ACID AND ALKALI

PART ONE

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.

BREAKFAST

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.

WHICHAM VALLEY AS A SCRATCH ON A CD

If a place is still its own mind,

this one quietly dreams

and falls ever further behind.

No, there is no Tourist sign to tell

how rich in natural and human history

is this valley by the oldest fell.

I heard the church is built on the foundations

of the oldest stone built monastery

in the whole of our fair nation.

Black Combe’s foothill Sea Ness (I hear)

was once named Seer Ness after

the trance of a mystic or seer.

Nature’s scales are all diatonic

and from all background static depression

here is her sonic, spiritual tonic.

The beck runs its hand smooth through

an angel’s hair in the garden and

assuages the soul when you’re blue.

On Sunday the posse of motorbikes

comes for the valley’s curves,

the flowing of troughs and spikes.

I could report on more, much more,

but shall just impart that down the beach,

waves still make gentle love to the shore.

POSTCARD FROM SILECROFT BEACH

The accents of the waves were Seamus Heaney

the clouds did not move for hours they hung

like search-engines in the big glass day I found 

pink in the shadows and splashed and played 

in the shallows the plush, corrugated, velvet 

sands stretched out like a woman's thighs the

kites in the sky were fishing without capture

or video games of rapture in the window of

wind the stone thrown rearranged God I waved

a wand for the dog to chase the dropped icecream

melted under the tired, madding, bleached, wide,

English sun and the man at the van gave the

unlucky kid another one, a round cone, gratis.

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.

COLLARED DOVE

I see a collared dove fly

and it lifts up my heart.

Into the filament of bird

I travel on. Birds

are for flying, not

for special perception.

It rises from right to left, fluttering

its wings in a frenzy, furiously flapping,

leaving the ground, ascending

an echelon of fresh, fell air, taking

flight in a flurry of feathers

and disappears behind

the yew tree. A bird

could be a portal of discovery.

It could lead to light

even if descended

from the pterodactyls

whose dawn chorus out-shone

the colours of the vowels.

LADY IN WAITING

Her watercolours go for the price of the frame.

You see them sometimes in village halls

where “painting and pastry” nights are put on.

It beats stuffing a room with polystyrene.

Her gardens are rooms in a gallery, (going

by the notion that Nature is an art exhibition),

and when I say rooms they have no walls,

and when I say gallery, it’s the naked eye.

I picture walking down the ocular nerve,

or hand in hand with her down a shoreline,

stopping to observe, take notes and photographs,

laughing as if we declared an endless holiday.

And how could I help it, anywhere I walk?

She loves muddy fields and packets of crisps

in pub gardens and seeing the sheepdog run.

I take my cue from her home-made LSD.

SHE GOT THERE IN THE END

The tail end of the node about a mother’s

bond with her son is at least unfalsifiable…

it was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all

ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

We found a boxing glove protruding

from the telly on a mechanical, metal arm.

We sat there knowing it was not

the living room but the dying room.

We didn’t really though, just needed

a parrot sent to space through the conch…

so we arrive at the next rung on the ladder.

Proving the island of penguins with the first verse

of the first song of your first gig

is something that made me famous in London,

at sixteen, and it was good that I did,

and we all needed me to do it, but

the line belongs to the house. So

you could make me go Anon after all these

years but that would mean attaining

the island of penguins would become a regrettable event.

That Captain Marvel is the other side

of the coin to I. T. is a more original idea.

That Lucy in the soul w/ demons

might be an actual substance is another.

She got there in the end, by aeroplane

to Finland. Now her luggage is going

round and round the carousel. She texts

us updates. We need more time.

THE STOCKS IN BROUGHTON SQUARE

No-one else here cares for Norman Nich

though he might make a garden brick

of the stocks in Broughton square

made for ritualistic humiliation…

as part of a public spectacle, sinners

would be fastened in and then have

rotten vegetables hurled at them.

My attention drifts to the nearby pub -

the Manor Arms. My dad would take us

when they used to do Bocklander sausage

hotdogs. We’d also be treated to a beer

and a few games of pool. I seem to

recall our having a grasp and knowledge

of the standards of all the local tables,

and the Manor Arms being the best.

Certainly, going to Broughton Square

was a treat far from being put in the stocks.

In years to come my dad and I would

joke about putting politicians in.

Gordon Brown he called “Gordon Bennet”

and also “Culpability Brown” after

“Capability Brown” but inverted so that

the imputation of something pejorative

lay with him in an accusatory tone.

He’d also say though art is above politics,

so I don’t wish to become entrenched.

Dad thought the stocks were a good idea

and we should bring them back for some.

I think people who place others under

inimical curses or hypnotise them

to do ill in the name of magic should

be punished; but the stocks in Broughton

Square are there as a museum piece now,

a relic from a gone era, not even behind glass.

They make the town, give it character

and charm, left over from stories untold,

when scandal was local and out in the open,

before the soap opera on the television.

They say soap operas are designed

to make us feel better about our lives

by showing us lives even worse than our own,

and maybe the stocks served that purpose

in agrarian golden ages of yore, also

to deter people from crime. To shame

sinners and give the people their revenge

without costing lives and within reason

one would expect is the true function.

I haven’t researched this on A. I. but

would imagine the stocks as an English

invention. We have the world wide web,

the sandwich, the Beatles, gravity, evolution,

the toilet and the game of football to show

for ourselves as well as more and many

more but there are countries out there

who would have us put in the stocks

if it came to a national level. We are

traditionally a scapegoat, a country

other countries love to hate, particularly

Celtic countries, who also hate each other.

You can imagine how shameful it

would feel to be put in the stocks

on a rainy day and have rotten tomatoes

thrown at your rain-strewn face while

crowds jeer at you, hurling abuse…

one day Forgiveness may be a chemical

cure, a fine white powder, and one would

hope the cure is not with-held until

the price is right, by its company.

Come to think of it, I might put

Big Pharma in the stocks if I could.

WEATHER REPORT

The weather’s not too bad today.

Like a blue powder box

dotted with white, tufty clouds.

Patches of sun break through…

there is no prevailing wind…

The leaves are still green,

still clinging on for dear life,

e’ en though it’s now Autumn.

I but who else could it have been

thought I saw a droplet of rain

but that was before and I might be

wrong – rain might’ve been yesterday.

So it seems English talk of the weather

is never without subtext, while

subtext of English talk about

whatever is the weather itself.

You need to be nice to talk

about the weather, said WH Auden.

He never had to be Anon.

I might be going Anon.

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.

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

A FROND OF BRACKEN

[with apologies to Brian Patten]

You ask me for a poem.

I offer you a frond of bracken.

You say that’s not good enough.

You’re not buying it.

I say how mood

Is also a bracken frond

Drooping down and

That is why I chose it –

To represent ‘mood’

This mundane Monday morning.

You’re not buying it.

You want something textual.

I say I plucked it from the fell

Which turns in summer

From russet to green

Like an homicidal machine.

I plucked it at random at dawn.

You’re still not buying it.

I seem to remember a time,

Taking the old bramble road

At the Augustan/ Romantic

Crucifix with you

Where a frond

Of bracken

Would do.

BLACK COMBE

It’s not so much a stereo, nor television

but Black Combe is a rustic alarm clock.

Looking up from the foot at its striated

way, you see it dips in the middle like

dad’s baggy hammock from Afghanistan.

As a child I had a mythos about tunnels

plunged in its heart, lined with free beer

dispensers, fruit machines and burning torches

which you could access through a portal

at the back of the cave on the face of Sea Ness;

but that’s just children’s talk and more

recently I trained myself to run to the top!

Up there you’ll find a cairn and if it’s not

too misty can see a view of four kingdoms!

