Nearly three months have passed since the last droplet from the tributary of our great gazette mountain spring. Only slightly importuning your forgiveness for our 90 (or some odd) day interregnum, we come forth with tidings.

Though most is of the positivist assortment, such as a vinyl release and a tour announcement, the second half of the year has not augured uninterrupted goodness. As you will read below, in addition to our notes on artistic developments and triumphs, a good friend of ours has run into some trouble and needs all of our aid.

Stalin Bollywood 5th Anniversary Vinyl Release

Five years ago, in partnership with POW Recordings, we released Stalin Bollywood, our landmark release of noise, invective, and rap-art-rock-punk fusion.

It saw tracks like “hos on my d*ck ‘cuz I look like a drawing of the P*****t M******d”, “the pope is a(n) (unrepentant) r*p*st”, and “dirty whiteboys”, with a litany of press and deep dives (including Rhys Langston’s appearance on the MAGNIFIED VOICES Interview Program).

Well, to celebrate its 5th anniversary Black Market Poetry has pressed up a limited quantity of vinyl records for you good people of the general public. Following the sold-out cassette run and the out-of-print lyric zine, this is now the only form factor for fans seeking a physical widget in our digital landscape.

Find it available for purchase at Rhys Langston’s Bandcamp, while supplies last.

Summer Tour in the Pacific Northwest with Fatboi Sharif and Icky Reels

After touching back down in LA in mid-May, fresh from our international syllabic sojourn with Open Mike Eagle, we smelled the roses for a moment outside our apartment. Then, we pressed play once more on the traveling rapman schemes.

That is to say we will be hitting the road this summer with Fatboi Sharif and Icky Reels, going through major and minor locales in the Pacific Northwest, blending styles and marbled poetics in the fog machine of our day and age.

Dates are as follows:

6/29/26 — Bellingham, WA - The Shakedown — TICKETS
6/30/26 — Seattle, WA - Belltown Yacht Club — TICKETS
7/1/26 — Baker City, OR - Churchill Baker — TICKETS
7/2/26 — Portland, OR - Atlantis Lounge — INFO [TICKETS TO COME]
7/3/26 — Portland, OR - Swan Dive — [DETAILS + TICKETS TO COME]
7/4/26 — Eugene, OR - Blairally — TICKETS

As this is the first tour we’ve booked as a part of the Northstar Artists roster, we are feeling like a real professional musical enterprise out here; though we keeps it humbly and stridently locked in search of the epiphanic, still.

Oh yes, flyer done by us (in fact in an airport terminal on a phone, if you can believe it).

Our Dear Friend and Collaborator Frankie Jax No Mad Has Been Detained by ICE

On May 14th, our good friend and collaborator, Frankie Jax No Mad became the latest target of ICE’s rash of warrantless arrests and kidnappings. As he was leaving his apartment in Portland, OR masked agents swarmed him and took him to be detained at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, WA.

Since then his partner started a GoFundMe in his name to pay for forthcoming legal fees, for necessities to be made available at his commissary, and to cover expenses (like rent and bills) while he is in custody.

Furthermore, as difficult as it was, we managed to conjure up words for POW MAG, telling his story and explaining his invaluable place in west coast indie rap.

Read below (and consider contributing to his fundraiser):

POW MAG

The ICE Detention of Frankie Jax No Mad

I had finally found out how to contact him. It had been three days since I learned the concussive news that masked ICE agents had swarmed my brother-in-music, Frankie Jax No Mad, outside his home. As if it were the same thing as paying for parking or ordering lunch from my couch, there was an app I had to download to get ahold of detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center, where he was in custody following a warrantless arrest. I did so; filling out a login, providing a photo ID, transferring funds to add communication minutes, and submitting the request for an online visit. Then I watched it remain pending for two hours…

Read more

a month ago · 32 likes · 1 comment · Rhys Langston

FOLLOW UP AND SUPPORT????

We will have news of more news as it becomes newsworthy, and by reading this far you have proven yourself worthy of the gravity we are trying to impress, the form we hope to hold (Newton and Non-Newtonian, respectively).

If you would like to support more directly, our Patreon is where we share works in progress, early videos, and even whole finished projects before they come out (and more). Or if you’re even more generous, there is a link on our website where you can quite literally pay our rent. Just saying.

Bless up.

I lied in 2026’s BMP communiqué number one.

The royal we has returned to my newsletter, though its reappearing majesty is to suggest airs more of the post-guillotine order, which is surely needed within our convenience-obscured radical imagination; a POV set against the horizon crinkling with the West’s “rules-based order” folding over its illusory self in hypocritical hilarity.

