"through our own damned trumpets, through our damned medium:"

          tourniquetsonnets are sonnets i started to write after the printing/publication of my book "Self-Portrait of the Poet Suicided by the MFA Degree." it was a nice way to unshoulder, unholster?, the fragments i cdn't/can't stitch into whatever i call a poem. they're deconstructed documentaries from a dragnet. here're two...


tourniquetsonnet upon the realization of a book


a stork’s heart is a right turn at a red light, natch?
21 minutes of recon in the forest of derailed trains
Anastasia loudly weeps tawdry Las Vegas crooner

…no way my lips are hacked off, Joseph; after all
Dutch East India Trading—  porn in the USA; to wit
a stack of LIFE magazines trapped in flat of angles;

aye, spent some of the war in a hospital at Nantes
before the nurse sutured my latent feelings, quite
it’s the essence of the idea that doesn’t really matter

the expression of vulnerability—it was vociferous!!!
storm stutter—38 apathy stab me w/ a butcher knife
Pantone 18-1663 TPX dismissed from one’s pulse

einstürzende! einstürzende! einstürzende! einstür…
zen is the Whalen in yr heartbeat (plz. come back)


—


tourniquetsonnet for the orison of a parachute,


certainly life erupts anchors aweigh w/ gravity
piano plink rain i sd Georgia i can’t stop drinking
tourniquets and Maria Callas records you were
cursive writing on a former trunk line, eastbound

it’s not a question of whether who we once were

my grandfather’s wars twinge and i see a violin
pique from the bourbon as i curate a car crash
departures blur through the old country of youth
whilst miniature carnations sprout from my aorta

restless rural romanticism, maritime americana

two rowboats tread water reifying insouciance
chance and design, from illogical angles, quietly
the radiator pipes of my rib cage rattle as i hum
self-portrait of the portrait suicided by justin, etc.









–post quote from J. Spicer's Imaginary Elegies I

modern melancholy, etc.

            elegantly taking one’s clothes off before a sensuous woman

            unabashedly, flamboyantly beautiful •• more elusive, historically •• it’s that faded sense of beauty you long for and forever hold onto when you behold it •• liable to be derailed at any moment and required for a debriefing •• after every fleeting, triumphant moment…stricken— •• opera gloves; a red gown, snarling as you pass, nowhere else so erotic •• scrawled prayers on the back of holy pictures •• these harrows are daydreams rended by indiscreet drama and inapposite passion… •• you suspect “no girl was ever seduced by a book;” •• the torrid narcosis that filters through the candlelight, the East Berlin amphetamines •• a searching fire, subsiding from a rosary, under chemical light •• the gears of an Antebellum pocket watch, in which you begin to interrogate clarity •• the velocity of a departing angel through the vor of autumn leaves •• incongruous is the horizon •• the hallucinatory hymn of her portrait •• “romance is a mournful beauty,” she’ll say, confuting the cute squalor of yr nostalgia •• as you taxi to threnody the treble in her throat •• it’s the most dangerous of moods: a desire for complete isolation of an all-consuming romance •• the ghostfights and other nude scenes •• exotic mirrors late in the tension of acquiescence toward the threshold of the absurd •• the elusive cartography: a stethoscope to the chest •• tonight brings what is left of auscultation •• melancholy may long for a samurai who gives everything up for the love of a geisha •• red carnations and the glamour of being a shadow •• a mannequin wearing an ornate wedding dress w/ an antique birdcage for a head •• Billie Holiday singing along to a Remington 5 typewriter •• an Astra Constable tucked into a folded New York Times •• it’s a rainy Tuesday morning •• remodeling interior gods in a Gledhill Halifax cash register •• which is to say, if the rumors were true •• speakeasy brass bands from inside a velvet chesterfield •• that just documents the diamond heist behind her eyes