All Music by Kevin McLeod
Under Creative Commons License
Actors:
Jack Logan: Tony Barnstone
Spider Floyd: Tony Barnstone
Street Drunk: Tony Barnstone
Mortician Joe Martin: Tony Barnstone
Red Bordello Waiter: Tony Barnstone
Shedd Aquarium Janitor: Tony Barnstone
Rose: Jennifer Sage Holmes
Violet: Jennifer Sage Holmes
___________
Tony Barnstone: “This sequence comes from my manuscript, Pulp Sonnets, and is the product of extensive research into 20th century American pulp fiction, noir, and comics, with particular attention to the spy, detective, crime, horror, sword and sorcery, vigilante, and pulp action genres. My approach is modeled on Robert Browning and Robert Frost, using dramatic monologue to let the characters speak for themselves in the vernacular of their class, location, and social situation. I research primary materials (including pulp short stories and novels, and original crime reports) in order to develop these voices, and secondary materials (theoretical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, philosophical, and theological studies of the pulps and the comics) to develop the larger themes of the project. I see the ‘Jack Logan’ story as fun (particularly in its wild plot and use of gangster vernacular), but not uncritical fun. It is meant to deconstruct pulp depictions of gender roles—in particular the femme fatale and the men caught up in their ‘tough guise.’” (web)
“Young Woman Drinking…” by Tony BarnstonePosted by Rattle
Tony Barnstone
YOUNG WOMAN DRINKING AT THE CAMPO DI’FIORE
(WHERE GIORDANO BRUNO WAS BURNED AT THE STAKE
FOR HERESY IN 1600 FOR CLAIMING THAT THE EARTH
ORBITED AROUND THE SUN)
On the green plastic chair she’s so alive
and blazing he can barely glance at her
as he drinks soda and Campari here
where tourists congregate like pigeons, and love
for just a day in Rome. He thinks her smile
is frightening. It yields such pent-up light
that he needs courage watching it ignite
not to flinch back. She is the sun. He smells
the fire and falters, almost mute, breath short.
He feels his stomach fulminate in red,
smoke his eyes from her flame of dark hair,
the breasts electric in her brown stretch shirt;
he’s splintered into kindling but upright,
and he keeps talking as flames drown the square.
“The Truth Is That He Never…” by Tony BarnstonePosted by Rattle
Tony Barnstone
THE TRUTH IS THAT HE NEVER WAS THAT GOOD
AT FLIRTING, BUT HIS FRIENDS DID THEIR BEST
TO SET HIM UP
Patricia looks just like a movie star,
you know, the actress in Jerry Maguire,
what’s her name, the pretty one, and he stares
at her a bit too much, feeling a fire
ignite, of lust or the Greek sun. A tiny
yellow missile darts from the sky of glass:
a bee that stings her where her white bikini
bottom arches round her lovely ass,
and Jaqueline says someone must suck out
the poison fast or else the wound will swell.
He gets the job and sucks with modest ardor
while everybody laughs. Patricia Pouts,
“It hurts. It isn’t coming out,” then smiles,
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to suck it harder.”
Tony Barnstone: “‘Why I’m Not a Carpenter’ was a poem I wrote inspired by a dinner I had with Yusef Komunyakaa, who is editing an anthology of carpenter poems. At that dinner, I promised Yusef a poem, and so wrote this one to order. My brother Rob is a former carpenter who is now an architect and professor, and I spent many of the summers of my youth working with Rob renovating houses in Greece and Boston, in Vermont and Indiana. In our unusual crew, the working class grunt sinking post holes or wiping his sawdust-covered brow was most likely a Harvard architecture student, a brilliant painter, or, in my case, a graduate student at Berkeley writing his dissertation on William Carlos Williams, and I strongly felt the way these different kinds of craft still carried gender biases and constructions of masculinity and femininity. I decided to reference my insufficient skills as a carpenter and as a poet in part by alluding to the title of Frank O’Hara’s wonderful poem ‘Why I’m Not a Painter,’ in which he shows the parallel and yet divergent skill sets and mind sets that go into painting versus poetry. Another element in the poem, the story about Achilles killing the Amazon queen, comes not from The Iliad, but from the 4th century epic poem by Quintus of Smyma that I happened to be reading. Quintus’s epic, titled Posthomerica, is a Trojan War poem that creates some new Homeric stories and puts a new spin on the familiar ones. The final element that I blended in was a failed draft of a poem that I had tried to write while working on a crew in Boston in 1988 or so. I am particularly happy that that failed draft, one that I worked on for years without success, has finally been crafted into the poem that I like. Thank you, Yusef!” (web)
When in the mist of a phone call you loose
yourself in thought and all seams an allusion,
when I take you for granite like statues
of limitation, and the one solution
seams to excape like hoarses from a coral
fenced with Bob wire, than thoughts go wild, gallumping
off, and take a different tact. The morale
is when I spread whip cream on your volumptuous
bawdy, when I gays at you awl rapt
up in duck tape of lust, its not enough.
We use each other viscously. We dangle
over a whole, unable to adept.
But cant we change? Lets nip it in the butt.
We kneed to see things from another angel.