light-speed Law of Neuroplasticity.

That love is the hope the heart literally

needs in order for it to survive without

which it can stop is a stance before life.

That Duff is H suspended in deafness

could be history as much as anything else,

even ‘horse’ or ‘how about the housework?’

That Dog = pi times MC squared could be

the equation for a power-cut at the foot of

Black Combe, three miles from Millom, or

like plugging the senses in the mains; and

that O is the key of the babbling unicorn

is more musical Nature poetry again. Lastly,

that fire’s effect on fire could = nothing

minus nothing could be nothing but mere

speculation and conjecture; or even Nirvana.

Then the Problem 1 in that Popperian,

epistemological sense is how to get down

again, safely, before the wind topples you over.

And so I have invented Backward Liquid

Maths, for my brother and I to share,

and I hope for each a peach in the wheel.

LOOKING CLEARLY AT MY SADNESS

It goes much faster does a dying animal;

which only reminds me grief does not account

for the kitchen clock’s tick tock panning, bilateral

and moving through the room with no scent

like a Disney animation clock. And so I see

my sadness clearly and sing my heart’s song.

We remediate the immediate predicament with tea.

We dream of a kingdom where nothing’s wrong.

A crow is squawking on a tree in the garden.

Crows, dogs, horses, trees, these are our friends.

To Nature I turn for solace, her truant compensation

while a lonely winter’s new fag-end burns.

Grey like a pencil is the new day dawning

here at the foot of the Lakeland’s oldest fell,

grey like a rabbit, full of puddles blinking,

templates in The Periodic Table starting to swell…

day is an abeyance that dissimulates the vacancy

of fish-eyes sipped on. Monastic mist

flies across the fell. Everything is so watery.

You have to live here and now, not in the past.

I dreamed that we went swimming in eyewash.

Then I ate a breakfast of every snooker ball colour.

To trollop I turned, then to niceness, then balderdash.

As for the poet’s role, nothing could be duller.

A FACT ON TIME

I know a fact on Time,

but not if it will last:

if we could build a time machine

that equalled light speed,

we could only go back

to resolve the past,

not into the future,

for that has not yet happened.

That was where I was at

back when I was ten.

The science man came

to talk to us at school.

Though I was a poet,

was a poet even then,

I liked the science man,

I thought that he was cool.

From dinosaurs to lightspeed

he showed us the way,

from fossils to the future,

we were instructed,

and everyone paid

special attention that day,

that day that is a fossil

where our futures were constructed.

THE EMOTIONAL CONDOM OF THE WORLD

I heard we grew our great brains by eating meat

and, needing to spread information about it,

about farming, hunting, killing, eating things

developed words for birds that sing with their wings...

now, the pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, translated

into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is diluted.

Language is the emotional condom of the world,

into which we are all so traumatically hurled.

One day we may learn to eat language, but for now

I’ll settle for the rump of the local farmer’s cow.

CONFESSIONAL POEM

I still think of you, all these years on,

from all those years we had. You

used to make us sleep with the light

on and I still do – for it feels like

switching that switch will flush

the past down the drain. That’s where

years of writing went when at the end

of our time together, you said “I don’t

want to be in it.” So I could only bin it.

All those times we went off exploring

just “to look at trees,” as you put it -

on the premise that “there should

still be room for Nature in the Future...”

I remember that I did document a

lot of it - but it’s gone. There were

inward journeys too, like a poem is the

opposite of a bus ticket - and I remember

when we drove into the Lakes from

some other place and I wrote down

every sign along the way for a poem -

how semantics is a road sign not a place!

Well, that too is gone – all the love

poems gone - and there were, well, poems

born of recreational drug use for

the sake of literary experiment, and it’s

all gone - under Gondwanaland like

the pollen, under the green hill like

the ecstasy pill. For it was all for you,

and you are no longer in my new life.

There was even one about the neo-London

skyline as a part of the Tube service,

but I was with you when I wrote it

so it too is gone. Even the dreamwork

diary I kept won’t work with you gone.

At least some of the melodies remain;

but I’m too old to make it as a pop star,

prance round in a vapid pose suitable

for the rebellion of youth – no, it is

as a poet that I wish to leave my sting.

