fire escape - QuirkEbooks.com

FIRE ESCAPE:
an illustrated collection
of smokin' hot quicklit
by Russil Tamsen aka MC Radiance © 2003-2007
All rights reserved.
russiltamsen.com
Book design, layout, cover and literature by Russil Tamsen
CONTENTS
p.1
Seven Dreams I Had All in One Night
an epic of sex, disaster, death and rebirth
p.2
p.6
p.10
p.13
p.16
p.21
p.25
p.28
Dream I
Dream II
Dream III
Dream IV
Dream V
Dream VI
Dream VII
Spam Spam Spam
compiled from random junk e-mail titles
p.30
Un Frog Edible
making Nat King Cole turn in his grave
p.32
Fish Out of Water Blues
a short, jealous blues
p.34
Yuppie Logic
priorities while getting jacked
p.36
Vegas Freezeout
got reamed and limped away (the short version)
p.41
It Was 120 Degrees in My Head
the true back story to Vegas Freezeout
p.52
The Dis
parody of a battle rapper in a hip hop club
p.52
Firepants!
Dream about a tiny sprite in a discotheque
p.56
The Underworld Tweedledum
standing up to a funny crook
p.59
Fire Escape
overwhelmed by city life… and unfunny thugs
p.64
East Side, Providence
thoughts about life while cramming for finals
p.71
Wildfire: a true tory
escape from a North California inferno
p.74
When Kurt’s Body Was Found
a cartoonish vision of death by recklessness
p.79
Apocalypso: a fun nightmare
a dream of nuclear war… and Disney!
p.85
Is This a Slam or What?
a comic strip-esque master of ceremonies
p.91
ARTWORK CREDITS
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 1
Russil Tamsen
7 DREAMS I HAD: ALL IN ONE NIGHT
7 dreams I had
all in the same night.
Seven dreams before I was due
at the LAX boarding gate…
Before my flight I wonder: am I scared
to fly this year? It's 1992.
DREAM I.
Los Angeles. Evening. A pool…
She swarms up through the fertile water,
playfully carnivoring my calf.
She
rises from the blue
dripping, shimmering,
and my hand comes to rest squeezing—
squeezing and surprised!
upon the jelly flesh of her waist.
For my memory etched
a different version of her
in a tighter hard-body.
Not framed by all this suburban stucco…
Oh, yes! a wild hottie
A memory that I have treasured thru the years
of she whose vogue ways
had once begged for it!
On that evening when I had first built a bridge
all the way to her inner desire,
and into her velvety sheets we had fallen.
Oh how she had screamed in release
... and then stopped calling!
The morning after, with a polite smile,
she had returned herself
to her regularly scheduled programming.
Fire Escape ~ 2
Russil Tamsen
How this karmic wheel has burned
with memories that were branded
only in MY heart.
Or so I thought…
But tonight
she is casually ensnaring me once more
in her dreamy gaze.
She tangos me backward
across the river rock patio.
Her towel is falling away
amid lovely kisses, suspended
under the Milky Way.
She is more than just a promise to me now,
more than eager once again!
She’s a mouthful of everything.
Those breasts are still such a handful.
Long I've waited, and at long last,
she, she has come fishing for me!
She sniffs the aroma of me,
and then wraps her lips
all around my world.
Still connected to me psychically?
After all this time? Could that be why
she’s sensitively sixty-nining with me…
A segue-way, a scent change
and I'm suddenly staring into some dark chasm.
Something's stuck in the way of my orgasm!
I can no longer focus on my own urgency.
She has edged my ship
toward the shores of vulnerability
and I start taking on water
in a sea-blue memory
of all the dry years
that have been separating us.
Do I even deserve to receive
Fire Escape ~ 3
Russil Tamsen
such wanton pleasure tonight?
For we all are struggling through these
years of national depression.
She and I climax
at last…
and after cuddling under the patio lights
I feel over-powered by so many global problems
which she and I share
just because we are PBS aware!
She leads me groggily
into her bedroom
where we drift away into uneasy sleep,
inside this, my wish fulfillment dream!
This first dream of my 7 dream night…
Fire Escape ~ 4
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 5
Russil Tamsen
DREAM II
My right eye twitches open
like a Hollywood shutter!
My second dream of the night staggers
into an unnerving setup…
The static air of her bedroom
is being scratched
by whispers from the yard, quiet voices
that spike through her gauzy curtains!!
A strange undertone
is slicing through the silence.
"Wake up, honey! Do you hear that?"
She listens hard
to the rustling outside,
somewhere just below the Bush-line.
It's definitely people out there.
And they know we’re in here!
How many of them are there?
The shiny sneer of a machine gun
glints a flash
of probing moonlight
across these rosy walls.
Christ! I have two saucer eyes!
Fuck! All our senses are peeled back!
She and I creep out of her bed like lost deer
but her knees give way beneath her...
Come on, Bambi!
Get off the carpet, let’s get out of range!
She grabs the door frame and moans:
"Oh I just knew something like this
would happen! Hunters fishing for me,
poking around for that one
chink in my security,
and now they're gonna take my life
Fire Escape ~ 6
Russil Tamsen
away from me.
Why me, why is this happening to me?"
Fuck no, wench:
we must counterattack!
I've got an idea.
Let's untangle these vocal cords.
Together we start to scream: "He-e-e-e-lp!"
But the thunderous velocity of our mutual shout
launches me backward…
down a spiral hallway of Time
whose distant wallpaper
is mostly unpainted cosmos,
like a black canvas
with a few starry brushstrokes,
the odd splatters of vomit yellow.
I continue to fall backward.
I am leaving her behind again...
until I touchdown in Eraserhead
where I am upchucking
my fear of Hollywood aesthetics.
(...Perhaps white vomit would match these fabulous
curtains better? White would bring the whole room
together!)
As I detour into various decorating options:
I hum: La did da, dum di diddledee dum…
I can’t help but wonder where will they pose both
of our spectacularly dead bodies…
"Let's just surrender and get it all over with."
"No." Her turn to put her foot down. “No!”
Okay, then, crack that light switch there
(oops wrong switch) as
I shout at the open window:
"We know you’re out there, motherfuckers!
Fire Escape ~ 7
Russil Tamsen
We both got guns!" but that's a lie.
She punches up 911.
On the intercom, I yell: "Intruder alert!"
just because I can.
I am about to tell her to go create distractions,
to run from room to room
and turn on all the light-switches in the house.
Instead something makes me stop her:
I grab her wrist so she can't move.
What the hell are we doing, girl?
Shouting is a neon
invitation to these assassins!
What a dumb idea.
Shouting just gives them a bead on us faster!
Baby, I’m afraid we are close to dead.
She and I climb meekly into a closet
to hide, like children, pulling her housecoats
down over our heads...
Fire Escape ~ 8
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 9
Russil Tamsen
DREAM III
How long, how long
since the moon set?
How many hours have we been here hiding,
crouched here waiting…
No cops have been arriving,
nor has the other shoe
started dropping…
I rouse myself now.
I need to feel more alive!
I want to feel stronger!!
Resolve is growing in me now!
I will not be weakened by their violence!
We must survive through Love, not War!
I stand up! Taller! I’ve gotta call for backup!
and the Relief in my blood relaxes my mind.
I ease my way out of the closet and tiptoe
along the hall of empowerment.
I mount her vital staircase.
Higher and higher,
up into the belfry!
I’m climbing higher and higher still,
through cloud 9 and
up into Universal Time I climb!
Becoming more of a dream-walker
and more mad like an Arab astronaut!
Up there, in the top of some cosmic minaret,
I summon the rocketing spirits of Revenge
to bomb down upon our property invaders:
"Darkness I say!
