This is The Grasshopper poem, and it is a relic. It was scratched into a scarred red notebook with a fountain pen in 1998 when I was sixteen, living in Yorkshire but mentally oscillating between the Black Forest and a very specific, mushroom-induced heightening of reality. I don’t call them drugs—the government does, but they also think it’s ok to pay slimy fux a salary for organised corruption at a national level.
They had a gigantic garden full of grass and ponds in the shade of strong trees
Over the walls outlandish insects lived in alien chorus
Curious as I was young I followed my eyes and feet
Out of the shade and into the heat
Between the gap I went through, beyond the wall into the tall grass
All around I could hear the sound of many nights spent falling asleep by an open window
And there waiting for me I found a singing creature
A big green grasshopper
With yellow tilting side to side eyes
Scary looking thing
So I took off my top and with t-shirt gloves
I plucked the sissing hissing from its sissing position
Held it to the light, the sun, for sister Helen to see
Yelled to the sky then set it free, hops silhouetted by the glorious sun
Gleaming Wing, Knees Spring Mechanically
Free of gravity, perfect symmetry
In the sun it became black, the silhouette danced and was gone,
Nowhere to be seen, so I put the top back on
But “LEERGHNNNHAH!!!aaAHELP!!!”
Fiendish crafty devil he had crawled in the sleeve
His glorious leap imaginary
So I ploughed across the pasture with it on my back
As I ran I tore not just at grass with feet and bare legs
But also at cloth top with berserk fear hands
Like I was running barefoot over scorpions
Fear loathed me and off came the top, left in trail for police if I never did stop.
Sorry, but return I did, and gathered up my garment
Prickly insect like the memory of a cactus on back and in hand
I took it back with me to the dark bit of the garden
Back through the gap
Back into barriers and organisation and fucking ponds!
I took the ugly bug of freedom and released it
Down upon trimmed lawn and saw the
Tilting unblinking yellow eyes with helpless
Antennae dangling in silence in between
Shock bangs loud as I smashed its
Only ever asked one question head
Why?
I’m still proud of this one. It was originally published, under my real name (DOXX ALERT) in a very early issue of Aesthetica Magazine, back when all they published were their mates’ poems. I just checked and Aesthetica did re-open creative writing submissions in 2013, but this one is on a print-only issue from 2003-4, so you won’t be able to find it there. It’s been sitting in old Word docs and dusty magazine archives for nearly thirty years, so I hope you informavores enjoy it.
The Formal Glitch
The original mission was a stream-of-consciousness prose poem without full stops. Let’s say I was in the flow. This was stream of consciousness and my consciousness was mega fucking high(tened). But, being human and massively flawed, I accidentally dropped a full stop in the middle of the draft. I can hear the noise and feel the spring of the fountain nib even now as I stabbed the page with that dot of ink. I was gutted at first, but then I realised: that accidental puncture is the perfect metaphor for the poem itself. It’s the moment the “barriers and organisation” of the adult world trip you up. You’re running barefoot and berserk, and then—clunk—the grammar of the state catches your heel.
Innocence vs. The Smashed Head of Experience
There’s a bit of a William Blake arc here, if I say so me sen. It’s the classic move from Innocence (the gigantic garden, the singing creature) to the violent, jagged reality of Experience.
The grasshopper is a mechanical, fiendish crafty devil. It’s an alien in a German pasture that shouldn’t be in a Yorkshire lad’s sleeve. The “berserk fear” of the insect on the skin is the moment the natural world becomes too much. Too fucking real, too prickly tactile like the memory of a cactus. We admire freedom until it’s crawling down our backs, at which point we retreat to the fucking ponds and the trimmed lawns of safety.
The Final “Why?”
Read This Part over in the PAID PAYWALL CAPITALISM DISGUSTING MONEY GRUBBING ARTISTS GOTTA EAT FFS disgusting world of my incredibly and genuinely surprisingly successful Substache.
