————

Aemilia Bassano (delirium tremens)

Ray Manzarek died on Monday from bile duct cancer

First they stop allowing you to get a degree in prison, then they stop allowing you to smoke

They say it’s all for your own good like fixing typos

It’s a killer

A dunce and a rogue

Yet I feel like an existentialist abstraction when I pay my taxes

I start qualifying my sentences by capitalizing all the openers again

but how did they get there first

I’m growing paranoid

People who haven’t seen my apartment are surprised by how clean it is

Hell is around the corner

a man resembling a lemniscate (a moustache that exists only in a parametric equation) begins to laugh

SOMEWHERE

trust me  

I’ll be the Dramamine to your oscillating seas

trust me

Proudhon and Exupéry are playing tic-tac-toe on a new planet they haven’t named yet

and Yes, the river knows, it is the crawl of the classical piano

chartreuse seclusion and television screens

a pretty face that I used to see, pornography

The tequila tastes like nail polish varnish by four in the afternoon

THE NEXT DAY

If you’ve been drinking all through the carbon copy

and as They bring the bull into the ring, he has his objections

They are just spears, they say, don’t look so concerned

————-

The post Take Care, Ray appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————-

it rained earlier today

they were watching basic cable television because it made sense that particular day. it was early. a procedural show was paid attention to, barely – Law & Order: Season 13, Episode 17 (“Genius”) – the writer was running out of cigarettes. he got up and poured himself a few fingers of brandy into a dirty snifter (“don’t you think it’s a bit early for that” she trailed off after him). he used a butterknife from the drawer to make a B-flat from the raised glass. she kept one eye, open, on the television, the other, closed, on him.

he recited:

“becoming a slave for a Sunday morning

way too early to be truly awake

I have no profound words left for you, darling

this love has become a heart attack

in the chest cavity of an anti-Nabokovian sentimentalist

who made his rent composing vulgar verses

that flew too high on wings made of pink slips

and rejection letters

from both publishers and peaceful cemetery plots

he has become a dotted line

that indeed blushes from time to time

wondering how a lie can have so many eyes

a contract that would make you weep

when you realize how much you’ll be giving away

a pleasant mistake brushing the dust off of ghosts

in the lonely celadon whisper of a resting day

begun too early

to truly be awake”  

he falls back on the couch. she palms his ring finger. it all seems so very tender. they continue watching the flicker of the tv set snatching time and silence. he lights his last cigarette a takes a slight sip of this living day. the rain outside has stopped.

————–

The post melancholy meta monday morning appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————

Q52: a short lyric

they haven’t touched the bridge in over eighty years

that’s why

after the hurricane snuck in

the trains don’t run over it no more

you have to take the bus across Cross Bay

and in those thirty minutes that you have

after waiting in the cold huddling in around you

you’ll sit on a hard and angry seat

watching the world like a weary guest:

the old Russian women talking too loudly on the phone

that they barely know how to operate

in a language that all other passengers

but me

do not understand

and after the call is done

before the next appointments are to be made

their bodies will tenderly convulse

because the nearly dead are made to dance

for our forced mocking sympathy and our amusement like the dole

the men that stand pace anxiously

in the two step space that they’re allotted

before a workday becoming prison

leaves them slumped along the railing springing  

like the wheels below along cement

the pimply adolescents and their pockmarked older siblings

read books they were assigned

while futile anger and frustration rages in digitized decibels

from their headphones

the aging allochthonous junkies who still make the trip

have come to pay their servile and pitiful respect

to scions of their old connects

from stories of seventies’ glory days

when shooting galleries replaced alleyways

and the cops didn’t have to pretend not to give a shit

the young and pretty neighborhood girls

they’re sitting, waiting, too

crosslegged and small and nearly blue

or gold, sometimes I cannot tell

because despite our same path here every day

we have all been detached, completed, from ourselves

these people just like me

are all I do not know too well

but try to meagerly

because this ride is the same one along which I’ll return

until the bridge is fixed

and we aren’t broken

lonely anymore

(for Claudia Rankine)

————–

The post On My New York Shit… appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————-

