Tom Bradley's Longpoems

Epos, Epyllia
and Long Poems

Nagasaki Soul Huffer — Trapart Books, Films and Editions

The Soul Huffer of the title is an enormous man, exiled in Nagasaki. He’s matrilaterally descended from an earlier Nagasaki expatriate, Thomas Glover, the “Scottish Samurai.” Known as the Founder of Modern Japan, Glover engaged in heavy industrial pursuits which eventually attracted the second atom bomb.

The Soul Huffer has undertaken certain esoteric activities as atonement for this hereditary guilt. From the top of an extinct volcano in the city’s suburbs, he inhales the atomized bits of “nukees,”
then—

Expelling hopeful, naked little beings
on gales cyclonic as Gargantuan throat
and trampoline-broad diaphragm can blow,
[he] launches them on greenhouse-gaseous wings
as far as superhumanly he can
across deepwater inlets of the bay,
beyond the piers, avuncular breakwaters,
the moles and causeways, toward East China Sea,
to hatch afresh with jellyfish and polyps
and un-Linnaean isotopic mutants
from Fukushima’s farce lately adrift.

Injuring Eternity by Tom Bradley — Guernica Editions

A precocious boy and his harried father are making a movie from scratch, using only materials in the backyard—or at least entertaining the possibilities. Their discussion embraces material science, biology and ethics, then expands to an examination of various cosmogonies and cosmologies, new and old, rational and borderline-psychotic. The bright boy’s pouting importune for full-time parenting is balking the old man’s efforts to go to work, until the encounter becomes a duel to the death--

...our half-blink of neat freedom, mortal coil
successfully off-shuffled, once, for all,
subséquent to a finished life of squirms.
It lasts, this liberation, say, how long:
a single flick’s immensurate duration,
a short-short subject, lit by half a pinch
of volatile magnesium, wrung from weeds...

“When is the world going to wake up to the genius of Tom Bradley? … One of the most criminally underrated authors on the planet.”
—Andrew Gallix. of the Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, New Statesman, BBC Radio 3, the Independent, Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement

Energeticum - Phantasticum, A Profane Epyllion, written in seven cantos by Tom Bradley — MadHat Press

This poem, extending over fourteen hundred and sixty lines of blank verse, recounts history's first deliberate experimentation with LSD-25 (phantastica). Ernst Jünger, the notorious death-worshiping Iron Cross Honoree, slips in some amphetamine (energetica), resulting in a manifestation of the Plasmator, the insane spirit who has masqueraded as Jehovah for three millennia.

During this Ur-bummer time and space are roundly violated. We sit in with Mozart as he composes an inferior concerto for an obese patron. We help Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin annihilate humanity in the Himalayas. We reduce Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to little boys and tuck them into their bunk-bed for the night, where they suffer lucid dreams of Roman beast wranglers and concentration camp matrons hiding in the closet. The Plasmator barges back in and assumes the shape of Wayne Newton, the Midnight Idol, who closes off the show with a guest appearance, live from Las Vegas.

page 6 of Energeticum - Phantasticum, A Profane Epyllion, written in seven cantos by Tom Bradley page 7 of Energeticum - Phantasticum, A Profane Epyllion, written in seven cantos by Tom Bradley

The passages in red ink are inspired by the Comma Johanneum, a marginal gloss that, in the third century, was slipped into the western Bible by a sleepy copyist or a naughty forger. For eighteen hundred years people have been tangling over that brief clause. It has exercised everyone from Erasmus to Calvin to Newton to Pope Pius XI, because it determines whether the Trinity is true fact or flimflammery.

In the same spirit of troublemaking, Energeticum/Phantasticum's red-ink glosses will sometimes misdirect, as do Tom Bradley's footnotes to This Wasted Land, Felicia's Nose and Epigonesia.

MadHat Press
Set during Nero's psychotic reign, this BLANK VERSE EPIC plunges a transsexed priestess of a Phrygian fertility cult into the becalmed Adriatic. He/She's attended by his/her erotically indecisive traveling partner who can't swim a stroke, and is clinging to him/her in this exhausted frame of mind--	...For me the Adriatic's sickly-warm, as one imagines amniotic sauce to be, or maybe recollects it as. Existence dragged beyond the edge of surfeit this time around, I balk to get re-sucked into the crumby syrup of the womb....
see some of Nick Patterson's illustrations