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Hello my name is John and I am a minor poet and songwriter. I have 5 collections out with Chipmunka (the mental health publisher); and there was a chain of self publications from before but I am disinclined to count them. On top of the 5 Chipmunka collections I have a small work of philosophy under a nom de plume called Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors though I am ignoring it; and also a digital collection called Owls which I made on canva.com by superimposing words on photographs.

Back in the Rimbaudian years of my youth, I was the guy to prove the face of stars with my very first verse at my very first gig… that was to an audience of future psychiatrists, doctors, lawyers, professors, neuro-scientists in a pub in Kentish Town in a band called Oedipus Wrecks. The lyrics to that are in the recent collection Yes You May. All 5 of my Chipmunka collections, plus my book of philosophy, plus my digital collection Owls are available to read for free on my blog.

The most recent thing I did was to organise my friend Grant Aspinall’s first book with him, formatting it and writing an Introduction, and I can report that giving is happiness just as my mum said. My friend’s book is called Songs And Poems by G L Aspinall and is coming out soon.

Looking back at my own work, things went wrong when it was left unsaid that I had proven the face of stars with my first verse at my first gig and knowing now what people made of it, how good they thought it, I consider how I might’ve done everything differently when it later came to making books had I known where to start. Still, life is too short for harbouring regret, and it’s a sunny day, and my friend is coming round to see me soon.

I almost forgot to mention there are also some 36 poems I had individually published by a reputable, online, literary webzine called Snakeskin, but they are rather old-fashioned and I don’t like them very much. Snakeskin is the oldest literary webzine online, dating back to 1995, and they profess to being very old-fashioned in their tastes. The Snakeskin mandate is to provide a digital portal for thought-provoking poetry every month and I guess if you want to read my Snakeskin poems you can visit their site.

Generally speaking, I don’t think my own poems are very good, and it’s getting hard to throw things away in the Digital Age. I think the best of my 5 Chipmunka collections is Soundcloud Rain where some of my songs are structured according to my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle where <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the International Language Alphabet. I think I did the same to maths as he did to language when as a seven year old I wrote

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

using a + sign for the ‘f’ of ‘scarf.’ That’s also published, this time in The Sunset Child. But still my high point was surely proving the face of stars in music. That’s why my friends deemed it the case that I would have to have started with that song, (from the Oedipus Wrecks set list), if I were ever to make it big. That’s why I am so vexed now, because I failed to start with the Oedipus Wrecks set list. By now, it being too late for that, I deem it that Soundcloud Rain, the one I did with my brother, is the best one and might get looked back on as something like Mahler.

At least at the end of this process I can say I still have some songs in my breast, in my memory, can pick up a guitar and entertain an audience of none.