UNDER THE PLOUGH

[A NEW COLLECTION IN PROGRESS]

PART ONE:

NORMAN NICHOLSON’S RUNNER BEANS

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 this 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.

THE LOCAL TRAIN LINE

You can go backwards to Christmas on a train

and often I would, and sometimes doze.

Squirrels can fly if perceived in the caravan

of trees sailing past through railway train windows -

windows that taste like an old copper coin.

I remember taking the train on schooldays

from the local village’s request stop station

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

round the estuary which Norman Nicholson

mapped in a poetry that remains matchless.

So many birds can be observed when on

that journey, already feeling semi-famous.

The gentle arrhythmia cajoles you into a lull,

the sound of the wreckety wreckety wreck.

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

at the end of the journey like a swollen beck.

I would already smoke pollen at school.

At the end of the schoolday I would travel back.

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

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

and since becoming so paranoid within

that I prefer to not venture all the way outside,

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

survivor of a pathetic attempt at suicide.

Tiny engines may rev up on pellucid glass,

augmenting the sense of cosiness you feel,

when heading for school, for an A-level class

about the meaning of Caliban and Ariel.

The Sixth Form girls would giggle at me as

I sat there reading a book of Robert Lowell.

Going to the private school meant I never

cheered up and joined in with the human race.

If there is a difference between being clever

and having what they call moral compass,

we should all sit together, and endeavour

to unite while keeping intact our difference.

The telegraph poles went flowing past.

Counting them I never picked a favourite.

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

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

Achieving my dream of being the best essayist

was easier when I put my sober mind to it.

A boy I was, mewling and puking to school,

feigning High Indifference when there.

Back then the currency was in being cool.

Exciting was the license to scent the air.

The music I collected was the sacred pool.

I was in love with a girl with brown hair.

Sometimes we’d bunk off and go walking

in a kind of pantheistic or animistic trance,

or sleep in caves; or stay up talking -

but never once did she see me dance!

To Amsterdam and Paris we went gallivanting -

to see the museums – to not waste the chance.

At the end of school I went down south

and broke off the relationship in doing so,

started to let ecstasy pills into my mouth,

worked some boring jobs and went with the flow.

The train was a gullet, gulping back and forth.

Sometimes we’d travel under a rainbow.

TO REDEEM A DREAM OF FREEDOM

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

that biding my time from here to eternity

to see if the lawn has sprung a flower

watch out for the Honda lawnmower:

for I mow the grass where the Plough aligns.

I try to keep to neat, symmetrical lines.

When the first, fresh, redolent, enervating

scent of change begins its fermenting

on the ego-loss breeze it is my duty

to the Natural World and all her beauty

to mow the grass – a foot high with neglect,

it was today, but owing to my respect

it’s been cut down, mowed over. Well,

I love the smell of petrol more than the smell

of a fresh Christmas tree, and to do

something with my life is also new

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

but it redeems a dream of freedom in my head.

Now when my mother looks out the glass,

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

but sees her plants in all their little pots,

their little de-institutionalisations and bets,

and the dog rolls around like he’s found

Paradise down there on the ground.

0

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 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 dinosaurs

whose dawn chorus out-shone

the colours of the vowels.

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 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.

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.

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)

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)

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, like something from Carlos Castaneda.

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.

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.

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…

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 CUMBERLAND

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.

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.

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 =

PART TWO:

FRESH SEA AIR

THAT’S IT

E’en though it’s not Anon

I see the Flo’ moving on

the floor up at mormor’s here

and find in sharing room to cheer

for we have written this new Proust

and with my hands which can attest

to weathers all about my head

that mean the sharing of the bread

which have been here since the start

of finding salvation in art...

at the moment Flo’s just the noise

of playing with her baby toys

but soon she’ll sleep and then wake

and later eat a fairy cake

and one day grow to be a mum

but as for myself I cannot come

and without the ability to ejaculate

I may have grown a little late

and can’t continue singing of

women in the wind with love

so I should say “That’s All Folks,”

it’s impossible to mend your broken yolks,

e’ en when you sit with smokes

and tell your friend some dirty jokes.

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*

EXCERPT FROM A WORD-SCIENCE NOTEBOOK

“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].

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea

[squiggle].

Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that Heaven sends is rain).

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

“Mayfly,” I say the word

“mayfly” phonetically

sounding out its every

vowel sound alphabetically.

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

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

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

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

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

POLLEN DOOR

We all know of Flora’s pretty pretext,

which I was the one to spot and articulate,

even though I had never known her kiss,

which looking back was a mistake,

but never has it been so well dealt with

as when at the age of seven, I

separated the pollen from its name,

for Jim Morrison has a theory

that when an object is detached

from its name, habits and associations

it is finally free to become endlessly anything

and when that object is pollen

never has the theory been so beautifully tested,

never has summer love been so evident,

never has fresh air been so much the cause.

GOLDFISH BOWL UPDATE

Mrs. Bloggins’s Goldfish Has Just Died,

the local, parochial headline wants to read,

and crossed the water to the Other Side,

left behind my almost ascetic greed

so I suppose I am feeling a bit sad,

knowing not why the goldfish is dead,

knowing only that God is good,

hoping its soul ascends Heavenward,

imagining the newsflash on the TV,

or online for anyone at all to see,

but as the goldfish becomes history

I see it could be worse for you and me

for if it was my brother’s <BEE>

there would be damage in all Infinity.

FLEE HAS SEEN A BEE

So, Flee, you may have seen a bee

but I don’t want you to see a rat.

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

that one should have to die like that.

The bee would sail across the ocean

as you lie back on the sunny green.

It would be cross-pollinating the garden,

extracting pollen for the mating queen…

once my copy of Neil Curry’s volume

started to smell of redolent perfume

so I built the Tower in my bedroom.

There were other books, a few of them

that also exhibited signs of natural

magic - for the smell was not a spillage in

my Gap Year bag, of aftershave, but actual

magic. I hope that when I am gone

someone reads the Tower as I built it,

tall and strong, lines left to right,

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

and you can take my word as true and quite.

DEAR FLISS OR IS IT FLEE?

Dear Fliss or is it Flee?

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

Love,

John

(who might soon be snow or under the sleet)

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.

SIBLINGS

Brothers are nice and sisters too,

always there’ll be something to do,

but they can elongate the queue

to use in the morning the upstairs loo.

There are also sibling rivalries,

to please the parents, and to please

the beauty queen who brings the bees

down onto their humble knees.

John Cleese says it like a brother -

no-one is any more clever than another -

that goes between your father and mother -

and your brother and sister and any other.

It’s boring not having a family,

and I do have my brother living with me,

but sometimes think in a different key

about what’s likely to never be

and yet with mother’s new grand children,

at least she’ll get some satisfaction,

and we are a tribe bonded in emotion

even if scattered across the ocean.

I hear Bob’s kids love it when he plays

on the piano for them in multiple ways

that mean the brightening up of days,

like a way to cure a transient malaise.

Siblings often squabble and fight

but judging by mine own, it’s right

that I would die for each of them tonight,

and leave them playing in the light.

AN ATTEMPT AT CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

One day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”

“They might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt below.”

John was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.

They were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a game of football in the field near their house.

They lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It was a big, ancient mound of land.

Their dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed “Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly cleaning or baking.

There was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a second like it could’ve gone on forever.

John suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up the fell?”

James said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”

Robert always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went in and asked if they could go on an adventure.

“First pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they got in trouble.

“Are you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.

Ossie was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm. It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead and bring him back.

Seeing all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child, especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by nature.

The family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off to.

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

So they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.

They did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane, taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the large fronds of bracken.

It was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided against it.

So they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.

“Watch out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools, and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.

It was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the summer heat.

They walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.

Then the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into it to cool down on such a hot day.

Ossie was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of going over a bridge.

As Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!” he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.

“We should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because he was the eldest.

You had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess what they found?

There was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in the fell.

“Imagine if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no money. It didn’t matter though because as John said

“there’s no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”

He himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.

They could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,” and it was true, it was.

James now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.

“What could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.

The mystery was a strange one.

“Maybe someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.

James was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.

They were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess what he found?

“There’s a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit up and the fruit machine made a musical sound and it turned on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at the back of the cave. There was a tunnel inside!

John shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at least a few feet in front of them.

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

They did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.

“I dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what is done as a Giant Day.

MUM’S MEASURING STICK

My mother took me out

on a mother-son bonding trip

- oh, only down the garden,

to the veg patch, where I,

as if gallantly, dug her a trench,

and after she planted

her potatoes, raked it over

again too. Here she comes now

into the kitchen, saying

“this dry weather is good

for the door,” because the door

used to swell, because it is wooden,

and offer much resistance

to being closed. I am out of

breath from working. I left

the veg patch first, carrying

two paper packets in for the sitting

room fire. I was in hospital

yesterday or the day before

after another O. D. and

don’t feel up to much work.

Still, when mother says

the dry weather is good for

the back door, she might mean

working with soil is good for the soul.

And she is mostly right.

She has a lot of magic sayings

hidden in the treetops, does mum.

You can drown in a puddle.

Language is a creature.

Imagination is a muscle.

In politics there are no wrongs

or rights. Just because someone

is good to you doesn’t mean

they are right for you. Actions

have consequences. The brain

only heals when it’s asleep

and even nightmares are

healing. Giving makes

you feel good. Poetry is not

the entrance and exit of life.

Of course she was the one

who made the flower-press ending

on cannabis that might = a dialysis,

and I was the one that made

the love poem for Flora

that might = a motor, and who

spotted the system, beginning

with ‘if.’ That system, I would

think of as my Equilibrium,

but it is on second thoughts mum’s

Equilibrium. I don’t like cooking

vegetables in the kitchen, or digging

in the vegetable patch after all.

So it is that when I sit here ( )

in the kitchen, because it has

a good table, a good chair,

and internet access, writing, and

mum comes in to cook, it augments

any work on Flora’s pretext

if I just write down what she

says, about preparing food.

Now I’ve made mum a coffee

for her flask, from the instant

espresso machine, her second

of the day, and she has gone

back out there, to the vegetable

patch, leaving me indoors.

And the bluebells are out

and some have more bells

than others, but all of them are nice.

And mother comes back in

with some layers of clothes removed.

And the dishwasher is still going

round and round like dreams

in the recycling bin. And mother

goes back out again, back

to the veg patch because

her work is not yet done. And

the dishwasher has stopped revolving.

And the fridge’s drone is heard.

And in the fridge I have a sausage roll.

And the sausage roll comes

from the local butcher and is made

with real, Cumberland sausage.

And out there, the fresh, spring air

sings that love is not dead.

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME

My eldest says I have a way with words.

“Magic sayings hidden in the treetops.”