The hue of the heather up there in winter

lends itself to the naming of the Combe…

and wherever on its surface area you wander,

be it alone or not, if you pass a stranger,

you always acknowledge the stranger.

This would be the main difference from

the city, in the rurs and urbis debate, for me.

Sometimes, approaching the fell from

Millom, you see the enormous shadow

of a cloud-scape on the flank of the fell,

and imagine a bird as big and its mating call.

Sometimes you drive past the ripped groins

and note where glaciation has left a mark,

by dragging rock in its protracted process.

Always in the valley down below, the fell

creates its own weather-system and micro-climate,

which takes us back to the first words of Anon.

Sometimes hang-gliders are pterodactyls

that float over the fell, leaving swift shadows,

as the tired sun makes its passage home.

WALKING TO ICELAND

N is the top of the telegraph pole

standing leaning in the Combe field.

The pole itself was once a football goal

when the future was hopeful and unrevealed.

My brothers fired rifles up one summer.

I did not participate, hung in the shadows

with a notebook and an acoustic guitar.

They turned away to aim for crows!

I watched them from my leery shadow, here

where the stars realign, in the day,

and later maybe we shared a beer…

a hunter might have a bit less to say.

If I were charting that bullet, that

trajectory, I’d write of walking to Iceland

on a landscape of cloud, but I am not,

and hope guns rot and all get banned.

To topple a pole I imagine you’d need to

smash the ceramic disk at the top,

but through what means I do not know

except corrosion. It’s a new music shop

up there, where standards fly like flags

and axioms pertain to the bullet too,

fired by my brothers in-between fags,

on a day when the sky was Nirvana-blue.

Now that love can be our arrow,

it’s seen in the flowers in the garden outside;

and even though the days will get narrow,

it’s safe to say that love has not died.

CUMULO-NIMBUS HAIR

The powers that be could be clouds,

passing by on their sky-blue roads…

today they are sparse and moving East,

not too slowly, and not too fast.

It’s warm outside for Autumn time.

As a child I thought Autumn Optimus Prime -

that Transformer from the kids’ cartoon.

I still think there’s something in

the personification – a triumphant sense -

for Prime is the sum of all difference

connected – that Sigma where everything meets;

and Autumn is likewise a God in Keats.

But speaking of weather only shows I am

amicable as a person. The strawberry jam,

meanwhile, has all run out on scones;

and so as if to blunt, yellow crayons

I return to art at the foot of the fell,

where it might all be “signed by everwell”

but isn’t, for that may be too untrue,

and just for something, anything to do!

If clouds were really in charge above

they’d look down on the world of love

and legalise soft, Moroccan pollen

and make all kinds of English education

the same high standard and free

and as they passed towards the sea,

cancel cuts to benefits and to the tax

on the rich…. they’d encourage sex

instead of war, and keep the room

temperature in the months of gloom

above a certain level for people over

a certain age for free with all their power -

and all their power would still pass,

as we lay out on the back lawn’s grass

and watched them go, wearing ripped genes

adorned with peace and anarchy signs,

and DM boots on the red brick road,

away to dump their wet, rainy load...

with this idea of State I quite agree;

but it would be an Impracticable Democracy!

SIX DEFACED BANK NOTES

*

When I read of Descartes on perfection and turn inward my eye to investigate I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

*

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

*

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

*

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.)

*

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

*

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

*

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

(1996 - 2017)

TOASTING CRUMPETS

Totally pointless packaging.

Medication included. Swallow.

Swallow Amazon whole. You

don’t need wires in your brain

to know your dreams are not online.

I was wasting time with the crumpets -

the packaging was too tight

to get one out and I was rough

with it so the crumpet broke.

Because of the medication

I am on for my illness, I can

tend to see packaging as pointless.

It brings up fastidious and pedantic

work for the hands. That’s not meant

as a duplicitous double entendre,

or embedded definition, just as itself.

One day all symbolism shall be

seen naked. Hello, I am one of

the doctors that served you

Sertraline for your depression.

As you press you compress.

Compress sans everything.

PETRA HYDRA DEUTEMOL

As you may know by now,

O some one foot wedge of air away man,

Dear, gentle reader,

I took an O. D. the likes of which

it was said to be genius to survive

but coming back down

had lost the ability to ejaculate.

Never again will I know a woman,

her containing elasticity

and texture, her granular wear -

and I am as yet to properly cry…

there followed another

O. D. attempt where I

got even closer to death

and I think damaged my brain.

I don’t want to sound like Sylvia Plath

who was an egoist, so unlikely

to last as a major poet,

so I keep my misery literature

heaped up in a separate file,

ready for when the day comes -

but I just thought you

should know all the same.

I used to be against poets on medication

because a poet is a translator

of feelings and the feelings

you get on chemicals

are fake – but now

I have no other option

except to join in with them.

Cannabis was exempt

in the old creed because

I thought Jesus would smoke it

if he were alive today – and

then other drugs started to be allowed -

like ecstasy for example.

Before I knew it I was a chemical factory

full of messages being sent,

signals and the like, overflowing,

overloaded, all through the night.

Each chemical enacts

a physical poem on the body.

Truth is one is made of drugs.

And to call all drugs “drugs”

represents a dangerous

narcotisation of the truth…

but I was so wrecked I dreamed up

Strictly Free as a drug. It is

the narcotisation of air

in-between spliffs.

Naturally, I don’t do that

any more; but there was

e’ en relatively recently

a time of communion

with someone that knows magic,

which I can’t claim to know myself.

And then, if you can get sorted out

with noxious toxins of

deleterious self-derision,

if you know the right person,

as in have a friend, and

are signed off work, and

on benefits with mental illness,

The Lakes becomes Paradise

just for a little glimpse

before it all caves in on you.

Like not knowing a woman,

I might not know chemical heaven ever again.

We were fiends, my friend

and I, but killing ourselves really.

When my mother passes away,

I wonder what I am to do, whether

I move in with my friend, or

head down south to Londinium.

My mother keeps saying

when she dies this house

is going to be sold…

I might need to have a few drinks.

And I wonder if beer

enacts its own

physical poem

on the body, and

I wonder of coffee too.

Beer is a depressant,

that numbs the pain

but at least coffee

is said to be a drug.

I was going to say mother’s

homegrown tomatoes also

enact a physical poem

and they might but then

I also remembered

even water leaves its own

indelible stain on the hypothalamus.

So everything chemical

conducts a physical poem.

And acid (which is flung

from the sun) is fungal.

That’s the one where poetry

is most evident. Or I suppose

you could say ecstasy too,

which is not psychoactive

but emotional. So

you could say they are

but different types of poet.

Here I search for correlation

between drugs taken

and poets read but find nothing.

I think maybe Milton is smack,

but that’s just rubbish.

The open freedom of this

game shrinks back down

to a narrowing of possibilities.

I suppose we’re looking at

a words as drugs analogy.

Have you ever ingurgitated, say,

the word “infradiegetic?”

It’s not actually a nice word.

It’s a posh, technical term

from the corner of the library.

Here I would like to mindfully

consume another, like

words are astronauts

entering the ear’s orbit,

and one delicious one

is the word “noetic.”

Another is “abeyance.”

Another is “propitious.”

And all along, you find

I am under the chemical cosh -

am consuming meds at a rate of knots -

and trying not to write

merely empty medicine packets.

A MEMORY STILL THERE

Between A Trance Of Stalks by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby

and The Scrotbag Party Manifesto, there is

a specific night in my mind. My bros and I

were having a scrotbag party in the caravan,

when all of a sudden I got a strange Sixth Sense

that the dog had run away and was trapped

on a farmer’s fence barking. I hushed my bros

and listened and could faintly hear what I thought

was barking; so we embarked on a mission.

