Drawing by Michael Leonard
**
Praise for Chimes
“I picture Tom Cole on a bare stage reciting Chimes to an audience who lie on cots in the dark. They slip in and out of consciousness and their own lonely dreams, which intermingle with Cole’s stories of isolation and longing, sexual desire and addiction. The Sun rises and Cole finishes. Everyone opens their eyes and stares into space. It wins a Tony.”
—Charlie Kaufman
“Chimes revolves on the axis of hope and degradation—a story as old as time. Mainly our hero keeps going, through shame, through drugs, through mania, through the isolation of the pandemic and other kinds of isolation. Through the grandeur of self-obliterating sex, with its own regulations and community norms. Lyrical insight and pangs of humor spangle this darkness like stars. Am I a monster? Or is this what it means to be a person?”
—Robert Glück
“Chimes is an intimate shape shifter—it’s a poem, a novella, a play, a prayer—carnal, spiritual, sweet & funny. I love this book.”
—Eileen Myles
“In Tom Cole’s stunning debut, Chimes, clean, sparkling writing takes us into the mind of an unnamed narrator as he shares memories, dreams, and moving attempts toward making peace with the world. Cole’s crisp style and humor took me from laughing out loud to questioning my own sanity.”
—Joe Westmoreland
**
Tom Cole performing in Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, The Kitchen, 2019.
Excerpt from Chimes #1
ToeTag loved me. His screen name referred to the tags you find tied to
the toes of corpses. I loved ToeTag back. We never spoke because when
he came over I was dead.
He had given me directions on how to pose within a specific stage of
rigor mortis. Mouth open, not wide. Arms by my side. Legs straight
out. Limbs heavy. He picked them up. I let them drop. He rolled me
over—I plopped down. He invited people over to fuck me in the ass.
He came in my mouth once. He brought over embalmer tools. He told
me he loved me. He also had zip ties—the plastic industrial type—he
tied me to things. In life I think he was a real estate broker, married.
One time, the best time, he wrapped me in plastic and left me to su#o-
cate. But he came back and ripped the plastic before I could die. We
never spoke. I was dead when he came over and dead when he left.
After, he wrote me e-mails telling me I should keep a cleaner house.
He paid for my pedicures.
**
A still from Magical Thinking, a film/installation by Laura Parnes. (Pictured performers are Tom Cole and Becca Blackwell.)
Excerpt from Chimes #2
I force myself to eat something, and get in bed with my dogs, try
to calm myself. I have a large orange vase and when I look at it, I
remember the orange cushions, the orange jacket. I try to meditate
and focus on my breath, but I can hear the wind chime wafting in
from my cracked window. I blame the wind chime for all of this.
I close the window, but I can still hear the wind chime. Even though
it is cold out, I turn on my air conditioner to try to block it out, but
I can still hear it, tinkling. I turn on the TV, the blender, the
microwave, the tea pot, the vacuum. I even open the spigots. I can
still hear the wind chime.
And amid this cacophony I finally begin to drift towards sleep,
I’m remembering still…
How my upstairs neighbors, the ones with a baby, had left a
carriage in the lobby AGAIN. It was old, a pram, huge and
completely inappropriate for the city. I imagine they had chosen
it for aesthetic reasons. This couple was going for a certain baby
carriage retro look (which somehow made me hate them even
more). I became enraged.
They thought they could leave their personal property in a shared
space just because they had offspring. We had to step around their
garbage, our maintenance person had to work around their baby
carriage. Without breaking a sweat, or thinking, I grabbed the
pram and rolled it onto the sidewalk, right onto Ludlow between
Houston and Stanton, calmly entered my apartment, made
something to eat, ate it, went to sleep, mentioned none of this to
anybody. Like one of those murders where someone stabs their
cheating husband and then watches a movie, boils an egg as if
nothing had happened. Psychopathic. Like that.
The next day I overslept, a rage hangover, but as I left my
apartment I noticed a sign taped to the dirty wall asking
for information about the “stolen” carriage, asking it be returned,
soliciting information, a picture of the baby carriage on the sign,
haunted, like something from It’s Alive, or Rosemary’s Baby.
As soon as I saw the sign I felt terrible – as if I had been in
a slumber – as if someone other than me had disposed of the
carriage, like please don’t let the dead body in the other room
be at my doing. I wondered, did this mean I was on the verge of
a relapse? I called my sponsor, then a friend, and no one knew
quite what to say but my next-door neighbor looked deeply
into my eyes with a kind of faux empathy, “Are you OK?”
and this made me feel wretched, like her worry made me a
worse person than I actually was, this doubt of my sanity
became my personality. Eventually, my sponsor said that what I
did was basically akin to stealing, she affected a deep concern for
my psychic well-being, and I became terrified I would have
to make a formal apology, and if I didn’t, I would drink, if I
didn’t publicly apologize the next thing you know, a needle in
my arm, and would they call the police once they found out it was
me who took it? I didn’t have the money to replace the baby
carriage…. Maybe leave a gift certificate to BUY BUY BABY
taped to the sign? But how much does an antique baby carriage
cost?
