Four Color Related Poems

OKAY. All of these poems are sensual. 

                       Diamond Brand is trying a new Poetic technique wherein words are linked to colors which are linked to places on the body. Some Shongas call these "THE CHAKRAS". The Poems will work without spiritual belief. There is no need to think about what they are saying. The words work together to evoke memories in the body. A color poem works by being held where it hits. The “hitting” may not come from the page but from the back of the spine, or down from the heart, or early in the memory, or late in the humor. They are purely for your physical enjoyment. Some of them may feel uncomfortable, like wearing tight clothing or being nervous. They are designed that way. Others may feel too good or too ripe. You might need to have an orgasm. That is okay. Do you want to rub your body on surfaces after reading the poems? The part of your body that you want to rub is the part activated bywords. Words have a physical element, and these poems are hand sounded to stimulate. 

RED (GROIN, DUH)

Sex Driver, Whisper monger

Groan

Deep lizard lover

Hover closer

Loin peeler

Meat taster

Whine courses of thrust horse

To my teeth wench

Eat harder

Eat harder

Vervain stick sucker

Reaming broil brittle

Scald mellow, I trust you, faster.

BLUE/SEAFOAM (ABILITY TO SPEAK/THROAT)

Denim on coral

Like linen on forearms

We search for diamonds in rocks at the sea

We succumb to combing

To calories

To yarrow

We earn our keep

In loitering

In hovering

O’er shells

Oh Morgans and Daphnes

Petunia our strength

We forage

For fortune

Our courage

Works tidal

Denim on corral

Our diamonds to keep

GREEN

ALLIGATOR SHIT

(TO BE READ ALOUD WITH YOUR STOMACH MUSCLES CLENCHED AND YOUR HEART ALERT)

There is an algae vision of winter glow

And a muscle memory to swiping credit

We heard you were going now

To see your aunt and mother

In a fabric factory

Where linen tastes like celluiod, silk tastes like lime

Where acrylic is too young to be worn

Where syntax is expensive and the devil

Sings midnight on the Jungle Lane

We heard you were going to meet the Violet Princess

With a sensitive ring finger and tight sixth sense

Please tell her we’re craving

A little backgammon tonight

We can rip a picture of Julius Ceasar

And fondle our childhoods with nylon and wire

We will have to get together whenever we can

To visit and clench

And puncture the sinews again

Before the collision sunset hints lust

And dangles twilight

Over the windows

Over dust

PURPLE (Highest consciousness… TOP OF YOUR HEAD)

(JANIS JOPLIN’S HOUSE)

Hello Soldier

Just dreaming of the chamber?

Of earning turkey with silence?

Of quiet penance born?

Where do roses hang their torture?

Where do poets aim their hams?

Reach under your bedclothes, and hunger

For a moment, linger

Touch November there

French your season

For no tender sister fair would wallow without reason

Handle gropes of slumber, rouge, tinder, volume

See matter as you hallow it

Harlot, sinking or violet

Dazzle us

Orifices of tigerlily

Fragrant nasturtium

Inventor of cream machinery, oh take me,

Quench me slowly in ringlet matrimony

When you leave touch everything

Lick the curtains and velour

Pour out your shoulders with temptation

Plunge forward through the milk

Spray long water on the hardwood

And curdle,

Please bridal, idle, a little longer

Double candle, taste the silver

suck the metal

On the door

THINK WITH YOUR BODY

Poeeeem ABSORBANT POEMM!!!!!

Absorbency


It happened on a Friday
In a room full of pansies and mulch.
All our records were lost in water

Soaked quilts
in silos of brine

pink wall insulation
leftover in the rain

neopolitan icecream melted
over silicon and
burlap

Epochs of oracles, ovarian yellow
wallow stray Tillamook
in sojourn
and clay

In Favor of The Bloom

In Favor of the Bloom

Lord of meander, swells of delinience
May your mountains
rid the real of animals who
mortar at the core

With stories of milk, we court enchantment
With red hands he stole her body parts
Envy the clock
hold on to the bloom

Wrenches and engines
the mechanic and the bedchamber
the pleasure of derangement
the stories of passing

Deer Life
Naysayer of Symbols
Can I marry the morning and never stay in hotels of disgrace?
Can I be the mosaic of permanance,
can I be both bread and book?
Can I mirror curiosity for mansions of the scalded?
Can I burry daughters in soft edges from
their courts of sore meat?

To those evil-doers
to those beasts and potholes
to those kinks in systems of blue air

Can't I forever happy stay?