Our tombstone-shadows stretched out beneath

the moon as we walked through the church field,

and got to the adjoining gate, where there’s

a triangular patch of land not ours. There,

a terrible goat was tied up, and we could see

its eyes shine a baleful green colour when

a car passed, headlights flick-knifing the darkness.

We weren’t so sure about the terrible goat,

but made it past him and got to the farm

where we found the dog trapped to a fence, barking.

I was wearing a fur coat and in the pocket

there was a bottle opener with which I cut

the dog free. He was hard to be cross with

but I showed some crossness and we brought him

home, locked him in the scullery and continued

our scrotbag party, in the caravan, in the back.

That meant drinking, smoking, talking, laughing,

playing guitar and having a good time. Strange,

it seems to me still, how fertile my Sixth Sense

was, how I was almost preternaturally right

about the escaped dog that night, as if we were

connected, which I think we somehow were.

PLANTING A CHERRY TREE WITH MUM

Today I planted a new cherry tree

with my mother, dug

a hole, but not to

receive my mortal body,

more to grow in soul,

here at the foot of the oldest fell.

I stood on the spade

to get my weight

to do the work and

cut through the grass

which cuts with a crunch

and dug a square

and when the hole was

deep enough and

all the loose soil

had been piled up in the wheel barrow

I held the tree in place while

my mother refilled the hole…

then I filled the watering can while

I thought “maybe Dave Morley

is unto water as Einstein

was unto light,” and watered

the tree as mother

happy-snapped me

and now the photo of me

watering the newly planted tree

will go on Facebook which

is the nearest thing to

a holiday I have had

since the fifth Amsterdam trip.

Nothing else has happened today

that is more worthy of reporting

than my planting a tree

with my mother which

filled me with satisfaction.

Further only to report

that as my mother says life is

not about being a genius, but

about hard work, day in

and day out and poetry

likewise is not the entrance and exit of life.

TRAIN-RIDE

This is the walk down through

the field to the local village station.

This is the space where before was a bench

where I first kissed Stefanie under the stars.

This is the fragile platform itself

where before school I would smoke.

This is the sound of the level crossing

when the barriers fall to make way for the train.

This is the headlight of the train

in the distance and getting closer.

This is me stopping writing a moment

so I can get aboard the train.

This is my nervous disposition taking

me from the countryside to the town.

This is the view of fields in-between

as we approach Millom, through the windows.

This is the sight of the church spire

and the crowding of houses in the town around.

This is me walking straight past

a beautiful woman on my way to CBT.

This is my getting back from town afterwards

and moving from the pen to the laptop.

This is me realising I relish the peace

and the laptop alike in my preferences.

HIGH BROW FARM

There’s no psycho-sensitive fire alarm sounding out

at High brow Farm, full of fear and doubt

but the horses listen to the radio

and the artists say it’s best to aim low.

I went along with a melody sweet

to a fairy-haunted artistic retreat.

The kettle ascended like a cathedral choir

to a silent scream and the host made a fire

whose faces flickered and lithely danced

and left the observer almost entranced…

we piled on the money when it was roaring

and through conversation our spirits were soaring.

We spoke about the art adorning the walls,

how one day there well may be stalls

selling tickets when the place has become

akin to the Northern Tate as a museum!

When I left I was down but soon went back

where names had tastes and Thursday was black

and loafed in the garden drinking tea

in the great, amassing shade of a tree.

I saw lithe spirits flowing from right

to left as I sat there, and O what a sight -

a vision of Nature, and love more holistic,

but I kept it quiet, like a postmodern mystic!

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.

NATURE

I feel like writing about the Lakes could be the refinement of a drug called “Strictly Free,” that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free,” to consume. Here, Nature is the true ramification of Kate. Mood is a bracken frond drooping down. The beck in the back is a fountain pen. And the powers that be could be clouds, rowing overhead on sky blue roads.

FULCRUM

Floating in the quiet of a weightless dawn,

the buzzard is the crux of the flux of time,

the reason the colour of Cumbria is brown;

and his mating call is a primal scream;

and then he swoops, streamlined, down,

far from the world of pretence and dream,

to remind that Creation is a dark machine,

to mug his prey, packed with dynamism.

He knows, that is, to obviate not titivate,

sate his quest for meat, how to fling

to his bright ring, his peerless orbit,

and like a balancing act to just hang,

in the fire-streaked dawn’s young light,

sensing his prey below, without a pang

of conscience for the inevitable death of it,

free as the air in my self-healing lung…

Imagination, I reckon, has engendered

this bird, and that faculty can heal the split

in the psyche, duality. Unencumbered

the buzzard is, when he swoops to eat.

The days of his prey below are numbered.

He shows how Creation is no mean feat -

imagined, not observed or remembered,

he has bad manners but is discrete.

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.

RIMBAUD IN LAKELAND

O Louise what have I done to your saying!?

I see there have been people here before me!

Nevertheless, I hope the following

words are still mine own:

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).

And though my dad did I don’t believe in heaven.

Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see.

And once I fell asleep

under a tree

in London town.

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.

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.

ON BEING BILINGUAL IN TERMS OF PLACE

It isn’t true that I am “in” but not “of:”

my father lived in this house as a boy:

his mother, my English-teaching granny

hailed from just up the road in Bootle.

But we did have a house in London

until I was about seventeen, and I do

speak in RP, with a southern accent,

so the locals think I am a southerner.

My granny did her Oxford thesis on Mr.

Norman Nicholson, a family friend, concluding

that he would’ve been even better

had he gone somewhere, anywhere

like Wordsworth to the French Revolution,

to know how very Heaven it was

to be on the crest of that wave.

Her dream was to sleep on the supportive

spring mattress of purple heather on the top

of the fell one midsummer’s night

but she got waylaid and never made it.

I imagine a layer of frost crisp underfoot!

And whether there will be popcorn

in the cinema, and whether the plush seat

will get a hard-on at the end, and whether

the blue whale from the Natural

History Museum in London will

float over, eating plankton, mouth wide!

If rurs and urbis are each a language

unto themselves I am bilingual.

THE SUNSET CAFE

At the Sunset cafe down the beach

you watch the waves roll out of reach…

you see the sea’s heaving, maternal bosom

and meditate on your recycled breath.

The coffee arrives, not strong enough

for mother who needs a second shot;

then the cooked breakfast is for kings, containing

every snooker ball colour somehow.

People down there in the sentient air

say they’ll keep their witness sinless.

You hear their talk reverberate around

amidst the alliterative and trivial

taking of toast and tea and sit

in front of the wide windows, watching.

The streamlined design of the place

allows for optimum beach-observation,

feels like something from the future,

windows washed by the mermaids under the waves

until smooth like a pebble in among

the natural art exhibition of the shoreline.

It’s trips like this that tip you back

into poesis when you have to choose

between poetry and philosophy and stick to it.

Even when you are really stuck,

literally pinned to the spot, by a

monthly anti-psychotic injection,

the movement to the shoreline brings good fortune,

to see the beach abounding with dogs,

to smell the good, clean, sea-salty air,

to be among the lovers of nature and the outdoors,

to sit in the Sunset cafe and drift,

on an afternoon approaching autumn.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE FOOT OF SEA NESS

Let us have a go then, you and I -

when we are tired of getting high -

when the note-well is filled with stars that swap

places when no-one is looking, let us kindly lie

down on the top of the oldest fell,

one midsummer night on the heather,

and munch our popcorn in front of the cinema.

Let us travel by xylophone up there, predictive

text, Robin Hood arrow, fountain pen,

or even better, to use imagination,

as the poet must again and again,

let’s travel by bullet up the top of a

telegraph pole opening piratical CD shops

at all the local telegraph pole tops.