I could put up my own sign offering babysitting services
Or or
Stalk them
Or
Befriend them and find out who they think did it. Lean into it,
spend time with them just to heighten anxiety and guilt. And I
could see this turning into a horror movie where the children end
up in a trash bin.
But the truth is I worried about myself – was I setting myself up to
get fucked up in the most fucked up way possible (like smoking
crack). Once I start I never stop. Years, and I mean years of selling
my soul for what? A baby carriage?
You’d put in your money and guide the claw – an alien hand with
three slender fingers – over a mountain of stuffed animals
modeled on famous creatures from Hollywood movies, it drops,
and you hope it snags something. This time, it pulled up a brown
paper bag with grease spots on it, as if something gross inside.
The claw carried the bag over to a chute and dropped it, at which
point it fell into a basket on the outside of the contraption. I
understood somehow that there was a baby in the bag, not a bomb
or anything like that, but a baby and that there was something
wrong with it. The air he breathed in he couldn’t breathe out;
and I saw the baby swell up and swell up till his body
and face were grotesquely deformed; as if he were about to split
into three versions of himself and for a second I thought he
might explode. Both I and the parents were horrified, in anguish,
but I was especially anxious because I knew that in order to save
him I would have to puncture the baby with a huge pin, so he could
split. The mother was the only one who took action.
She went over to the baby and started to strip off its skin as if she
were peeling an orange. It was no good. The baby kept swelling,
especially his head and belly.
I never dream of the police.
Instead, I dream a lot about doctors, babies, and x-rays.
Or that I was in love with a man, and as we were having
sex, he kept getting
younger and younger
so that by the end of it he was a
baby, and we were still having sex
until we were done
at which point I put him
in the
antique pram
and I was
I was
a…a… a… a pedophile.
And I tried to explain
when the sex
started, he was a grown man
but they looked to the baby
carriage, and back to me,
the sun was
shining no
blackouts
nowhere to hide
everyone can see I had sex with
not even a child but a baby
and the shame I experienced in that moment was
complete.
But I adjusted his
little baby hat
anyway
to keep the sun
from his eyes.
**
Recent press
“A monologue can take many forms: intimacy, confrontation, identification, a disembodied voice, a mouth in search of a scream. Cole deftly mixes all of these, often on the same page. Like the best monologues and performances—Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis, Will Eno’s Thom Pain (based on nothing), Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, and Ron Athey’s body-extreme ritualistic blood-lettings—Cole has created a singular work that connects to and disrupts a lineage. Some sections read as prose poems, reaching from Baudelaire’s spleeny Parisian whirl to Richard Siken’s recent stroke and language recovery block-texts. Others have diaristic blunt force. It’s a sleight-of-hand nude illusion rather than a striptease. Part of the power of the onward rush of words and emotions is what is left out, what is foregrounded, and what is revisited like a worrisome fever dream.”
–Nate Lippens, from his review in Full Stop
Full review: https://www.full-stop.net/2026/07/31/reviews/natelippens/chimes-a-monologue-tom-cole/
“Things have a tendency to escalate quickly in Tom Cole’s slim new novel Chimes. ‘Someone organized an orgy in my apartment while I was coming in and out of consciousness,’ the unnamed narrator tells us, recounting a time before he got sober. The half-conscious group sex isn’t that unusual for him; rather, the odd thing is that a stranger shows up to the party with all of his belongings in a suitcase and, after the orgy’s over, moves in. The man stays for a while, doing meth and eating M&M’s. Eventually, the narrator kicks him out, only to spiral into shame: ‘I knew I loved him, wanted him back, we were meant to be together.’
–Eric Dean Wilson, from his review in The Baffler
Full review : https://thebaffler.com/latest/desperate-living-wilson
“Artist and playwright Cole debuts with an alluring narrative of a solitary gay man contending with quotidian annoyances and his submissive nature…Throughout, Cole’s naked honesty gives this sharp confessional its power. Readers will be rapt.” –Publishers Weekly
Full review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9798993181134
“By turns deadpan and poetic, the narrator of Cole’s debut novella reflects on his chemical and sexual depravity and his pursuit of self-actualization.”