Poem: On The Passage of a Large Reptile

On The Passage of A Large Reptile

I am alone
I am a child
I am the wolf cub's mother

I'll walk down the lane
I'll ride on the train
I'll talk kind with another

But,
Oh,
France has many valleys
and mountains for to climb
and limestone in cathedrals
and souls for another time

And maybe I'll throw a party
To remember the Mardi Gras
I'll nod to the Zulu masters
and the Wars of Algeria

I'll translate Berber Wisdom
I'll soak the bread with oil
I'll gaze in real estate windows
and I'll ever be love to the world

but twilight comes like reason
intuition invites the night
I'll coil my thighs like music
and I'll write, alright, I'll write

In words I'll keep my promise
to learn and to be forlorn
to listen to the reams of language-
Catholic Yarn for Catholic Yarn

The Pope stepped down on Sunday
the day the largest crocodile died
In Filipino mourning
hail mary burns Vatican skies

And here at my desk in Paris
the geraniums fight the dust
a piano is tampered to silence
and a mirror's the God that I Trust

A tree of provincial cosmetics
drops a clementine
I will rifle through sweaters in markets
and dream of American pride

In gasoline I am paying
for the highways I have found
for Indians whose Salmon are dying
for casinos on burial grounds

I enter a Europe of Syrup
Whose natives are people in stores
where children succeeded their elders
Into cities and centuries pure

In citrus and pagan yearning
I'll take to the theater steps,
In a town named for its lilies
In a Paris of history kept

I'll drip magnolia hymnals
as the band begins to play
the brass of held horns jingles
out of the theater today.

Inside of the auxiliary chambers
New Orleans steps out on a snake
the jazz of oceans in slumber
is here for my ears to take

Like shepherds we take to newness
to the hills that rise before
through pulpits and cupulas and ti-chi photoshoots
Through starlight I herd the world

New Mondial New Mondial
the sun dial of our days
The crocodile was captured
The crocodile was mourned
as Martyr
but never as slave

Largest Ever Recorded Crocodile Dead

HERE

Here Rests the Connection between France and Louisiana

The Connection between Louisiana and France is uninspiring and frayed.

Merde.

            I tried so hard to find it today. I returned to the derelict offices of L’Association France Louisiane in search of a remedy to the truth that is coming clearer- I am dealing with the overlap of two very different places. If the L’association France Louisiane symbolizes the connection between France and Louisiana, I am weaving with vintage thread

            The office is on Rue Reille in Paris’ 14^th arrondisement, waiting for the clutch of decomposition to finish it. Its windows are full of paraphernalia symbolizing the New Orleans I lived in and the bayous nearby. A riverboat model, a strand of off-white mardi gras beads, a dusty bottle of Tabasco sauce at the stoop of a wooden house modeled after the homes of Cajun ancestors loose their coloring in the sun. I am often tickled by the end of things, as they lean towards the grave, but since I am so determind to find living entrails of heritage, the window displays and dark offices behind them disgust me.

L'Association's Louisiana Window Display (Creepy!!!)

The idea of going to American Universities to find other students to speak French with is appaling. I didn’t know what to say when the woman inside of the Association’s office began to write down the locations on a piece of paper. Her fountain pen etched the names of departments and buildings of scholarly merit with American accreditation. She spoke the English of a childhood in New York, much to my anxiety. I don’t want to hear English. I tried my hardest to respond to her English inquiries in French.  The theme of my first week in Paris is avoiding the use of my habitual speech. I am dodging bullets of Anglophonic phrases as my accent detonates the truth of my position- I am foreign.

In the museums and gentrified cafes, English spouts from the mouths of tourists and service people. I am in a constant state of linguistic refusal. I ride my detraction to the places where no one expects me. I prefer the peripheries of Paris where the opportunity to speak in French occurs out of necessity. At the office of L’association, the woman writing the names of University establishments in Paris for Americans on paper makes a remark:

These days it is harder for students to integrate with French families. So it will be easier for you to learn French with other American students learning French.

That. That is the least interesting incarnation of French to me. Textbook French.  Bleached, young, rolling off educated tongues, the French of private minds! I like the way drunk people talk, belligerent and shirtless in the subways, with globs of words hurled in beer breath. I like the way old Muslim women banter with their bags of fabric and coins. I like the voices of market vendors offering deals to the throngs. I like the North African slanguage employed by a stranger to get me to go out with him. I liked the awkward improvising of my French as I refused his request.

“Je voudrais être touet seule!” I say as he leans in close. I walk away. My body is the clearest form of communication. I AM LEAVING NOW.

That’s why I knew the woman at the Office was insane. Or under a spell. I think the black dust on the rose wallpaper clouded the minds of the old women who worked “out of benevolence”. They breathe over files and old books on explorers, answering phones next to antique computers, taking in the fantasy of a “France for all people” and a past of plantation photographs. I accept that the youth today in Louisiana are going to learn French in school if anything. French in Louisiana is not passed down from Grandparents to their grandchildren on the bayou in 2013.

What I don’t accept is that school French is the better French. And that is what the office woman said to me. And she said it in French, “meillieur”, so I knew it was not a rough English translation of something preferred. The French of the educated is better than the Cajun and Quebecois of yore.

The reason it is better, to further my inner conflict, is because these French students can have “careers in tourisme” after their education. The woman seemed nervous as she spoke.

           

            Sometimes I feel pressure, as if I alone have to stich together the frays of history by entering old Parisian offices run by old ladies volunteering and find the truth. I found almost nothing I believed in there. There was a young man in the bibliothèque at the back of the office who accompanied the ancient female behind a desk. She wore a golden chain with a crucifix, a floral patterned shirt, and the physique of decades gone by. The boy was a little older than me, researching under a mop of dark hair. How many people in the world will bear the mystique of attraction but will be heading in the other direction?

