Thomas Sayers Ellis

Thomas Sayers Ellis is the sun after an eclipse— the artist who shows us how to empty himself to find liberation—fearless—going directly through layers to the truth of language and sight—humility is his excellence— art is his energy. Best of all he loves his beautiful cats. —Grace Cavalieri

Poet, photographer, and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc,: Identity Repair Poems, and Mexico, a book of photographs. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary Free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. Having recorded six CDs to date, HAGL has performed in Paris, Berlin, Gdansk, The Hague, New York City and Lisbon. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His most recent book is Crank Shaped Notes (Arrowsmith Press, 2021). TSE was named the first Photo Laureate of St Petersburg, Florida in 2023. Paradise Paradise Layered, a new book of photographs is forthcoming midsummer.

A Seat At The Table © 2019 Thomas Sayers Ellis — A Seat At The Table, © 2024 Thomas Sayers Ellis

Infamy

This is infamy: Mornings,
a worry
as was Walcott’s,

cold driveways,
Iowa, aging aubergine,
a fight, a space heater

at the foot of a dream,
the moon without a nude model,
like a literary lie

alive in its crystalline
canopy, and writing workshops:
photocopies, white

photocopies, stapled sheets
dead as Dey. The hive’s
slanted diss abyss

turned on. A track
of heroes that repeats
its I AM bics, a purring song.

A mothering notification of betrayal from a dumb phone.
A crawling regret.
A craving for grits
no muse of history can fix.

Electronic Detection Leak Agent, © 2019 Thomas Sayers Ellis

The New Crown

And now, too, we will have to suffer through years
of mankind's middle management,
its minions, handlers, influencers,
and the elite of this realm
who are controlled by beings,
beginnings, Eden, endings,
from the lower regions of both testaments
where the bad novel pushers
have initiated us all in Identity
and the cult of the cure.

We will have to detox our organic systems
of all traces of the radiation
that linked itself to our websites
and recharge our water,
before drinking, in the real sun,
if we can find one,
if we could just stop reading so damn much
and talk to each other
as much as we used to touch.

The old crime of kicking TV in the face
will have become
a prerequisite Sport,
the old physical theater of Rome,
on the path to ascension
and those who cut open trees
to reclaim their grandparent-portals
will be forced to remove their own knees
to reinvent the new tin foil
scalp cap
of former forests,
the religion of the seed helmet.

So many elders in windows overlooking
melting cafes,
the perspiration of a slow tempest
same as the one
the makers of celestial surfboards
juice for human smoothies,
stem cells, micro to macro,
buried beneath Red Cross Buildings,
the royal access of needles.

But the kids, the kids won't care.
It’s all acupuncture to them.
Dressed like adults
with real jobs and real faces,
each will sit in the sickly stadium of yesterday
versus no tomorrow-day,
watching the math of birthday reruns,
holding hairy, sweet globes of cotton candy
that never grow old.

Camp Freedom, © 2023 Thomas Sayers Ellis

Finger Chart Sonata to T Rex-Cue Evolution from Da Fuels @ Christie’s

Frontal Throat Altissimo

Buried in a lie
that’s still alive
walking the earth as art.

A thing to see becomes the skin of all there is to hear.
This is how the senses become sensei,
the ear at the heart of earth, the art at the end of heart,
covered in Dino Dirt and dug up to staff the past.
Key rod facing key post.
Choke the sax neck with cork till you baffle the articulation with reptiles
larger than bis, a direction to repeat.
Had his surname one more “s”
[without surface repentance in it] next to the other “s,”
Basquiat could have played upright,
but his ancestral suffix was amputated
and regulated to be framed in the melody of fame,
the invisible “atom” at the end of him,
nomenclature, less than present in the mezzo marrow of attack and release.
Register the chamber’s arc in embouchure
then like a box of fine press brochures,
dumpster dive down one of Dante’s side rail trash chutes
where nothing in the mouth of any river or valley
is as spiritual as seeing Jean-Michel playing spoons, real spoons
silver, with burnt bottoms, for real food,
on the humid subway platforms
at Astor Place, Union Square and Broadway-Lafayette.
You simply have-to-know which way to go,
uptown for a queen or downtown for a crown,
once your fear becomes the museum’s dinner table.
Diagram every diaphragm. Cue up the history of brushes.
There it is again: art, an art-body of bones, the worms of worship in engineered soil,
all buried alive in the intestines of baritone
––octave sequencing cavities, caves of curious windows,
conductors, curators, and patrons. Every Baroque rat,
dressed in black, in the room of bidders
is responsible for the well-publicized roadkill,
the rich tones in vibrato, visual victory just another evaporating vibe,
human valueless, carny vampires
feasting on equally carnivorous canvases.

