Jack Tsoy Tumult

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The Brief Divinity of a Quim

I wasn’t planning on drinking

until a friend of mine tried to convince me that Grand Funk Railroad was the best heavy metal band that ever existed,

then he played “Heartbreaker” and their version of “Gimme Shelter” for me a few dozen times

until I felt as pointless as a post-feminist trying to disparage Ted Hughes

then I went home to meet my girl

she had a few stolen bottles from work

her boss doesn’t mind because she lets him grab her ass on Catholic holidays

and I know that
if you wake up still drunk and smell the vagina of the woman sleeping next to you –

it should prophesize your condition better than any Moses staring at any burning bush

and then

you’ll want to die in this bed

because it all feels so soft and welcoming

like a lonely job well done.

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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“).

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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.

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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.

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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.”

Just an old joke being repeated.

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Official Material section has been updated.

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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.

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Rest in peace to homey, MCA. You’ll be missed.

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Sour in the Web

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All I’ve been is interpretation

striving to find a language lost

through which the audience can learn

that even shadows share a hatred

of all this interminable light

which makes us forget so sweetly

all that we’ve ever seen for ourselves.

She stands next to me

looking at me deliriously like an vagrant button never sown

on a jacket she threw away years ago

knowing that I saw her as a divine chord

that no one’s mastered to play

another hole in the mystery of existence

a beautiful myth I couldn’t translate.

I have blood and phlegm filling up my lungs

but I’m still smoking

because the abjuratory-committed don’t expect me to give up just yet

without another glass of wine

they sit with their liberal arts degrees in their high-walled asylums

getting high on stale Arizona greens

waiting for young Keats to show his face again

because he didn’t quite accomplish all there was in his 25

so he might as well take mine  

like an old Salieri who waited for god’s silence to turn him deaf.

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Might do a short set at Art House tomorrow (directions can be found in the Upcoming Events section).

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Leaving Like a Return

I used to only call you

when jerking off

in a sweat reminiscent of late November

didn’t hit the spot.

Don’t ask me where I’ve been

because I honestly don’t remember much

but I probably stopped at the liquor store

on the way

taking a penny for the road.

It’s nice to see you, though –

I’ve missed your “company”.

Yeah,

been writin’ too many poems about New York

lately

so I knew that I had to escape off to New England to drink with some friends

who collect vintage posters of Eraserhead

for a week or so

but they smoke too much pot and sit around talking about Joss Whedon’s brilliance

for too long

so I had to return

like a gunshot in April.

I called you as soon as I got back,

I swear it, honey.

In hindsight

it might have been a mistake

because

you always hated my preoccupation with death

and Keats

and slow black-and-white Jarmush films

and that I once told your mother that she “made the best fucking meatloaf I’ve ever had” and that I once resurrected from your parents bathroom high

with my eyes pinned

during Easter dinner entr’acte and proceeded to drink two bottles of wine

(as though I was preparing for the overture)

but that was all so long ago.

And every time I’m reminded that I miss your taste

because I could never replicate it with the others

And you know that I once loved you

and you know that’s the truth

as much as I like Cointreau in my orange juice

and now you’re here again

in my bed and in my mind like some eponymous agony

and I’m grateful

don’t get me wrong

but you could at least do the fucking dishes.

I enjoy your smell on my bedsheets

again like a romantic tragedy reinvented

but you could at least make the bed

and not ensconce me

with our past that we both know

was like getting dirt in your mouth

on a long road trip west.

There’s too much love between us still

like a short Belle & Sebastian song playing through shitty speakers

and too much acrimony

for us not to know each other anymore.

So, it’s nice to see you

because you’ve always played the part well:

my lost vision on a cold day,  

my brutal beginning

as the reason to leave again…

it might have been swell,

but I never remember much –

which is really the only gift

you’ve ever given me,

but, it’s all I’ve ever really needed.  

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About a girl I used to know who grew bored while I grew tired

So much

yet not enough

and I don’t care about your punk etiquette

I’m glad that you can afford the mentality

which would dictate a lack of future for the rest of us.

No Hemingway

just junk food and self inflicted cuts along your arms

microwavable burritos and cigarette burns on skin hidden in long sleeves

a craving for morphine and a trust fund that’ll hit when you’re 25.

When do you find time to write, sweetheart

when you spend your nine-to-five feeling sorry for yourself

and selling advertisement space for Family Feud reruns?

Pretending independence

while yearning for arms to wrap around you

while you sleep

dreaming of glittering fame

and of someone finding out who you are

on tiptoes.

I’ll still love you, honey

once California sinks underneath you

and I’ll remember when you called me

“a dirty prophet with a beautiful junkie body”

while I recited poetry between your legs

unconcerned by the handsome gravestones

that grew outside of your windows like a summer fever.

This one is for you, wherever you are…

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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.  

Don’t forget that

We have nothing but accomplishment between us

And only lonely sanity below our feet…

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…if your ex-wife starts calling you “dude”

…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

…if you still want your child to become an artist

…if you believe that any of this is true

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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

and we become dedicated to one another

for a while

making jokes, like:

today the day was catching its own nod

and aren’t we oh so satisfied…

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