Let us bypass normal societal procedure,

and stay there until we yawn at the dawn

and emerge from dreams as if from water,

brush the crumbs of sleep from our clicked-on

eyes, befuddled, encrusted with glue…

For up the fell no cars come and go

with backbeats blaring on the stereo;

and no go faster stripes of booze

are streaming on the unicorn’s side.

Ha, let us open a Burger King joint

at the top, not so much to reappoint

the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods

whom it seems disintegrate under their sods,

but to allow a new sense of archaic gay,

replace that emotion now gone astray

with gun and bud and band and butter:

let it be like writing a long letter

either to or maybe from a higher self

whose brain sits upon a Waterstones shelf.

Let us first dare the darkness to insist

we sip our flasks at night and get pissed

on firewater whisky – let us turn

to God and see what we might learn.

If dog still equals pi times mc squared,

because you want to think Him round,

and O is still the key of water, be assured,

and its most soul-assuring sound,

let us babble down in the morning,

all the way, heeding the warning,

to make as mezzanine our science,

in an increasingly competitive world…

already the elements have nettle stings for names.

The deep, green lane leads you home,

but first you must launch your song

into the blue ether like a Timeshare salesman

sizzling the dream of a plate of roast beef.

Draw on this dystrophy of darkness

soon coming to your cinema screen

now that we’re at the summit and can glean

honed alertness, awareness, from a purpose

achieved over a long afternoon of walking,

walking side by side and even talking

on telepathic walkie talkies of how no,

there’s no such thing as the Nirvana barcode,

how maybe in very Heaven every step

we’ve ever taken up the fell will be kept

in a pile for us to count and compare -

only to find no statistics up there!

Ah, I forget if we are up or down -

let us fetch the wines of the wise men -

it seems planes are the shoes of clowns -

but forgetting is part of escape and return…

there is only loss of self and recollection,

which templates over life and writing,

which templates over experience and data,

which templates over the now and the after.

Let us phone a supernatural female deity

on collect call, and find that she

never hangs up, after a prayer,

let us pray to the closing of the door,

the ordeal of the seer may well soon be over,

the on and off at once invention is far too clever,

let be the beck as it rambles and falls,

let know the flowing of dry stone walls,

let over be under and all be at one,

let the land of flying fairy cakes be fun.

Already the yellow DogMuckels M

atop the pole in the industrial park in town

is the postmodern churchspire, in

the spiritual vacuum, post-modernism

theme dissolved into message, and

semantics is a road sign not a place.

Already margins are centres, centres margins,

surface is depth, and distortion

clarity, and there is a ream of cheap tea

from Africa in among the supermarket bargains…

Hell, we’ll have another game of cards.

We’ll link to the internet in actual clouds.

Yes chink pelvises like champagne flutes

atop the fell wearing leather walking boots.

Sometimes in dreams I find an organisational system

for the organic whole of the magnum

opus, that living work of art

I might call Gondwanaland yet

which is a living thing, which I should leave long,

not try and make cohere like Pound,

but when I wake and press my feet to the ground,

the Order I dreamed, the scheme, is gone -

and Truman speakers wake me like a gong

augmenting the end of ‘The Lemon Song.’

Who will renew the morning dew

that music has moved the green grass to?

All the birds have gone south by now.

I heard that they sing with their wings.

(2019)

THE PLOUGH-SHAPED STAIRS

The Plough-shaped stairs are made of pine,

up we go to the creaky mezzanine,

to gaze out at the garden of Gondwanaland-green

through the Victorian, stained-glass window, then

up another bit to the top of the stairs,

to the landing, where the bedrooms are.

But now it is Night and mum comes

tottering downstairs and goes out,

out into the garden of Gondwanaland-green

and calls me out there to look at the Plough!

It isn’t in the socket, but abstracted,

miles away and aslant. “One of those stars,”

she says “is the North star, and always

points north whatever time of day it is.”

We look at the stars together, without pareidolia,

without imposing order on something

through use, just as innocent spectators.

Then when we come back in, I sit

at the table in the kitchen and mum -

she goes walking up the Plough-shaped stairs.

She is carrying things, water for example.

The Plough-shaped stairs are one of

the house’s best features. She goes

step by step, lifting her little feet,

all the way up, past the creaky mezzanine,

and towards the source of the music, emanating

from her new Smartspeaker in her bedroom.

The music is old but is still relevant.

MOTHER’S WHISPER

Mother’s whisper in the cinema spreads

to the whole auditorium. We go

at Christmas traditionally to see

the new James Bond or Star Wars -

and she whispers throughout, until

her grown up kids tell her to be quiet.

“Shut up, mum,” they might say,

while mother whispers to herself.

EXCERPT FROM A WORD-SCIENCE NOTEBOOK FROM SIXTH FORM

“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. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt. But when you write it down what happens?

Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.

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

[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].

Lucy in the soul w/ demons may happen to be an actual substance. Sensation precedes thought in art. What colour is white? Smooth and tight! What colour is blue? Be true you! Waves [squiggle] crossed the FTSE [squiggle] and the Helter-Skelter [squiggle] crashed in the electric-sea [squiggle]. Every Atom Ate Our Eyes. Then horror-mouth closed in. Now on the edge I rest my head, feeling feint as “FUCK” touched in steam on glass and dream a cure for pain. Chain is made from same as key. Perception is for alchemy. I plunge the needle into the heart of the brain.

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.

Captain Marvel may be the other side of the coin from I. T.

REBECCA

Rebecca is sxc, sitting on the Tube…

but there are farmers getting up at five

and going out working in the rain

every day while she totters around

on high heels in fashion taking cocaine.

It’s the farmers that we really need -

the most noble profession unto the Greeks -

but when Rebecca is slippery and wet

what Heaven can compare to her granular wear?

ALL THIS CAN CHANGE

The earliest source I can find still in print

is Binaural Songbook.

Then we have things like

57 Paintings For Art Therapy

The Field of Rock N Roll Science

John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem

Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy

The New Beat

The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn

Word For Stained Glass Windows

154 Shakespearean Sonnets

Then we have some Chipmunka books for example:

Soundcloud Raid

The Sunset Child

Breath Trapped In Heaven

Brave New Tense

Transition To Philosophy (by Johannes Bergfors)

Yes You May

There’s more on his blog.

Poems superimposed on photos.

And there are 36 poems with a magazine…

he would rather forget some of those.

Then you realise

he’s also done the music…

he has ten albums or long E. P’s.

They are only demo standard.

All this can change.

PART TWO:

MICK IN THE PUB

One late, lager-soaked afternoon at the pub,

Mick, named after the Mythical Mickey Bliss,

1930’s rhyming slang for piss, woke up sober.

He was in his car, inside the pub, with

a violent, heart-shaped hole in the wall

behind him having fallen asleep at the wheel –

so he got out of the car and went to the bar.

“A pint of Guinness and a packet of crisps, please,”

he ordered, and got talking to the barman too,

who, knowing it was all covered by insurance,

seemed surprisingly forgiving. In fact

you could say there was an upbeat feeling

of camaraderie despite the near-life experience.

Mick was allowed a tab. Punk was on the jukebox.

Love was proven in a concrete hive. Life

was redeemable, transmogrified into love.

Ladies were dancing. Beer was spilled.

Musicians were detained without bail.

For it was a lock-in the traditional sense.

The green stem of dawn poked its nose over

the horizon at the end, when God shrugged.

MICK SPEAKS UP

My father was sponsored by some philosophers

to provide the real, human witness.

When I was seven and liked the movie

All Dogs Go To Heaven very much,

I stored the idea of the internet in writing

in the attic to give it a chance to grow

all the way round the world and keep it free.

I am away for the next two weeks on holiday

so please send your e-mails elsewhere.

You needn’t be very big to be a good batsman

at cricket, just look at Sachin Tendulkar.