This we reports from America, where everything but the violence is symbolic. This we writes using the English language, where forensic debate and the “powers of persuasion” are nothing more than cover for chauvinist hegemons (to put it lightly) and future-history-and-historiography-as-public-relations-budgets. This we drafts within Substack, where our ability to write under their confines of free speech (paid subscription option pending) means N30-N@Z!-P3∂ø-@P0LøG!$†$ also have permission to scribe (and generate substantial revenue from that).

But I/we digress.

In truth, as genuinely as I/we can (in this reality we take as immovable), I/we respectfully offer news of an international tour, some local LA shows, new literary movements, and a new feature verse out everywhere.

Read on (if I/we haven’t written your eyes bloodshot).

Springtime for Langston Across LA

Without Max Bialystock riding shotgun, we see in the rearview mirror the atmospheric rivers, 90 degree Black History Month days, and the tufts of this afro resilient through it all (no Leopold Bloom either).

Looking forward now, we here at Black Market Poetry Bed and Breakfast, Insurance Adjusters, and Dogwhistle Wind Snuffers, bring you news of some shows that we have in and around the vernal equinox:

3-8-26 — Reading with moor mother, Rasheeda Phillips, Mimi Tempestt, and Will Alexander at Stories (Echo Park), 6pm

3-13-26 — Beat Cinema with Slim Carrie, Wave Groove, Coby, M_Boogs, DJ and Soul, Yourself in Peace at Hello Stranger (Little Tokyo), 9pm

3-22-26 — fabled armory Release Show with nahhphet and Dick Chainey at De La Playa Records & Leisure (Highland Park), time TBD

4-4-26 — Langstónian Spring Break at The Black Market Poetry Bureau of Internal Affairs (Mid-City), time TBD / RSVP via blkmarketpoetry(at)gmail(dot)com

4-28-26 — [Details TBA] at DSP Studios (Frogtown)

Supporting Open Mike Eagle in May

Yet again, the God of Neighborhood Gods Unlimited repute invites us to join his caravan, to rattle off some raps over more of the North American expanse. We will be in Canada for the first time, believe it or nawt. Tickets here.

5-5-26 — Brooklyn, NY — The Sultan Room with E L U C I D

5-7-26 — Montreal, QC — L’Esco

5-8-26 — Toronto, ON — The Sound Garage

5-9-26 — Lansing, MI — Stoopfest

5-10-26 — Cleveland, OH — Beachland Ballroom

A Return to Our Writerly Roots

Throughout grade school and through my first two years in college I wrote a lot of fiction. When I turned 20 though, I found myself drawn to music. Turning a focus to that medium, and keeping up my visual art and poetry practice, a more consistent and dedicated time to flex my fiction writing muscles and instincts got elbowed out. However, here and there moments of narrative prose would occasionally come out of the pen.

Thus it was, that sometime in 2021 I wrote a single scene, centering three loosely conceived characters. It was simple enough, but something about it suggested the start of a longer premise. Well, over the years I kept going back to those initial paragraphs and character sketches, expanding on them, adding more shading and contour, deeper dimension and time, and eventually hitting about 10,000 words in 2024. It was shaping up to be a novella.

A few months ago, when 2025 was waiting for 2026 to perambulate in, I looked at my long hand draft, its digitized fragments, and calculated how infrequently I had sat down to hack away at the story. As I am wont to in my many creative anxieties and headassery, I noted the paragraph here, page there and thought to myself, if this doesn’t get done in 2026, I might perish.

So in November, I gave myself a schedule. And three days ago I finished the first draft. Something about its completion felt wildly different than anything else I have managed to bring to the finish line in the last few years. Maybe it is the return to my aforementioned roots. Maybe it is the marked pivot from my established creative process over the last few years. Maybe it is the possibility that it could be bad, but also that it might be good.

We’ll see. I hope it arrives in a form for you to read before long.

Additionally— burying the lede here dramatically—my debut book of poetry is coming out this fall via Writ Large Projects. When details and pre-orders are available, you’ll be the first (364) to know.

P.S. NEW FEATURE ALERT!

Some good friends of ours, nahhphet & Dick Chainey recently released their second collaborative project, fabled armory, within which we had the fortunate task of providing some featured poetics.

So listen to the whole shebang, with particular bias toward the track “adder’s bayonet of intractable grievance” feat. Rhys Langston.

Follow Up and Support????