Vile orcs, strange bats,
ancients of Sumer, arise!
Come and enflame a screech
within their smug ear-holes!"
Fire Escape ~ 10
Russil Tamsen
Instantly, a strange insanity
falls upon the sneaky snipers outside.
My conjuration, to my surprise,
is becoming a sweet success!
Through her attic window,
I giddily observe the after-effects.
And oh, it’s like some Xmas
pantomime now—their hands
glued over their ears, stricken,
they scatter helplessly
to the four winds like demented chickens!
HA! Conceit is become my possession!
Control of the spirits is mine!
I laugh smugly,
like a manly hero would, feeling cocky.
I return down the minaret
to my sweating LA lady.
Also all mine.
"Wipe away your sweat and tears.
I've saved us, m'lady! And wouldn’t you say
my magickal out-flanking
was well orchestrated?
And exquisitely authoritative?"
Yet inside me, unseen, I have grave doubts:
Did I go too far? Did I drop my aces cleanly
or have I again indebted myself to The Darkness:
to the lord whose Powers sometime
befoul my dreaming?
Was I merely turning the tables
on some bad enemy energies
so that we nobles can emerge unscathed?
Or will I have to atone for these favors, later?
My use of the black arts will have to be repaid…
Fire Escape ~ 11
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 12
Russil Tamsen
DREAM IV
In the morning light,
she is standing strong and radiant
like the Statue of Liberty—
that symbol of American hospitality.
On her stucco doorstep
we kiss
and then I bound down to my Pontiac.
Proud as a newly crowned king
I’m striding down the street.
I crack my neck once, mentally
preparing my day’s agenda before the 9 o’clock
school bell.
This will not be a routine day, however.
Something odd in the sky catches my eye.
A package plane, perhaps?
This purple, red and white 747
is meandering off course,
slowly circling.
Wing tipping.
It’s more and more alarming
so of course I can’t stop watching.
The plane veers down toward
the longshoremen who are working the piers.
Oh no, the great machine has gone nose down!
Unguided or steered by a surreal pilot,
the 747 smacks the ground.
It tunnels briefly, plowing
into the concrete city and disappearing.
Like a needle plunging under
the civic skin
it injects its poisonous fire within.
For a long millisecond, it is
broken and silent and invisible.
I am braced for the cue
Fire Escape ~ 13
Russil Tamsen
As a peaceful maple leaf spins
across my immobile shoe,
the violent shock wave arrives:
KA-BOOM!!!
Oh what hath God wrought?
Fire Escape ~ 14
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 15
Russil Tamsen
DREAM V
"They were ASKING for it."
I know. I know. Oi vay.
It’s just that I’m so tired
of having to teach people LESSONS—
even if they WERE asking for it.
"Oi, that’s not good style there!"
I indicate down the lane between the dividers
but the kid keeps doggie paddling
like a delirious gold miner
digging a hole toward buried treasure.
"Backstroke. Like this…" I demonstrate
the approved technique.
I reach back and sweep my arms under,
but my aging shoulders
are alternately complaining.
Oi. Oi.
My bones are getting heavy
like decommissioned locomotives!
My teaching brain
is every more filled with urban
concrete and metal.
Yet the stupid student
continues to stare at me
through his angular splashing,
totally uncomprehending.
So I roll my eyes with a sigh,
and then dive in.
Oi vay. Damn these beginners!
Damn these teaching lessons…
I don’t know why I don’t quit.
All this grinding and wheeling
and kicking correctly
makes me feel overbearing, and heavy.
Fire Escape ~ 16
Russil Tamsen
Oi vay, what is the goddamn point?
They never GET it anyway!
I’m just an old catfish now,
getting tangled up
in the cable lane dividers.
Going steadily obsolete.
I’m so jaded it’s like I've sprung a big leak.
I’m a paddle wheeler
with a gaping hole in the hull.
I’m torquing my wooden shell.
I’m greedily reaching for the bottom mud.
Sloshing slowly down,
disappearing from view
for I have no buoyancy left,
unlike you bubbly young students,
you shmucks!
A wash of chlorinated light
closes over my balding head
through softly jiggling waves…
I am reminded of her wavy hair
and her lovely warm pool waters but
like a heavy-hearted anchor,
I am sinking
much deeper than I should
into another bone-chilling dream!
The surface recedes away,
out of reach,
out of hope.
The surface freezes into a ceiling of ice
that is rising away from me
as I gulp dirty water instead of air,
but do I even care?
Caring is for the young.
Does anyone else recall
that wintry plane crash into the Potomac?
Fire Escape ~ 17
Russil Tamsen
Or remember overloaded ferries capsizing
in the North Sea? in the Philippine Sea?
All acts of the tabloid God, briefly
grasped in a supermarket checkout line.
Now these disasters are all too resonant with me.
I hear their distant echoes,
those wat’ry graves,
as unearthly as these forebodings I have
which foretell that I must be reborn!
Reborn?
Impossible, I've been floored.
Below me, I can't possibly sink no more.
Above me, however, like a building crane,
I think I spy the Architect’s Light!
It begins to haul me up now
Like sky gravity,
the stars are reeling me upwards!
until I am dangling
precariously from a thread
of this imaginary Love,
high above the school pool.
My limbs all wet and akimbo
a-twitching like a newborn in mid air,
in the nebulous air of limbo,
turning slowly on a vertical spit
while my lifetime of crusty spite
peels off and completely flakes away.
The crane arm trundles
until I am hanging above concrete.
I feel as fragile as eggs
so I try to fixate
on easy Shabbat memories,
to focus on unbreakable dates
with girls who remain sweet
the morning after.
God? Goddess?
Is this it? Am I being Reborn?
Fire Escape ~ 18
Russil Tamsen
I hang from the winch,
thinly suspended.
I wonder what or who it is
that I would REALLY love near me
this lifetime.
Fire Escape ~ 19
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 20
Russil Tamsen
DREAM VI
Like a reinvigorated Spiderman
strumming a silky cord on which I swing,
I gain momentum until I am lunging
through the flung-open portico curtains.
Still expecting to find my L.A. woman there
on the rumpled and welcoming bed.
Instead, this room is unfamiliar and dusty,
and that’s not where the bed was before…
I think to myself, "What the-?"
just as a hotel bellhop
struts past the open door.
I leap over the covers and interrupt him:
"Um, excuse me, is this the sixth floor?"
He looks at me with utter contempt.
"It’s not?" I continue, "So sorry!
Then I’ll just pop out by the corridor."
I'm alone, bereft of my wet LA dream gal,
but at least I am feeling alive!
Now what was my mission target again?
Oh yeah! (And this time I mustn’t confuse it.)
I'm about to learn a big lesson about music!
There so happen to be some famous musicians
holed up in the room right across the hall.
20 of the most wanted instrumentalists
in the entire musical world!
I can already hear them:
Their door is ajar.
I timidly grip their doorway frame.
Maybe I'll lie down in a chilly corner of their room?
and try to learn to groove along with their masteries.
Will they be frighteningly serious too?
Fire Escape ~ 21
Russil Tamsen
Amid their fiddling,
amid those melodies,
I realize I know that chord progression…
and it's quite inviting to me.
This music is dawning across me
with songs that have been resurrected
for a noble purpose!
I could be the voice of the People!
Inspired!
I burst in and burst out
and overwhelm their instrumental mood with
“Lord, here comes the flood!
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It’ll be those who gave their islands
to survive
Drink up, dreamer,
you’re running dry…”
That was my sparkling rendition
of a Peter Gabriel song
but the Soul Train stumbles to a jumbled halt.
Laser stares from all the musicians
shooting down my big take-off.