I want to date a photographer

I want to date a photographer

the smell of a closet turned into a darkroom

catechol, acetic acid

in the morning

a filterless cigarette

waking up in light

in the sanctuary of another artist

another who drifts like a rhythmic martyr

or an aging bicycle on an icy road

pinched flats

I’ll kiss her

just as she pictured it

with corruption just like a limerick on my lips

and there will be a restful slumber

that lasts a day and a full night’s appetite

and then when we stretch

waking up in light

again

she’ll take a photograph

while I’m still in bed

and I’ll pretend

amongst the covers

that I’m anything but happy

in the bliss of undeveloped prints

stuck for a time to find myself exposed

in the winking coffin of her lens

yawning for her smile like a protective dog

hair resembling an eureka moment   

waking up in light

realizing that dust has gathered

and the walls, they have become  

a shoebox full of photographs

like a treasure chest of glass blown into bodies

all fettered by an invisible force

indoctrinated by good intentions

and each left to sleep alone

———–

The post Some Bittersweet and Lonely Madness appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————-

from a fan shining for the fat lady

16

1924

across 74 pages

nearly the span of the magazine entirely  

save for advertisements

June 19^th, 1965 becomes a cadaverous footnote

(and yet there was a summer camp and a quarter hour’s fascination with touching,

dirty fingernails that bloomed

from a Czech woman enamored with the symbolist poetry of Otakar Březina)

but the critics won’t call it regicide

because that takes the climax out of masturbation  

and yet, again,

reading is the only company for the dispossessed

this is our nourishment

and our army marches on its stomach too

stems dangling in the air

it is an agency (not of the travelling, transitory kind)

or a dejected providence:

a recitation amongst friends or those that drink enough to be

at a salon in Rhode Island or Connecticut or New Hampshire, wearily…  

no, no bullshit – as long as the lights are lit and the beer is cold

that’s all we care about

truth be told

just keep on going

little sparrow feet

in shiny golden slippers (smiling like the sun

on an aeolian Hyperborean, like a fucking classic, honestly)

or

wings in romantic twitchy tweed

gowned by every varicolored trick imagined

by a marriage to the sea

                       or to the flight of time  

an incantatory improvisation with lovely, lonely legs  

which transitions

into verse

unto reflection

and yet there will still be a gravedigger singing as he works

a descant about a January date

whether perfumed premature or much too late

sometime in early twenty ten

when Buddy Glass put down his pen

and I used some ornamental and intimate language

to describe what I felt if I’d have no characters to relate to

oscillating between Myshkin and the youngest brother Z (more like Rogozhin, arguably;  

with an impotent anger, a holy pedigree)

a Jake Barnes who can still get hard  

especially in eulogy, divided up in cant and cantos

(to be sure, for BIOGRAPHICAL PURPOSES ONLY – or a new print of Harland Miller’s)  

in a song to pass the time

somewhere coming lo-fi from the Husker state

like a sullen Hüsker Dü intake

or a convict waiting on parole

there used to be something that I was waiting for (I know)  

that I was watching slowly disappear

like Buddy, himself, did year by year

or day by day

or when a suicide needed to be explained away

he linked brother Seymour with Gordon Sterrett

and it all became of quite a merit

when he choose himself to be a worthwhile successor

to some masters that time would soon make foolish minstrels out of

waiting on a mocking joke or new commentary to explain their fate  

too late, again, too late

(the biographical again, enough to make you want to put down a pen)

there seems to be no resolution coming

like a letter from one writer to another during war or famine

abandoned or unknown

or a meeting at the Paris Ritz in ’44

or at the Dingo Bar in ’25 (as it was Spring as well back then,

apparently moving)

only an epistle left to yellow like a folkish curse

a fabrication to drive the drunken hearse

…

and I don’t know how or for who to end this verse

there were some rhymes

for which I take the entirety of blame

I am ashamed to say

I do not rhyme too well

but all of these men who I remember fondly are all dead

they aren’t expecting much

but me, a sigh, I am still here

just bargaining on a final encomiastic compromise

asking the remaining few

through tears and memories and bookmarks:

who do I have to look forward to

            meeting

                    for

                       a drink?  