            I enjoy making deep and intense eye contact with strangers on the subway platforms as I speed away in the train. I like to see how long it lasts, knowing that we are parting for eternity. The idea of being remembered, recognized or known here is such an incomprehension, that I make no effort not to stare.

            I want to belong everywhere. I am infatuated with the verb reposer, to rest. “Je me repose,” I can say when I put myself to sleep for the night. There I gain a renewed state for the French morning. I repose myself. I loved the verb as I took it to sleep. At La Cimètaire Père Lachaise, I was more enthralled by “reposer” than the tombs of dead celebrities. For in each sèpulture there echoed the motif- Ici Reposent, Here Rests. No matter how many books they wrote, how many streets they widened, how many fires they lit, the dead were all reposenting. The word carries the magic of life beyond the grave, as if the morning will find those who rest all the more ready for life.

Ici Reposent

Pere Lachaise

No Filter beeyaothhhththchhchch

            I belong in the places I find renewal. In the café where I am known by first name, on the street playing music and receiving coins, in the home were I eat and sleep and bathe, I belong because I repose there. Where I belong, where I have found reposure, I learn the most French. Sometimes I imagine other places where I can come into a fuller contact and comprehension of the French language. I imagine a country house warmed by fire, an afternoon laughing with the ladies of the L’Association France Louisiane over croissants in the office, a poetry reading involving cigarettes and Rimbaud- but I am met instead with the physical environs that appall and repose me. And I would rather it this way, encountering beauty I didn’t expect in places I relax at the end of a day of bewilderment.

Viola! I reposent myself here. 

            “And after returning home alone, at that hour when Wisdom’s advice is no longer stifled by the buzzings of the exterior life, he said to himself, “Today in dream, I had three domiciles where I found equal pleasure. Why force my body to change location, when my soul travels so nimbly? And what good is it to carry out plans, since planning in itself is a sufficient delight?” (page 56, Baudelaire)

A la recherche de la Louve

I'm searching for the Louve, not the Louvre.

While I'm in Paris, it is not my goal to attend the grande art expositions of the city, but rather to explore its inner reaches for my spirit animal at present.

The animals which inspire me range from The Owl to The Dolphin, but a good middle ground is the Louve- the She-Wolf. 

At the table where I eat mon petit dejuener et mon diner, I opened the dictionary. The dictionary is like a cookbook with recipes of comprehension for the kitchen conversations. It bares no attention to the phrases I seek, just the words that make them. 

It's morning, I'm alone, I open the dictionary and find her. Of all the words-, Louve. Translation? She-Wolf. 

The basis of my study. 

Today is February 2nd, La Fete De La Chandeleur. To describe this holiday, my hostess runs into the bedroom and returns with a great golden candlestick. She says it is the tradition on this day to eat Crepes together. I am curious as to the origin of the holiday and wonder if it has any connection to the Mardi Gras and Lenten period nearing us. 

In christianity, the holiday is Candlemas. The day when the Virgin is purified. My hostess, after doing her research. She says its a pagan fete, pour le retour de la lumiere. When the light returns, it comes as the sun, le soliel, the great grainy circle symbolised by the crepe. She explains to me how the Catholics had a great period of adaptation, of transforming the Pagan days of reverie into religious ceremonies. The holidays surrounding Lent, or Le Careme, are no exception. 

La fete de la Chadleur is my first hint of a faded French carnavale season. I follow the She-Wolf's appearances in my days because she is the natural leader of Winter into Spring. During Lupercalia and Saturnalia, Pagan Celebration of Greek and Roman antiquity falling at the beginning of February, the Mother Wolf was venerated. 

She, alongside Pan (our great Goat friend and patron saint of Jitterbug Perfume,) are the central shadow carriers to the tradition of Light worship at the beginning of February. I realise that I will not find the carnival of New Orleans Mardi Gras in Paris. Carnavale here is only the shadow of itself. Children wear masks at school and its cute. But, as I navigate the sphere of La Louve, I plan to find the remnants of a season solidified in time. 

Today's holiday is the commencement. It is the purifcation of myself, the fresh female virginal misedomeanor into the candor of French afterthoughts. Time, Place, Culture in the first two decades of the 21st century, inform the cannon of new Traditions.

Here in the Bagnolet neighborhood outlying Paris, where the immigrants come to settle, we prepare for Chinese New Year. L'an Nouveau Chinois falls at the same time range as Mardi Gras and the Lupercalia. This year is the year of the Snake. There is the She-Wolf of these lands, of Old Europe, who approaches the city of Paris through dictionaries and iconography. At this time she is accompanied by candlesticks and chopsticks, snakes and mistakes, masks and geranium plants, store keepers and street walkers, into the returning of the light. 

France Meets Lousiana

Ferme

La Cuisine

Cactus Family

Soggy Wet masks on a Paris Bench near Mardi Gras

Le Carnaval a Paris, Un Exibition a la Maison de Balzac

Marie-Ge et Moi

The stuff.