They're making me wish I could just disappear
inside my talentless skin.
Was my input really THAT fucked up?
It’s judgment day now!
High court is in full session.
I'm soon found guilty of interrupting,
of adding NOTHING worthy of mention!
How can I avoid
their prickly feedback, this critical pain?
Can I pretend that I've been sleepwalking,
Fire Escape ~ 22
Russil Tamsen
(sleep-singing)
and I'm only now awakening?
Yawning, I feign
groggy-lids.
Mumbling goodbye, I back out the doorway
and stumble
tumbling backward into the blue
corridor of water.
Fire Escape ~ 23
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 24
Russil Tamsen
DREAM VII
I swim down the wallpapered lane
to a different hotel room, a dorm room,
where my resurrected life starts to improve.
"Um-m-m-m, hello?"
she calls out from her warm cocoon.
Her hesitancy is sexy.
It arouses me.
Well look, here’s a freeze-dried cutie!
Did she just fall out of the clothes-dryer?
We hit it off and talk until past dinnertime,
until she feels a lot more inspired!
"Oo," she giggles, totally relaxing,
and soon everything about her just seems
so natural and daring and exciting.
"You’re the first in a long time
that I’ve even felt like
doing… something… with."
She murmurs into my ear
as she trips with me, awkwardly,
onto her chastity bed, backward…
She falls, laughing with me
in this, the last of my seven dreams.
But her gray woolen sock-covered foot
lands in my face,
(By accident?
I don’t think that’s a good omen!
Plus I’m allergic to sheepish fabrics.)
"Maybe you’d like to meet my friend too?"
She hollers through the bathroom wall:
"Susan! Come on in and meet somebody new."
In vamps her friend.
Fire Escape ~ 25
Russil Tamsen
It’s the campus party girl, Susan.
She is shapely and attitude-oozing
…and uniquely endowed with a small
elephant seal proboscis
flopped on top of her human nose!
This is hard to process…
Oh my God, this is just monstrous!
I try not to be judgmental,
but hell, it’s a trunk!
I peek through my fingers
but her trunk still lingers!
Beauty is in The Truth, they say,
it's in the Eye of the Beholder.
That’s what I repeat to myself over and over.
It ain’t about plastic surgery.
Better to fix the perceiver!
That’s what I repeat to myself over and over.
Like I’m stuck at that bar in Star Wars.
The girls both smile at each other, then at me,
while taking all of their clothes off.
Oh my God, Oh my GOD!
I pat my Omnimax forehead
because I'm being flown
to a planet that's totally bizarre!
Will I be getting proboscis head?
Oh this dream is the craziest by far!
of the 7 dreams I had before flying.
7 dreams
all in one momentous night.
Fire Escape ~ 26
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 27
Russil Tamsen
SPAM SPAM SPAM
Suck my fiery catling,
isthmus roadworthy.
Eat the sagacious turret!
Swim genoptic cheeky.
You will love this:
constellate allotropic!
No perceptions and long queues,
Zachary Zachary.
Resuscitate installation
in refractory taxidermy.
In short:
Petrificate your manhood.
It’s all about soft Marcelino…
joy resounding.
Fire Escape ~ 28
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 29
Russil Tamsen
UN FROG EDIBLE
(a song parody*)
Rubbing alcohol
on a steel tray
You’re dissectable
in every way!
With formaldehyde,
clamps and spatulas,
all your organs
are so spreadable!
On a Triscuit,
they’ll be delectable too.
You seem still flammable
near open flames.
I’m just a cannibal
with Chardonnay!
That’s why darling
it’s incredible!
That a gourmet
so insatiable
should discover
you’re indigestible, too.
[*To the tune of Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’.]
Fire Escape ~ 30
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 31
Russil Tamsen
FISH OUT OF WATER BLUES
My baby goes fishing
every day in the streets.
My baby goes fishing
every day in the streets.
Mean mama, don’t I give you enough
fish to eat?
When I found your address book,
my eyes wanted to die.
When I found your little black book,
my eyes wanted to die.
I’m stranded on the rocks now baby,
Just trying to remain high.
You said not to worry,
them was only old flames.
You told me not to worry,
cuz them was only old flames.
You Cat Demon from Hell,
best return back where you came!
Fire Escape ~ 32
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 33
Russil Tamsen
YUPPIE LOGIC
“Hey Man,
Relax!
Take it easy.
Put the gun down.
Okay, okay here: you want my wallet?
Take my wallet.
Relax.
Okay.
Just please
don’t touch my Dick
Tracy
wristwatch.
Okay man?
It’s all the personality I’ve got…”
Fire Escape ~ 34
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 35
Russil Tamsen
VEGAS FREEZEOUT
I step out
nervous
onto windswept streets
in Vegas.
My mood? it’s like an omen
epitomized
when I spy
some saran-wrapped feet.
Although Lady Luck
supposedly arrives
every morning
in a ’64 Cadillac,
strewing her enchanted dreams!
like a red carpet of petals
in front of rose-colored glasses
sported by future kings!
Sweet cherries! Lemons!
Bright stars!
Across our horn-rimmed spectacles,
we're staring up at lottery pies
piled high in lottery skies!
A cornucopic vision to relieve our Endless Dirge.
Me, just a humble woodsman,
I admit I (somehow) caught an urge!
I was ripe for ditching my small town
with its trite rites of life
to move to Vegas!
To fondle her more than twice
to caress all of her fluffy dice
all human contact available for a low neon-lit price,
Fire Escape ~ 36
Russil Tamsen
there, where the sand tracks merge
with concrete skies.
“Gotta be tough,
kid, if you want to survive,”
that’s what certain Natives
snicker
in between their casino advertising and advising lies.
LIES! I tell you.
Lady Luck.
She who is supposedly busy
giving it up
a few times a day in the back
of her Pink Cadillac.
Vegas, baby, Vegas is like Lady Luck's crack.
Oh, why had I prematurely written back:
“Boys, me in her is a real good fit.”
Me, fitting into this Mammon of mammaries!?
This Vegas Strip of infernal lust
where I did quietly sit one night
admiring all their clever mind games
and sexy green tables
AND their perfectly legal destruction
of my basic human-on-human Trust?
I clink the shiny ice cubes
like deadly dice cubes in this
my final happy hour glass,
so casually pent-up cuz I feel like
a real redneck dumb ass.
Oh Yeah, Lady Luck,
you have SERiously fucked over your
oh so naive bandit!
My mechanical arm:
Fire Escape ~ 37
Russil Tamsen
Broken, just like I am broke.
You pulled my leg once too often,
Vegas, and now I can’t stand it.
Afterward I am scrambling hard, dragging a foot,
but I keep sliding down a strangely glassy cliff.
Tires burn.
Now I can’t take my eyes off of the rear view.
For in that desert glow
is all my money which they somehow legally stole.
Yeah, I have been thoroughly rolled.
I've lost everything
Cold
Vegas, you high class bitch!
Lady Luck,
you perfume-anointed skunk!
Won’t you kiss goodbye
to another slicker wannabe,
to another sucker sunk?
No kleenexes for my tears?
No free kisses tonight from the dames
for a sore loser cow-punk whose farm cash is drained,
whose brain stem got sprained,
while chain-smoking zombie geriatrics
sitting at their slots keep spinning away
in 24/7 madness
amid robotic dreams of free change.
“Fuck you, dead, Vegas,”
is what I coughed,
speeding 95 in the nocturnal heat
and trying to choke down my colossal defeat.
The loss of an innocent enough dream
that perished on a cold shoulder
just another Vegas freezeout~
Fire Escape ~ 38
Russil Tamsen
but why should any of this
be of your concern?