———–

The post from a fan shining for the fat lady (closer every day) appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————–

Sempiternity

I just imagined you

in a party dress

of surprised pomegranate gabardine

peeling crawfish

to see whether they were cooked

like a blues song on a downtuned piano

and by that vision

I knew that it was summer

again

at last  

a cackling whirl

of sunshine and sweat

in strands of dark chestnut hair

that smelled

like my last trip to Louisiana

and bubblegum from my Soviet childhood  

bought with inflated currency

tasting of the same inspiration

as when I got high

with the animals in their furnished cage

and my body no longer felt broken

and only a heartbeat

to keep the rhythm for our boogie

remained

only a single summer evening

when I conjured you in a dream I haven’t woken to thus far

because we hadn’t met back then

but there were wild stanzas that rollicked blindly along the zephyrs  

and I could almost capture them

like fireflies skirting the glass of opened jars

in juvenile hands that hadn’t grasped the world just yet

and we smoked a bit to pass the season

the cigarette transitioning from your fingers to mine

in delicate hesitation

and we looked at each other

wondering what kind of time apart this was   

in this mulberry vespertine glow

of new summer

refashioned into an astral, phantasmagoric isolato

taking a threepenny tour of eternity

(for M.)

———–

The post From a Clean Page appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————

liricheskaya (if I ever write a song in prison)

lay in my arms

like the book that you inspired

the velvet slip a binding

taken off by one passion or another

one more time

sing it with your ambit  

sway against my lips

like a choir of seraphs

that after some drunken revelry in purgatory

(which resembles an overpriced bar I know in Times Square)  

cantillate vulgar ballads about maidens of antiquity

in golden curl and vicious skin

that Orpheus never brought back home for dinner

to hear his lyre twang

fading like everything

beautiful and obscure

within a sandy sojourn

in an arid savage climate

where no one grows

taller than a capitalist  

slowly blown away

farther than the mind can go

and it’s only us

translating into wind

speaking or scarcely listening

to snakes and other animals

that barely resemble secondhand Marxists of some kind

who make you laugh like a laconic port

that turn your teeth to butter

and my hands to parking lots  

lay in my arms

like that nude portrait that you bought

hung on a wall for decoration

to hide the truth of cracking paint

and any resemblance of a life that’s being lived

(another percocet for a new twitch that dances)

and I’ll coo to you

from that mark the nail made inside your wall

and I’ll tell you

slightly muzzled by the celebrity of your churlish quietude  

that you approximate

an e e cummings poem

because it is the Woody Allen movie that you haven’t seen

you are becoming

that soft light that gets stuck inside my teeth

a canicular hunter of imaginative men

who lose it all gambling inside of you

sleeping unaccomplished

they will still be there

ghosts along the sacrilegious highway of your thighs

waiting to be stuffed like pronghorns for your mantle

they will have their own time to crumble

like war torn monuments to independence

so, lay in my arms

for just a little while longer

I’m still writing you, you know

the day is still ahead

and if later

someone calls you with a better proposition

go with him

I won’t get lost

I promise

(for anyone who’s ever been loved before)

———-

The post Someone To Love (A Thinking Man’s Erection) appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————

she fell asleep

with her face

nestled against my neck

her breath

warm against my ear

listening

to the vision that she saw

in the midnight of the fantasy

from the bight of dreaming

I could not wade into

I realize now that you do not want to be saved, how trite, you rather want to be worshiped at a distance, left alone to die, like an object in a store that costs more than what’s in my pocket

————–

The post A Sample of the Night appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

———–

Ellipse

…

and there was a dusk

(as must be),

then spattered dust

(as always was),

then a crack of an empty minute

resounding like a frenzied horsewhip in Nietzsche’s mind

or like a pointless pauperized vendetta

carmine humidity along cement

surrounded by red brick tenements

facing one another adversarially

and then all was silent

suddenly  

as the night submitted

to the dreams of frightened children

quivering through the intractable unknown

like a young bride sold to cheap wealth

to mask the poverty of kinfolk

and then the lampposts came alight

blinking like a fool

who’ll never see tomorrow

because today lasts too long

and the light flows troubled

like a sonnet

for a first love

whoever she may be

sought and searching

tanned shoulders and mild insomnia

…

an elephant graveyard

where only memory exists

unburdening itself

as the sun beats down

in heavy, arced layers

foreboding

waiting for the heavy footsteps

of time to pass  

——–

The post First One for May appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.

