‘He lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world.’
John Freeman, ex-editor Granta

‘Thrillers like The Da Vinci Code are key indicators
of contemporary ideological shifts’.
Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes


For what might break a writer’s block that grips
my pen as if King Arthur’s sword,
I quest through bookshops of My Lady Charity
in Urbs Leodiensis Mystica,
completely outside Freeman’s (as most) worlds,
where locals speak blank verse (says Harrison);
Back-to-Front Inside-Out Upside-Down Leeds,
according to the Nuttgens book I bagged
along with authors offering keys to open
secrets of iambic pentameter,
how it’s a ball and chain, a waltz – but best,
in Žižek’s windsock for the New World Order,
Gnostic code imprinted by five feet
that lead us to a grail Brown liquefies
as Shakespeare melts to decasyllabics
like congealed saint’s blood in a Naples shrine.
Brown quotes from Philip’s Gospel where it suits
to build on Rosslyn Chapel’s premises
vast hypophetic labyrinths in the air,
yet blind to masons’ mysteries below,
who carved among the seven virtues greed
with charity being made a deadly sin...
The world was made in error Philip wrote –
Savonarola, in The Rule of Four
(another blockbuster from Oxfam’s shelves)
is made to quote ‘the Gospel of St Paul’–
does what seems error hide a secret truth?
What if ‘Paul’s Gospel’ really did exist?
What if it was some long-lost Gnostic text
thrown on the Bonfire of the Vanities,
so seen there by our zealot’s burning eyes,
a road-map to the Holy Grail now ash
but seen there by our zealot’s burning eyes?
My back-to-back looks on a blind man’s road
that draws a straight line north past Wilfred’s city,
Shandy Hall then on to Lindisfarne
whose monks St Wilfred had been sent from Rome
to knock back into line from toe to top,
their sinful tops being ‘Simon Magus’ tonsures,
named for that gnostic heresiarch
a dog denounces in St Peter’s Acts,
where Peter raised smoked tuna from the dead,
explained his crucifixion upside-down,
then how God’s Kingdom might be found on Earth:
Make right your left, back forwards, low your high
 then, in a flash, like Paul, I saw the light
through Peter’s apophatic paradox
as if from some impacting meteorite
that would become Von Eschenbach’s stone grail,
the grail that I had thought my writing block:
it freed my pen like Arthur’s sword to write
this poem backwards, as Da Vinci might.

1
The signal box at Coxwold
serves a line that isn’t there,
connecting nothing with nothing,
thin air with thinner air

but its trains of ideas
(the phrase is Locke’s)
take you to – & – & –
past Coxwold signal box.

2
An Irish bull, an English cock,
a cat, a mouse, a tree, a clock;
an abbey’s stones, its changing faiths,
a knife, a book, shapeshifting wraiths;

a hobby horse, a maze called Troy,
a starry name, Didius’ boy
whose meteorite broke the mould
of Ptolemy on a Yorkshire Wold.

3
A poem is a meteor
Wallace Stevens wrote,
one of his lines
I often quote
or pass off as mine
to strike the poet note.

A meteor turns to fire
in the course of its flight;
one crashing to Earth
is a meteorite.
That is the poem I’m here to write.

‘More binds Walter Benjamin to Walter Shandy
than their common first name.’
Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities


Walter Shandy thought nomen est omen,
so tried to name his son for a great man
but providential stuttering foiled his plan.
True art is one, thought Walter Benjamin.

Walter Shandy’s clock undoes his heart.
Benjamin damned dada for destruction
of the aura which distinguishes true art
by the means of its own art’s production.

Rhyme also reproduces, but in the mind.
Dada echoes the sound of the new gun:
what the thunder said in World War One,
stuttering. A poem is a clock designed

to stop, I’ve heard. In this respect, it’s like
a man; yet if men and clocks both strike,
clocks or poems won’t try to stop another,
as, even gently, Walter Shandy’s brother.

Benjamin and Shandy share a first name
which, oddly, means the ruler of an army;
that Weber doesn’t mention this is barmy,
but I’m a poem. What I think is all the same