He collects them as if they are painkillers.

English is only my third language, though.

I told him recently “you don’t need a University

degree to know a thing or two about life…”

I once made a flower-press for my husband, ending

on a homegrown cannabis leaf.

My eldest decided when he’d read it

that if a flower-press ending

on cannabis = a dialysis,

a love poem only hoping

to impress poor Flora = a motor.

He thought of it as his own “equilibrium,”

but has come round to recognising

it is mum’s equilibrium. He doesn’t after all

enjoy working in the veg patch

or chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

Once I made him put asparagus

in a pint glass with water at the bottom

like it were flowers we were dealing with!

Anyhow, I come from Finland;

and the trees are taller in Finland.

Finland is famous for three s’s:

sauna, Sibelius and sisu…

the Fins think the Midnight sun

might be a musical orgasm.

Growing up I liked David Bowie.

We all followed the English music scene.

I married an Englishman I met on a train…

he was on business, I was travelling.

My husband was an art dealer nicknamed “Blue”

and to be honest we still don’t know what it meant,

and now he’s gone, taken secrets to his grave,

and I live in the large country house he left behind.

We live at the foot of the Lakeland’s oldest fell.

My eldest, he says I had a happy gift

for treasure hunts and Easter-egg hunts, laying

clues all about the house and grounds.

It’s getting towards night-fall here now

and the Doors are on the Smart-speaker.

My eldest thinks my husband named his sons

after the Doors without telling me.

I have four children, named John,

James, Robert and Hannah, whom

it would seem are born in a season each, spiralling

Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer, marching

right left right left in the handedness

as if military zeal will always win.

I myself am very left-handed,

and think reading and writing,

which is geared for right-handers,

is un-natural when it goes left to right.

In my early twenties, I was learning English

because I had children born in England

and my eldest, he thinks it beautiful,

to have a foreign mother who did that.

Before I had children, I worked

in a Steiner home for autistic children

in Sweden. The corners of the rooms

are rounded and purple because

it is less threatening than right-angled corners.

When my children had grown up,

and my husband was ill with Hep C,

I braved it and got a job in the Care Industry,

to keep this Plough alignment house afloat.

The hours were cruel and the pay quite thin,

but I stuck it through to retirement age.

Now I deserve some peace and quiet,

and some downtime with my grand kids.

As well as having four kids, I have

four grand-children and counting.

My youngest, my daughter Hannah,

she says I have a gift with children

which brings tears to my eyes,

to hear my own daughter praising me so.

I love babies and have kept a lot of stuff

from when my children were babies

which others would have binned.

It’s nice to see Robert and Hannah

have flown the nest. John tried it many

times but always got into a mess

and ended up crawling back home.

Robert and Hannah both have jobs in tech

as well as families of their own, but

John and James, the eldest two,

live with me, and are writers.

I recently went down south to see Hannah,

and to spend time with my grand-daughter Florence.

She was so feverish and only mummy would do

when it came to holding her in one’s arms.

Hannah was supposed to go out to a party -

that was why I was there – to babysit -

but she couldn’t go out in the end

because baby Florence was so ill.

Anyhow, I am a free spirit, and say

live and let live. I have an ideal

for poetry, but my eldest, he

misappropriated it in one of his books…

I think it was called Brave New Tense.

And he gave the game away as always.

He’s done some good things though, my eldest.

He helped invent the net at seven.

Some scientists came to the house.

They realised the net could not exist

all the way round the world without going

through the Plough alignment house.

When someone needed to store the idea

of the net in writing in the attic here

to give it a chance to grow all round

the world and keep it free it was my eldest,

John, who wrote that document, at seven.

I was on board with that one at least,

even if my husband concealed things

regarding his business, and what it meant.

At eight my eldest was the witness

from The Lords And the New You Know Who.

That’s a book by Jim Morrison, I hear,

in case you too don’t know.

At eleven my eldest was marked only slightly

by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour.

At fifteen he attained the face of stars

which might’ve been scripted in the Bible,

and proved it with the very first verse

of his very first song at his very first gig.

At eighteen he forewarned

my other sons about September 11th, in 2000,

also prophesied the God Particle hunt

from looking at dust in a late ray of light, angling

in, also prophesied the alignment.

He wrote the highest-marked, English Literature

A-level exam essay in the nation that year.

I still remember how proud his headmistress

was, because it was on her favourite book.

After school, my eldest, John, he recorded

an album on binaural earphones,

had an effervescent mobile, reverberating

the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every

technological inlet in the room before it rang,

hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change

in the White House, got a First despite the onset

of mental illness, spotted a hypertext

of his name tattooed on Piper

At The Gates of Dawn, worked

at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen,

built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy,

conducted an experiment into a tape

with a small pause where cut and re-

sealed in the flimsy reel, and

was the human being to discover

the sheet where pictures, seemingly

depicting his own song lyric, grew.

The sheet itself belongs to my second son,

James, who designed it and laid it down.

If you think my eldest is a genius

for all that he has gone through,

then my second son, James,

well, he is a genius too

for he designed the sheet

where pictures grew

and said that <BEE>

might soon ensue

from @ in the international

language alphabet, which

was much more what the doctor

ordered than anything from John.

John provided songs and poems

and threw most of them away.

James is now working on an epic sci-fi novel

set over 1000 years in outer space.

Back when John discovered the sheet,

he was good about it, and recognised

it was James’s work and g-a-v-e it to him.

John was better at school, but James

is more creative being left-handed.

James says to design the sheet where pictures grew

took a deft left hand born of another.

John also made the Nirvana barcode to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode

shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard,

brought it into my bedroom on a page, boasting

that he had invented the Nirvana barcode

only for me to tell him there’s no such thing.

It was, I said, a trick of grief, after his father passed.

Anyhow, I am Susie and I am a bit

of a driftwood artist and opportunist.

I like to use driftwood from the beach.

My eldest, John, picked up the information

that there is no such thing as female genius

from some London friend, like a virus, but

I told him “without females

we wouldn’t even have spines.”

That shut him up for a good, long while.

I’m actually entering second adolescence;

I put my music up loud like I did

when I was young and barefooted,

e’ en though it is an anti-social nuisance.

Long into the night you can hear my music blaring…

it passes through the walls which immure us

as we penetrate the isness of life through it.

My eldest will be down in the kitchen, typing,

driven mad by all the resonance upstairs.

My second will be even closer to the source

of the music, in his room, despairing,

trying to continue with his sci-fi book.

If I had a failing it was in not teaching

my children Swedish. Though I am a Fin,

Swedish is my first language, my being

of a slim percentage of Swedish-speaking

Fins. But when I started to teach my children

my husband would always take the Mickey.

I gave up in the end, because my English

is so good, and we live in England.

Swedish is like English detuned on a dial.

It is the only language of Indo-European

etymological origins that qualifies as tonal.

I used to keep a word-science diary

and my eldest does the same thing.

His is probably even more interesting

than mine, but then I’d have to leave it out.

Anyhow, I used to read them Roald Dahl.

When Roald Dahl died I was upset

and seeing me so upset my son,

my eldest, John, said it’s ok mum,

I’ll be the next Roald Dahl.

He was only about four years old.

It hasn’t worked out for him yet.

I keep telling him children’s literature

is where the money is at and the way to go,

but he doesn’t seem to take it in.

Without kids himself he could

write for my grand kids as a substitute.

He asked me for help during his degree…

I told him I prefer the third person

to the first and like a narrative

to go from A to B without anachronism.

One time he needed help with dreaming

up a plot for a novel and I gave him

the idea to make it a book about dreams…

once he started writing it, he made it so

there was a dream-meet experiment with a band.

A burglar entered and it was the burglar

that got killed not the other way round.

So it was an allegory for September 11th.

John only had to write a few chapters.

It turned out he already started a novel

about dreams in Sixth Form, his first attempt

at a novel, where a taut, pragmatic prose narrative

about a stoner going around London

is inter-wedged with the penetration

of a surrealistic fantasy world in which

the protagonist visits a shop beneath the sea

where all our dreams are stored on disk.

So we are obviously of similar mentality.

We also have the same taste in Deli food.

Houmous, olives, mushrooms, chillis etcetera.

We like to dip breadsticks in the same cream cheese.

I keep telling him the Nirvana barcode

is best done differently from the way he did it.

Now the barcode is being phased out

of some Tesco stores around the world.

To be fair he wrote a gorgeous little number

when he was but 12 or 13….

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

It came into being when he was a Nirvana fan…

there was what was advertised as a

government set intelligence test

at the computers after exams at Prep School,

for the winning of which there was said to be a prize -

and my son finished the game first,

called out “done it” but was ignored,

turned back to the screen and typed in

the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana.

That was when the maths teacher stopped the game,

but still no prize, no bag of Maltesers, was awarded,

because the point was that nobody

is any more intelligent than anyone else.

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

Those were days I remember buying him

Nirvana CD’s. My husband liked ‘Polly.’

Even though I am a David Bowie fanatic

I thought Kurt Cobain’s version of

‘The Man Who Sold The World’

was even better than Bowie’s version...

and it is also my son’s best number too.

When you find out what he went through.

That he kept the net free as a boy.

Then you see why his version is also good.

There are a few other songs my son does

well. One of them is Syd Barrett’s

‘Dark Globe.’ He’s putting words in my mouth now,

because I don’t know much about Barrett,

but I know my son has mental health issues

much as Barrett did before my son.

I think my son with his guitar is better

than he thinks he is but listening

to Queen, for example, you recognise

my son has never got past a demo.

His mnemonic for the strings of the electric

was Even A Dick Gets Big Erections

which took the same amount of time

to conjure as it takes to say…

ii

Now it is a second day. What was I saying?

Where was my thread and my head?

I was talking about my eldest.

He says I am very considerate.

I pay him a lot of consideration

and amazingly to him do the same for all my children.

I don’t wish to expand at leisure though

on everything they do and think as well.

I think that this is my time, my chance.

If it makes any difference to you

the wind makes me angry.

If it makes any difference to you

no, I am not a hygiene Nazi.

I am a free spirit, an ageing hippy,

with organic values, who only makes

home-made food, no shop bought Bisto,

and my children love me for it too.

I used to think Finnish is a more poetic language

than English in its use of sound,

the way our national epic poem The Kalevala

is written in pure alliteration. But

my son’s word-science reveals

much that is poetic about English

and I came round to changing my mind.

The day has gone already, and

I was waiting for a man to take care

of the honeybee hive we found in the garden

but the man in question did not come.

I like to spend time in my garden,

used to write the gardening column

for the local magazine Round The Combe,

with the help of my son for grammar.

Already dusk’s enchanted kingdom

floats in the sky to the left of the fell.

Already a sense of plasma screen peace

descends from above. It is summer

and the sentient air has gone FM.