It seems unfair that I was faithful, and

it’s all my work that’s now destroyed, but

I suppose it could be worse: I could have

grown homosexual through the onslaught.

Maybe I did and just don’t know it yet.

LONDON FLASHBACK

London is a craven haven for corrupting taste.

Police motorbikes were being chased by the waste.

I spent a year down there after my degree -

even slept rough – but didn’t feel that free.

The riots were lootings: Christmas on earth

didn’t follow on in the town of my birth.

I busked for next to nothing, saw old friends

but abandoned ship – my each adventure tends

to me crawling home, puking, apologising profusely

to inward grace – senses broken loosely -

and now I sit sipping tea at the foot of the fell,

in a large country house not ready to sell.

There’s a beck in the back and we’re agreed

I am even allowed to write of it if I need -

no Poetry Police who have never read any

poetry will stop me, although not for a penny

I have worked for them… and I cast my mind back

to the daughters of London. The Plough and Black

Combe had aligned by the time I went down.

I lived in the East, it was like an undertown.

I drifted and loafed and smoked too much.

A Londoner by birth, I still am one as such -

but no longer hang with the cutting edge crowd -

I guess they wander lonely inside the cloud!

And no I didn’t pull when I was on holiday,

except a gay experience, though I walked away...

and soon had a dream bigger than a dream,

for which the gnomic nomenclature is “drum,”

characterised by cosmic freedom, bounding

in circles in space. Already daggers of lightning

in the storm were part of a God Simulation;

and I woke feeling cleansed, with re-aligned perception.

Still, back to the sticks, I came by rattling train

unsure if I will ever make it down there again.

A REALIST VISION OF WINTER

If winter has her compensations,

they might be found in the rosy cheek

of the woman waiting at the station’s

tentative platform in the week;

in a layer of frost crisp underfoot;

in the breath making tortuous, iron

statues in the emaciated light;

in the whole gulp of white sun

going blind behind a thorny tree,

splintering into a thousand shards

like a coruscation of divinity;

in staying in and playing cards

beside a roaring sitting room fire;

in chimney smoke against a canvas-sky;

in a little sprinkling of icing sugar

on the tops of fells as we drive by…

soup and hearty stews as well.

If Christmas has become a mad, red

rush of consumerism, such detail

cannot be bought, so I’m not sad -

sad to see the wintry trees all bare,

sad the days are dark and short.

There is no cause for dark despair

when winter’s visions can’t be bought.

A COOKED BREAKFAST MADE BY MY FATHER

Breakfast today was two fried eggs, sunny side up,

on toast left to cool slightly so the yellow butter

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

containing black coffee with a lump of brown sugar,

plus streaky bacon turned in the dark-blue AGA

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

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

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

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

I belched quite crudely then, which was my food

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

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

and, grateful for plenitude, felt somewhat satisfied,

and took my leisure to the beautiful world outside.

A CONTRAPTION MADE OF WORDS FOR MAKING YOUR OWN EMOTION IN LIFE

What I want could be a contraption

(made of words) for making

your own emotion in life. You do this.

You make your own emotion.

It could be pellucid as a glass phial,

or mystical as an inscape of wings.

I am not fussy, nor think this

reductive dichotomy too meaningful.

What I get instead of what I want,

yes, is to be the neo-Rimbaud

whom it would seem has now bought

and sold a share in silence, white.

The headspace I have been through

is the most interesting in terms

of timbre tenor tone texture tense

timing tensility tenderness since I’ve

dreamed of a forbidden fifth

brain wave category, off the map, knowing

brain waves are angels here and

there are said to be only four types.

At the top of a mountain in a dream

in Italy I saw the contraption around

which we had gathered collapse

and transmit its emotive impact.

I would say it was like a child bursting

into tears, when tears break forth from their

tiny, blue chains and shatter from

your eyes but it was happiness.

The sunset was putting its giant

spliff out in the sea in the background

as the poets stood atop the Italian mnt

regarding the collapse of the contraption.

It’s possible in dreams to make it across

the ocean using only a contraption

you dream up as you go along -

just jump off the cliff like a lemming.