I should’ve left the plate to soak in water but didn’t.

Then the tear up the front of mine bike -

maths left over from the rules of Monopoly.

That’s the one hidden parts can’t allow.

The cellular stripe is a line of mathematical code.

Moving swiftly on, Rimbaud attained the face.

In 2000 I also spoke against September 11th,

wrote the highest-marked English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation, predicted

the hunt for the God Particle from looking

at dust in a late ray of light angling

in, and founded a religion based on the elephant.

Then we have recording on binaural earphones,

(O plug my senses in the mains!), the

effervescent mobile reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every

technological inlet in the room before

it rang from home, hosting the white eyebrow

for a rhythm change in the sea, the tattoo,

hypertext or sensory overlay of a name

on Piper, the numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

the tape I cooked in the AGA when

its small pause where cut and resealed

in the flimsy reel finally healed and was gone,

and then I was the man to discover my brother’s

sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting

my own song lyric) grew. All told it’s like

the esemplastic fled away with the quadlibetical.

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 these as parts of a popular a song.

I imagine them transposing a specific hit.

More than a blank page, 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.

TEA IN DEPRESSIONVILLE

An aching, reaching, longing

to be back in your bed;

a fatigue deep in your bones;

this is depression. Depression

is a physical illness not just

being in a lugubrious mood.

I’ve got it, and also hear voices,

have attempted suicide too.

The days never start round here.

Medication is like my bookmark

in among all this, dividing

time, at both ends of the day.

It’s 17. 15 and I was asleep

for most of the day today.

I just reread Jim Morrison’s

book The Lords And The New

Creatures and wanted to

write afterwards, but what?

It’s the same old trouble from

Sixth Form, not knowing

how to proceed from it.

Maybe to sing the song in my

breast, sounding out the sights

that have been seen is illegal.

Maybe it’s been like this since

I was but an eight year old boy.

ERASING THE DEBT

(for Simon Pomery)

My father told us he was a fine art dealer,

smuggled fine art o’ er the Berlin Wall,

sold his business when the Berlin Wall fell,

was codenamed “Blue” and donned a faux

Australian accent for the job; but I found out

it was pollen that he really smuggled, that

art was recourse to euphemism for pollen,

that he had a pollen farm up in the Moroccan mountains

and shipped tonnes and tonnes of it to the States,

a kind of stuff that crumbles under

the thumb, replete with mascara bruise,

peacock feather, butterfly-wing and velvet flare;

that that was how our schooling was funded;

for all the schooling of his children was

“the only thing worth spending money on”

or so he said; and so a minor footnote in history

became a front we learned to see through.

THE STERILISED HOTEL

My first stay in the acute ward, I ran

away, across a busy motorway,

up a serpentine trainline to the station,

and got on a train that took me to Scotland…

I thought there’d be a different jurisdiction.

The cops were swift on my slow back.

They found me wandering that other nation,

brought me back to the border in a van.

I was ticked off at the door, made

to surrender possessions, but it went

down as a sign of my sanity returning.

My father thought it a funny story at least,

but it was actually rather sad because now

I’d be forever in and out of hospital,

the sterilised Hotel with locks on the doors.

At least I’ve got a degree since then.

SAFE FROM HARM

Fleeing the scene of the smoking crime

my shadow legs were failing falling

decided to run forever but fell

the cops were swift on my slow back

& slow to follow my swift soul

which grinning escaped through some hole

& down a road safe from

Ignorance perfectly un-noticed and perfect

The cell was hard like white bone

& naked like something blind and ugly

I slumped & swayed in openly stonedness

& opened my black, silken shirt

“the silent one” sulking & moaning

in hooded prayer to an inward God

The cells were sick & blind

some people advertised their Ignorance

in graffiti screaming from the walls

“FUCK THE PIGS” someone had scratched

I would have told him to fuck himself

for what worse is a pig than a sheep?

& so it appeared that Ignorance wins

only over Ignorance again

& I was thankful for this thought

& thankful that I felt wise

& winked eye to my mind

thankful that though I know my judgment

really judges deeper and wider,

unlike the pigs and sheep I don’t

insist my judgement is better

(1999)

HIGH BROW FARM REVISITED

There’s nothing like going round

to High Brow Farm to drink tea

in the fairy-haunted garden.

But to aim low is more the goal

these days. Art is tending

to the Low not High end.

Some people even contend

my song lyrics are meant

for wiping up semen.

At High Brow Farm we

record them, our songs,

or some of them, without rehearsal.

Richly synaesthetic paintings

of the portraits of rock and jazz

musicians overlook from the walls…

they are painted from photos

with the music on and

in mind to paint the very

feel of the music itself.

Thus, they mix the postmodern

readymade with the emotion

of Romanticism. My friend

who lives there used to be

a labourer for a building

firm and did some work

on our own house when

I was but a little boy.

The steps leading up

through his garden to the table

round the back are his own work.

And how could I forget

those horses that listen to the radio!

I bet they’re difficult to paint!

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.

I DIDN’T KNOW

I didn’t know I lived in the house

where the Plough alignment was visible and viable

I didn’t know I was marked by a failed

experiment into the maths of the new colour

I didn’t know I had helped invent the net

as a seven year old, was kept in the dark

I didn’t know there was such a vision as

The Future State that people bought into

I didn’t know why the riot broke out

and still remain uncertain about it now

I didn’t know what my dad’s job was

but there were options and I was on the case

I didn’t know I was raped when the Towers still fell

despite my having spoken against it in 2000

I didn’t know what the bird in the wood

was called until very late into the game

I didn’t know my name was used in the equation

that helped invent the net when I was seven

I didn’t know because they keep it all hid

from the kid that did too little to be Nash

END OF SUMMER BLUES

The pollen count was knocked unconscious

by the rain’s many hands this afternoon.

I - who am but a flower-head flitting capriciously

in the Allen Ginsberg breeze sometimes -

heard it from the spacious hall downstairs.

I thought of a bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.

The Western medication had slowed me down.

I yearned for something to do here in the sticks.

For katabasis, humour and gravity it’s good

to have a dog but we don’t at the moment.

Traditionally in boyhood one might design

a menu for an imaginary pub in such weather.

These days it would feel more like a tender

spreadsheet of emotion for an internet cafe.

I took a sudden interest in the dust that lies

at the bottom of things, and thought of my father.

A GUIDED TOUR OF THE HOUSE

Here is my bedroom, anagram of boredom.

The books belong to Dr. Robert

because it used to be his bedroom.

From here I can take you on a guided tour.

We enter at the back, into the scullery,

from which you can access dad’s office,

or move through to the spacious kitchen,

painted a plush, Mediterranean coral.

There are black, slate flags on the floor;

then we move through to the carpeted Hall,

from which you can access the cloakroom

under the stairs, the large sitting room,

and the posh, coffee-cake dining room.

The stairs are pine, one of the house’s main selling

points and lead you up via a creaky mezzanine

on which there is a Victorian, stained-glass window

to the first floor. To your right as you

make it upstairs you find two large bedrooms.

Straight ahead of you is another.

To your left is the corridor, off which

you find a single loo, the shower room,

the bath room, Hannah’s old bedroom

and my own bedroom down at the end.

Just outside my little room you find

the attic stairs that wind and lead you up

to the third floor, with a large bedroom,

that used to be my dad’s attic of radio static,

and which has its own little bathroom.

Moving through you find the playroom

where James and Bob played Lego

except the Velux has sealed shut by now.

I used to climb out of it to smoke

on the slate roof in summer nights

and maybe write in Doors film weather.

And last of all is the locked attic that

stores or used to store sacred treasures.

UNDER A BROKEN SHOWER

Downstairs again. I cannot escape

what’s inside just by changing

the four walls which immure me.