– Paul McAdory, from his Editor’s Pick review in Bomb
Full review: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2026/09/15/tom-cole-chimes-a-monologue/
“If at all possible, it is best to do whatever Thora Siemsen says. So when she said ‘Can I send you a copy of this?’ about Tom Cole’s forthcoming monologue Chimes published by The Song Cave, without any context, I got excited. It’s exactly the kind of book you want to send to someone without context, like a really good psychic or money. It’s a slim volume, which means it feels like a present instead of a burden. I related so much to the inner world of this gay ranter at the center of Chimes.
“I understood that it took place in the early days of COVID, but it also felt so timeless, like we’re just kind of constantly living through these periods of profound isolation and crisis and normalcy and absurdity. I wasn’t familiar with Tom’s work previously only because he’s not on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills which is where I source most of my cultural references. But after reading Chimes and then talking with him in my apartment during an intense thunderstorm, I am a Tom Cole nationalist. I hope you will send this book to some other lonely degenerate who is just trying to avoid the rain, with no context.”
–Morgan Bassichis, from his introduction to a conversation with Tom Cole for Literary Hub.
Full conversation: https://lithub.com/tom-cole-on-autofiction-shame-based-writing-and-being-an-unreliable-narrator/)
*
Image Galley of Tom Cole’s performances
Crash Diet, Sculptural installation and performance, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 1998
Head Hunters, Provincetown, MA, 1998. (A collaboration with Jen Collins, playing Salome.)
drip, Sculptural installation and performance, Mass Art, 1999. A collaboration with Jackie Goss and Mass Art Students.
Oklahoma City, a play performed at the Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts, 2001
Erase, Sculptural installation and performance, Participant Inc, 2007, as part of Performa 07. (Collaboration with Lovett /Codagnone. Performed by Jim Fletcher, Stephanie Fischette, and Susan Bowen.)
**
Tom Cole is a writer, performer, and artist living in the Lower East Side and Kingston, NY. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Dixon Place, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Howl Arts, Poetry Project, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a three-time MacDowell Playwriting fellow, and an Edward Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. Tom heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he commissioned, developed and produced Heidi Shreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, two Tony nominations, Amazon Prime Original), as well as commissioning and developing major works by Craig Lucas, Nathan Alan Davis, Sheila Callaghan, and others. With True Love Productions, he has worked on over 20 Broadway productions, as well as a dozen Off-Broadway events, including Well, The Flick, Sleep No More, Skylight, Shockheaded Peter, Medea and Waverly Gallery. He co-produced ANOHNI’s Turning (St. Ann’s Warehouse) in 2004, as well as her performance Hopelessness (Park Avenue Armory), and acted as assistant director/dramaturg/actor for She Who Saw Beautiful Things (The Kitchen). He was the artistic director of the Market Theater in Boston during its acclaimed 2000-2002 seasons, where he presented new work by ANOHNI and the Johnsons, David Mamet, Ricky Jay, Ping Chong, Frederick Wiseman, and Biljana Srbljanovic. In 1991, Tom worked with Robert Wilson on his production of When We Dead Awaken, (American Repertory Theater), and from 1991-2001 assisted David Mamet on all of his major works. His writing has been anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles; Sluts, edited by Michelle Tea; Flesh and the Word 4, edited by Michael Lowenthal; This New Breed edited by Rudy Kikel; and Flashpoint, edited by Michael Bronski.
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Tom Cole reads from Chimes: A Monologue at his book launch at Parkside Lounge, NYC October 4, 2026.
BUY A COPY OF CHIMES: A MONOLOGUE:
https://the-song-cave.com/products/chimes-a-monologue-by-tom-cole
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend, courtesy of the thoughtful curation of guest-host Jeff Jackson, you get to discover a new book by the multi-gifted Tom Cole, as published by the always reliably great press Song Cave. Please explore its specialness and see what happens. Thank you kindly Jeff and Song Cave for the chance. ** malcolm, You’re making a movie video for Steven? Wow, that’s some coincidence. Fantastic! I can’t wait to see it. I’ll look you up on YouTube pronto. And how interesting it would be if you can coax Alan Boyce into your work. He was such a haunting actor, and still is, no doubt. Great luck with that. You’re doing amazing work. Yes, I saw the Nirosta Steel gig in Paris. It was excellent, of course. So interesting that he manages to carry the charisma of that album into a live setting. I had wondered how that would work given the particularity of the sonics of that record. I hope you enjoy ‘RT’. Again, really good to get to talk with you. ** Adem Berbic, Hey. I think Little Caesar’s success was due to a number of factors. In ’76, when I started it, punk was exploding in LA, and the venture was keyed into that scene. Having super talented writer friends was big. And I was ambitious, reaching out to young writers in NYC and SF and other places and bringing them into the fold. And I wrote to my favorite writers asking if I could do a book by them or have