SIX CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

1

When I was a kid and we had two houses,

one in London, one in the Lakes,

we were often found driving up or down

the motorway between them; and

I would be looking at the derelict barns

on the side of the motorway, in

fields, and imagining a nomadic

existence. It seemed to me that

a derelict barn would be enough.

2

On the motorway, I now recall,

I used to imagine snagging my foreskin

on the barbed wire fence as

we sped off at seventy miles an hour.

I guess it was like stretching honesty

to it elastic utmost and further,

pointing the moment to its crisis,

a mixture of cartoons and chewing gum.

3

The only time I ever questioned

my brother’s intelligence as a kid

was when grand-dad asked us

“how many beans make five?”

and my brother said “I don’t know.”

I wondered how he had escaped.

4

As a kid I used to picture

a bouncing ball in my head at night

which would only bounce when I said

stop, and only stop when I said

bounce, so only through inverse

logic could I control it. Every

night I would check it was there.

5

I remember also as a child, I used to

repeat the word ‘kangaroo’

over and again in my head

until it went numb, emptied

itself of meaning, hopped off

to become the mad, kangaroo king,

down at the bottom of my ex

English-teaching granny’s garden.

6

For some unknown reason, when

the school bus used to go past

a certain farm contiguous to

the school I used to sit there asking

myself if the farm had a secret

underground lab where unsound

experiments were conducted on animals.

I never got to find out before I left.

LINES IN THE LITTLE BEDROOM

Earth bounds in circles round the sun.

Breath goes in and out like a tide.

Death sells records to the young and impressionable.

Youth is wasted on the young they say.

Teeth are meant for chewing meat.

Truth probably hurts less than cliché now.

Birth hurts like trauma for all concerned.

Dearth means a scarcity or lack of something.

Darth as in Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father.

North is the rest of The Lakes, then Scotland.

Mirth is my feeling to be released.

Moth wears an off-white wedding dress.

Worth waits for ladies to cross the road.

Bath is not where Jim Morrison died.

Light changes the key in the bathroom.

Beth died in the bath, a true tragedy.

South is where I originate but not reside.

Mouth to mouth means resuscitation.

Math is American slang for mathematics.

Sloth is my frame as opposed to cowardice.

Broth is good to heat and eat in winter.

Wrath is another one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Path through the grass leads to the greenhouse.

Plath is a poetess of egoism therefore minor.

Plinth is a platform supporting a statue.

Month is a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Wraith is a flame-point demon, screaming, lithe.

Faith is the right to approval by the supernatural.

Froth is the river at the broken-green-beer-bottle-corners.

Fourth in the Premier League are Newcastle United.

Water should come free from the Tap.

Myth is made by any re-namer of reality.

With me is the opposite of without me.

Vermouth is generally drunk with gin.

Absinth makes the heart grow stronger, actually.

Cloth is laid down on the kitchen table.

Labyrinth, I think the inner ear is a labyrinth, yes.

“Mammoth” could describe the great, hulking universe.

Growth begins in Spring with gilly flowers.

Pith is the essence and gist of something.

Strength becomes less important when you’re wise.

Underneath the bridge the Pooh-sticks went.

Wordsmith after wordsmith walked on the wall.

They deem it I am the butt of the joke.

Wreath after wreath is a roundabout-picnic.

Both of our heads are left with tonsures.

Loath to control things, I just let go.

ON THE ROAD IN ENGLAND

Why is this lane stopping and starting?

Stopping and starting uses more fuel than

the blank amnesia of Nirvana, the extinction

of consciousness, and we are travelling south,

all that queue, all that congestion,

(you see I’m in the car), and

not a single person parking,

so we seem to work in shifts,

and the road opens up, clear

of other traffic, and the car

accelerates, and the wall

of Maya now falls down.

Imagine graffiti on the wall

of Maya (whom it seems is

Sanskrit for Goddess of Illusion.) -

I’ve heard of graffiti on the

keel of The Drunken Boat.

Also on the wall going round

the edge of the universe. But not

on the wall of Maya. I don’t know why

I bought my computer, unless to slink

off alone and have a private moment.

We are only going for five days.