I look about at what’s on the walls -

a calendar with local photos,

a notice board of cork, a chart

depicting the plants of the meadows,

a dead telly wearing mum’s funeral hat,

some of my sister’s art – and I wish

to have no nastiness inside me.

I cannot escape into these

indomitable things. Then I hear

footsteps upstairs, and doors closing.

Someone gets in the power shower.

I know who it is but that would be

telling. And my Right to write

of who is in the shower ends

where another’s naked body begins.

The thermostat on the shower’s broken,

so the temperature is always too hot,

too hot to get in, so we need

to get a builder in to fix it. That

will mean taking up the tiles,

and re-tiling the surface of the interior

afterwards when the job is done.

I’m no handy man myself. To me

the house’s plumbing and electricity

is more or less magic, more or less

defiant of the rules of physics.

This not being able to wash normally

angers my brother and I, who like

to get warm in the shower in winter.

DEAR DAD

If you didn’t want me to pursue music

you should’ve told me about the art deal

for music was escape and release

but now here I am talking to myself…

I know my music’s not very good

and was just a waste of precious time

and now I sit here wanting more,

still not knowing what your deal really was.

Now that it is raining out in the garden,

I think of putting a stop to all violence.

Lennon got shot when he sang for peace,

and I hope the same won’t happen to me.

You left behind the sheet where pictures

brown and blue bloomed or grew

which made me think of the afterlife,

as a crepuscular, liminal netherworld.

It is boring talking to myself and so

I will have to reach an emotional horizon

and cease this messing around, here

where I used to design cheques in the kitchen.

You had much more than me at my age,

two houses out-right, four children

in private school, a wife, two cars,

whereas I have books and a few guitars,

plus some scratched DVD’s and CD’s

that go to decay in boxes in the attic

where we once lay, side by side, you

telling me the news about your cancer.

When you were newly gone I ate your

cancer food, the uncooked jelly, visited

your grave and welled up and prayed,

wishing your soul to ascend to Heaven,

that you would look down on us and smile

on my books, which happen as they happen,

no longer consuming all the truth and

butane, which might go hand in hand.

The one I did with James, your second

son, is still the best one I have done,

despite what happened to you, when

in a land without a referee to govern.

That’s because with you gone, your

daughter Hannah has become the ref,

and believes said book proves the music

can be 4D, and is a work of genius.

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.

WHEN

When I read of Descartes on perfection, and turn inward mine own eye to investigate I glimpse a perfect inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

When I read Saul A. Kripke trying to persuade a sceptic that by “plus” he doesn’t mean “quus” I think of that time I put a plus sign for the ‘f’ in my seven year old book in the line:

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

When I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations I am reminded of a game I had as a boy where I would, with eyes closed or under the duvet, lie in bed and forget the room, forget which way I am lying and where the wall is, drift away from spatial sense.

FUSSY ABOUT THE MUSTARD

One evening, my dad took us all out

to a posh, French restaurant with grand-dad.

When the steak arrived, grand-dad

asked the waiter for some mustard.

When the waiter brought out some French

mustard, grand-dad asked for English

mustard. When the French waiter apologised

and said they had no English mustard,

grand-dad stood up and announced

to the whole French restaurant loudly

“the mustard has to be English!

The mustard has to be English!

The mustard has to be English!”

until dad said to him “alright grand-dad,

we get the idea you can sit down now.”

Grand-dad lied about his age at fifteen

to stow away to the second World War

on the bottom of a sub, then joining

the Air Force, won the Sword of Honour,

and became the youngest non-commissioned

officer in the whole R. A. F. They say

he was a great man, but he was certainly

fussy about the mustard that night.

Personally I can tolerate French mustard

and American as well… I am famous

for having an open mind like that.

I am always willing to try new things

as if my life were an experiment

but into what we do not yet know.

IN-BETWEEN JOBS

A kitchen to clean can be a bitch.

Through cooking we travel the world –

or at least those that cook do, leaving

me to clean it up afterwards.

And what job satisfaction you get

when it’s done, and what a clean

room you have to work in now.

The trick is in keeping it clean.

And what can I write but vent

my spleen at a slinky screen, my

mood made stable on a sterilised table,

all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage?

The meds are a wall that the meditators

cannot break through. In the kitchen

I sit now and vacillate between files…

the screen confers a spurious sense

of creativity. The cars whoosh

past – but then there is an abeyance,

and that I like, a quiet lull between cars.

A city boy in the sticks I am stuck,

but I know where to go to muck

in – the Miners Arms, the heartbeat

of the village, where I used to drink

port with the farmers. Once upon a time

I had no further ambition in life

than playing an acoustic set down there,

to an audience of local folk gathered,

but it hasn’t worked out thus far.

Unemployed, or in-between jobs, I

think of my father saying how

“you’ll never be a bricklayer, John,”

and recommended a music store.

But music stores all closed down,

those fertile years we all got phones,

when the Towers fell at the gates of dawn,

and paved the way for the next century.

YOU DON’T NEED A MANSION IF YOU ARE FOR REAL

To the one who says

I should be writing

about mind cancer

because my mum is blue

you might find that

even though she is blue

there is still a bed for you

whomsoever you are

whenever you need it

at the foot of Sea Ness.

A BROKEN CHAPEL

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

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

Light shafts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?

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

Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement

but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.

We have seen this all before, time

tumbling away into sleep, seen

this darkness drop and these ruins murmur

and now we are gathered to appoint the gods

and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves

and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

(1998)

IN ORDINARY SPEECH

“When I was seven I wrote a book

that performed four functions:

to encrypt a scientific node to do

with Gravity; to store the idea

of the internet in writing in the attic

at the foot of Black Combe so that

it was possible for the net to

exist all the way round the world;

to calibrate an algorithm that

sublimates letters and numbers

on a cellular level to see if the

new colour could be rendered

as a cellular mark; and to separate

the object ‘pollen’ from its name.

It was a book with a heartbeat.

It had a heartbeat. It made

the sound of footsteps in the attic.

It’s been stolen by someone.

It was in The Dream Suitcase

along with some other priceless things

like the sheet where pictures grew

and the cassette that was cooked

when its small pause in the song

where the reel was cut and re-

sealed healed and was gone.

I think they were after the sheet

where pictures grew, but by the time

they stole The Dream Suitcase, there

was only my seven year old book in it.

I still have bits of it typed up -

bits of it went into a publication -

but not all of it - and the original,

the handwritten version with

the heartbeat, is now gone.”

LOCAL POET CALLING CARD

The literature of the city is that of alienation,

the literature of rootedness can become repetitive,

and the city is the intellectual breeding station

but country life is closer to how we ought to live.

You have to gain freedom from accepting limitation.

You have to mow the grass, carry the sieve.

I read Michael Hofmann here where Norman Nicholson

made a thing about being intrinsically Conservative.

I loved what I read, and couldn’t make a decision

between the two sides, if something had to give.

I believe we come to art with the presupposition

of many binary opposites, which all of us have,

and a good work of art can mean they’re undone,

which I suppose would put us in the territory of love.

THE ISLAND OF PENGUINS

The island of penguins 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.

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, far away,

to bring us ever closer to Nature.

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.

A RECURRING DECIMAL IN THE NIGHT-TIME

He’ll flit about a little bit, going

from this thing to that… he might

put the music on, then the telly,

open a book to read and sit

down to play piano instead.

Then he’ll see the fireface moon.

He’ll see it through the window, burning.

He’ll go outside to look at it

but come back in before eye contact,

put the kettle on, sit down to write.

He’s absolutely all over the place.

At least he’s brought some alright books out.

Now he sits in a time after sunset, drinking

coffee in the middle of the night.

The coffee is strong but the Night stronger.

The Night is long but his life is longer.