It might be time to put some music on.

My sons will be sad to see me gone.

I don’t like gravy, prefer Mayonnaise.

Gaze upon me, find my eyes

are feline like a cat’s, and grey blue.

I see the world as beautiful too.

I try to always see what is good not what is bad.

The plan I had with my children’s dad

was to buy a camper van and tour the world

but I got stuck and my husband died…

crossed the water to the other side.

We were going to do the hippy trail;

but it never happened, dreams can fail;

and yet I might go travelling still,

leave my sons at the foot of the fell.

I might meet someone, take a lover,

though promised my kids I will never

marry again, that once is enough.

Under the Plough my life has been tough.

I could paint a very black picture of

my life if I wanted to, but there’s not enough love

in the world so I desist from that,

make you at home in this habitat,

where there’s always a place for you

to sleep even though I am blue,

and lie back knitting to the songs on Spotify…

Now it is Night again, by the way;

it won’t stop my eldest drinking tea.

I gave up tea when Hannah was born.

I still like my coffee strong in the morning.

**

My eldest son, John, he is getting

in a pickle about Anon. They

whomsoever they may be, meaning

voices he hears in mental illness,

want him to be Anon but he

has no wish to do an Anon one,

so his therapist from CBT

has advised him to write and publish

a low-key book that no-one

will want to be Anonymous.

I lie back knitting to the sound of David Bowie

or else playing a game on my tablet.

John’s got the things he did with his life

which I mentioned a little of before,

and I would tend to believe he shouldn’t be Anon

with a CV like that because it’s like the philosopher

John Stuart Mill said: a progressive country

can quickly become backwards

if there is a decrease in Individuality.

Besides it’s against the law to make someone

Anon against their own wishes.

He stays up late typing while my music

blares around the house, past midnight

and into the wee hours, all three of us awake.

If he amends and re-publishes his seven year old text, knowing

this time it was about helping invent the net, getting

it all right they might make him go Anon with it.

As for his songs, the people

with whom he was in a band

don’t wish to be Anon either,

and neither does he.

He always comes to me

asking advice about poetry.

I won awards for my own poetry

at school in Finland but can’t say

I have read that much in English yet.

Still, I am a poetic soul,

whose eloquence lives on in my children,

e’ en if in John it is gone under Gondwanaland.

He has bought me a copy of The Lords And

The New You Know Who by Jim Morrison, breaking

me in slowly to that which I never knew.

He has been in my room, where I’m lonely

to ask for the music to be turned down

because it is getting past 2.

It could be that he wants to sleep.

This is not the end, my only friend.

This is just the start of my art.

The pulleys can’t even recall the plot of Riddley Walker.

As for what all this is about...

Yesterday, James got back from Millom

with the take-away and I was having

microwaved curry and he said to John:

“why don’t you do mum’s for her?”

So before John had opened his burger

and chips he sorted me out with microwaved

curry, chips, rice and naan which

I couldn’t finish, in terms of the carbs.

This evening James the chef made us

pasta in a prawn and cheese sauce

which I added Sweet Chilli Sauce to,

also having green spinach on the side.

I like my spinach with butter.

If you ask the guys of my best dishes,

they might range from a warm salad,

to roast chicken, to a Finnish starter

called gravadlax, to what I do with the barbecue, including

a potato salad my guests always love,

to pasta with chorizo and chicken sauce.

I also do a mean chicken curry,

amazing Swedish meatballs with mash,

and I think the best home-made soup.

I am inventive in the kitchen, never sticking

to petty rules, always trying

new things like when Jamie Oliver

puts orange juice on roast carrots.

iii

And on the third day, I sort out my son’s medication

into one of those dosette boxes

that look like multiplication tables.

Country and Western plays upstairs.

A lone motorbike passes on the road.

I find a whole, unopened box

of Co-codamol which is good

because I have a bad back.

Everything strains towards the post-apocalyptic

ending of The Lords And The

New You Know Who.

But there’s nothing planned,

no-one to meet us there beyond the end.

Cars pass by on the A595.

Nothing happens worth reporting.

The kettle boils.

To a present tense sharpened by flame

our attention returns.

It could be said that John

went beyond water’s boiling point.

The details of his life are interesting.

I would say he was a beautiful mind

and that they’ve given Nobel Prizes for less.

But when it came to helping invent

the net there were others that did more.

When it comes to being the witness,

you’re even less likely to win the Nobel

upon becoming witness than you were before.

You can’t win the Nobel for trying

the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark either.

As for the face of stars, if someone

started to dole out payments

they themselves would be tyrants.

We don’t need to go through

the rest of the story, but I think

he did well with the things he did,

never earning a penny, never turning

the situation to his own advantage.

Upon trying to realise his creativity,

and do good things, he fell ill,

as if he was up against a democratising,

balancing out mechanism that stopped him winning.

As James says, the Nobel

is not an accurate metric anyway.

Now it is a dullshine day.

Grey tattered clouds conceal the dome.

The garden has gone on to produce

many variations on the theme of green.

The yew tree guards the front gate,

a traditional Christian symbol.

Cars pass in a whoosh of noise.

Music blares from the Smart-speaker again.

I lie back playing a game on my tablet, neglecting

to read Jim Morrison’s book newly bought for me.

I am so much loved, that I will be sorely missed…

when I am gone, suddenly having to pay bills

is going to be the least of their concerns.

I’m not thinking of going anywhere yet.

It’s almost a tea-total house now b/t/w/.

When my husband died I turned to drink

but have stopped it now and recovered.

The sense of humour is returning.

I can make a right mess in the kitchen

if you really want to know, leave it

for someone else, usually John,

to come and clean up after me.

I enter the kitchen, hungry, clean up

after James and John, put some croissants

in the oven, complain about my recently-broken-

and-supposed-to-be-mending hand,

look for marmalade in the cupboard,

take out a plate, take some cheese

out of the fridge, for I intend to have

cheese and marmalade with a croissant,

eat some cherry tomatoes from the packet,

exclaim that they’re almost as good

as the ones we grow in the greenhouse,

take my croissants out of the oven,

(for they don’t take long in a Smart-

oven, for it warms up so quickly),

remark to the one remaking my mark

that I have half a thing for lemon marmalade.

I leave the kitchen with my croissant

and my eldest (who calls me ‘Ma’

and might do a creative writing M. A.)

then starts to copy my actions, putting

a croissant in the Smart oven, having

it with cheese and marmalade.

I suppose that like mine his was delicious too.

Now it is later… time does not pass but evaporate.

I like to recycle.

I like to be green.

I don’t take acid

but I am the queen.

Now it’s not just John’s but mine I’d say it’s a very spicy curry and I might’ve put a bit too much chilli in it.

SIR GALAHAD ANDCETERA

The Night is sad, the air is black,

nothing’s going to bring the good times back.

Still, I beseech thee O One -

what comportment would you deem fit?

The Night is black, the air a banner.

You can’t confute my love for Hannah.

But she is my sister, O One,

and it is thee whose affection is my remit…

When I die I am supposed to leave behind

something like the sheet where pictures grew

for my brother like my dad did for me.

The equation for the ratio between sunlight falling and Gravity pulling down on the sheet where pictures grew still eludes me but if it is c over G we are dealing with, I’d say it equates to

backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through…

L to the pregnant snorkel.

O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

The symbol [R] might still represent the stance, the large R, Romantic stance that Creativity in the synapse gulf is possible, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

If mother’s flower-press ending on cannabis

could be said to = a dialysis,

a love poem only hoping to impress

poor Flora still = a motor.

Rah the sun-god sleeps upstairs.

It might be a good telepathy-game that, but I don’t know whether I am doing this for Flora or for Rachel. For all, Flora was the nicest woman to gawp at, at school, and Rachel, still beautiful herself, the nicest to talk to.

And the redolent fume of the mating queen

from the green pages in the flesh

leads to a moonlit chamber…

If Flora was my brother’s ideal,

Rachel was mine, so it must be

for Flora that we are doing this.

I am but Sir Galahad anyway, still bleeding after my tron. My brother knows what’s gone on. He left two sheets in the barn. One of them, if I remember, contained a sunflower made of Badly Drawn Boy lyrics, slightly imperfectly quoted on purpose:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soleil all over you

It’s a nice song. We notice the sunshine is inside. That it is what is inside that counts. The next sheet contained what I call the new da Vinci circle:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity symbol

If I could quote my sister Hannah I would say the new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. For it suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.

There were burning candles on top of the box we used as a table, drawn on the underside of one of the pages, which was placed face down on the box with burning candles we use as a table.

I went down to the barn. I read the documents where they were left. On the Badly Drawn Boy one I was inveigled by the sunflower pattern. And yet on the <BEE> one I could not see James’s discrete system… I could see only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes containing the whole international language alphabet. One of the characters was

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through.]

So I left the document alone, thinking James had designed a whole alphabet in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. But when I returned to reread it – not in jealousy but admiration – the tabular arrangement was gone and the <BEE> document remained as initially designed. I left it alone again, and then, one day, when our father passed I went down to the barn again and found the first sheet, the Badly Drawn Boy one, had bloomed or grown pictures.

The pictures seem to depict the lyric to a song I wrote, called ‘The Ghosts Lament,’ going:

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun.

This is the dead land.

Crack a smile and curse the sun.

Still, back at the age of 15 or 16, when the song was written (in the Lakes) and performed (in London), the sheet was not my game. My game back then was the face of stars. I had attained it, yes, that is the word, with two friends up visiting from London town. I hear of late that I proved the face of stars with the first verse of the first song of the first gig, at 15 or 16, in Kentish Town and was beautiful when I sang. That was a different song, one called ‘Shallow Oceans.’ I could posit the set-list… the band were called Oedipus Wrecks… but instead I would prefer to just show you that first verse in question…

Oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with rain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost, the last thing a glass gene.

Here I would like to augment the shrunk-down teenage set list with something Oedipal at the end, something about her, Flora, whom it would seem I hugged in a boarding school corridor, failing to kiss her, falling for her enough to write a poem, in the style of Jim Morrison, but by now it is my brother James that knew her kiss.

It was for Flora that James contrasted the flower and the <BEE>.

I can’t seem to really think

every time I think of her anymore,

which might be because

my brother and I are close.

To be delivered from writing for Flora is actually a relief.

We still don’t know how whomsoever it was knew the lyric to ‘The Ghosts Lament’ or made the burns. But we take it that whomsoever knew the lyric and did the burns did it to unify us, so that we are all one.

You might need to hear the song to know the rest of the lyric that was used for the sheet, which you can on Bandcamp now. Or you can read the Oedipus Wrecks set-list in a volume called Yes You May.