The automated conveyor belt

of poesis still flows and

so it goes and so it grows.

THE MIDNIGHT RAINBOW

My father was not a retired assassin

which he kept secret from us, his own kin;

the Revolution never thrust a big mistake

on me in the wood for that would be sick;

I was not made to see things which

no-one should and Nature’s no bitch;

my lover never slept with my buddy Paul

which is not the sickest thing of all;

they never took the Towers down

because of the verse of Jim Morrison;

I never was placed under a curse

and nothing’s really mending worse;

the dog has not just weed in my bed

and I do not wish that I was dead;

in fact the midnight rainbow shines

and the toilet flushes with fine wines;

I definitely got to sleep with whom

I wanted back in the land of gloom;

my brain has not come under attack

from acid flashbacks trying to flashback;

I’d really mind if they emptied space

of the human form without a trace;

the disappointment which I feel

is not the appearance of an electric eel;

my best ideas were not all stolen;

the front for my art should never be pollen;

I do not hear the myriad of voices

cutting down on my existential choices;

it’s not the case that what can happen to you

may not just be naff but sick too;

desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies

I never had to loot wings from Hades;

so you see I may have it all wrong

and can’t commit to literal things in song;

the sound of sirens is not heard near,

even if only brought on by The Fear;

a love I’d need to blow all this away

never would tell me actually I’m gay:

how dare you treat a human being like this?

The midnight rainbow mixes blood and piss.

Through it we escape from chronic pain,

or not as the case may seem to be again.

BAT

A bat just appeared in the dining room

as I lay there one night thinking of you.

It flew around, encircling the gloom

and I asked my mother what to do.

She said to get the window open

but I remember Bob’s son’s Christening -

we couldn’t open the window then -

unscrew the bolt that needs unfastening.

So my mother got my other brother down,

told me that I was always bad news -

and my brother took up pliers, to get undone

the too-tightly fastened up screws.

The bat meanwhile flew around

and around, encircling the stale air,

frightening us down on the ground -

and the way it just happened to appear!

It could’ve got down the chimney I suppose,

but it’s not the only possibility.

Bats don’t spontaneously self-organise

like a Strange Attractor from Chaos Theory

but from where it came I do not know

and think of the woods where once I stood

being good and how plastic can grow,

and all that light, evening jazz from childhood…

my bro got the window open with pliers,

even though bats are not dangerous,

because as much as bats are not liars,

we still don’t want one living with us!

We propped the window ajar and I

took my laptop, Vape pen, earphones

and vacated the room, where I used to lie

dreaming of you, here at Cumpstones.

It’s still flying around in there, has not

found its way out of the window so

I’ll have to sleep in the attic, like a bat,

for there were many in the locked attic long ago…

I’d say if the house where the Plough aligns

is cursed then it affects everyone in turn,

but that would be boring, just lines

to elongate this little, midnight yarn.

When there were many in the locked attic,

they escaped through a tiny, little hole

when dad (who slept through radio static)

installed central heating, and even soul.

Now we must wait for this little bat

to be free too, to be out there in the Night,

and it might take a little while longer yet

because of course a bat is devoid of sight!

LIVING IN THE LAKES

Living in the Lakes I am often struck

by the sensation that life

is going on within the pages

of The Lords And The New Creatures.

It could be just a slant of light

that gives the game away,

the remnant evanescence behind the fell

when the sun has set and the fell darkened.

It’s either that or Nirvana

Unplugged In New York.

For that I think of rivers,

such as the River Esk to the north.

In the summertime, we like to go

outdoor swimming in the Esk.

Today the weather has cooled

so it is not a good time to go.

So I could speak of a “storied” world,

a mythographic universe intact,

an infradiegetic existence

saturated with inter-textuality,

or I could talk of sheep and cows,

the way the rain falls at a slant,

the green-ness of the grass,

and all of Nature’s abundance.

It is a pretty place to live,

which Jim Morrison himself

intended to visit on one of his trips,

but never got round to in the end.