their work in the magazine, and because Little Caesar became very cool, I had a pretty good success with that. And Beyond Baroque had typesetting facilities that I could use to make the books and magazine. My mom was basically bankrolling the press until she got tired of it not earning back and pulled the plug, killing it off sadly. I hope your weekend is just a continual rise to the status quo, body-wise. ** Carsten, Hi. Oh, I’m sure there were people back then thinking Little Caesar was exclusionary, in fact I know there were. I was very picky. When I started the magazine I had a co-editor for one issue, and he insisted the zine had to be named after a Noir movie because he was really into them, and that was the only Noir movie title I was willing to go with. With scripts, you have to find it really interesting to write hints and directives for future visuals rather than just text that is a fait accompli, which is a particular mission. I’ve come to really enjoy that challenge. Well, it’s the going thing to be triggering and scandalising people who prioritise identity issues, so you may get some pushback, sure. That’s way of the world these days. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It was heady back then doing the press and so on. And so much work. It was one-person operation aka me. I don’t how I did it really. But, yeah, thank you. After the hell around our last film, it’s hard to let myself feel hopeful and excited, but it does look infinitely better. So far. I think cold can technically create itchiness? Or maybe it’s the artificial heat. Love finally getting his Halloween dosage tomorrow at Parc Asterix’s spooky makeover and ultra-excited, G. ** scunnard, Do some churches do that? I’ve only been in a church during a service maybe three times in my life. Nirosta Steel was very, very good. I’ll have to email you my mailing address. I’ll do that. Remind me if I forget. Sure, pick my brain if you want, and I’ll try to be alert when you do. It’s extremely better so far, but I’m sure I will be antsy until things are official. A bit of PTSD, I think. ** Tosh Berman, Hey, Tosh. Yeah, you were there. Actually, I met yesterday with a guy/press who wants to republish my early poetry books, and he expressed interest in doing a facsimile edition of all the Little Caesar issues. The ongoing problem is getting the permissions because that would be a massive amount of work. We’ll see, but that’s been the problem with reprinting them so far. I think the authors of the LC books were pretty happy with how it went? I don’t remember any recriminations. Thank you kindly, Tosh. By the way, your Dean Stockwell piece was/is really fantastic! ** worm, Hi! Yeah, the guy who did the Dennis Cooper website let it die, unfortunately, No, there’s no archive of the magazine online. I mean to do that, but I don’t even have copies of a number of the issues to scan. Hope you like ‘RT’, duh, but it’s okay if you don’t. Have a superb weekend. ** Bill, Haha, yeah, the photo of Ron. It was very atypical if that helps. I never met Oswell Blakeston. It was done all through international letter exchanges. I don’t know Joon Oluchi Lee, no. I’ll try to rectify that. Bob Ostertag! ** _Black_Acrylic, They were wild and fruitful days, for sure. You got them! Everyone, B_A_ aka Ben Robinson created some terrific screen prints of late collectively titled ‘Radioactive Moorhen’, and you can check them out and will be glad if you do. Here. Kudos, pal. I assume you’ll be off to do more? You have ideas? ** Jeffrey, Hi, Jeffrey! Thanks so much! I think I still have copies of all of them, but not many. It was such a score to get Joe Brainard to let me do that book, as you can imagine. Thank you for coming in. I hope all’s excellent with you. ** laura w, It was very cool for me too, of course. Tim Dlugos and I were very close friends. His Selected — or is it Collected? — Poems book that David Trinidad edited is extremely recommended. The last issue of Little Caesar Magazine was a collection of essays about overlooked writers, and Purdy did an essay for it, I can’t remember about who. Europe changed times about a week or maybe two weeks ago? So we’re already dark here at 5 pm, for better or worse. ** HaRpEr //, Obviously I highly recommend Equi and Koertge. Right, drunk women writers are far more in my echelon than drunk male writers. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I’m long accustomed to being tagged a queer writer, but I still think labelling the work itself is reductive, in my case at least. I’m queer, but the work is everything or trying to be. Or something. ** Poecilia, I have that record! There was a Halloween sound effects record that had one of the actual mansions that I used to explore on the cover, but I don’t remember the name of it, drat. Nice drawing. Captures its essence to be sure. ** Malik, Hi, Malik! Thank you! Great about the swimmingly! You’re killing it. Zac and I talked with the producer of our next film the other day, and she said we might be shooting it near Baltimore. We’ll see, but how about that? Take good care. ** Thom, Gerstler’s great. She’s also my oldest friend, but that doesn’t cloud my judgement. Favorite Paul McCarthy … I think this old video that he made with Mike Kelley where Paul was the abusive father and Mike was the abused son. I’m blanking on is name. I’ll try to remember. Favorite Deerhunter album … I guess I would way ‘Microcastle’. Yours? Have a weekend to forever remember. ** Right. You know what is or was in store for you around here this weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday.
Now available in North America 