I come from the sea, a little chip of granite off the Normandy French coast called Jersey CI, a 12x8 miles inter-UK offshore banking island, and I grew up watching rainbows, big hazy arcs that looked like makeup dusting grey piled-up slabs of cloud architecture. I used to sit on the beach and look out at the horizon like a plasma screen and watch ships go by and get so sad that I wrote poems like open letters to the universe. One reason to write is that you fill in time and space with words, and of course you retrieve everything that would otherwise go unnoticed. Do things know they’re being incorporated into the creative process, or are they dumb? I take sightings everywhere, and today, while I sat in a Pret A Manger on St Martin’s Lane, a cyber-blonde Chinese girl came in carrying a Camper shoes carrier, and the logo facing me read in a vertical column
Cyan
Yellow
Brown
Camper
Grey
Orange
Silver
Inspiring me immediately to write a poem called ‘Camper Carriers’, because nobody else has done or probably ever will do.
My materials: Violet Pentel Sign Pen made in Japan
A4 Side Wirokraft Notebook 5055133 made in Poland
Silvine Student’s Notebook Red Code 141 made in UK
Street Reading
Four clowns appear like council mafia,
top hats, red noses, black braces,
they’re like hoodoo on Marshall Street
at 3 p.m., backs to the wall
opposite William Blake House—
a grey concrete circularly lathed affair
that could be art, and faces the high-rise
15 floors of reflective steel and glass
projected above Blake’s site
on Broadwick/Marshall. I perform on the steps
of this street auditorium,
three orange roses bunched in a jam jar,
Liza’s voice as accompaniment
to bluesy figures worked off Niall’s guitar.
We’re three pushing lyric into the face
of the assembled, casual foot-traffic
stopped off from curiosity
to catch a phrase and stay with it or go.
We work hard to maintain the crowd
in edgy Soho, Sunday afternoon,
most traffic dead, the precinct in rehab,
a spillover from the John Snow
picking up with us, rowdy in their beer,
and those four mafia staring us down
like survivors of a shoot-out
turning their menace on this place in town.
Elephants
It rains so hard I think of elephants
frisking the steamy London streets
26,000 lbs of muscled hulk
streaming in rain like the black ballistic steel
of an armoured SWAT truck,
two zoo escapees turned psycho—
a Congo genome cooking in their blood.
Bioterrorists work the ecosphere,
ozone holes and the carbon foot
smudged like a black rainbow over the earth.
My lilies explode after thunder rain
into shock-waves of reactive perfume
effusive oriental stargazers
erupting like black smoker volcanoes
into an atomised scent plume,
a smudgy vaporous mirage.
The times I live through I swab like Bloodoff,
a blue thixotropic gel
cluing up intelligent bacteria.
The rain’s sometimes like an aquarium
through which I sight orange crocosmia
like oscillating fish, and higher up
a helicopter gunning through the slab
chasing emergency.
I keep imagining black elephants
in cataclysmic climate reversal
and thundering like trucks to the attack.
I keep with what I do, take off my shirt
and wade into the shower for shock impact,
the garden hissing and the rain so fast
it feels like liquid bullets on my skin.
Yauatcha
A blue light box, deep sea ultramarine,
an Yves Klein shot with toothpaste blue
(Colgate Oxygen) faces out
on Broadwick Street, a rainy Sunday fuzz
pixellating beadily, a damp glow
grainy Soho 4 p.m. 30/11 chill
we take inside from the windows
of Cowling & Wilcox opposite
(I make adjustments for altered physicals
in my sci-fi Soho novel The Grid)
and find immersion in 150 teas
and choose a Pau Dragon Orchid, the scent
written into the name, a gold sauna
poured in a cup, a steamy trick
turned on the palette. It’s your green tea cake—
three leaf-green suitcases pitted in mousse
like baggage angled on a carousel—
arrests my eye, an arty thing
designed to tease the bite: the Cantonese
next to us fork venison puffs
and lobster dumplings, slow, incisively
like surgery, a serious graft
of separating textures, while I stare
out at a 10 ft strip of afternoon
leaked in with shop lights, frontage, drizzled smear,
a Broadwick Street grey, different
from any other Soho grey,
and feel the transient suspense, the last
shot-down blues bled out of the winter day.
R.E.M.