I showed you the lyric to ‘The Ghosts Lament’ as far as the line “crack a smile and curse the sun.” Then, the first line of the chorus is “death awaits to fuck me.” Dr. Calculator Ptom loved it when it got to the chorus. There was something nuclear going on. “Give me bliss and give me kisses,” it continued. “Death awaits to save me,” it went. “The ghosts lament, the ghosts lament.”

Come on baby,

you know it’s easy,

don’t say maybe,

let’s go crazy.

The chorus was a step too far for the pictures. They never got as far as depicting the line “death awaits to fuck me,” but then again did coincide with my father’s passing.

There was something vivid, gorgeous and erotic to the depiction of the death of the sun, almost like it was seen from within the sun itself. It was almost like a musical orgasm was going on. But at the same time it was brutalist.

As for the one that proved the face. I think at the time it was necessary that I started everything off in that manner, but that the line about the ocean still belongs to the house – so there is an argument I should have to be Anon with that particular line.

The counter argument is that if you take that line away, it would mean I regretted meeting the face of stars. It would make the attainment of that vision a regrettable event.

I know that the rest of my band, whichever band that means, don’t wish to be Anon and nor do I.

Even though it is myself, I would say let the young visionary keep the line, especially considering he was making an effort to read Rimbaud at the time he wrote it, whom it seems says “the poet makes himself a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to attain the unknown.”

The line about the ocean could even be seen as a translation, into poetry too.

The argument for it being an Anon line is that the kids will want to climb the ladder. In which case I would prefer to leave it out altogether. It felt like the real me, as easy as leaves to a tree, when I wrote it.

Leaving it out would mean I need to redo the song from when I was 15, so that I can still be bonded with my mates and make it through school. I am 44 if you can believe it, and we still haven’t made it through school. This time it would be beneficial to know I helped invent the net at 7 – but we still don’t know much about that for certain because it was done with hidden parts of government.

THE MYSTIC VISIONARY

(For Robert)

The bond between a mother and her son

should be one of unconditional love,

not limited by language barriers,

different appellations for the light.

Under the moon, I love my mother

as I loved my father too, whom

it would seem would deem it jolly good,

the food we ate in Italy recently.

Orange is the sun when it sets there too and

then in the clouds Heaven’s bars

sell upturned jars of sunset, making

you claim that even plastic can grow.

The colour of a red toy car with my

fingerprints on it could then seem to be “detuned”

like a guitar string, and counting numbers

seem steps down into the earth...

I love the bones my mother grew

inside her warm womb long ago now,

before the trauma of birth separated us,

and I face the music, dreaming big.

Wow! I can’t believe the things I’ve

touched with my own fingers but my

fingers have crashed, I type, and my

mad, crashed fingers have connected.

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 second caught

on camera whose lens can distort.

PART THREE:

THE MYTHICAL MICKEY BLISS

THE GAME OF MONOPOLY

The game of Monopoly has hidden places.

Snakes and ladders isn’t for telepathy.

Dice changes hands to signify power.

The business of democracy is not as Marx said.

That’s why Crime And Punishment is my favourite book.

It’s a spiritual or germ X-ray that reveals

the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

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.

ERASING THE DEBT

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.

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 Calliope’s face 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 face 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 plane

to Finland. Now her luggage is going

round and round the carousel. She texts

us updates. We need more time.

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.

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.

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.

MICK

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 some salt n vinegar 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.

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.

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.

PART FOUR:

THE ALIGNMENT

THE ALIGNMENT

Proposition 1

What some call Order in the universe others call God, but they are one and the same.

Explanation

Having attested to the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe, only to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, I asked myself whether the alignment indicated Order or Chaos in the universe. The argument for Order was that the alignment only coincided with a rhythm change in the White House, so backed up that idea that the Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man, and the White House its child in terms of both philosophy and build. It is easy to see how one might consider the alignment indicating Order; but Chaos is a different matter. The argument for Chaos is that the alignment would happen with greater regularity if it were a clocktick universe, rather than simply “when we want it to happen.” Still, the correct endorsement turned out to be Order, for there are cosmological events that only happen once every few thousand years or so. So having determined that the alignment indicates Order in the Universe the next step was to recognise that in this case Order in the Universe is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 2

Metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.

Explanation

The scientific mode or even “tone of mind” would be to call it Order in the universe; and the religious mode or “tone of mind” would be to call it God – and as shown they can be synonymous with one another. Therefore metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet. Q. E. D.

*

Proposition 3

If God is synonymous with Order in the Universe, it follows that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

This view might be trendy at the moment, as scientists at C. E. R. N. hunt for the God Particle, which has been labelled a daft misnomer by others still who tend to believe that God is perfect and matter is error. The belief, though, that God is not extrinsic to matter dates back at least as far as Spinoza, for whom there was no substance that wasn’t part of God. The counter argument is that the alignment is not God itself but a mere example of a state of Order in the universe that is itself not visible and is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 4

If the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.

Explanation

We already know that by definition God is perfect and the alignment does not necessarily let us stare at the perfection that is God but merely signifies the Order in the whole universe at large that is synonymous with God. To stare at the alignment is not to be let down about the perfection of God, but God is more than the alignment itself.

*

Proposition 5

It is not the alignment itself but the Order in the universe which it indicates which is synonymous with God.

Explanation

Here we seem to be slightly tautological. I have been teasing this point out. At the moment of the alignment, which lasted for a good, few nights, there were other things going on in the world of simultaneity, synchronicity and syncretism and these were also connected into the same scope of Order as the alignment. God is the overall picture and the alignment an example by which we can measure the Order.

*

Proposition 6

It is good to get to the root of one’s own beliefs but you must understand the way it seems is that necessarily all belief-systems are woven in to this religious stance by the alignment, even atheism.

Explanation

In the alignment, we see that atheism and theism lose their polarities. The Order in the universe would be what an atheist makes of it, and even if that is all he believes in, as shown it is synonymous with God, and can be just the same as what a religious person would take from the event. An atheist and a theist can in all likelihood agree, and only agree, on the matter of our Plough alignment. The alignment factors all faiths into its happening, like the goal of syncretism, almost attesting to that notion that Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Rather than different religions connecting though, it is even more startling that religion and science agree, and religion and atheism agree in the event of the alignment.

*

Proposition 7

Because the alignment is about one-ness, it is possible to use it to undermine and undo presupposed binary oppositions in arguments.

Explanation

We have seen how science and religion can be a binary undone, also how even theism and atheism can be undone. This is propitiated by the basic principle that Order in the universe, which can be appreciated by science or atheism too, is synonymous with the idea of God when it comes to the alignment.

*

Proposition 8

If Order in the universe is synonymous with God, we are all one and our differences reconciled.

Explanation

If an atheistic scientist recognises Order in the universe in the event of the alignment, and a Deist believes the alignment a manifestation of God’s work, then they essentially agree on the same thing if it is true that order in the universe is synonymous with God, and are but calling the same thing by two different names.

*

Proposition 9

If the alignment is not God itself but just an example of Order in the universe which is synonymous with God, it may not be the case that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

If the alignment were God manifested, it would be a God of atoms, stars, particles et al, but seeing as the alignment is indicative of a sense of Order in the Universe that stretches beyond the alignment itself, and which we are saying is synonymous with God, God might be the underlying, organisational principle and still retain exemption from the condition of matter.

*

Proposition 10

That Order in the universe and God are two different names for the same thing creates common ground between science and religion, also atheism and religion.

Explanation

This point reiterates previous points. It shows that in practice what science may call Order in the universe, religion may call God, and despite their seeming to not agree, they could be one and the same thing, under different appellations.

*

Proposition 11

It may be magnetism that underlies the variability of belief when it comes to the matter of the alignment.

Explanation

Maybe, we are all but iron filings firked to the moon in the same way and our differences are differences created by language being stubborn and awkward. When I say we all agree that the alignment is the alignment, it makes my home the magnetic, telluric and gravitational foot. It endorses the yellow, McDonalds ‘M’ in the word “them” in the advert. It could be that magnetism unites us where words keep us separated, and the event of the alignment could be an essentially magnetic event in and of itself on a scientific level. So it is that we could be all stardust, all helplessly and involuntarily charged in a magnetic way. Different fields of language, to use David Morley’s phrase, could also be underlined by a common principle when it comes to magnetism. The magnetism of the stars, the magnetism of the oldest rock, could be the same magnetism, and people part of it too.

*

Proposition 12

The alignment and its inherent magnetism has the ability to turn a staunch atheist into an agnostic.

Explanation

It barely needs explaining that the observation of the alignment is so sublime, even terrifying, that it truly becomes a good use of the word “awesome” and has the power to change the polarity or the charge of an atheist into something like an agnostic or even more. Even an atheist who saw it would remark at the stunning sublimity of it, and the coincidence with the rhythm change in the White House too; and it might suddenly strike the atheist that God might really exist after all, because the atheist would glimpse a sense of Order in the universe that he had previously never considered, it being bigger than one man’s brain. The atheist may have empirical science behind him not believing in a man in the clouds, but the same empiricism would lend the atheist towards a more religious or at least agnostic stance if with his own eyes he perceived the Plough alignment.

*

Proposition 13

It does not diminish God to have him equate to Order in the universe, nor muddy up and make dogmatic religion of science to have Order in the universe equate to God.

Explanation

To mention Order in the Universe might make a religious person contemplate nothing but the cold, black, vacuity of space, which is seen as Godless in science, and to mention God to a scientist might have stigma for the scientist too, but truly in the alignment I can see nothing other than the point of Order in the universe becoming synonymous with God. It does not diminish God to call him Order in the Universe for this backdates to the Bible and is not a new, scientific notion at loggerheads with religion but old. Traditionally God created the world from chaos; and therefore my documenting the alignment takes on the role of rewriting Genesis to a partial extent. Still, I can see how a top scientist, wishing to find something out would be frustrated if God was the only answer and he was not allowed to go any further, ask any further questions.

*

Proposition 14

The universe may just be a very elegant place.

Explanation

The universe may be elegant but whether it is designed by God or not we do not know. There are said to be three arguments for God in philosophy: the ontological, the teleological and the cosmological. My argument is that at some level the Order in the Universe which an atheistic scientist believes in is synonymous with God, the same thing but seen through different eyes, expressed with a different name. The scientist and the theist could be working on the same problem, onto the same thing, albeit in different disguises, disguises which are superficial, while underlying it all we find the same magnetism, which also ties in with the same instinct on a human level.

*

Proposition 15

The alignment doesn’t prove God but it does prove Order in the universe.

