On Johny Brown’s CORPSE FLOWER (Skill, 2024)
When raising and praising the dead you will always unearth
Long lost flowers, even if the corpse is yours knowing
Where it will be brought by death’s hand. And so it proves here
As Johny Brown finds the colour in soil and stain, mind
And murmur; this angel from the north understands
What it is to walk, work and live and sing between shadows
There is still a holy joy to life’s horrors which Brown himself
Has lived through. From prostate smut in the gut,
And a hospital bed, his debut book breaks through pavements
Onto which he escapes, seeing visions from past, present
And as you might expect, future hues. The book is Biblical
Brown as primed by secular spirit; part poem, part novel,
Epic in form, diamond faced, from Inga Tillere’s author shot
And her Dali-like melting petal design, this spine musics
Hers and Jonny’s devotion, alongside Alan Beeson, whose
Layout and let achieves grace. Each page is this Pilgrim’s
Progress it seems on its freeform verse voyage,
From the ‘existential film set’ of sickness, to cocodamol
Dreams and slow steps, as Johny re-enters a world
Of ‘crystal shops and peace marches..solidarity between workers’
As the surrounding city unravels around and beneath
His soul schlep. Johny Brown is a bloom around which each
Apocalypse figures. He is a positive force, primed by passion
And by a belief in the word which he sets sail across notes
Still heard here in these pages, as if there were a score
To be settled and also strummed, savoured, stirred.
The ‘beautiful weave’ takes him back to his first room’s
Bare brick and floorboard in North Shields and London
As in this poemoirnovel life becomes tapestry.
This downcast Dante has his own Beatriz before him,
And with Virgil and vision the two of them remain free
When faced with life’s unknown compromise to which
We each succumb or transfigure, just as he has
Through writing and walking through the Mayday Workers
Festival to ‘Capsize all water cooler moments/Blast away
All surveillance methods and time constraints’ here to see
In this time travel tome, as our urban flaneur flags pale
Prisons and positions each inmate in easy view of the sky;
Thereby to dream or drag from dirt their corpse flower,
Be it dead memory, person, or surrendered ideal,
They can’t die, even if they can be replaced by whatever
Informs us; here in these pieces, to be in love is J.B.
As love fuses forms between lamppost and laughter,
Between ‘winded ribs’, Mall and madness, where he
‘Can go dance the graceful dance’ skillfully.
JB journeys on, watched by ‘old sales plastered
To the glass storefronts’, away from hope, through
The homeless and human race hate for what’s fucked
Into ‘the liminal zone where fields and back lots sprout
Between buildings’ in search of fire and flower
From which no petal or heart can be plucked.
From ‘Bloobath pogrom/ethnic cleansing/
Holocaust shoah saville’ the singer poet still suffers.
He is ‘an obligate parasite who cannot photosynthesize
On my own’ and so sings to us through step and screech,
Search and stumble, casting aspiration, aspersion;
A King cracked by chaos, but still in hope and hunt for a throne.
He heads into the forest of souls, an abandoned bus depot,
Where Cerberus rusting in red-eyed assault has been
Stalled. Brown shines the light of each line across murk
And miasma, farming fucked landscape above
The hidden heart’s buried call. He descends as a ‘slight
Memory flickers’ ; a former procedure on the ‘poison pip’
In his brain could have deleted his dream to write plays
For the Underground Utopia he restructures; dead before 40
Yet here he is still, leased from pain, but not from temptation,
As soon after he fell, into drugs and drink, free but formless,
As if life regained were a pressure to both surmount
And sustain. And so he catalogues here all of those earthed
Excesses, each in search of a heaven that hedonism
Cannot hold, helping us to see that mid-way through this life
Of ours, we’re all Dante. Dark woods await and yes welcome
Each honed heat-seeker forever primed to the cold.
To survive, we have to succumb to the scream, grow wise
In the Well, rise from water, be they strong as spirits
Or full of beer’s bluff, or drugs’ thrall. And so this book
Bibles forth, bubbling up from dead rivers begetting
Corpse flowers: man/woman and they as mycellic,
Changing the form as tears fall. From Beatriz to Arum,
Brown roams in the Autobiographical section, detailing
Damnations and how Barman becomes Bard, as Kahlo’s
Corpse flowers burst to bloom around even more death
And destruction, be it America’s Iraq invasion or the depths
To which souls can sink, Johny’s jarred. And so resolves
To rise. This is his reinvention. This is his right to rise
And his revels are at first Bowie blessed. From Diamond
Dogs to Bad Punk, ‘with Jono at the junction’ from catheter,
Catechism and soul chorale wounds are dressed.
Each sour stem scored with the price of experience
Weighing wisdom and each conversation, encounter
And relationship the next stone on the survival path strewn
As we might expect by dead flowers bleeding their colours
Back into the earth to attone for the sniffers and scents
Across which ruination was smuggled. Here, Brown smuggles
Corpses away from their graves, sealing sin. As he travels on,
Resisting each illness, forming sounds with Sayako
And Jono and Inga on theremin. Wednesday June 18th 2024
Was Corpse Flower Day in which JB raised his voice
For all of the ‘stinky outsiders’ in Valhalla, Whitechapel,
Forest and Costa, prison cell, bed and pew
As he has continued to do, with the Band of Holy Joy,
Or these solos; from Gut Feels to Corpse Flower,
Life’s garden grows from the spew of vomit, blood, soul
And memory also. This book burns by igniting
How the unguessed needs of the many take just one
To enlighten across ache, age and ashes.
The right to rise is accomplished.The dead do this
For us, yet once they bed down, they rise in us.
Another Eden emerges and we are everything.
Look: we flew.
David Erdos 3/12/24
Corpse Flower is released on December 31st
.