A retrofuturistic bleached cocktail
of Beach Boys surfy harmonies
and back porch evening
under fadeout orange sun
anomie—think dusty poppies
rashed by airport perimeters,
contrails cooling in blue sky,
a jar of Flax Seed Oil capsules
vigilant by the singer’s bed—
a.k.a. Mr Moki.
The songs are urban nomadic,
their cryptograms Michael Stipe’s
zoomy in-and-out-of-focus
lyrics—his off-duty tone
signatured with global long haul,
alien as reading Baudrillard
jetting into Osaka.
The sugarcane, it’s lemonade,
the sunburst motifs yellow pop
done with busy unreconstructed riffs .
It’s out there Genesis mission
sampling solar wind, trapping
neon, argon, iron,
retrieving a little bit of the sun,
10 or 20 micrograms
for NASA.
Reveal’s neither close nor far
of urban-wastelanded desert,
hotels, sterilely accessorised jets,
a lyric stringy in simplicity
and touched by the full on sun,
a flower as subtext, like a moment won
in real time and reworked again
clean as a red peppery nasturtium.
Yellow Chrysanthemums
Caroline’s gift of clenched yellow pompoms
like guardsmen in dyed busbies
tightly compacted extravagant
moptops that look introverted
stemmed in a vase with a snake twisting round
in a U-turn bite at its tail.
They smell like memories locked in a car,
printer’s glue and green tomatoes,
and come October to my flat
perfectly placed as Marilyn Monroe’s mole
for city-time quiet, an urban bunker
rained on by blood-orange red London leaves.
These are the Asian ogiku,
irregularly fringed 20cm lemon suns,
each with a planet’s industry
sustaining cells. When I buy lotus
buns
I make sweet chrysanthemum tea
for taste-bud kicks, a tea-head chase
at leafy biodiversity.
Gastros do petals mixed with snake meat soup
in Beijing towers. I’ll have these a week
and sit with them nights reflectively,
sighting associations in their glow,
no dialogue, as I slice and dice time,
the twinkly showery flash outside
pinging like rice grains, as the night comes on
like a black slab of local universe.
Rock ’n’ Roll Suicides
A 12-gauge shotgun and red dahlias,
an explosively paranoid Joe Meek
waits for the moment like take-off—
a Boeing’s nose cone climbing out:
bang, bang, he blows his landlady
into free fall and follows her
crashing backwards down the stairs
in a vermilion double star.
307 Holloway Road: his flat
a sounds-lab—pop and Ouija and blue pills.
They follow after him all the way down,
the escalating suicides
or death-inducers, Presley, Hendrix, Brian Jones,
John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ronnie Lane,
Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain,
excess bingers hallucinating in the drop
into the roaring underground
like hearing tubes brake at Kings Cross
before their terminal shut down.
Joe’s shot precipitated avalanche,
the bodies slamming through down the decades,
their lives obituarist memorabilia,
left with an aura-halo like the glow
of house lights sunk on Bishop’s Avenue,
the Saudi billionaire owner
weekending in Zurich, his lit mansion
there like a liner in the Hampstead dark.
What I’m Giving
I live in permanently accelerated time: it’s the light-speed of my imagery, 186,000 miles per second, put through neuronal transmission that keeps me ahead of most British poets, and so futures-forward thinking that I’ve singularly invented a subject matter for the sort of poetry I do: cyber, sci-fi, glamour, makeup, pop, neuroscience, cryogenics, the NASA space programme, the look, fetish sequins, cakes, Elvis, cars, bad boys as gay, rock and gangster types, and most aspects of the underworld as it’s lived by those who don’t conform.
I’ve been called by The Independent, ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, in that my very particular look is integrated into my poetry, and also because my performances with the musician Itchy Ear, as the Ginger Light, pursue a visual dynamic, part poetry, part cabaret, informed by electronic beats, but always performed, that has us largely unparalleled in the intensely projectile genre we’ve created.
I’m unagented, write for no advances, have little or nothing to do with the literary world of social networking, and live totally focused into imaginative creativity, the poetry, fiction and non-fiction books I write, all coming from the same fired-up inner resources, and texturally detailed by what I call colour moments, or the optimal hoopla of sighting the potential in someone or something to be transformed into its imaginative equivalent. This involves living totally in the present, as though you’re holding a handgun to rob the moment of its visual contents.