Please beware if you do go for a desert drive
toward that sadistic city skyline
ever twinkling pretty and
tempting YOU naive kiddies for a risky ride.
Beware Vegas and what it can do.
It’s like a cuddly but perilous Picachu…
Fire Escape ~ 39
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 40
Russil Tamsen
IT WAS 120 DEGREES... IN MY HEAD
It was baking
when we hit Baker, Nevada.
The subwoofer was pounding,
the AC was cranking.
She was babbling away about aliens
and Tony Blair and Arafat.
Behind my headrest
sat 8’x8’ of boxes and clothes.
It was costing $60 a day
for these comfy rented wheels
and muscular SUV engine. Damn.
Plus gas and insurance
—it was gonna all add up to a tidy sum. Damn!
She claimed to be in touch with E.T.
She said the aliens would
beam in a “confirmation” for us
up at the pass.
Into Nevada we swooped,
ready for anything.
I had some hip hop in my heart.
I had a new gated community
for me to move into, just awaiting my arrival!
I’d seen the pretty pictures online.
I was excited about starting fresh.
*
Backstory: It is 2002 in San Diego. I’ve finally gotten a
little more computer savvy, and my mp3 webpage is now
finished. A place online for the music and graphics I have
been creating. I have even discovered the button that allows
you to email someone an mp3 directly! And God knows
Fire Escape ~ 41
Russil Tamsen
I’ve lots of different songs on my webpage to choose from,
should I want to send any of them to strangers.
A variety of characters pervade my songs: some saints,
some villains, some ugly, some silly.
Strange though. I can never tell how someone’s gonna react
to a song of mine. Some people don’t ever listen to the
lyrics. A lot of people, even. They just ain’t that interested
in what a songwriter might have to say! Just give ‘em a
good beat with which to wallpaper their minds. Just feed
them the same old shit that they already know and feel
comfortable hearing. A rare few care to listen to what’s
really being said.
I feel pretty good about emailing original songs to people.
What’s the worst that can happen?
A song is just a song, right?
*
So there I was rolling
down a shimmery Nevada highway
with a cosmic chick riding shotgun.
I had dragged her along for the ride
because she is a good judge of character.
At least an independent judge:
good at reading people’s auras.
She can pick up on their vibes, as she claims.
I sure hoped so.
Because I felt funny about this rental deal I’d made.
I hoped she’d be able to tip the truth scale
one way or the other.
*
She tipped it, as predicted.
Fire Escape ~ 42
Russil Tamsen
At the new apartment, we both listened to this roommate
talk. She noted all the same sub-texts in his languaging as I
had. I was not just dreaming! Homeboy was indeed trying
to ream me. In a pretty cynical fashion too, unblinking, cool
as a cucumber to my face, he proceeded to try to twist the
out-of-towner.
How? Well, he had this happy knack for making sudden,
unilateral changes to Done Deals.
We already had one such Done Deal.
He pulled a rapid series of swerves. Surprises. Curve balls.
Hidden costs he had “forgotten” to mention up front. (“Oh
by the way…”, “Oh, and also…” etc. ) He started chipping
away at the Done Deal, devaluing my side of the agreement,
tacking on extra conditions after the signatures were already
dry. WTF!
The deal grew sour. Very sour.
Obviously I decided it was time to opt out, get my money
back and leave. I would have to roll the Vegas housing dice
again.
But by brutal coincidence the apartment market in Vegas
was dry as a bone that week, dry like cattle bones in the
desert. And my rental SUV was on the clock.
Nothing was panning out. Not one place! Meanwhile, the
SUV rental alone was killing me.
The cat now refused to honor the IOU he had already signed
to me for $160.
Chump change, I hear you cry. But understand that I was
living on borrowed money! Every dollar was crucial and I
had to pay it all back to my creditor.
Fire Escape ~ 43
Russil Tamsen
[Seems the thief had some debts of his own too. He’d
bought the condo plus a new set of wheels so he was up to
his eyes in monthly payments. Not to mention that he was
in over his head with a feminist Philippina girlfriend who
kept failing to move out.]
A day later he became ‘unavailable’. The conman was now
officially AWOL.. “Please leave a message.”
‘Deals go bad every day, it’s part of doing business,’ I hear
you cry.
Yeah. It does happen. But when this particular thief gets to
disappear with MY deposit money, plus give me the finger
while doing it, I get upset! I’m human. It’s the principle, not
the dollars and cents.
Well, okay, it’s the money too.
Indeed, I knew something wasn’t kosher just as soon as I
had finished putting my John Hancock to that form online. I
had trouble defining the feeling at the time, which is why I
had brought the alien-recognizer along. Man, I should have
listened to my gut.
I had nowhere to go. Could anything more go wrong?
*
It was 120 degrees
and she wasn’t digging
radio hip hop like I do.
She didn’t ‘get it’.
She tuned the beats out for a while, but
she really wanted to hear “Smells like Teen Spirit”
so she could fantasize about boinking Kurt Cobain.
(She hasn’t boinked me
in quite a few years.)
Fire Escape ~ 44
Russil Tamsen
*
From a marketing point of view, getting some reaction to a
song is alleged to be better than getting no listener reaction,
so they say. So ya may as well lay it all out on the line,
uncensored, just like you thought it up. That’s why society
has singer-songwriters, supposedly: to shed light into the
dark corners of our human psyche.
So, on my unflinching website, I had uploaded some protest
songs about the drug war, some brassy sex songs, some
floaty instrumentals that I did with an older hippie friend,
and more.
I guess I was under the illusion that all my free speech was
being protected by the First Amendment.
Today I stand corrected.
Later, in San Diego, I had to look over police reports that
had been filed on my ass in the City of Las Vegas!
See, from SD, I had sent this scoundrel a polite email telling
him he really needed to mail me back my deposit money.
He wrote back saying he was keeping it as ‘Hotel Expenses’
for the one night me and the alienette stayed in his “suite”. I
wrote back implying that he was making a big mistake.
I included (for fun) a couple of links to my webpage, so he
would know something more personal about me as a
creative individual. One link went to a beautiful, optimistic
ditty called “Dawn of World Peace.” The other link went to
a humorous rap about getting tortured by a psycho.
The way I meant it was: he was acting like a total fuck.
So the thief gets my New Age commercial in one hand, and
my mini-horror movie in the other hand. I thought that
Fire Escape ~ 45
Russil Tamsen
covered the full spectrum of options, don’t you? I awaited
his response.
A couple of friends were very surprised to see me return to
the house in SD that I had moved out of! They could see
how pissed off I was. Now that I was homeless and
everything. They asked me what had happened, so I told
them all about getting dicked around by this Vegas chump.
They said, “We’ll take care of that for you. Don’t you worry
about a thing.” One said he had a rough and tumble uncle
up there who worked in an autoshop. Wink wink.
*
Hey, I knew I was just a skinny white musician.
I had no clout, no posse, no way out.
I knew this slippery bitch
wasn’t gonna take me seriously.
Given what he’d pulled so far.
So I shrugged my shoulders and let the chips fall:
“Whatever, boys.
Whatever you guys wanna do, go ahead.
I’m jaded. I’m tired.
Man, to think I was gonna share
an apartment with this crook?”
*
Anyway, the tight-fisted thief completely overlooked my
World Peace olive branch and took the horror movie rather
personally. He decided that he himself was the victim in the
rap story, not me.
The guy must have been paranoid in general (as it turned
out), so—get this—he called in for police protection against
the sadist in the rap!!
That song character was predictably unavailable.
Fire Escape ~ 46
Russil Tamsen
So the papers were instead filed against me, the songwriter.
For real! We’re talking real cops doing this! I received an
injunction to stay away from the City of Las Vegas because
of a SONG I wrote.