Even a tree that is out of sight

might bend to the tune of the night-wind.

Then just like that a stray cat

out of nowhere fast turns up, sitting

on the ledge outside the window, meowing,

drawn to the kitchen’s midnight light.

Should we let it in or should we not?

As we pursue a recurring decimal

made of nothing but black and white

ink droplets on paper, the cat that sat

on the matt is on the window ledge

one minute then the next minute is not.

It has gone off looking for comfort.

It is something we cannot articulate.

Its timing was utterly perfect.

THE PARSIMONIOUS PALIMPSEST OF PENTIMENTO

While the wire

was like the Weimar,

the poet made himself

the centre of a brave, new tense

through a prodigious

derangement of

the Glastonbury fences

containing his senses…

the poet 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, forever.

DOWNLOADING THE LOWDOWN OF DOWNTIME

The children of our friends are waking,

growing up to do the <BEE> one,

the one where <BEE> might soon ensue from @

in the international language alphabet…

it’s not my idea (though the subject of a book of mine)

but is the idea of my brother. It

could be the only original idea

in the whole of my writing life.

That “I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too”

and that “Lucy in the soul w/ demons

might happen to be an actual substance”

were both my ideas around University time -

but the former could belong to Captain Marvel

and the latter is clever word-play.

So it is that despite what I’ve been through,

for which you’d need to see my CV,

it is to my brother that we look,

in terms of the future of homo-sapiens.

So it is he won’t let me do the one on “the bet”

that I might regret and so it is I regret

dissing <BEE> in a fit of confusion.

Soon it may be the case that standard English

is perceived as Classical music or Chaucer.

REMEMBERING SPRING

Barnes has scored a chicken.

But every time I confute it,

it grows back, like a tree into which

you have carved your name, healing.

It wasn’t Barnes, wasn’t a chicken

and wasn’t a goal. So Barnes

hasn’t really scored a chicken.

But then you need a proposition.

And “Barnes has scored a chicken”

grows back. Because it is about spring,

renewal, rebirth, growth. So

you have to prove it wrong again.

It could be that the proposition

is right in terms of recourse

to euphemism and wrong

in terms of factual data. Every time

I prove it wrong it grows back,

but that may have all changed now.

This might’ve been an epitaph.

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.

HAIRVENT

I love my mum sometimes.

I love her always actually.

Sometimes we get frustrated

but today was a special day.

She said “Nirvana would

do one called ‘Hairvent.’”

I absolutely cannot wait.

To listen to it, or to fuck it up,

that is the question. To

listen to it, or to fuck it up,

that is the question. Over

and out, testing testing 123.

Over and out, testing testing

123. Welcome to my presence

and its intensity. I need

to let some pressure out.

THE PROTECTOR

You used to play for England

but now you play for me

when all I find is words unkind

you protect my sanity

You used to be a winger

but now you play anywhere

to get between myself and the scene

when people are in the air

You used to score for nothing

but now you score for peace

when screaming eyes are in the skies

demanding a swift release

You used to be left footed

but still could use your right

emblazon my soul with your England goal

I think they should make you a Knight

ON A RENEGADE FLIGHT

My head is burnt

I fried my brain

as if prefigured

in James’s stain

I do say James’s

but it’s mine as well

as if the rest

can go to Hell

so don’t take drugs

they only lead

to bad outcomes

where dreams can bleed

I’ve bored myself

with my own tale

the bread is dead

the past is stale

when all at once

I get some tea

and that’s enough

for this new me

whom it would seem

stays up all night

as if to escape

on a renegade flight

SONG IN THE WEE HOURS IN THE KITCHEN

The voices won’t stop

oh why oh why

I am not a shop

that sells them pie

I think at the top

they have to lie

down here I flop

as time goes by

what shall we pretend

to fill this hole

and shall we ascend

a telegraph pole

and will metal bend

to greet your soul

with ears that lend

and a mine of coal?

I’m under the old

chemical cosh

and feeling cold

and in need of a wash

and being bold

splash the dosh

before I can fold

on this bunch of tosh.

I’m guided by voices

just like the doors

and make silly choices

without good cause

they are not James Joyce’s

nor are they yours

as the dawn rejoices

in the great outdoors.

I AM A TROLL

I’m so groovy,

they’re making me a movie,

I’m so cool

they’re closing down my school,

but something you don’t know,

don’t know if I should show,

your little mind might blow…

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I’m so sorry,

they made me say a lorry,

I’m so smooth,

they’re getting me a booth,

but something you don’t know,

don’t know if I should show,

your little mind might blow…

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

I am a troll!

FLUOXETINE LADY

Fluoxetine lady you shine so bright

in the dungeons of the night

what immortal band or lie

dare frame thy fearful telemetry

I crashed on your sofa last night

as all the world was in unmanned flight

and sensed a disturbance in the Force

then saw at once a winged horse

it was going past outside

in the world we sleep to hide

but that was just my imagination

as I looked through a Sony Playstation

Fluoxetine lady I love your curves

and see the way your mirror swerves

to keep you but cannot contain

the beauty bursting in my brain

JUST ANOTHER LET DOWN

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey bro – what do you know?

It’s always raining at the station.

Hey dude – it seems a bit crude

but is it time for medication?

Hey sis – if I give it a miss

they say bad things can happen.

Hey man – I do what I can

to help my mother in the garden…

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey friend – where does it end?

Is it with another let down?

Hey mate – what’s your fate?

Is it arriving at a new town?

Dear Sir – I hope you concur…

it took us all this way just to get down.

Dear Maam – you’re a cherry palm -

I hope you like your new night-gown...

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal

(Am/ G/ F/ C/ Dm/ F/ Am/ G)

Hey dad – it makes me sad

to know we’ll never speak again.

Hey mum – it’s not that I’m dumb

it’s just that some things are in vain.

Hey ho - here we go -

trying to sing away the pain…

Oh yeah – I’ll meet you there,

where we discuss my brother’s stain...

(F/ C/ Em)

and dreams of love are over

but still something is distilled

and though I’m not too clever

with my brother I am chilled

and though I’m getting older

love is still my first ideal

and when I was much younger

I was more inclined to steal.

HERE COME THE WAVES

Here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s move our bodies

and dance a little bit

and when they come

in all shapes and sizes

that’s when we need

to average out the waves

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s see through music,

let’s rule our kingdoms with song

don’t pave the wave,

unless you’re a slave,

unless you want

things to turn out wrong

here they come,

here come the waves,

let’s let the phet

be a little bet with the myriad mind

and when we lose

and have the blues

that’s when we choose

to not continue colour-blind

FOUNDSTEIN

(a new fingerpicking song)

How do you do Ryuken?

Ableton is broken,

like the first morning,

nothing left to decide.

The kids will want a garden,

spaces that are open,

I wish I had some pollen,

surrender to the tide.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

I’m not up for fighting,

witness in the lightning,

the winter wind is biting,

I dreamed of love and trust.

There has been a sighting

of something that is fleeting,

the job is a good one,

ending up in dust.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

Drake is in the wilderness,

suffer teeming emptiness,

nothing comes from Nothingness

except nothing at all.

Another day has begun,

and even though there is no sun,

it could be a good one,

where I remember Paul.

The morning’s come to names,

we left our old flames

in the land of dreams

and now will play our games.

LOVE SONG

I left my comfort zone,

travelling by mobile phone,

through the six inch gap,

to make the stranger clap,

sitting on my seat,

thinking on my feet,

eating crisps and drinking tea.

I said goodbye to things,

surrendered angel wings,

underneath a rock

found a pretty frock,

proved the face of stars

with my old guitars

and took a drug called Strictly Free.

Then it came to pass

the moment was made of glass,

that shattered on the floor

and left you wanting more,

and everyone could see

the sheer insanity

of the world afloat in space.