I write everywhere, at home sitting on black painted wooden floorboards, on buses, in bookstores where I help out sometimes, in Soho cafes, London parks, in yards, in bed, on the street, but never at a desk or table. I have an antipathy to anything formally associated with writing: you can start a poem on the back of your hand, as I sometimes do, if need be, like a blotchy Pentel sign pen tattoo.
I met Gerry McNee, a.k.a. Itchy Ear, when I was working at the counterculture bookshop Red Snapper, 22 Cecil Court, one typically grey-compressed West End afternoon—I was writing at the red glass counter—and the fortuitous accident of shared musical interests led weeks later to our making our first recordings in Gerry’s stripped-down minimalistic bedroom at Bruce House off Drury Lane; and from there to our first Sunday night performance downstairs, under lipstick-red and teal-blue lights at First Out café on St Giles High Street, where we still perform several times a year.
I’m a multitasker. I work on three or four books and related projects in a single day—poetry, fiction and non-fiction and whatever else gets into the mix. Maximum energy for me comes from veganism: the chemical messengers in your body travel faster unobstructed by fats, and there’s generally more spatialised air miles in your blood if you’re thin. Speed to me means jumping out of today into tomorrow through the window the poem presents. I’m writing this under a moody no-colour sky looking out of First Out café at Centre Point Food Stores opposite, using its reflective frontage virtually as a surface off which to bounce the poem’s signals.
Most good creativity is an attempt to reach escape velocity, organised by the 100 billion neurons and their complex interactions in the brain’s micro-circuitry. You want to reach somewhere you’ve never been before, and discover in the process things that were within you and never out. When the expression becomes physicalised you encounter the alien, the poem you’ve created that can’t now go back in and is there for others to read.
Poetry’s my oxygen and has been ever since I started connecting bits of imagery like Lego when I was six or seven. I’m not only an image consultant, but an image thief. I live from stealing detail from everything I see. The theft’s legal because it’s virtual, and when I do it on people it involves the entire look, everything from your scent to nail transfers and eye colours. I’ll mentally scan and recreate it all in poetry and prose, sometimes right in front of your eyes, and, if you’re curious, give you what I’ve written about you on a bus, tearing the relevant page out of my notebook.
What I’ve always tried to do, and increasingly so, is to make poetry out of subject matter not usually thought suitable to mainstream literature. The excitement for me is in engaging full on with the present, like a pop single, taking experience to the next level, because the contents of what I choose to write about can’t be rephrased or placed in a different time, but belong singularly to now. The process continually feeds my brain’s reward system with a hyperactive dopamine rush.
Non-Mainstream
A de-anthologised throw out,
an aircraft grounded from long haul,
an engine casing gone, a lead
defective, and my signature
invasively warping radar.
Most of my life identified
with cutting-edge weird, the outside
frees me from tagging protocol.
It’s lonely out there, but the needs
I feed are individual.
It’s kicks I want to share with friends,
the poem tracking parallel
to normal. I’m in the fast lane
the hyperactive line searching
an overtaking red Ferrari.
No feedback, but the groove maintained
and picked up by the underground.
I find my own; they’re mostly gay
or fine-tuned to an imagery
kicking in like a chemical.
London’s mapped in my arteries
and forms the solar plexus grid
to what I write; my afternoons
hardwired into West End cafes
writing to pop accompaniment.
My role models are leftfield dudes,
lyrics like Frank O’Hara’s cute
eulogy to a pink sweater,
Prynne’s civic zanies, off the wall
Anne Sexton ketchup slashed confessionals.
No place for me, I learn to keep
familiar with my territory
and make of exclusion a right
of virtuoso dare, the way
I sold sex at Piccadilly.
Writing’s a means of killing time
imaginatively. I persist
in celebrating what’s around
as odd, angularly singular
and mostly for the first time found.
Frank
Stripy confection on his feet
like a pink and black bumble bee,
his socks like sweets on that September day,
lysergic humbugs, shocking pink
footwells to blue snakeskin loafers,
that incongruously flash.
I’d crossed the square with writing in my head—
images paused in disconnect
and saw him there, left profile, hair shorter,
reconstructed look, skinny jeans
grey Dior jacket? (I was right
at distance), a thin white pinstripe