Sayonara First Amendment.
So I ended up limping away, tail between legs, down the
road to homelessness again. That tricky bitch was
apparently very good friends with a certain lawyer, who
was very good friends with a certain Chief of Police…
And that’s what you get for being an eclectic rap
songwriter.
Fire Escape ~ 47
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 48
Russil Tamsen
THE DIS
Yo, I didn't say nothin'
bout no phat ass beats to dance with.
I said I wanted somethin'
to beat yo big fat ass with!
Welcome to Hades,
Welcome to Dis!
Where the haters are pimps AND ladies
and it all comes down to this:
If you weren't so lame on the mike
we wouldn't be forced to dis you.
You're like Christopher Reeve
out of reach of a little tissue.
You'll sneeze and fall over and die
and still nobody will miss you!
You might look at me kinda funny but
Sorry, pal, I won't fist you
You better just head on back home
before I un-guest-list you.
You try to freestyle but can't
raise even one intellectual issue!
You line up all those rhymes,
but no, they're not really connected
On further inspection, no train
of thought to be respected.
You can rap a mile of crap, true,
but you, you got no brakes!
And no story, and no heart,
and even your style is a Walmart fake!
Fire Escape ~ 49
Russil Tamsen
Your shit is so sizzle,
but where's the beef, where's the steak?
It's like all goddamn icing...
but no fucking cake!
Baa baa black sheep,
kid you'll never be cool.
Your eyes are turning brown
like they drowning in your bull.
We got a special stool here,
at the end of this catapult.
Sit your ass down, copycat,
you're going for a short ride, foolbut ain’t no room in the catapult bucket
for both you and all of your drool.
Your brain is needing repair,
but ya don't seem to notice or care
that your whole attempt at life is like
a pointless shortcut to Nowhere.
Like sheep into a canal
your fans jump for the banal
they go sink there but the stink there
is re-e-e-eally fucking foul.
Mr. Alleged Rap Poet?
Come on, you just word bluffing.
All spit and sound and fury!
but you signify n-n-nothing.
Fire Escape ~ 50
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 51
Russil Tamsen
FIREPANTS
There was a whole lotta zero zip zippo
goin’ on that night.
Potential, sitting like dynamite,
just waiting to pop boom bammo.
I was cold wondering what to do.
At the disco, however,
there was Firepants.
He stormed his way in.
Just legs, that’s all.
Striped slacks, that’s all,
with a flashing red rotating lighthouse on top
where a torso should have been.
Looking for all the world
like the lower half of a gymnast.
Firepants came tromping into my vision
through sheets of tiny flame,
doing standing flips!
and pirouettes inside pirouettes!
without ever burning.
Firepants was my tiny creation.
No torso, no head.
Half of a circus performer.
Just Firepants.
Nobody else could even see him!
He paused out on the dance floor and frowned.
“Don’t any of you sheeple understand Danger?”
he shouted but no one heard.
“What is so great about being vapid and
ecs-fucking-static?
Man, y’all are just stuck like Velcro
up in the comfort zone attic,” he continued.
Fire Escape ~ 52
Russil Tamsen
“That’s why I am down here, man,” he yelled.
“I’m careening around potholes, man.
I’m all one-point focus, man.
Don’t step on me, motherfuckers.
I’m no taller than your ankle
but hey, at least
my sex machine is alive and humming, man.
Humming a mean tune, man.
Too small for big beasts to hear,
but I don’t care, man.
Don’t talk to me about livin’ dangerous.
“Anyway, all your big thought waves
are stagnating,
interlocking like dead vines waving
way up there through the rafters.
Me, I’m Firepants and I’m burning below!
I’m a hundred miles an hour down here!
“I’m dodging between the clattering soles of
jacked-up sneaker people.
I’m whirling around the stiletto columns
of secretarial pumps.
“I’m on fire down here,
far below the nipples of big breasts.
I’m tearing around gum-wrapper land.
I’m laughing through broken margarita
umbrellas by the bandstand.
Deep in the grit and in the shit and
in the spit!
I say Yeah! Feel it!
This is the realer dimension,
you obliviously lost, inane disco Frankensteins!
"Check me out,
I’m Zoo-oo-oomin’ Baby!
Yo, didn’t you feel that wind
against your insole?
Was that a mouse, nibbling?
Fire Escape ~ 53
Russil Tamsen
A rat brushing past you?
Or was it just a corny twinge
between your sandaled tootsies?
"Nah, babe, that was none of the above.
That was me flying past!
The Famous Firepants
doing his fiery dance ta-da!”
Disguise of the scorpion.
*
When the disco queens spotted little Firepants
their panic ignited ! Stop the DJ, stop the dance!
And with frightened squeals, under spiky disco heels,
they squashed our sprite as flat as banana peels.
Fire Escape ~ 54
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 55
Russil Tamsen
THE UNDERWORLD TWEEDLEDUM
I called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Like big fat brothers.
A hick and a hick.
One ruled our scene by day,
the other by night,
although that arrangement
would sometimes flip.
They were the underworld twins.
Tweedledee was the darker of the twins.
He liked to bust my chops,
always giving me flak…
until one rainy day
my patience cracked and I busted right back!
I cussed him proper, and after that,
I suddenly got respect from him.
He started smiling at me
through his dental shambles, but then
he sure had a mean underworld grin.
He was so deep in with the chollos
and the Mexican mafia in prisons
that the rest of us never
really knew how far
we could safely push any criticisms!
The underworld twin knew semaphore.
Sometimes he would ‘playfully’
whip out his samurai swords of steel
and “threaten” unsuspecting passersby.
Fire Escape ~ 56
Russil Tamsen
(Or was his macho posturing for real?)
“Hey, I was just joking! Hey, what’s a meta for?”
He’d pull me aside and punch
a hole in the drywall
to demonstrate some fatal jab
that he claimed to know
from his glory days
as a supposed martial arts champ.
This underworld twin
often rented a centerfold
from the Tijuana whorehouse
so he could shoot his horny load.
His ID manufacturing machine
was not his wisest investment,
(as was seen…)
The underworld twin was getting laid though
the day the cops raided his room,
The pigs were already on a first name basis
with this dark, confusing twin:
Tweedledee.
Yes he was the self-proclaimed king
of the hard trance club scene.
He certainly rocked it.
Too bad he was so damn toxic.
Fire Escape ~ 57
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 58
Russil Tamsen
FIRE ESCAPE
Soon I will have to slide
down a certain fire escape,
like down a totem pole
of silence
of Omerta!
into the Big Apple Noise…
1.
It gets LOUD.
A South Brooklyn train is screeching
with raw tonsils.
The hideous scrape veers around a corner,
narrowly missing our heels,
scorching our eardrums.
She and I get jarred along industrial
cobblestones
beneath overpasses.
We sense the barometer shifting.
2.
We arrive at some crimson brick steps.
I look up at the door numbers.
I suppose this must be the place:
her grandparent’s townhouse.
An omen of twisting wind
suddenly tosses me around like a leaf.
When I stop rotating,
I shiver to witness
a colossal black thunderhead
that is brewing behind us.
Above the hill, lightning jags
hammer across the skies!
Reflecting off street puddles
off wet shoes...
and soon off her wet thighs too?
I already can almost feel myself inside her
Fire Escape ~ 59
Russil Tamsen
inside the thunder now inside
the roar of my lioness.
3.
I push on splintered paint
and then we creep inside the open door.
I am now a stranger in her strange house.
Penetrating, stalking
through cavernous mansion rooms.
My thoughts echo like a dream
around me, round me, round me.
Is this really her grandparent’s abode?
