Black Bird Sings...MDRansom
Got this lean and hungry mentality
I’m anorexic down to my bones
Yet legendary bouts with bulimia
Are my truly catastrophic incomparable
Sights to behold
Today it’s famine by choice
Hands swollen from a hammer
Swung deftly at nails or gin and tonics
I wait now in a sterile room
Sans windows, lit by bright white
GE fluorescent light scheduled
To go out.
I recall sun salutations
Seems years ago
When in truth
It’s been less than
Two hours
Hands painfully swollen
From hammering
Staples or a keyboard
Black Bird Sings
Dead
But that will never make it
To the cover of a Rolling Stone
Fuck ragged ravaged fingertips
From anxious bites as my teeth tear off
Bits of skin and crescents of cuticle
Chewed and digested
I live on myself and black coffee
Poet, sculptor, photographer, actor, playwright, performance artist, writer:
A native of Staten Island living in Brooklyn, Mark D Ransom earned his BA in English/Writing (Poetry genre) from the City University of New York. From there he went directly into the construction trades. His eclectic work background has taken him through the produce section of a supermarket to selling ladies shoes at a mall to extensive exterior masonry restoration of the Empire State Building and now civil service protecting and serving NYC as an emergency responder with the Buildings Department..
On the amateur and professional level he’s worked in radio, film, video and stage and in the past studied with established writers like Cherry Fine and Chocolate Waters on writing poetry and getting published. He's profoundly influenced by the likes of Whitman, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Dylan, Lennon, Phillip Glass, Lou Reed, Tom Waits and Jim Morrison. Presently he’s under the tutelage of various artists and producing his own music CD.
While performing in the mid-90’s at such venues as The Red Room @ Reckless in Hell’s Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, Biblios, The Nuyorican Poets Café and many others, he developed his style. Poetry fuses rock and folk music lyrical forms with post-apocalyptic images of urban renewal and decay while integrating sound collage and tonal ambiguity into the mix to form his own Angry Creative Explosion.
In collaboration with such musicians as Tony Noe, David Cooper, Pablo Cubarle, Paul Rebhan, and visual artist Sairie Kiritani, the spoken word CD Wild Iron Freedom is his most recent accomplishment. Other endeavors include having his plays read at the Square Peg Theater Collective, writing with The Badlands Theater Company, readings with The White Horse Theater Company and being a guest vocalist with Miss Babs and the Kicking Boogie Band at Hogs & Heifers uptown. His film-noir style cinematic debut in The Brotherhood directed by Adam Grable and starring David Mazzeo can still be seen on i-film.com.
“On September 11th 2001 I witnessed the barbaric carnage and destruction of downtown Manhattan barely escaping the death and victimization suffered by thousands. The magnitude of this experience has forever altered my life and given me an urgency to produce as much healing as I can. Long ago, painted on the side of a wall at Allen and Delancey Streets on the Lower east Side of Manhattan, I read such eloquent words no long gone, which said in effect that it is the job of the artist to repair our world from all of the horrible damage man has inflicted upon it. This is my mission, to participate in that process.”
Mark’s Bio
Mark D Ransom has performed as a poet, actor, singer/song writer and performance artist in many NYC venues including: EXIT ART, American Theater for Actors, Expanded Arts, SoHo Rep’s Summer Camp 2001, the Cherry Lane Alternative, BRICK, Brooklyn College, WNYE, HERE (American Living Room). Many thanks to Steven Rahe, Cyndy Marion, Tom Ronin, E. Katherine Kerr, Lydia & Scott Brooks, Sondra, Babs, Paul Rebhan, Lisa France, Routh Chadwick, Morty Schiff, Arnie Kantrowitz, Tony Noe, David Cooper, Damon Boccadoro, Denny Randazzo, Lloyd Cropper, Lenny Asaro and Buildings ERT. Mark’s spoken word CD “Wild Iron Slave” is in the works. As ever, all of my love to Jen-Scott Mobley the love of my life and my wife. PEACE BEGINS AT HOME.
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