A very peculiar clip I recently discovered: some strange, circus-like, Greek band covered/adapted one of my favorite Bukowski poems (“To the Whore Who Took My Poems“).
———–
Jack Gravely Makes Yet Another Remark About Dylan Thomas in a Long Sentence Written in a Relative Daze While Smoking the Last of his Cigarettes
The dogs weep with craven bellies
then contort in deathly quietude before my feet
like an Aimee Mann song whimpering across a film soundtrack, or
like broken ramparts belying sanctuary antithetically to an unending siege that plods along dully and purposelessly like the wrath of a god waking from a lengthy dormancy with a hangover and no Tylenol in His medicine drawer.
The dogs see me as the amalgamation of all minor tragedies
that are whispered like the cycling sands upon the shores of furious dreams
We play softer now because the noise has become an affront to our aesthetic
it’s much too effortless like a drunk phone call to a spurned lover
and my mind is having plenty of conversations with itself –
as was the line in the short film that revealed my madness –
adapted melodramatically from my lived-in novel whose baby teeth have apparently all fallen out and caused a tantrum because the fairy never snuck a nickel under its pillow
There used to be a girl that smelled like Zenax and danced like a Tom Waits dirge that made the punctuation flourish
and made the plethora of ephemera of all of it so majestically imperative
instead of forgiving me this mashing up of one-liners for the sake of starved wit.
(I need a new fucking editor.)
But then,
when I joined the dogs and judges,
and we, with pouted, weather-beaten lips
cried withdrawn against the call of death with such a passionless abandon, it made me amplify monolithically about the rambling Welshman yet again…
smothered as I was by the past like an explanation for recidivism finding me at another court date.
He drank a lot of whiskey too, but wrote better than I did.
The dogs, the ones who weep with craven bellies
with no heritage to speak of or to blame
are dressed in funereal rags
they gnaw on an old sneaker hidden like the omphalos of universal truth inside my closet
and they coo about you
when they can
about how your hair looked like someone mixed coal with stardust on a lark
about how your smile was sulfuric when a cruelty enticed you
and how I was fucked, fevered and slightly mad whenever I dared to look for longer than was my allotted time (the red light flashing)
Their howling eventually becomes the sound of my own mouth retching itself clean of a wretched soul; once varicolored and sentimental – now just a quasijocose shade that entertains at hourly rates with old jokes and recycled references:
a cavorting shadow without equal that reminds
that all old dogs eventually die without their supper.
Today, I will focus my attentions on writing an essay about John Milton and Nick Cave.
Nick Cave taught us that the devil is “…a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru.”
…
The Giant Sand (shortened from Giant Sandworms) covered “Red Right Hand” better than the Arctic Monkeys – but regardless, it’s a good enough reference to Paradise Lost (Book II, 170 – 174) to stick on Murder Ballads, after it was shortened to a single’s length from its original debut on ‘94’s Let Love In.
…
Al Pacino (playing head of a prestigious law firm, John Milton/as well as Lucifer in The Devil’s Advocate)taught us that the devil likes to ride New York subways and instigate crimes of passion in Spanish. He’s charismatic and prone to over-acting. He likes heights (the fallen getting up again) and doesn’t berate Keanu Reeves for his lackluster thespian abilities.
———
———
Tomorrow, I will be performing at the BMCC’s (Borough of Manhattan Community College) Voices Concert. Probably doing two pieces (Visions of New York and For Further Courtship), drunkenly and barely.
– Next up… well, wait – is he here?
– Yeah, he stumbled in ten minutes ago.
– Alright, up next is our friend Jack Tumult – the New York City poet and charming degenerate, here to recite a couple of lyrical pieces, if he’s able to see his own words at this juncture in the night…
The pale moon put its lipstick on and slinks away majestically and I take a weary sip from my Scotch.
It was raining again and I found myself to be lazily satisfied.