The fell overlooks with its bald,

blank forehead. Driving from town

it appears a great, slumbering

diplodocus come to fat and die

by the Irish Sea; but nearer

the foot you see it could be Buddha,

Buddha levitating. Walking

up could be Western meditation...

but if you mention the slow

ascent up flat, gradual paths,

I think more of a bullet to the top

of a telegraph pole, or even the kettle

that rises to its silent scream,

its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s

chain. No, I have not been up

the fell for a long time now; so

it’s like I am growing into one

of the locals! But to the fleeting,

evanescent backdrop of dying light

behind the darkened fell at perfumed sunset

I often turn, stare until life grows

detached, naked, until I remember

how weird everything is, how

mysterious and magical the universe.

WAKING AT MIDNIGHT

It’s not nice waking at midnight when you’re me:

dead to the world on Western medication,

you look the Night in the eye and find

the world might’ve quietly passed you by.

There might be a snake on the patio too.

Then again it could be your imagination

grown over-wrought, inspecting shadows.

Still it’s safer to stay in than go out.

The moon is a drunkard above the yew tree.

You see this from the kitchen window.

Telly through the wall leaks in from another room:

it’s where the lion from the heart of Poem

Records originates, when you’re a child,

listening in to telly through the wall, in

the inner city, hearing its whiskers dipped in News.

But childhood is gone, as seems the city -

here we have a pretty place of artistic retreat.

The loneliness rots in the whole, human heart.

At least in reading the voices go away.

I’m on The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell.

BECK VARIATION

Standing in my wellies beside the beck,

I note its most mellifluous applause,

how it falls two feet

into a sound as sweet

as a kettle drum’s metal petals

of silver bliss that blossom

on a carnival’s street.

Further to distil the air in the mind,

I wait, to obviate not titivate,

and notice the green kingdom all around.

A squadron of nettles guards the wild.

It must be so different from living

in Norman Nicholson’s Millom,

down the end of Rottington Road.

A lone bird pipes a bar in a tree.

Then I notice I need to pee.

So into the heavenly nectar I do.

H20 might stand for Hypothalamus Tattoo.

SPYING A WILD DEER IN THE COMBE FIELD

I looked a wild deer in the eye and held

its gaze while both of us remained motionless.

I saw it run like mine own desire, unfold

its leap and bounce and springiness.

I’d only gone into the garden to smoke

and saw it grazing, in its own world,

up by the babbling beck in the back,

contained in the museum that’s the field.

While I paused to watch it, it grazed away,

then noticed me and both of us froze.

While I was still, the deer looked at me

cautious of danger one might presuppose -

then I made a movement and it leaped,

jumped into orbit, red, running off fast.

I watched it running all the way, rapt,

and saw it leap over a fence at the last.

Cloaked in the aura of special perception,

the encounter was almost like a visit -

to see those elegant legs in extension -

as if the deer were an extension of the poet.

Nibbling up the beck my mouth is water

and when I speak it spills on the earth.

I try not to flaunt my role in Nature.

Down to the sea I flow without death.

HYMN TO LIFE

O life, that has been called a mid-death crisis,

a dull throb of loneliness inside my breast,

a colourful spew going on outside the cave-

walls of the skull, how beautiful you can be!

For something that crawled out of the sea

or “clambered up” I am surprisingly evolved

and with my super-involuted eye look round,

as if for clues in the solipsistic kitchen!

My mother’s grand children will come up,

to stay with us soon, and the whole, great

human comedy of it all remain self-perpetuating…

I too am part of the electric human chain

even if a little bit skint, single, unemployed,

mentally ill, medicated, living with my mum, car-less.

How you like to surprise us with little things.

How we should not let you just fly past.

As I process my leisure to trial and outcome,

I cast my mind back to the recent past, flattering

the procession of memory with memory,

trying to come unstuck and see the light…

and what great corridors you have me go down!

And what great arms you seem to possess!

And what great wings you still fly with!

And yet how fragile you are, how precious!

I should never do anything to harm you,

anything to jeopardise this fragile situation,

but celebrate your glory and exalt the senses,

with a song of triumphancy in the dead of the Night!

And with what frail clutches we hang on sometimes,

when prone in the hospital bed in A and E,

and how we learn death is absolutely vile

and the reason to want to stay alive is love!

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.

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.