Should we bed down here
on this antique sofa
and hope to outlast the passion storm?
And: is there some gift she wanted
that I should have predicted and brought?
She grins as she straddles me…
4.
My father suddenly towers over me
and exclaims, “I hope you wrapped it!”
[as if I had had a chance to wrap my gift in this
weather.]
“Shhh,” I tell him.
“Someone’s going to hear us.”
How the heck did he get in here?
More people crowd into the living room.
Melissa appears, sloshed as usual,
jerking her hands around like a puppet.
She’s telling a funny story
…she’s miming, pretending
to be getting boned doggy style
over one of the leather armchairs.
I realize there’ll be no privacy here!
Fire Escape ~ 60
Russil Tamsen
So we'd better split
in the old man’s Dodge.
5.
But down by the waterfront
a hurricane storm surge is creeping
higher and higher.
Toward the streets it is advancing.
The salty invasion is fast upon us!
Panicking cops flag us down
and make us turn right…
…right into even denser traffic,
the evacuating hordes!
Oh no:
behind the steering wheel
Dad is lapsing into a coma!
The gearshift has popped into reverse!
Now we are picking up speed backward
around road curves and
the car doors are all springing open!!
6.
A crash
A flash
transfers me somewhere
in a blink.
I wake up.
On a foamy carpet in a tenement building.
Recuperating,
I am hunched over,
silently picking up aspirin pills.
My head hurts from that collision.
Voices.
Slowly becoming aware
that I am not alone here.
Through the open door to my left,
at a kitchen table,
five hoodlums are working themselves up
with extravagant tales:
Fire Escape ~ 61
Russil Tamsen
Of who’s been whacked,
who deserves to get whacked,
and who they are planning to whack
later this weekend.
I am precariously alone and aware
that I need to vanish immediately.
“Sh!” I reprimand myself. “Stop thinking so
loud. Someone’s going to sense me.”
I’ll have to slide this low bookshelf
over
a couple more inches
unheard
and unnoticed
so that I can sneak out onto the fire escape!
And I am barely breathing…
Wondering how not to be the guy
who gets whacked first.
*
Hear ye, hear ye!
This is how I had to slide
Down a fire escape ladder
Like down the totem pole
of silence
Back into the Big Apple Noise
All to escape one nasty Brooklyn Flood.
Fire Escape ~ 62
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 63
Russil Tamsen
EAST SIDE, PROVIDENCE
When the sun burrows
into the horizon of this city
the clouds belly out
with oranges and purples.
Empty, unrented skyscrapers downtown
seem a bit silly, don’t they?
A bit pointless.
Yet other hives betray an inner buzz.
The persistent spirits
of second shift workers inside
(those few sparks of light
like pinned fireflies
stuck for the night)
are glowing!
among the trunks
of this glass and chrome forest.
From afar I am entranced by
those fluorescent overheads
switching on and off sporadically,
connecting the office windows
into punch-card patterns.
[Remember punch-cards?]
Wait: here's a hipper metaphor:
Those lights interconnect like brain portals
into neural networks
into psychic digital readouts
of the world’s future!
Are they at least calculating
the prospects of OT tonight?
Out there in corporation land.
As for me, do I look casually observant
in my jeans here, smoking a joint,
looking over this landscape
Fire Escape ~ 64
Russil Tamsen
like it was just cutouts propped up
against tonight's brilliance?
Although admiring of this smoky sunset…
a beautiful, solar-generated,
gold-painted backdrop.
A very clever theater set design, if you will.
An illusion!
of pleasurable distraction,
which is emanating a stoney feeling
that time no longer even matters
because this poetic flow of beauty
is tailored
just to lull me and my two eyes
away from my pressing duty.
My night shift, alas,
will not prove lucrative for me.
Instead, I will be spending dinero,
paying through the nose because
I am a student, you see,
and that's how capitalism goes!
Ever the student in America.
I know why the mystery
of nocturnal commerce
remains out of reach
beyond Prospect Street,
past all the robust elms along Waterman,
when the wind
guides them to life
to shake hands with the stiff
mansions lurking there.
All their elm foliage is
as black as evening suits.
A corporate soiree, 100% proof.
A street of cardboard silhouettes:
their shadows all seem unreal to me.
Fire Escape ~ 65
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*
The day is done.
The stage-light faders
are sliding all the way down
but the dusky show is just beginning, folks!
Now the real buzz!
Now the human electricity ramps up.
Under street lamps
posses of students are roaming,
totally wired
as they flicker with expectation.
My buddies are heading out to party land!
They snicker at me
because behind me looms the Clock Monster.
It is a boss
ever mocking
those of us who have real work to do tonight
and must, until the morning, deal with it.
Soon I’ll be deep in the focus
and lost
in the tick tock.
Ridiculously tired already,
I must burrow and crawl
into the coral reef of books like
a brain sponge with digging claws.
I can't take my time tonight
to enjoy soaking up this learning.
All this forced hastiness
repels me.
All these expensive deadlines
are turning my stomach over…
but tonight I must bust my ass and cram
or face failure.
Fire Escape ~ 66
Russil Tamsen
Speaking of disaster:
in my hungry hands
sits the bowl of chicken stew I attempted.
Frankly it proves nasty…
My hurried cooking is inedible again!
I disgust myself.
So I balance the bowl atop the 2x4 railing
of my friend's wooden porch balcony
and eyeball the mess
of unopened textbooks at my feet.
Any other last minute distractions?
Yes! Between the planks of this porch, hey!
I am overlooking a living wheel
of street mutts
who are chasing each other in circles,
howling and determined
like spirits on the Kalachakra.
Look at that life.
Street Life.
Real Life! Not college life.
How about THAT energy, man?
Is adult life this kind of doggie game play?
Is it a sport of top dogmanship?
The dogs careen away
like barking race-cars.
The hounds skid and
drift around the corner
and disappear away
up onto College Hill.
I listen to the moment after,
feeling how the dust
settles
after the breeze stops.
That stillness
Fire Escape ~ 67
Russil Tamsen
of a library night,
this Sunday night.
I will shortly be stuffing myself full,
between fellow crammers,
there where the A/C
hums its incessant lullaby.
That's why a still-hungry belly is necessary
to force me me to remain awake.
*
Oh, I’m sure I'll never finish this madness,
this goddamn satanic Syllabus!
I am trapped
by the stacks of knowledge
in the smallest
and soberest part of my head.
I stare like a crazed medieval monk
at some highlighter-streaked print.
Cross-eyed and unfocussed
yet I must not get jealous
of all the crazy activators running outside,
I hate their high spirits!
I ignore their vibrant energies!
Outside, beyond the barbed wire
of serious study bootcamp.
*
When I was younger and more reckless,
I would have flown down these porch steps
and joined in their fiery circus
with a
Let's run wild, kids! But first,
I brought you a gift. Hope you like chicken!
Fire Escape ~ 68
Russil Tamsen
Cuz I bet those three merry-go-round mutts
would have devoured all my dinner discards
as if they were delicious,
meaty successes!
Like I'd vomited up a classic essay
and the professor gave it an A.
Which would only prove one thing:
that in life there are SO many other ways
to absorb what you really need,
other than cramming
some huge pedantic syllabus
into an empty stomach
in one unsporty night.
Fire Escape ~ 69
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 70
Russil Tamsen
WILDFIRE: A TRUE STORY
Mean smoke was growing stronger,
a blackened arch damaged the sky.
Dumb cows never flinched a muscle
while them chopper crews shot by.
Wildfire!
Must have ignited behind Weed airport.
All cottonmouth dry, I swear.
We barely survived Ashland,
forked lightning speared the air.
Wildfire!