We will have news of more news as it becomes newsworthy, and by reading this far you have proven yourself worthy of the gravity we are trying to impress, the form we hope to hold (Newton and Non-Newtonian, respectively).

If you would like to support more directly, our Patreon is where we share works in progress, early videos, and even whole finished projects before they come out (and more). Or if you’re even more generous, there is a link on our website where you can quite literally pay our rent. Just saying.

Bless up.

Huzzah! Welcome to this stack to which you may sub. If you are receiving this in any confusion, just refer to the several MailChimp emails you did not open last year. These will replace those newsletters, and I largely will be replacing the jaunty royal we I previous used with a more stolid I.

So, this I hopes you stick around, for news on my musical, literary, and visual art creations, as well as the occasional picture of my cat / studio manager.

I foresee the clip of these missives to be consistent with the rhythm established in past newsletters (about one per month), but the nature of these will inevitably shift. Essentials like updates on live shows and unveilings of my multivalent art practice will be mainstays. However, this format feels conducive to letting more extended writerly thoughts fly.

I remember two years ago, trying to levy a complaint against my employer, when my teacher’s union rep told me that I talked too much. Well, I also write too much.

So enjoy— as we smolder in this smoking world.

LIVE APPEARANCES AND SHOWS

We (sorry, instinctual delusions of grandeur) are starting this year with a few poetry readings, and then breaking the seal on a much postponed venture: rocking with a band. Look (alive) below.

1-29-26 — Reading with moor mother, Mimi Tempestt, and Will Alexander at Stories (Echo Park, Los Angeles)

2-10-26 — Reading at Solarc (Glassell Park, Los Angeles)

2-17-26 — Performing songs from Pale Black Negative with Bobbyy and his band at Melody Lounge (Chinatown, Los Angeles)

new sh!t: Psychic Rhyming Like Kings Shining feat. Andrew Mbaruk [Lyric Video]

Back in December (of 2025) I released the second music video off my album Pale Black Negative, a lyric collage for “Psychic Rhyming Like Kings Shining feat. Andrew Mbaruk.” Utilizing no fake entelechy in creating the reel music movie, I edited and animated this video transcription of the musical poetry.

For the sausage makers: I frame-by-frame animated the motion of these lyric cut outs at about five frames per second, and spent hours sorting through archival footage for the video collage underneath the words. While the video for "loftily I do abstain" from my and ’s project was my first exploration of this style, this iteration and outcome is for a sure a more refined distillation.

Anyways, this video was supposed to come out in September, but my DaVinci Resolve install kept crashing in early August. Only in mid-November did I resume work on the video and song, powering through the crashes that occurred each 5-10 minutes of work. So, though it did not go as planned, I got to get this out eventually.

A Year (a Few Weeks Late) in Review

Allow me to be a little lazy and merely adapt something I wrote on the Zuck’s Grammatazoa:

In search of itemized reflections on 2025 I can only quilt loosely-connected sentiments. The year began with my city on fire. I had planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign around the same time, but I decided not to ask for donations to finish a musical album when folks were searching through charcoal remains of rubble. Somehow I still got my album out after a three year delay, though the release week was the week things ratcheted up in crazy, with the executive branch illegally sending troops to our streets to roll out its experiments in autocracy. Well, I did have the fortune to write about that in the LA Review of Books, too, in what was technically my first long form essay ever published.

Amid everything, I kept it secret that a few months prior Open Mike Eagle asked me to be the opening act on his tour Neighborhood Gods Unlimited tour with Cavalier. When it started in July, it was like everything I had been waiting for and working toward for the last decade had presented itself, even if it felt way overdue: in die hard crowds hanging on my words (and merch), in traveling across the country on the heels of my art, in feeling a peer to some of the living greats while also equally receiving real mentorship from heroic artsy Black dudes. I’m still piecing together everything, as the haze of the hospitality budgets and Wofford Steel Reserve cocktails are just now leaving my system.

I also made a bunch of new art pieces, started a year-long writing exercise to draft an epic poem, and toured again on my own (bringing my artistic talents to a total 15 cities in 12 states for the year). But most importantly, I lasted another year in my expensive hometown.

It likes to act like it wants to end my life, but it’s gonna have to try harder.

Follow Up and Support????

In the next calendar year I’m hoping to be less tethered to digital handheld modules and their platforms, though, over these 12 months, I’ll be sending SOS signals before I drop two new albums, publish my debut book of poetry, and put up the inaugural show of my artwork.

I will be sharing more detailed (perhaps gory) updates via my Patreon.

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