Explanation

The alignment doesn’t make the Bible stories literal. It doesn’t mean we have captured a square of blue sky and examined it for evidence of God and found it. To those that don’t naturally believe in God it only proves Order in the mechanical operation of the Universe in which man finds himself. It proves also that the sociological and the astrological realms are connected. To some though that is enough for a redefinition of what the word “God” means or should mean. It means, as stated, that there is an Order in the universe that is beyond our control – for surely the alignment was not down to human manipulation of the stars – and that the Order is elegant, and the universe therefore benign. These things that are proven are as stated enough for a God, a redefinition of God, for me, as a personal belief.

*

Proposition 16

If the alignment recurred tomorrow night, without anything significant to coincide with in the socio-political sphere, this argument would not be invalid.

Explanation

This is because what has happened has happened and we cannot change the facts. It may make me look a bit ridiculous if only now I am bringing this paper together and the next day the alignment recurs for nothing special, no good reason, but I would still say Order in the universe is the atheist’s God, and a scientific description – or even equivalent – of a theist’s divinity. It would also surprise me if the alignment did recur tomorrow. But I have become convinced that what astro-physics labels Order in the universe and what Christianity calls the Divine Being represents a false dichotomy. That is the point.

*

Proposition 17

After a while of talking about the alignment directly, one starts to wonder if the whole conversation should be hidden or else abandoned.

Explanation

It seems like wearing clothes out of the shame of one’s body being naked; but in the case of the alignment and talking about it, it is the shame associated with the Sin of Consciousness. So we reach a point where the prelapsarian event of writing, which is freedom, becomes changed. To liken this change of mood and tone of mind to the Fall of Man is another step.

*

Proposition 18

Speaking of the alignment directly might offend like sacrilege or blasphemy.

Explanation

Indeed, this consolidates the sense of the divine nature of this event, this theophany, where it is not just about awe but possibly law too. If it is rude to stare, I was rude. If it is blasphemous or sacrilegious I was that. If God cannot be seen with the naked eye, the work of God can still be seen with the naked eye. Unless that is you deem it the work of, say, cosmic silence, in which case I would reiterate my point about the false dichotomy between God and the idea of Order in the universe.

*

Proposition 19

The alignment is an object of worship that transcends difference and also underlies the variability of religious beliefs.

Explanation

To see the alignment is to be taken in by a religious event. The religion itself, as in what religion you are, does not matter. The alignment makes sense whatever religion you are, whatever colour or creed. It is so sacred that some people, from a distance, without seeing it, hide it under the name “white eyebrow.” It is not inconceivable that it is the main focal point of an international religion all the way round the world. A Rastafarian and a Jew and a Christian could all be equally awe-struck by the alignment, which is almost like saying we are equal in the eyes of God, and almost like the idea that these different faiths share a common perception of God, which I have argued is the same as the idea of Order in the universe.

*

Proposition 20

The alignment is evidence that Nature is the true architecture of State.

Explanation

Indeed, I was just thinking about Wordsworth who sought passage to the divine through the medium of Mother Nature, when I stumbled on this old aphorism, this axiomatic truth. It is the connection between the astrological event of the alignment and the socio-political sphere that makes this axiom ring true to me. Still, it feels right-wing compared with the exploration of the Future State, and maybe therein you have the essential difference between the Right and the Left.

*

Proposition 21

Even though the alignment is only really visible from this private property, we can’t affect it to happen.

Explanation

Indeed its being affected to happen is something beyond my knowledge as well as control. If there is manipulation, I cannot tell who by or where. I cannot tell if the alignment arrives top-down from the State or bottom-up from the farmers who plough the land. It being the Plough alignment, one would presume it might be the farmers… farming was the most noble profession unto the Ancient Greeks. Wordsworth too, who sought the thoughts of the highest man in the words of the common man, thought that the working class, the peasant class, had stronger moral fibre than the higher classes. The alignment also includes the plight of the blacks… I was once thanked for what I did for the blacks, even though I did little except host the alignment. My friends came up from the south after quite a few nights of it and attested to it; then we went off on a camping trip in the Lakes and that was the last I saw of the alignment. What would’ve happened had we walked up Black Combe instead of the camping trip I do not know. And ultimately, when it aligns, who else can you thank but God?

*

Proposition 22

God might exist on a mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

Explanation

I confess I read this online somewhere but have long since been interested in the idea that answers to the divine will arrive in maths. My father read Philosophy at the LSE in the 1960’s and went there seeking answers to the divine but found instead the philosophy of science. I have looked into the idea of a number sequence that leads to Heaven in my own writing. Ascending the fell I consider that Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see – for I would seek to know if I have taken more steps up the fell than any other – and reason that I will never find out. But as for the proposition, it is but one of many concepts of God. Aristotle’s God was “thought thinking on itself.” For others God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. For others God is used to fill holes in arguments. For others God is not to worship in blind, dogmatic slumber but to behead, dethrone and become. For others God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. To others we don’t deserve a God, are but monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers. And yet to those who speak against God in such ways, I ask what do you make of the alignment then? It doesn’t strike me as random-ness and chance.

*

Proposition 23

One is free to dismiss anything I say about the alignment because one has the Right to Freedom of Religious Belief.

Explanation

It scarcely needs me saying that I am guessing with all this, for academia proceeds by guesswork. It is not intended as a dogmatic creed. It is not intended to be stamped on the hearts and minds of humanity. Should you disagree with my thinking on my feet in such a way you are free to form your own opinions. For example one of our nearest neighbours lives at Fell Brow which is further up the fell and looks out from it rather than up at it, and the person from Fell Brow dismisses the validity of the alignment because it can’t be seen to come together from his house. I can only report from the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot, where the Plough alignment is uniquely viable and visible. You find the footpath up the fell begins here on our land, in the Combe field which is a museum of a field, retaining a furrowed, rippled look from old-fashioned ploughing technology of agrarian golden ages of yore. It is in that field where the alignment really works best in terms of visibility.

*

Proposition 24

You cannot separate a religion from its indigenous landscape.

Explanation

Indeed one of my favourite novels from when I was growing up, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, seems to posit a religion in a different place from where it arose, and the difficulties inherent in that. Clearly though, what they mean when they say you cannot remove a religion from its indigenous landscape comes clear to you at the alignment. The alignment makes it all make sense, the indigenous wisdom of the saying. It’s the first time you see the landscape in a religious light. It connects the stars and the farm land.

*

Proposition 25

At the alignment the main event was in the White House.

Explanation

My father didn’t even acknowledge the alignment, preferring to stay indoors and watch the inaugural speech of Mr. Obama whom they called “the poet” on telly. For dad that was the main event and anything in the cosmicomic sphere was trivial compared with it. I remember in 1997 when we still had a second house in London, he told me there was probably going to be a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, and he was right. He would’ve said the poet’s democratic election was the main event and not the Plough alignment. Still there were people I knew among my southern friends, musicians mainly, that foresaw the stars coming into alignment before they foresaw the democratic election of the poet. I suppose as momentum gathered they became one and the same goal. I suppose the alignment showed that America is still the policeman of the world, but derives its Enlightenment values from Britain.

*

Proposition 26

There is a seer’s trance associated with the oldest fell.

Explanation

The foothill of Black Combe, Sea Ness, was once upon a time, according to a white witch who proof-read for Norman Nicholson, named Seer Ness after a seer and his trance. Someone said the seer was St. Patrick but it hasn’t been confirmed. I am now known as a seer by the locals… I envisioned the net and was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures too as a boy, attained the face of stars in adolescence, foresaw the future on many fronts in 2000, including forewarning of September 11th, attested to the white eyebrow in 2008 and even more recently attained visual radio in the perceptual kingdom of the individual. What place there is for a visionary in modern society is not known, in terms of whether a visionary is still needed or not, only that you shouldn’t expect to be paid for your visionary activity. It might be the case that my geographical position is what accounts for a history of visionary activity, such as the idea that September 11th had to go through me as a schoolboy because I live in the house where the Plough alignment is uniquely viable.

*

Proposition 27

The Plough can come back to confirm the geometry and the dimensions without actually aligning.

Explanation

Indeed, the Plough has been back to confirm the geometry and dimensions, but hovered above the socket, without actually being plugged in. I captured it also on my new Smartphone, in a state of partial but not complete alignment. We can do this again, and it likely will happen again but whether or not it will be in my lifetime I do not know. There may need to be a great event in the socio-political sphere. It may need to be a coincidence, in the truest sense of two incidents coinciding. You notice last time it coincided with an American political event… it is not certain whether or not it can coincide with an English political event. So far it has only been a partial alignment for various events in England.

*

Proposition 28

Out of many things, the alignment is said to be the only one that augurs well for good sanity.

Explanation

This one isn’t my own proposition, but is the comment of Mr. Mark Velarde to a long paragraph I sent him containing some information about what I had been through. I hesitate to replicate it herein because I might wish to employ encryption, delight in a wilful opacity. Still, it warrants noting that the Plough alignment does augur well for good sanity, unlike, say, much of the other things I got up to and went through in my life. If I told you what they were it might cause problems.

*

Proposition 29

The universe is a very mysterious place.

Explanation

Indeed when my old band came up to attest to the alignment and we spoke of God in the camper van, I mentioned that “mystery will remain a constant.” I privilege uncertainty, believe the beauty of uncertainties to be the only Absolute, believe that there is indeterminacy at the core of all things, believe that what science calls indeterminacy art calls Undecidability, that they are the same thing just one for the world of matter the other the subjective realm, believe that Keats was right with his utterance on Negative Capability, believe that to end on a note of radical incertitude is to end in the dark which is nourishing for the soul. In short Uncertainty prevails. But the alignment points towards answers because it points towards God’s benevolence, if you believe in God. I for one know that I don’t know, but have taken to reconciling dichotomous entities via the alignment.

*

Proposition 30

What gets you most about the alignment is the silence.

Explanation

Indeed it is very silent for something so magnificent and of such immensity. The whole universe is the same. There is more sound in me walking round the kitchen in a circle than in the black vacuity of space, because no sound travels in a vacuum. So the great, hulking, mammoth universe is surprisingly quiet when it falls at your feet. As quiet as a gilly flower curtseying like a delicate ballerina. So it is false to then call the alignment a chord, like a secret chord Y, because it is silent and makes no sound.

*

Proposition 31

Every planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means “beautiful face.”

Explanation

Now that we are on to cosmic blues it bears noting that Every planet has its own colour and also that Calliope means “beautiful face” in Ancient Greek. These would be my two, mangled hands if I were playing the piano up in the Alps. It’s better than saying “Every atom ate our eyes” which is simply not true. The latter came from taking too much LSD with Paul at the solar eclipse, and was in fact written during the eclipse itself. There’s also “Blessed is peace as blessed is ‘FUCK!’” which comes from a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer’ and again turns the aural into the visual it being about concealing the face of stars. These were my former mangled hands, and were supposed to be the rudimentary music theory for the sheet where pictures grew but to say “Every planet has its own colour” and “‘Calliope’ means “beautiful face” in Greek,” is better because truthful. The job of philosophy is all about finding out the truth after all.