It had been a long week, with another long week ahead sharpening its nails for further torture and tedium. The massacre of words was scheduled for midnight and I’ll was to be there with plenty of black-ink pens and medicated ideas as part of my trusty arsenal.
“I am death incarnate in bold and blah blah blah… and it wadn’t the wine that has made the words rough, it was woman from my past that props me up in this fatalistic manner.”
Make a paintbrush from a pen from a gun pointed at the man that comprises the dotted line, and if you find yourself in a Brooklyn pub, but really it’s the bottle of imported Absinthe hidden in your celebratory overcoat that has you dazed and dunced and heaped upon, likely by the sour strain from California that went into the zig-zags earlier that afternoon when the sun was shinning but muddled like everything going off and slightly away and it all becomes like rented hopelessness, odorous and warm and with inherent horrors, can’t forget the horrors, and all the recklessness of youth, the forced rebellion, the exquisite torment that can only ferment nostalgia – while you’re [wishing you were in better form] in a ridiculous (a rattle of obscurities!) discussion with your cinephile film student friends about the best Korean revenge films made in the last five years – you should just take a breath and order another drink (so as to at least not look as suspect as a nomad in a studio on the Lower East Side) and find your cigarettes and find the door and a place where it’s not windy and you can light your cigarette and all might be well before the first exhale and immediately following it and everything looks like a war and a drowning economy and then there’s that asshole who pretends to be a gypsy on the train who’ll introduce you to the man that comprises the dotted line and a gun will become a pen that will create like a paintbrush washed clean by a rainy day in the park when the angels swim in color in the aging fountain and the drunken musicians play old folk songs.
Today is a sick day. I feel like a stray dog walking a Newark winter. “Rocket Queen” (the closing track off of G’n’R’s Appetite for Destruction is stuck in my head – could be blamed on the fact that I’ve been rereading Chuck Klosterman’s 2001 half-memoir/half-optimistic and apologetic collection of essays on the inherent cultural value of 80’s heavy (hair) metal Fargo Rock City) has been stuck in my head all fucking morning – thankfully it’s not the Steven Adler solo version that, for some wholly forgettable reason, somehow still exists. My back hurts (which is especially bothersome for an ex-junkie because instead of heroin and withdrawal being the predictable culprit – I have no idea what’s wrong with me… probably an alien living inside of me or maybe spinal cancer) – I feel as though I’m that stereotypical, crotchety old man that wakes up in a hospice to the realization that his family has completely written him off already. I want a drink, but my back aches too much to move, and my coughing forces shooting pains down my spine. Although I have way too much work to finish, I’m taking a day off from struggling at the altar of an endless manuscript, and instead will call on an ex to play nurse to me for a while, maybe roll the old man a joint so as not to exacerbate his arthritis.
…if you eat avocadoes for breakfast and jog in the mornings
…if you are interning at a publishing house idealizing John Kennedy Toole
…if you think that that was really Tupac at Coachella visiting from Cuba
…if you’re voting for Mitt Romney and have a vagina and an ounce of self-respect
…if you’re the ex-girlfriend that called me at 3am this morning expecting me to rush out and pick you up at Port Authority so that I could provide a you with a generously stiff drink and a decent lay
…if you’re like me and find it impossible to not get turned on by Alison Mosshart
…if you want to sleep with Lena Dunham because she writes awkwardness well
…if you think that it takes $100,000 in student loans to make something of yourself
…if you’re critical of me for putting my lyrical content out for free
…if when someone mentions the song “Mother” you think Glenn Danzig instead of John Lennon (although – with an objective sincerity – I can admit that the Misfits were sporadically fucking awesome)
…if you see yourself as an avowed feminist and still have Ke$ha in your iPod
…if you were born to dream of an orphanage
…if you admire that prick Hunter Moore but have never heard a midnight call by Sam Kinison
…if you think that George Zimmerman can use something besides a hanging
…if you’ve let the world shame you of your neurosis