————

8 X 8 (Of Cinerea)

I don’t like to make the bed because it reminds me of a Soviet orphanage; of tiny, pale hands pushing wool blankets of rough gray up into a strict horizontal angle. It reminds me of drying cement and a thin film over curdled government milk. I never want to be with her in an apartment where we have to make our bed, I always want for it to remain an eager invitation. I don’t want throw pillows, silk sheets or a mint either. I just want her and a ruffled blanket thrown on a comfortable mattress in a comfortable manner, some purple covers to keep us restless. I want it to look, in the morning especially, as if it all lay there like a song from an out of tune instrument, and I want her, and I need her to want to get into that bed with me. Everything else is shibboleth, ceremony, or a politeness I can’t stomach.

She thinks that I don’t know anything about her – but I know she’s stubborn, and she thinks it’s cute. I see it when she grins at me, in a toothy silence, during a pointed pause in conversation. I see it when her eyes become dewy from the irritation of light and contact lenses. I see it when she folds one leg underneath the other to listen to a new story I was meant to retrieve for her.

There was the time we went to Philadelphia and she caught a cold (before any soup could be purchased) and yet wouldn’t take my coat to cover herself during the bus ride. We split an order of curly fries after she refused to order her own. She ate most of them before we left the state, hoarding all the ketchup in the tiny paper container – I made sure not to notice and kissed her salty lips like rain on an April window or gray hair mourning on a cenotaph. When we finally reached the fraternal Pennsylvanian city we stayed in a hotel room that seemed to be moulting like a prideful falcon that cast its home on a high tower in an abandoned metropolis. We ate cheese steaks, which never seemed to have enough peppers or onions on them. We argued about who claimed the better Faust – Berlioz or Gounod. We drank whiskey, when she still drank whiskey. Watched bad television and made love like two bank robbers that got away with the loot after a gunfight with the law. Then we took the bus back to New York, never seeing the crack of the Liberty Bell or taking a single photograph – but she wrapped herself in my coat on the ride back and I thought that the trip was wholly worth it.

There was a time that the writing

flourished

in my stomach

like a writhing ulcer

and you’d see me spitting blood

in nouns that wore black stocking on long legs

in adjectives in rouge and skimpy robes of good intentions

in verbs that spilled over like premature ejaculation

and you’d soften it

stroke my hair

a 20^th century massacre that we’re only forgetting now

you’d sit me down in my favorite chair

with a pen and Yardbird Parker

and get me to write another line

that connected the old world with the new

in a sepulcher of words

the same pretentious masquerade of black and white

stitches across the skin of an exhausted dream

resigned to the gluttony of past

and then what’s left

we’ve shocked and scared ourselves to love again

and on some strangling advice

which you warned me not to take

I rewrote the ending for some commercial viability

and started spitting blood again

but now

with no longer someone left

to stroke my hair

I want this life to remain an improvisation. A 20-minute riff in B minor. A yearning for more. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breasts. Her waist. Her hips. Her thighs. Let’s pause a moment. Not too long though. Her face: all brightness, sun along her skin. Something I described so simply, because there was no reason to strain it with complexity: I was a cold cup of coffee and she was the warm hands that held it. In our relationship, it was always too late to castle and so I left the king open and vulnerable, but with her, I never much minded losing the game, as long as it remained nothing more than an improvisation, a variation on all that we take much too seriously.

Russians have a superstition that if you step on someone’s foot that they in turn have to step on yours lest you get into an argument – a savagely irrational eye for an eye custom hued in folklore fitting for the people that originated it. Adhering to this superstition tends to make for awkward subway rides during rush hour, especially if you’re navigating the conservative, overpopulated East Side of the city. I once asked an elderly man to step on my foot while I was huddled amongst weary bodies on the 6 train, late to work, and after he looked back at me bewildered, I explained the peculiar ethnology of my proposition. He smiled and tapped my shoe, then talked my ear off about how he had no one, no grandchildren to tell the story of how he wrote a musical adaptation of A Midsummer’s Night Dream with Duke Ellington back in the 1950s. It was a nice conversation and we promised to meet again when the musical was going to be put on in New Orleans the following summer, I mentioned that I always very much enjoyed Cajun cuisine. And with the words “the course of true love never did run smooth for young Lysander,” I left the train with a small imprint of his heel on my shoe.

(For Herb Martin)

———–

The post 8 X 8 (Of Cinerea) appeared first on Jack Tsoy Tumult.