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Proposition 32

The alignment is not a vision as such.

Explanation

It could conceivably and potentially at least be described as a theophany which is an epiphany that reveals the Lord; but it is not a vision. To call it a vision would be to dismiss it to being transient, or privileged, whereas it was proven all you needed to do was stand in the garden here at the foot of the fell to be able to see it; and no it was not a vagary of perception, nor a vision in any sense of the word except that Martin Luther King sense of “I have a dream,” and that dream coming true.

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Proposition 33

Vision is demarcated from mere wild hallucination by it containing a revelation of the divine.

Explanation

I have written at greater length about this elsewhere and so needn’t repeat myself, only note that this proposition means vision has been indoctrinated by the Church, who only brand Nature as evil.

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Proposition 34

Apart from the alignment this is nowhere.

Explanation

There is no neighbourhood; there are no amenities; there is nowhere to go if you don’t have a car. My father described this place as a monastic retreat and a spiritual tonic, a good place to come to get a piece of writing done. He said we were out of sight out of mind to the powers that be. Equidistant we’ve got Sellafield up the coast and the nuclear submarine factory down the coast but in-between there’s nothing for miles. Even if I could work, which I can’t on account of Stress being the arch-enemy of mental illness, there is no job for miles. Here, you are really stuck without a car. You have to gain freedom from accepting limitation, that freedom that the visionary still knows when in his cell.

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Proposition 35

There’s no such thing as “almost infinite.”

Explanation

This proposition could be regarded as a counter to those that say “there is no immutable truth.” Poets often think history is malleable, selfhood mythology, all writing fiction, and that there is no immutable truth. But Bertrand Russell points out in History of Western Philosophy that a philosopher may regard truth as being timeless and eternal, fixed and static, or at least believe in a type of truth that is so. The idea that there’s no such thing as almost infinite seems to my meagre mind to exemplify that philosophic truth, seems evidence that some truth is immutable. But I might be wrong.

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Proposition 36

It may mean mayhem to consider that it’s all contained in the word for “mother.”

Explanation

Well, Henry Miller talks of the “ovarian shopping trolley.” I would take this to mean the Plough. But I don’t remember anything else from the Miller. The alignment is exquisite for something as commonplace as the word for “mother.”

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Proposition 37

It’s also what Leonard Cohen means when he says “I thought you knew where all the elephants lie down.”

Explanation

Another cultural reference, this time the sung poetry of Leonard Cohen. I quoted the line to my gf once upon a time whom it seems wanted to meet up in dreams. Years later, after we had split, she came round. By this stage we both knew – that “unreal world” as she called it, the other side of the gate that leads to the fell, is the place where all the elephants lie down.

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Proposition 38

The alignment was also foreshadowed by a Gomez album called Abandoned Shopping Trolley.

Explanation

Indeed, at the event itself, when my old band fell up north in a camper van and first filed out into the northern night, and I said there’s something you’ve got to see, I advertised the Plough as “the abandoned shopping trolley from the Gomez album of that name.” It was just like normal speech, there were no airs and graces, there was no great Unified Theory of Everything following on for any of us – but that may not be final.

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Proposition 39

I have said it before but the working equation for the alignment might be the way the qwerty keyboard ends on M.

Explanation

There would thus be the gravitational pull of the oldest fell written into the digital network of computing. The magnetism of the alignment would be inherent in the way we now write at a screen. What I mean is when it comes to the alignment, the occasion IS the equation.

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Proposition 40

The alignment can reveal to you that you don’t know your own belief system yet.

Explanation

Indeed, I wasn’t sure what I believed in. In the conversation in the camper van about God the rest of the band seemed convinced one way or the other but I seemed to endorse a third party, saying (as stated) that mystery will remain a constant. Please see Proposition 29 for more on that.

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Proposition 41

The face of stars was a vision but the alignment not.

Explanation

The face of stars was a true vision for being observable by three gathered in the name as Jesus said but was also propitiated by Rimbaudian derangement, for Rimbaud said “the poet makes himself a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to attain the unknown” – and we three gathered in the name had shared a spliff of pollen before the face. It was therefore true vision and derangement at the same time. The Plough meanwhile was more than a vision even though it did arguably at least contain divinity, and it was not born of the derangement of the senses to attain the unknown (as far as I know).

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Proposition 42

As Blake said the nature of visionary fancy is very little understood.

Explanation

As stated in Proposition 33, vision is traditionally demarcated from mere hallucination by containing a revelation of the divine. Blake was said to be a true visionary for breakfasting with angels and seeing the sun as Holy. Allen Ginsberg was visited by the ghost of Blake who taught Ginsberg the notes to the Songs of Innocence And Experience, and was deemed insane for it because there was no divinity. With Rimbaud people go both ways – some think him a visionary for being able to look at a factory and see a mosque, others think him all about mere wild hallucination. If the alignment was not a vision, nor wild hallucination born of derangement, it must be something else.

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Proposition 43

With the Plough alignment the object of vision is perfect in geometry and proportion.

Explanation

Indeed it could be said to be “to the inch.” It therefore points to answers. It says the science works. It justifies a belief in progress even if it is the same milestone over and again. You could say it was an angel in its divine proportions. You could say it is the sum of all difference connected. You could say it shows life is mystery more than muddle. You could say the big mystery is whether or not the shapes involved – the oldest fell, glaciated and striated over thousands of years – and the Plough – are so exactly fitting out of chance or design. And to be honest the universe looks so much like it has been designed intelligently with the alignment that I almost forgive my father for bringing us up to believe in God.

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Proposition 44

In the camper van at the alignment, a song was needed.

Explanation

And indeed it didn’t really matter what song or rather whose song. I played a song by the songwriter Will Fenn called ‘Found Out’ which is a number I really like. He was a big influence on my song writing at one point when I was younger, and a friend too. I thought I should play the best song I could play and as well as I could do it too. I think the guys in the band were impressed by the Will Fenn number… even though it was a cover. I think they thought the alignment terrifying and the song I played an absolute classic albeit one not related in any way to the subject at hand, be it astrologically or socio-politically.

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Proposition 45

There is no-one at hand to start monetising the alignment.

Explanation

The only money I ever received at the time of the alignment was when I took the band down to the Miners Arms and found a five pound note on the floor. It wasn’t payment as such but I kept it and bought myself a shot of whisky. Had it not been for that fiver I wouldn’t have had any money when the band came up.

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Proposition 46

The alignment might spell continued freedom and equality for the blacks.

Explanation

Writing is freedom, as Martin Amis said, and freedom man’s main, psychic thread dating back to his nomadic days when he was tall, lithe and muscular. If I can’t find the freedom to write in England it is hopeless. Indeed, the alignment may have enshrined continued liberty and equality for the blacks. It may have been about the black diaspora. I’m white and I still felt the same. And I contemplate now whether or not I felt I was being shamed, when I clocked on to it first, but I don’t think I was. It was mechanistic in the divine order of things rather than indicating that one should feel ashamed. It represented Order in the great, star-crossed clock of the world. When the stars come into alignment it should be peace on earth. It should affect everyone. And to be fair it coincided with the great triumph of the human spirit that was the first, black President of America. Morrissey had a song in his solo career about how he couldn’t respect America until it had provided a President that was gay, black or female – and his wish was granted. Unto some, it really was the case that America was a right-wing nightmare, a white, protestant maelstrom, a hegemonic zone. The election of Mr. Obama was a dream come true that had been on the cards for generations – and as soon as he came in, it was all about his policies, nothing else. He was in short to be judged fairly, according to the same criteria as the rest. And what a charismatic leader he was, his catchphrase being “yes we can.” I suppose the alignment coincided because it was like resetting the clock.

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Proposition 47

The fell’s striated way by daytime dips in the middle like dad’s baggy hammock from Afghanistan.

Explanation

The hammock in question is rusty brown like the hue of the fell in autumn and winter time. It dips in the middle. Infinity does this too – it dips in the middle where prayers are said. Sometimes I look at the fell, though, and just think “hammock.” This was particularly the case before the alignment. I am reminded now that walking on the sun there are no ups, downs, lefts or rights. Also that musical notation only reads left to right and there may be something more holistic to dream of. That sometimes in Nature I see invisible sheet music stream from right to left. But these are scattershot-logical perceptions as part of a brain-storm.

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Proposition 48

Sticking to the alignment might be as near to a Unified Field Theory as an amateur like myself can get.

Explanation

It may seem like a narrow focus but only through the system is the system conquered. To be truthful, though, I know all too little little about how far Einstein got towards his lifetime goal of the Unified Field Theory. Still, there was a time when I recalibrated my own goal for that same end. It’s a long story that I might cut short. In short, a desire to contribute to the Unified Field Theory was engendered by life events not education. To start with, my father, as it now transpires, might’ve been sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison. At seven I am said to have helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell in order to give it a chance to grow all round the world, it was me that wrote it. At eight I made not one but two very strange Naturalistic Observations as witness. By then I had also gone wrong with the maths of the new colour, which by eleven left a tiny mark. At fifteen I attained the face of stars which might’ve been scripted in the Bible. At eighteen, in 2000, I forewarned of September 11th and also wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. In 2000 I also prophesied the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in like I were Democritus himself and yet said the alignment, to celebrate a rhythm change in the White House, could be in India as opposed to my own back garden! The idea I had for a book was called The Scientific Papers and classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” The Towers fell in my Gap Year 2001. Some friends and I started to record an album on binaural earphones which I lately gather were even mine own idea to invent. At some point I attended Warwick University and found my tutor had just brought out The Scientific Papers. It was classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” He had the extra word “writing.” So I had to recalibrate my goal and thought about The Unified Field Theory as in Einstein’s unobtained ambition and also defaced bank notes which would be more Rage Against The Machine. After some interesting work on Instant Travel, also on Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons, I left Warwick with no degree, finished off the album we recorded on earphones, saying I would “plug my senses in the mains,” attended another University in Lancaster, and then we had the alignment. The alignment was itself an item in a chain that continued after the alignment. I think in Order I hosted the alignment, then got my desired First despite mental illness in the end, doing the defaced bank note thing, then spotted my name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen in an experiment into post-humanism, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and discovered the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew. Even after the sheet things continued for I also falsified the Nirvana barcode and attained visual radio broadcasting dreams. Then it was time to bring out books. I brought many out but didn’t yet win with them. And now here I am, supposed to be focussing only on the alignment!

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Proposition 49

It is not certain whether or not the alignment warps and bends the fabric of spacetime.