…if you are trying to figure out which designer belt matches your veins
…if you spent your entire day ghostwriting for a fat, mean woman who smells like Herod’s gangrene melting
…if you moved from Omaha to Brooklyn to be a playwright after reading Neil LaBute’s catalog (especially if you don’t notice the fact that he looks exactly like a young, sullen George Lucas on Quaaludes)
…if you believe yourself to be the voice of your generation
…if you actually find yourself to be the voice of this generation
…if you actually believe in your own created persona
Surrealist Addendums Grow in Post-Script Like Geraniums
(for young lovers who don’t know any better)
You’ll know that you’re going blind once you start smoking the ashes
We pause
and she reminds me that I have a dick big enough to seem charming on rainy days as well as during summer blackouts
In fact, I’ve been notarized, and
Con Edison has pimped me out on several occasions as a form of apology
for the folks with their black nights spent by dying candlelight
it made sense as a routine (you have to learn to remain somehow)
Believe long enough in dark beer mornings and a coffee for breakfast when I wake up somewhere around a lurid dusk
and sometimes I write before meeting dangerous people in dangerous times
because we leave our last spit of stained spirit for the last; ahead of time in a jaded millisecond with a knife impending to paint the throat with something worthy of Esenin’s penmanship
but it’s really just the wait
and soon enough you’ve reached Side Two and it’s time to turn the tape over:
And sometimes, if you remember, you used to leave the Starbucks bathroom with blood on your shirtsleeve
and then you would sit, pale, relating something or other to Byron and pretending there’s charisma hiding in the floor
and it’s really like trying to explain the importance of the Minutemen to an 18-year-old girl inside a screaming art gallery that used to be a warehouse where you couldn’t find work on a cold month, next to some negligible stop off the L train and a taco truck with overpriced burritos
And you’re out of the blue and into the black, like a Neil Simon cover with too much vodka and no real politics to speak of and something vague that you’re angry at your father about because of course it must be his fault
No longer running for the bullet, you might as well accept that I am not going anywhere:
This city’s blooming again and the allergies are killing me like paternal rot
my eyes feel as though they’re smoking crystal meth
but I haven’t bought a bus ride out of town yet
because I haven’t a place to go
I know that there’s a girl that I want to write in this movement, with her little finger on the trigger
a lemonhead that you have after your first shot of cognac
the cute little Gerber baby face that ended up on a milk carton on a sprawling 90’s highway forgotten after the first exit like a statement taken out of context by some punk rock version of Ralphey Waldo Emerson talking too much shit about the inherent subversive value of horizons, waiting for the West Coast to drown
And then how do you learn to collect the checks,
if you’re a literary pawn shop?
Like the last can of welfare tuna in the fridge –
don’t throw me away too early as though you weren’t staving…
and now god’s got a melanoma on his palms – that’s why we come out so broken
he ain’t the craftsman he used to be
And
It’s all a lie, like how
in moribund chastity being a heroin wife is a noble endeavor
since junkies are an enviably, cinematically sentimental bunch
eager to lavish warmth and generous kindness unto the cruel world perceived as unimmediate and unworthwhile, full of nothing much but polite conversations, subway rides and early mornings – dope being more honest: you wait to get high in a zen rebirth each time slower
The wife gets the soft nook in the crook of the arm while the happy, dozed couple lay in each others arms as the silent soundtrack of purgatorial (sickly as the yellow of the fading cardboard after a fortnight of rain) inevitability drowns out any worry and any trepidation and any plans and any appointments unless they are uptown by the train or in the village in a phone booth that waits and carries itself like a stiff, gruff relic or a stale childhood prayer you still remember although it has long since lost its use
and then we grow old dreaming of the Arctic cold
and then we are apart
for a while
and then we find each other again
like the wet thighs of the divine
and then in the joyful bundle (ten bags with smiling faces on them) she looks so young
as though it didn’t speak
as though it was like putting a tie on a corpse for the purpose of forced purgation