Uppity Sunshine, © 2023 Thomas Sayers Ellis

Skin, Inc.

A black arm, unarmed, bent upward
at the elbow
so the blow slides off.
Wanted so bad,
back then, to hit back
but didn’t dare, ever, strike their tense, twisted spin.
Their ruled, loose-leaf,
paged air.
First they conjugate you,
then you die.
Them, laying out by their lonesome, blocking sun.
You, shirtless, serving drinks,
one of the brown things they bleach, eat.
If punctuation
were a punch,
I’d publish line breaks of fists.
Sorry I know
“Cracker” and “Honky” hurt,
but nothing fruits a noose like the N-word,
white acceptance or revolt.
No more little boxes,
stacked, like the ones in poems.
A deeper sense of verse frees skin.
I am not merely in
this thing I am in. I am it.
Born in the morning to reform form’s broken economy.
To sit-in
in the sit-in
in the margins.

1st Avenue South Stardom, © 2019 Thomas Sayers Ellis

Man

A part of, a part of love, hates, hates, a part of.
A part of, a part of hate, loves, loves, a part of.
Loves a part of, a part of the man, the man, the state hates.
Hates a part of, a part of the name, the name, the people love.
Hates wholeness, hate. Loves togetherness, love,
the togetherness of the large human movement.
Loves togetherness, loves. Hates wholeness, hate,
the wholeness of the small human hyphen.
De Wet, de Klerks. De Klerk, de Wets. Botha.
Moneydeala, Mandela, Moneydeala, Mandela,
your worship makes an island of freedom.
Detained Harassed Banned.
The trap
the trap, the trap.
The capture, the capture, the capture.
The trial, the trial,
the trial.
So do we So we to. So do the Cape parts,
a part of, the Dutch parts. Ho wick, Ri vo nia.
She Who Tries her Sacred Knock, her High Organ of little male Anasi.
Her Eastern Star in his Malta night, a part of the Order,
groomed to be the Queen Mother Goddess of her time,
Madikizela, tarnished by an Informer but not affected by the Effect.
Breytenback’s albino, Gordimer’s Beethoven.
A part his, a part hers. The odor of Resistance, Brutus Dennis!
A part invests. Victor, a Verster. A part divests.
All American Apartheids pulled South.

Dela

Polo Goes to the Moon

for Reggie Burwell

There’s been
a lot of talk,
lately, as to whether
or not America
actually went
to the moon.
The nonbelievers
say there’s no
weather in Space
––no humidity, no wind, no rain,
only empty pockets
and crank shapes.
Craters, big-ass
asteroids, black holes.
They say waving
our arms, all at once,
is as false as the flag
and we say We, We the people,
percussively agree:
Astronaut-Bouncing
jive-like looks phony, unless,
of course, you think of the moon
as a snare drum
––half, eclipsed, full,
and consider, as Polo did,
the percussive
nature of gravity,
the forcible way the Earth,
like a party, pulls
a body, every body
back to it…every time
some symbol crashes
or the rototoms,
like satellites,
get too-hype and someone
jumps up, as Polo did,
beyond the
regular “lock” of
solar system
like a short, well-barbered
meteor, hurled
into the divine orbit
No stanza break
of coma…beyond the limitations
of all things earthly,
including the notion
of nation, and its local,
ingrown extension: going National.
The whole time
Polo was in the air,
he was in total control
of his own ounce
of lunar sleep,
replacing the handcuffs
around Saturn
with open hi-hats.
The whole time
he was on
life support,
alphabetized,
removing vowels.