Explanation

I might be wrong about this, because memory is unreliable, but I remember saying to Tommo from the band I shouldn’t have a problem getting a job now that I’ve got my First Class Honours degree; and I remember that being at the Plough alignment; and I didn’t get my First until 2009; but the alignment in history happened with the democratic election of Mr. Obama in 2008. As I say I may have misremembered something there or else may be sitting on evidence that the closer you get to the alignment, the more time breaks down. It may have been the case that my First was already a dead certainty by 2008 when the band came up. Or it may be that I mentioned to Tommo that I wouldn’t have trouble getting a job at a different, later occasion, after 2009. Still, I have no way of knowing if the gravity of the alignment warps and bends the fabric of spacetime.

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Proposition 50

The encrypted node in my seven year old book is that if the Gravity between the earth and the moon is instant and therefore enough to break light speed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah – but this is wrong.

Explanation

Indeed, it is wrong because Gravity has no motion therefore cannot be said to travel faster than the speed of light. Gravity, according to Einstein, simply warps and bends the fabric of spacetime. Only things with no mass can travel at light speed. These days you only need to watch a Youtube video on the topic to pick up this amount of information.

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Proposition 51

In poetry they say there is nothing so dead as an important thing; and the alignment is important; but in philosophy it may be the case that it can be treated.

Explanation

Indeed, philosophy treats a subject, or even object, and the alignment comes into focus now as that. It seems that Man is winning with the great cause when it comes to the alignment. It seems the great song of Man is being sung. It seems a great triumph of the human spirit. In poetry something as Symbolic would be dead. Poetry finds itself in nuances, contingencies and inklings not important things. It is a guess but I would say philosophy is the correct endorsement for the alignment. So it seemed when the band fell north – we all got philosophising in the camper van, and God was the topic. I remember everyone apart from me having some security over their own opinions, whereas I tended to the third party of agnosticism. The alignment is big, in literal scale and socio-political significance, and the questions it makes us ask are big questions too: questions of whether God exists or not; questions as to the intelligent design of the universe; questions about chance and fate; about random-ness or determinism. I was at the time a practising poet and left the alignment more or less alone in my work, unless it was a prose paragraph, and was wise to do so too. It’s just too big to fit into a poem. If my life were a game of Tetris, the pieces would all be too big for the screen and the alignment especially so. It is public and political but only from a private residence and everywhere else too at the same time. The Plough also aligned with the oldest fell in London, in Paris, in Rome – and still only from our home.

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Proposition 52

The tail end of the encrypted node, that a clock is only as fast as a cheetah, still feels right in an unfalsifiable sense.

Explanation

Science and art have different sensibilities when it comes to truth. In science truth is to be falsified, but through falsifiability nothing is 100%, only 99% at best, only the best theory at the time. In poetry there is truth-to-itself through which anything can be 100% if well-made enough. Poetic truth is like the truth of the individual, constituted of its own inner nature. A poem could say “Barnes has scored a chicken” and get away with it being 100% true but in science it would never be 100%. That a clock is only as fast as a cheetah feels right in the unfalsifiable sense to me. You could even try and encrypt it in musical truth with no words on a drum kit!

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Proposition 53

Providing what we provide here is no different from a worker in a tea field in Malaysia.

Explanation

We tend to the house and garden. We don’t get paid, we pay the bills as per every other household. I myself can count doing the washing up as one of my daily tasks. Others that drive have to do the shopping. My brother and I are on Benefits, and my mum on a State pension, so we are not very wealthy though my mother owns the house out-right and it is quite a valuable property. Three times mum had it valued at over £800, 000 recently. We don’t expect to be paid for looking after it. We provide a Function. And it strikes me while looking at a photo of a tea-field in Malaysia that a worker there doesn’t expect to be a rich and famous rock star, just quietly gets on with his work. Then it strikes me that it is the same here, that we are on a level, that there is kinship between us here and that worker in that Malaysian tea field.

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Proposition 54

The value of this house should include the Bigger Picture.

Explanation

My father said this, not I, and it’s funny that he did because he was taught by Karl Popper at the LSE, who didn’t believe in any “Bigger Picture” towards which an argument tends. Popper’s epistemological methodology was P1 to TT to EE to P2, meaning Problem One to Tentative Theory to Error Elimination to Problem Two, and he was diametrically opposed to logical positivism for whom even the circular argument trends forwards. Popper saw no Bigger Picture towards which things trend. My father cited his influence and yet believed “the value of our house should include the Bigger Picture.” An estate agent will not factor the alignment into the valuation of the house, simply treat it like other houses. My father thought living here his children should be aristocrats.

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Proposition 55

To focus on one subject or object is therapeutic.

Explanation

There is something purgatorial going on. I can talk to you about, say, the maths of the new colour, or the falsification of the Nirvana barcode, or many other things, but to focus on just the alignment promises a document that is neatly sealed, a tidy piece of scholarship. It trains the mind to focus on one thing. There have been distractions, but the idea is now to get the job done. This is not a chore, but is slow progress; and something therapeutic is going on with regards to the repetition of the theme.

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Proposition 56

Order is happiness.

Explanation

Again it was my father that said this… and does it follow that Dionysus, the Greek God of Chaos, equates to sadness? No it does not, but it doesn’t mean there is no truth in what my father said. He had a file for almost everything in life. He got up with the sun even in his illness. Maybe it follows more rationally that mess equates to Pain. For sadness may be the musical key of intelligence. And yes I think disorder leads to pain. This may have been prevalent in my narrative, always looking to tie things up neatly, always subject to a Craving for Order that is a natural part of anyone. I would say that Order is happiness could be the most prevailing theme of all of this writing about the alignment, and it is there in my word choice as well as evident in my subject matter, namely the alignment itself.

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Proposition 57

After all that, words are insufficient for dealing with the alignment.

Explanation

The natural beauty of the Lakes in general seems impervious to effusive verbiage, fanciful magniloquence, fastidious loquacity, to words in general. The alignment in particular is jaw-dropping and heart-stopping, utterly awesome, sublime, preternatural, and thus does not fit into words. If I were in a National Park in Chile, though, I would be inspired by the surroundings and try to incorporate that in my poetry. So I don’t see anything wrong with trying to write about the alignment of the Plough and oldest fell in the Lake District. It’s description that fails, description that is not enough. It is the role of the writer to obviate not titivate.

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Proposition 58

On the first night of the alignment, other people elsewhere also saw the Plough.

Explanation

And their seeing the Plough might’ve been in relation to something else again, like a chimney or a different hillside, a spikier peak perhaps. This does not invalidate the alignment if it is true. The argument that is growing is that the alignment proves there is Order in the universe, that the universe is elegant, as if the product of intelligent design. If there are other places where alignment-like things happen, I would not be surprised. What one starts to wonder is whether or not they knew about the alignment in the Ancient World, when things like Stone Henge and also the Pyramids were being built.

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Proposition 59

Even the fell is mutable on a long enough timeline.

Explanation

Everything is, even the fell. Even though it is the oldest fell, and was subject to glaciation before the newer, punk upstart peaks came about, it will not last forever, so even the alignment is not eternally present. Eternity is Now and Now and Now, and before the alignment Eternity can be observed, but the fact of the alignment, the logistics of it working, will not last forever.

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Proposition 60

Here, the night sky only seems to turn on axis unobserved.

Explanation

Indeed, the earth spins in circles round the sun, but when it came to the alignment it was fixed in place for as long as you observed it. Taking an interest in the sky again I later found that the constellations in general only seemed to have moved when I was no longer observing the sky. I would have to come back inside to the kitchen, wait a while and go back out if I wanted to see them change. I don’t know why this is but the alignment also was held in place with fixity for several successive nights, and every time you went out into the garden at night time it would be there.

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Proposition 61

The alignment must’ve been like taking 100 LSD tabs for breakfast to those that had never been taken into a visionary world before.

Explanation

The rest of my band, they had never seen things before, the face of stars for example, or made weird Naturalistic Observations in boyhood, and must’ve therefore perceived the alignment as like taking 100 LSD tabs for breakfast. Indeed, I heard someone say something like that when we later went to the Secret Garden Party (a festival). It was also like “attaining television,” but so was the face of stars before it, if I am not wrong. The face of stars is not a regular constellation, only a visionary access, but the alignment involves a known constellation and it seems more ancient than the face. It is no less impressive than the face, and in fact maybe even more so. It reveals that the universe works, that the world has secrets, that everything is in Order. Rather than the metaphor of LSD I would prefer to consider 100 ecstasy pills but it would be a fatal dose. Ecstasy is more about heart-magnetism than being psychoactive. Yes, I think the alignment could be unpacked in terms of Ecstasy rather than LSD. Sometimes ecstasy can make you feel like your mouth is full of water, cold, heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it all spills on the floor.

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Proposition 62

The alignment was dead as Valley End Services.

Explanation

That’s the garage at the bottom of the valley, where we would sneak off to in order to buy cigarettes when we were young. It’s dead and has been dead for years – and yes as my mother said the alignment looked as dead as that dead garage too. Here I’d like to reiterate that there’s nothing so dead as an important thing. One of the two local pubs (the John Bull) where they had Jimi Hendrix on the jukebox and a good pool table was swift to follow the dead garage. Then the local village shop and Post Office closed down. The only hope we have left is the new cafe down the beach.

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Proposition 63

With love in it the universe is at least a luminous corpse.

Explanation

There’s a discussion in Nabokov’s novel Pnin about whether or not the universe is a corpse and if so whether or not it is at least a luminous corpse. One would hope that with love in it it is at least a luminous corpse; that the universe is not in a hearse; that the universe-hearse is not in your soul-hole whole.

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Proposition 64

The alignment could still be a manifestation of God’s perfection.

Explanation

Yes, and it could be a manifestation of God’s perfection of which there are others. But what others? Maybe even a bar of light on the table is one. And the alignment seems to be the most archetypal, sublime and symbolic of all manifestations of God’s perfection because of the sheer scale. It is not just the scale but the fitting-into-place-ness. I was going to say it is absurd but that is not the right word, nor uncanny. The sheer logic of it is sublime. The logic of the alignment is beyond Man’s capacity to dream up and indicates a God and intelligent design. It indicates, at least that there is more to the universe than we understand; and when I say intelligent design that is not just in terms of Creation but in terms of God having a plan for Man. All of this is a major rebuttal of the pragmatic atheism of my youth.

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Proposition 65

One might be forgiven for supposing the alignment is Man’s best chance to prove God.