At least I sent a text,

feeling rather vexed,

to have my message sent,

despite it being Lent,

and have it bounce around

and come back to the ground,

trying to send my love to Trace.

FLOPS

It’s just another problem

for me to sort out

intelligence is sadness

intelligence is doubt

the band aren’t with me

the band have gone

we still don’t know

if my first word is Anon

the music I am writing

is meant for the book

I’m still feeling empty

from the things that I took

with Colgate toothpaste

you can’t go wrong

I want to put a roundabout

in the middle of the song

A WALLETY WALLETY WALTER

I was walking down the valley,

in search of Where’s Wally,

and I became a silly billy

and everything was willy nilly

and the squiggles on the page

were the corners of the room

and everything was in a cage

at the foot of Black Combe.

There were eight pills in the evening,

six pills in the morning,

three pills at lunch time,

while the new Age was dawning,

and there was an emotive charge

in the cables overhead

and the headlines were a splurge

and some things are best left unsaid.

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 =

WOMAN IN WHITE

Agonising woman, dancing in white,

your short dress hugs your figure tight.

It’s only a photo, only a still,

but still how you are dressed to kill.

I’ve never seen love from this angle before,

totally useless, but the thing we adore.

I see you among the adverts there

online, tossing your blonde hair

in a leonine way, and want to know

who you are and in what show.

Of course if I click on you I fall

for the adverts and so instead I stall

at you, the bait, to suck us all in,

with a promise of wanton-ness and sin.

I don’t wish to be re-directed

feeling as badly as if I am rejected,

I wish to know more of your eloquent shapes,

for in my mind your beauty shapes apes.

You dance in a sensuous graffiti of

blind white light, proving only love,

but all we can see is a split-second caught

on a camera whose lens can distort.

Distortion is clarity with a guitar

that stretches between star and star,

but not with your body, for it is clear

that I would love to hold you near.

I’ve seen you in yellow and in red,

but white is best, like words unsaid.

Come closer, please do, for I am alone

without any use for my mobile phone.

FLUVIENT COINAGE

Sonnest abraddio grample and bricken

gontocker blonky and wellity white

postico flostico flipstick and fleving

fluvient coinage has gone againe

driptheria drearier than a tree-drum

do-lang and blang-gast gustopong coo

sloo flicking flostico flostico flagrant

masticko mecklebot plastic and plee

flestico follerdong farmerly fillegist

fillegist farmerly follerdong flunk

collerdon gollerdon gumian grey

ollerpoller sollerdoller follycog nonk.

AURORA FLOREALIS REVISITED

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

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

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

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

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

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

*ketamineguitar*

QUIETA

Now everyone else is asleep

and you are still up, having fun

like the midnight sun

is a musical orgasm.

You turned the Lakes into the future state

or tried to through the snooker cue.

Trying a Google search in the air,

you find there is no-one there.

It’s not about rats playing

games with your eyes,

nor skywriting at

the Secret Garden Party

for your stuff is found

betwixt the dove and the Duff,

or was that the duster?

You would need to be on the Right

to come out with what it is all about,

but don’t, preferring to leave it open.

Your verse was good

when it lead

us through the wood

but that was before.

You should quit

before you spoil it.

Otherwise you’ll be

in a bare knuckle fight.

It should be alright.

As long as you stay up all night,

doing what you want

you’ve won the war.

THE SEED OF THE POEM

Your brother has just

been down to the kitchen.

He suggested you get some

of that delicious Fazer chocolate

from Finland which

you’re not allowed to

have on this dire

diabetes diet… so

you get some from the

posh, coffee-cake dining room.

It becomes a metaphor

for writing when you are

supposed to not write.

So he planted a seed.

He planted a poem-seed.

The seed consciousness of the poem

being your brother’s makes

it a special poem which

should be nurtured

and received well.

Eating the chocolate

was something illicit

like an electrifying affair

or a one night stand

with a married, gypsy woman.

So there’s another sense

of what the chocolate symbolises.

It was absolutely delicious.

It was ‘in’ and ‘of’ itself.

The poem chugs on,

as dawn’s first bird

pipes up like a miracle.

You think what your brother

was trying to say in this poem

is that you shouldn’t write -

or at least that you are prone

to dubious moral hygiene,

like when you went off down south

on a mad, Rimbaudian escapade

dead against computers,

ecstasy and porn, as if

part of a New Lakes, Slow

Art, eco-poetic sensibility

and soon allowed ALL

your guitar strings

to be detuned at once.

There was a similar laxity,

a similar crumbling of innate moral values

in the detuning of strings

and the taking of E

in the year the Towers came down

which like Thales himself

you had predicted to the day.

You think your brother,

in this poem which you are

starting to wish you hadn’t written,

was also trying to say

a poem’s seed consciousness

can lie with someone

other than the poet.

And how could you renounce

literature for the world,

to plunge into the maelstrom

as Henry Milker remarked

of Rimbaud when you have

all this freedom, all

this spare time continuum

and nothing to do but read and write?

The “helium aubade”

is a type of poem you invented

for the dawn after

the dark night of the soul

when you’ve been up all night…

the “shadow page poem”

is a type of poem you invented

for writing outside in darkness

when you can’t see the page

and are on drugs

on a road trip.

There are things you’ve not done too

like make a page’s turning

into the turning over

of a steak -

or structure a poem

on an airport or the Premier League -

or write what a lion would say

if a lion could talk -

or show us a house brick

from each brain hemisphere contrasted.

You haven’t done Bart

Simpson’s suicide note.

But none of these things

are what you really want

and you feel inside [ ]

like you’re yet to start.

Your Norman Nich

is better than your Michael Hofmann.

Your garden brick

better than your left-wing implication.

This is not to say

you are right or left,

for you have no allegiance,

and it’s only your own opinion.

The brain paths are fixed.

The sun is rising.

That feeling of the end of Fascism

can be elongated, almost

like it ties in with a sense

of being unburdened by guilt,

or set free from suffering.

Your brother has done

well in this poem,

which he planted,

and which you have cared for.

You’re reminded of that dream you had

when in arduous poetic training

of flying to the Isle of Man

to pick up a new collection

the shape of a remote

control and made of chocolate

from a white garden table…

ah, poet, your dreams

are recorded in your dreamwork

diary, though your CD’s

are scratched in the attic

in boxes going to decay.

Your brother did especially

well in the poem he planted

for staying in bed

while you wrote it.

HAUNTED BY THE MOTH

Since I was cursed by a hypnotist,

and made to walk the plank,

I have been haunted by the moth

that likes my scented candles,

my bare bulb three floors up

in the night-time while I

read the New York School.

The midnight moth flits about

a little bit e’ en while I sit

and work during the day.

I’m so badly bruised I might be

disaffected, so badly torn

I might never feel good again.

Happy days may have flown.

The moth is dull but with its wings

it carries my life away with it.

You should learn not to listen

to the moth. Ignore the moth!

I’m riddled with guilt about

something not really my fault.

Had it not been for that

I might’ve been the best.

It’s down in my bones and

in the meantime, voices everywhere.

That’s what I mean by the moth -

the rate and frequency of a female irritant.

It’s not a word-chord synthesiser

at the edge of selection allowed

in the band, not magic alphabet

radio, no, not the new,

synchronised word, not even

Smart-talking – when it’s the moth.

They let you believe everything

is on tick, and don’t leave

you alone, but then it

turns out they want you to be

Anon and you don’t want that,

because you’re an Individual.

Sometimes you want to turn

the moth out, set it free, otherwise

sleep under stars in the garden.

The colour of pain turns dull.

Yellow is not the colour of pain.

I preferred it before it turned dull.

The screech of the moth

I find is absolutely terrible.