Her home’s in Gazelle, so she’s stranded
on the wrong side of these flames!!
She screams: “Get out them sulfur baths!”
(is there escape out the way we came?)
Wildfire!
We floored it …and prayed through
Phoenix fires, rain and then hail,
as elementals danced on graves!
(Those too are signs on life’s trail.)
We tokers, we do what we have to,
but we pull over for a couple of pics.
White-haired giant Mt. Shasta
loomed over these wildfire antics.
Next to him, something quietly peculiar
a cloud that was strangely lenticular
caught my nervous eye
and for no reason I called
to this cloud that never moved,
though it was just big enough
for a mothership to cloak herself in—
Fire Escape ~ 71
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[And for one moment everything paused]
Then Agni clawed, wailing once more,
through the raging firewalls!
*
The wildfire began dying out…
Sunset salmoned the clouds
as we sped out of range.
Driving and driving past the border hills
up into Oregon
upon soft, green grassy waves.
That sudden California wildfire
left us both stunned that day
but yes, from Agni's wall of death
we had been spared and saved!
Something was floating off in the east.
Look, it's a double rainbow!
Like a bad pun sent from Gillette, about how we’d
both just been close shaved.
Fire Escape ~ 72
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 73
Russil Tamsen
WHEN KURT’S BODY WAS FOUND
Oppressed
by all these last minute dos and don'ts
before I leave the world.
Please hurry, my friend,
you were supposed
to have picked me up already!!
Meantime I am Kurt, laying here
flat on my back, paralyzed.
There’s Father Duty on my right,
there’s Mother Integrity on my left.
They’re buzzing around me,
rattling off orders at me,
oblivious to the fact that some gay bro
is going down on me!!
What the fuck?!
I’m braced for the next humiliation,
and it’s like my will
counts for absolutely nothing in this life…
Wait. Sh…
I spy someone
down the corridor in the kitchen.
Either I’m sideways or he’s sideways.
No, it’s not me, it’s him.
He’s standing sideways on a wall socket.
He’s a 3-millimeter tall man.
(Maybe it’s all in the perspective…)
Fire Escape ~ 74
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Maybe Shorty there
has come up with a really cool solution
for my gigantic-tiny ego problem?
Like a gracious showman
he grandly bows low.
Then he grows!
Lengthening, like he’s a rubber band man
Before shrinking back down to size again.
Ego extending, then retracting.
Is that even possible?
*
Well now who’s this?
Here’s another really gung-ho shorty!
The French cartoon warrior,
Astérix? He’s just like me!
He leaps into a Flintstone car
that’s parked next to the kitchen table.
He revs the motor BRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMM
and waves for me to jump in and escape!
Escape this world of humiliation
and paralysis.
Why not?
Who cares if it’s not really happening!
We zoom up the Grand Canyon…
High atop the mesa,
It’s getting time to pitch camp.
But first (you know me)
I gotta go exploring!
And I can’t help being drawn to the cliff’s edge.
Oo, the chasm’s presence,
so permanent, so scary, so final.
Fire Escape ~ 75
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It’s like a hand that reaches up
– and it grabs me in its grip so fatal!
In turn, I reach backwards to cling
to a square pillar
that is covered
in antiseptic white porcelain tiles.
This pillar is apparently
the Electromagnetic Starting Device!
That or the bathroom wall…
Either way, I am magnetically glued to it.
Man I am feeling so sick to my stomach.
Completely attracted to her negativity but I CAN’T
LET HER GO!
anymore than I can edge my way
backward up the cliff to Health and Safety.
Which blows.
So, while I’m stuck here on the ultimate ledge,
wondering what to do next,
I start making up rhymes:
Rhymes about water and fire.
Rhymes about magick squares.
Rhymes and nonsensical prayers
Hey now, what’s that down they-yers?
Even further down the precipice
at the edge of the great canyon
I notice one spindly branch
poking over into the void.
One last flimsy handhold on life.
I must surely be a fool,
for the curiosity comes upon me:
Fire Escape ~ 76
Russil Tamsen
I wonder what it would be like to dare
to hang off of that last branch,
instead…
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Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 78
Russil Tamsen
APOCALYPSO: A FUN NIGHTMARE!
I hadn’t seen him in a long time.
DJ Sesqui. He has done well.
He’s thrived over the years!
I find myself visiting his spacious
middle-class ranch house
way out in the flat-lands…
Sesqui now owns a Nazi lizard.
It seems impossible, but here it is!
Complete with lizard armbands
and lizard jackboots.
Sesqui asks me,
“Do you want to take a closer look?”
The only thought in my head is:
“Nazi cockroach. Nazi cockroach.”
I want to stomp and squash it.
I decline the offer and quickly retire to bed
where I drift off to sleep
*
I wake up inside the dream.
It’s the middle of the night.
What the fuck was that?
Do I sense the Earth shaking?
My intuition is telling me
this is IT.
This is ARMAGEDDON.
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Russil Tamsen
Oh Hell on Earth!!
Through my feet I can now feel them:
distant atomic explosions
rumbling underground…
I dash like a maniac out the side door
and start running pell mell for my life
across a vast field.
Of course I’m all exposed
on this midnight farmland,
and in my panic I must be hoping
for some kind of deliverance!
Some kind of shelter
in the forests up ahead.
Instead, directly in front of me
an ICBM (a big old rocket)
begins lifting off out of the woods!
It's thunderous!
Is it one of our own?
One of our own missile defense systems?
I stop running.
There's no shelter.
There must have been a secret silo
in the forest… and now I get a feeling
that things are going badly.
The reason this ICBM is getting launched at all
is so it won’t fall into enemy hands.
But I don’t have any enemies!!
I watch.
After climbing for only ten seconds,
the rocket begins to stall.
The rocket begins to stall and lose power and it begins to tip
over and stall and tip over…
Oh no
before it gives up and starts dropping back
toward the forest floor!
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Russil Tamsen
like an American woman taking a tumble
as the Ultimate Flying Challenger
Columbia
Boeing
Lockheed
NASA
The whole space program
falling to the ground, into the Gorge,
a scribble on the wall of the sky
of my patriotic imagination,
debris crumbling, writing its message
across the unhappy land.
The rocket hits terra firma.
Its warhead detonates.
Although I don't have any enemies
I now watch AGHAST as
a massive nuclear mushroom cloud swells up.
A rolling wall of flame
races across the field toward me.
“It’s over now,” I acknowledge, Zen-like.
I start counting numbers to myself
-to steady my nervesand to see how long I will remain conscious
after it hits me.
The atomic wall of Death
sears right through me and blasts past.
My material body is shredded into molecules!
And yet, I am still counting…
7…8…9…10…11… (?!)
I count a few more seconds
before I realize
that I must have made The Transition already.
Well, whaddya know.
Fire Escape ~ 81
Russil Tamsen
It was very intense, but not really painful per se.
Very very intense like it makes me
It makes me…Makes me
Wake up once more!
Inside this quaintly apocalyptic nightmare...
I vault out of Sesqui’s guest bed again,
in a desperate, sweaty panic!
I race out of my bedroom, again.
But this time
I must first warn the others still sleeping.
(What is this, Groundhog day?)
But damn! I can’t find Sesqui anywhere.
I stop to catch my breath in a corridor
when, out of a corner of my eye,
I spy a fairy, sparkling.
Something paranormal at least, glinting
at the far end of the dining room.
I sprint toward this, the only lit room,
but in the doorway I stop short
and my jaw sags with disbelief.
All the glinting silver soup-spoons
are throwing a parade!
Marching across the dining room table.
[All by themselves, that is.
Upright! Jimminy crickets!]
In the shadows beyond,
I spot one of my ex’s
but she keeps pottering about, oblivious…
Can’t she SEE what’s going ON?