Explanation

The burden of proof is on the believer in debates about God’s existence; and to be the one who lives here one must surely turn to God. The alignment might be Man’s best chance to prove God and if it can’t be done it may be a problem with the desire of the author. There are other proofs of God I came across. One was the instance where you put all your postcards of visual art, like Van Gogh and Turner, on the wall, and accidentally leave a space, then some time later are sitting talking about God with your gf and notice that only the blank space has been visited by sunlight through the window. Then it seems like God is making a work of art to juxtapose with the post-cards, and it looks like a pulsing, subaquatic wind-chime on the wall. A Jehovah’s Witness however would say God can not be observed, whereas someone like Spinoza is a pantheist that as stated earlier believes there is no substance that is separate from God. Dedalus from Ulysses by James Joyce says ultimately we all have the same definition of God and the alignment could easily be seen to confirm this utterance from Ulysses.

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Proposition 66

It is not glaciation that shaped The Plough.

Explanation

What I mean is because it all fits together one might consider that the Plough and Black Combe were subject to the same force, were created by the same thing. This could be God redefined. It could also be something to do with Gravity. When you think about how it all fits, you have to factor in human life into the equation too, not just in terms of the socio-political sphere but at all levels and stations. It is not glaciation that shaped The Plough but glaciation did shape the fell, and what shaped the Plough is to do with physics, is astral, but they both seem subject to the same sense of Order, an overall Order that is perplexing and which one might be forgiven for calling God.

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Proposition 67

The other stars in the sky went un-noticed at the alignment.

Explanation

It was different at the face of stars, where the universe was enlumed, drenched with electric diamonds, wet, dripping grape-bunches of stars. When it came to the alignment, all focus was on the Plough. To call it monocentric, though, would not be right. I here refer you back to Proposition 62 – for the Plough truly looked dead at the alignment, and the surrounding sky, and the fell, and the universe at large. With the face of stars it was different: the cosmos was alive, fizzing with energy, and it was like peering directly into the erotic core of all things.

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Proposition 68

Truly, what was needed was some pollen from the Muslim World to smoke.

Explanation

I say this knowing pollen is against the law, for I think it should be legalised. By the time of the alignment we had given up smoking pollen up here. My dad once doled it out as a reward for working outdoors, like setting up a Republic where pollen was a currency. We had many a fine and poetic conversation on pollen, my brothers and I, many an outpouring, an unspooling, including when I forewarned of September 11th in 2000. But as I say by the time the band came up to see the alignment, there was no more pollen allowed in the house. This was because of my own mental health issues which were being blamed on drug-taking. I suppose the band were anticipating there being some pollen when they arrived and were upset to find none, finding instead a walk up the nation’s tallest mountain and things tending to health.

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Proposition 69

She has a way with wheels.

Explanation

My father said this to me, knowing that when he died, I would get handed a book I wrote at seven that had to be stored in the attic all his life. It was the one where the idea of the net was kept in “Long Storage” to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world and keep it free. It seems they couldn’t invent the net without going through our house, because it is where the Plough alignment is viable, but this was 1989. Now we have had the alignment itself and that represents the same thing in terms of “her way with wheels.” It’s all about timing, even though t = 0.

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Proposition 70

The alignment confirms that there is no time.

Explanation

It may coincide with the socio-political sphere with exactitude but that proves there is no time. The way the alignment didn’t happen until the rhythm change in the White House, and then when it did happen hung around with persistence for as long as I could observe it, proves that as Einstein said Time is an illusion albeit a very persistent one. If there were such a thing as Time, maybe the alignment would happen with a more regular rate and frequency. But truly, with the alignment, we are dealing with the timeless realm, and that includes Eternity being Now and Now and Now. So in the alignment we see the timeless sphere bulging into the temporal sphere, like a reminder of Infinity. One’s daily activities, or nightly activities, like watching TV or having a cup of tea, suddenly go on with the backdrop of Elephant Night. The alignment is a portal to the Infinite.

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Proposition 71

The problem with writing about the alignment is that one would always expect it to be more than mere words and to be better words too.

Explanation

You might expect, if someone was “doing the alignment,” that the document would be the Third Testament, The Unified Field Theory, the British Constitution, or the cure for cancer. To make a paper about it that just “seems intelligent” may not be enough, may be but an echo of a great thing, clinging on to it after it has gone.

And so we don’t know what the alignment means but live in the hope that we will see you soon.

And as you can see I was the seer, and I don’t need much more than fresh sea air.

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Proposition 72

Infinity is to space as Eternity is to time.

Explanation

The words for “Infinity” and for “Eternity” pre-exist Einstein’s mergence of space and time into the spacetime continuum. In terms of space there is no such thing as “almost infinite;” in terms of time, Eternity is Now and Now and Now. Yet in a post-Einsteinian world, the distinction is no longer valid. I wonder also of Chaos and Order after the Plough alignment. To merge them would be a mistake, I feel. That is, we can’t just undo the presupposed binary opposition of Chaos and Order. It backdates to the Greeks, to Dionysus and Apollo. But certainly the opposition of space and time can be undone, and the alignment may be the convergence of the infinite and the eternal into a singular image.

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Proposition 73

The alignment may pave the way for new knowledge.

Explanation

A new epistemology might be gained from it. But there don’t seem many original ideas in the world. As stated the tail end of the node about a mother’s bond with her child feels right if unfalsifiable: it was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa. But the idea is not original, dating back to Hawking and further to a poem by Geoffrey Hill called ‘The Assisi Fragments.’ If that was my seven year old “node,” there were certainly others too. An interesting situation occurred when I was sixteen: I proved the face of stars with the first verse of the first song of my first gig. But the line belongs to the house – so some say after all these years I should be made to be Anon with it. Still, if you take it away from me it makes the face of stars a regrettable event. More original than that line about the ocean is the idea of my University days: that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. Also that Lucy in the soul w/ demons may happen to be an actual substance is another one. But Flora’s system is not mine and Will Fenn’s notion about Hollidot not mine either. The idea that there is no such thing as the Nirvana barcode, meanwhile, might date back as far as the front cover of Nirvana’s classic album Nevermind, or even further.

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Proposition 74

If you seek the new Einstein you’d be better off looking to my brother than to me.

Explanation

It’s not quite Einstein but as I have stated elsewhere in my work James designed the sheet where pictures, pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric, grew. He also says <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet and I like that. I like it because to me it seems an original idea which I had not encountered until in the doodles and daydreams of my bother. As for me I can think of only two occasions where I was Einsteinian and they are as follows:

(1) when I looked for the equation for the ratio between lightspeed falling and Gravity pulling down on my brother’s sheet where pictures grew I decided “c over G” might be “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

(2) when I was writing my boyhood book, and after we had taken care of Einstein’s E, I put a plus sign for the f in the line: “I have a scar+ that is red and black;” and then continued to count upwards.

Other than these and maybe the bet on Sameness w/r/t/ attaining the face, I can’t think of much in my own work that is Einsteinian. Of course my brother hasn’t seen the alignment so can only leave it up to me, not to package and sell it, but to try and learn something about the universe with a neutral eye.

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Proposition 75

I suppose for the alignment to have its full power you have to be surprised to see it there.

Explanation

I told you in my prescient speech in the barn I predicted an alignment but said “maybe in India.” If I had known in advance it would be my own back garden, it might not have worked. I still think you might get an even more philosophically beautiful paper about the alignment of the Plough and the Himalayas, because that way there would be no alignment, just as the time ten to eight has no specific meaning. I can’t think how I was supposed to find out about the alignment in advance and don’t think I was supposed to. I still don’t know if the same thing happened to my father before me, or when the last alignment was. I think back to other occasions like the end of Apartheid or before it the blacks being allowed to vote or before it to the abolishing of slavery. Who knows if the alignment coincided with these things? Who knows when it will next happen? When I was a child my father’s Asian-extract friend came up to stay with his young sons and when they arrived, the sons started running around the house. I wondered why and did not know and found out recently that all those years ago they already knew it was the Plough alignment house. Why my dad didn’t tell me I have no idea except he did say he wanted to leave me to find out things for myself.

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Proposition 76

The alignment needn’t be a black-only celebration.

Explanation

All colours and creeds can join in. It just so happens that it coincided with a rhythm change in the White House, in my lifetime, but that’s a celebratory moment for more than just black people. There might’ve been other occasions in history where the alignment sealed victory that were not black only, and there might be events to come that are not black only. I look forward to seeing it again. Something done once is already a habit. But the smell of a curry is one unrepeatable process.

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Proposition 77

The alignment is not the triumph of either the right or the left exclusively and absolutely.

Explanation

Indeed, as for it being for all colours and creeds, so it is also that the alignment is not the triumph of the right, nor the triumph of the left against one another, but the unification of Man under one Night. Therein the magnetism of the heart comes into play more than the IQ. Nobody is any more intelligent than anyone else. What the alignment seems to suggest is that we are all of one mind. Who the PM was at the time I can’t remember – it was either the end of Gordon Brown or the beginning of David Cameron but we must look beyond petty rivalries, snobbery and inverse snobbery, class prejudice, the personal civil war being fought by each. We must look beyond to the Heavens, to the Gods, to the stars and start asking big questions, and loving one another again, and showing compassion, and understanding, and love.

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Proposition 78

The alignment stays in place, even though the earth is turning, for long enough to have meant the constellations should’ve revolved.

Explanation

I have no explanation for this and for that matter the idea of following a proposition with an explanation is weak, not just because it only shows I have been reading Spinoza but because you can’t just “explain away” certain events, especially cosmicomic events. The present proposition might indicate, however, that the alignment is synthetic, that there is something unreal about it, that the laws of physics are suspended when it happens. I don’t believe this was the case, that it was “fudged” or “manipulated.” I just know it fitted into place like the last piece of a jigsaw. And I wonder if having collectively put it there, if that is what happened, there was then a further effort needed to get it out again. This I missed, both in terms of plugging in and unplugging again but can say “elephant night” is an image from my seven year old science book, and that “plugging my senses in the mains” is an image from my Gap Year band who recorded on binaural earphones – if that is you should wish to see little bits of my part to play in the collective effort – and as stated I only imagine there is a collective, concerted effort, for have never discussed it with anyone. I suppose, even though it’s not artificial, if we, collectively, as a species, wanted it to happen again, we could. But at the same time this is a private residence, as the Dude in the film The Big Lebowski says, even if from time to time I am called upon to make observations. If I didn’t and indeed couldn’t know about the proximity of the alignment to my backgarden until it happened, and others knew from early boyhood I would possibly have a lot of catching up to do. So I also wonder what it would be like to write of the alignment from miles away, like London. Could it be that the alignment is “out of sight out of mind” unto the powers that be, like the whole area? Voices on magic alphabet radio now allowed to take part have just said “you shouldn’t write about the alignment apart from when you are far away.” Further voices say it is good that I chose the alignment to write about. I suppose it’s like the moment in the movie Indiana Jones where he has to guess which of the cups is the one Jesus drank from, and in among the opulent and ornate and adorned gold chalices, the correct endorsement is the humble, wooden cup.