I call to her
and point as hard as I can
at this unbelievable scene!
this soup spoon parade
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Russil Tamsen
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And, somehow,
by using the Force of all my Finger-pointing,
I now create instead
a swirling magical maelstrom of dishes
and tiny cups and saucers!
They're all spinning in a crazy circle
around my arm outstretched.
Holy Bat Shit!
I wake up:
For real this time:
laughing
and amazed at my OWN power.
Animation magic! lemme tell ya, it sure beats
feeling helpless
about the goddamn Apocalypse
ANY night of the week.
Especially when your overheated brain
might need a relieving escape from reality.
Fire Escape ~ 83
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 84
Russil Tamsen
IS THIS A SLAM OR WHAT?
When I say Slam, you say Slam.
Slam? Slam!
Hot damn, is this a Slam? Slam!
Good. Now listen up kids.
This ain't no 'daisy-linking' jam.
This is Robin and Batman!
with a Zorp Crunch Bam and a paddywagon rear door Slam!
Slam!
Takin' names and kickin' asses,
playing games and freaking out the masses
by busting a lyrical nut all OVER their sunglasses,
I think it's time to S. L. A. M. Slam!
Some hoped that this might only be a little love "Slap".
But they were mistaken.
That final letter "P" failed 'em.
It got its posterior pounded and pummeled until it completely
passed out
of the word brought to you by the NEW final letter "M" as in
Me, me, getting too tricky and slick, maybe, for a simple ole
Slam? Slam!
Don't get left behind,
by that slippery starting letter "S".
Not to worry, it can not slip and slide
and sensually sneak it's way surreptitiously to safety, why?
Because that S is always on the "L. A. M. Lam". Ow!
No more painful puns I promise,
this is a goddamn Slam! Slam!
The right word
for such a word rite.
A revelation of original thought
an ornamental telling of what lifts us up
and what pet peeves perpetually piss us off.
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Russil Tamsen
All wounds resealed and healing up nice today,
thanks to some multi-colorful rhyme spray.
Spat words, splatterin' like graffiti paint drippin'
all across the neurons
that you're on,
that you're sittin' on and trippin' on when I say Wait!
Doctor says 'Wait... mon!
This multi-culti healing paint from out my superhero spraycan
has to cure, damn!'
This is a healing Art, baby. This is a Slam! Slam!
Now, you don't HAVE
to dig this.
You may not LIKE
our Slammy brand.
Maybe you wanna kick out
our underbelly kickstand, and
in our vulnerable faces, kick sand, cuz
you've heard enough words
in your surly day already,
thank you, whammy bammy thank you mammy ma'am.
But understand
that you're free NOT
to believe in the words we weave,
you can leave
and go elsewhere in the Matrix to seek your own scene
or create your own stand...
First, however, prying your fingers free,
off of these here poets' door jam,
because the heavy poet's door
just caught some wind
and is about to Slam! Slam!
Tonight we might ignite your mind
with some delightful laughs
of the fucked up kind.
Toilet humor might be oozing out
just beneath the gaping opening
of tonight's jam:
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Russil Tamsen
Here's to a princess,
ranting about the pain from her pea, her princess pea...
while tentatively pushing out the first few drops
of her first poem
into the street in her baby pram,
is this a Slam? Slam!
Here's to Borat and his poetic plastic bag,
that hairy, hairy man,
he poop in America like how they poop in Kazakhistan,
help me out Slam! Slam!
Here's to nonsequiturs
rising after the deadly bullet blamblamblam
of some crazy rhyme-slinging Son of Slam
who shot his waiter Yosemite Slam,
for serving up those yucky green eggs and ham!
Do YOU want to Slam? Slam!
Why not? I know poems, and you know Poems.
Ah, poems...
they're like desert dust devils
drilling up into yer dome.
Like spiders
spinning a million magic meanings there,
that were not just casually cloned!
Like dentists, delivering shots of delirium
and brain cleanings deep in the cranium
until the relief in your face glows like uranium!
And I bet a Benjamin
that we'll be winning your grin
even if you can't seem to pry your nose
away from the omnipresent glows
of your goddamn iPhones!
Your undivided attention now
to the microphone, Slam! Slam!
So.
Whatdya think, man?
Does this poetry scene,
with its freedom to slam mean
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Russil Tamsen
that you gotta get crammed
with dramamine
while bobbing on these lyrical seas of green
cuz they'll be leaving you uneasy
or feeling queasy if they get a bit too cheesy?
You think getting these rhymes
to even float your way was so motherfuckin' easy?
To have these lyrics perfectly waterfall down your dendrites
and spinal columns, tingly and teasy,
right down to the seven seas
of your spread-wide sleazy?
Or not.
I'm no Weezy,
just another uncorked captain
blasting out the Word.
In fact I break wind so breezy
that no Gasparilla pirates have ever dared to seize me!
Believe me,
I won't stop rocking your worldship, honeys,
just as Hard
and Long
as you breathe me (sniff) Wait, don't leave me.
Please please me, oh yeah, like I please you,
is every word that I speak completely true?
Like the Donald, I trump all kinds of nonsense
with my Alakazam!
I even fired the Don for being
an elephant's ass with a tan.
Now toss off your toupees
and get topless in the spot,
and give it up for real
'cause giving's all we've really got!
Clap your hands and stand
and holler back all you can
for another sexy, stunning,
super-cali-fragilistic Poetry Slam! Slam!
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Russil Tamsen
~THE END~
Fire Escape ~ 89
Russil Tamsen
Fire Escape ~ 90
Russil Tamsen
ARTWORK CREDITS
p.1 Suspension by uniquenudes on DA
p.5 Traps by sutakaibagirl on DA
p.9 The Faltering Tower by Sakalah on DA
p.12 Never forget by abcartattack on DA
p.15 No Air by Rora (chan7 on DA)
p.20 Torpedo Juice by rtvegas on DA
p.24 When Twain Aliens Meet by MushroomBrain on DA
p.27 Damn spams getting outta hand by gardenhoes on DA
p.29 Metamorphosis iii by it hammar on DA
p.31 Night of the Drowning Clowns by vmaximus on DA
p.33 Mugging and Hugging by JNSdesign on DA
p.35 Vegas by valfok on DA
p.40 Burn Baby Burn by davidmacdowell on DA
p.48 Battle by Mentalrabie on DA
p.51 On Fire by ratbagdesign on DA
p.55 Thing by chaz trombatoreon DA
p.58 Escape by DarkstaR7 on DA
p.63 Downtown sunset by wallflowerinbloom on DA
p.70 Hills of fire by kkart on DA
p.73 Red Skys with Kurt Cobain by TheVampireQueen on DA
p.78 Playing with Fire by fahsi on DA
p.84 Children of the Apocalypse by Roderick Thornton at
angelcomicsonline.com, aka Razielssecret on DA, & by
BlondTheColorist on DA
p.90 Fire Phoenix by BurntPheonix on DA
DA=DeviantArt.com
Fire Escape ~ 91
Other titles by Russil Tamsen you will enjoy:
The Great Voyeur
My Life as a Gypsy
Bad Voodoo
Everything I've Learned from Hallucinogens
The Python Era
The Uncanny Adventures of Hellodali
The Kundalini Code
Freakshow at the Carnal Carnival
Funky Psycho
Heading for a Three Way Wedding
Ultra Ménage à Quatre
Black Gaga
Us, Pried Open
24 Challenges for Models
The Shiva Channel
Zombie Luau
iNSAnity!
FACE IT
Co-Jinn
These e-books are available for download at
Russil's personal e-bookstore. Please come browse at
russiltamsen.com