Those Mansions in Your Walls

From 'The Diaries of The Titillater,' Entry #251

Those Mansions in Your Walls

the blood in your high walls
poisons my base desires
making me reinfect myself
with what started the foundation
of my longing for you.
I travel through those gnarled veins,
chronic, chaotic passages around the bend
to where I ruled a world I invented
Terrible, Titillating, Totalitarian
to me as infant
then crocodile
tree, chopped down
then ripped into a page
of a script where I read lines for
the hunted, then the hunter,
preyed
then cast
against type, of course,
as predator.

Though I attended schools in mansions
I tended to you like you were all the weeds
of what I learned
about human beings
I branded with inhumanity.
I confess to seeing you as separate from myself.
I'd like to say that now, I am devoted to you
through becoming a devotee of me.
And though your walls grow tall as Redwoods
the ladders I produce should not pick your heart
like a peach.
But I am afraid I will always crave then crush you
for the rush of staring at myself in mirrors
falling in love with the image of my disbelief
and know that diamonds can be derelicts
and derelicts delicious.

by Tiffany Osedra Miller

Puppeteers

Judgment of the Puppeteers

Heat harlotted in your hips
dances and harlequins new hysteria
on the broken, troubled floor you move on.

That strobe light over your head
wasn’t put there by you.

Diamond dotted clothes
fabric and illuminate
beneath this light
undulate
beneath this light-
to show you trembling,
coupling, laughing.

Your face flashes
the pitch black animal wrestling
with your heart
behind a hot mask of shames.

You are a furnace for fools
who radiates nothing,
an unwashed costume
all the next mornings
dangling on an empty clothesline
waiting for your
nocturnal march through alleyways,
underneath underground discos
led by a brass instrument
of motleyed thorns
sticking you deep inside your head.

Your days have no lights,
night flashes artificially lit colors,
Music pricks you open
in private places
mechanically you dance
like human offspring of puppets
held loosely by chains.


by Tiffany Osedra Miller

I Dance in the Carnival Room

I Dance in the Carnival Room

I dance in the carnival room
with my carnival doll
it's the only way I will dance
if I dance at all.

When my doll sees me dancing
it does not laugh or turn away
I'm not sure if it's a boy or girl
When I ask, it doesn't say.

I dance in the carnival room
while everyone else dances at the masquerade ball
my doll and I spin 'round and 'round
'til we get dizzy, laugh, then fall.

From my room I could hear the crowd
crown the King and Queen upon their throne
yet if someone looked into my carnival room
they would think I danced alone.

They are blind to the beauty of the thing
dangling from my hand
its body hanging from a string
dancing to the steel pan band.

So what they crowned a king and Queen
they do that every year
Won't someone crown my doll and me
during our carnival love affair?

I dance in the carnival room
with my carnival doll
it's the only way for my doll and me
to freely bacchanal.

Unmasked by PURPLE ZOE!

Purple Zoe, artist, writer, and bloggeress extraordinaire operates a fabulous blog called 'The Ultraviolet Underground' which introduces and showcases Undergound artists of many different disciplines. Check her out!

Purple Zoe interviewed me about my art and writing a few weeks ago. Here is the link:

A few words with Revolutionary Picture Bookist Osedra a.k.a Bassa Bassa girl

Calypsonian Blues Woman

Calypsonian Blues Woman

Calypsonian Blues Woman,
What is your death to me?
Is it America, Antigua,
England or Africa-
Catholic or Episcopal
Yoruba or Obeah?

I see the same colors now
that I saw from your womb.
I feel the march of painted stilt walkers
And marvel how their faces
Nearly reach the sun.
I hear the chant of the steel pan
And the blow of the bugle in
The old man’s final whistle-

Mother, I am missing you.
Clowns, jesters, and the beautiful
Are not supposed to die.

In me is carnival again
Bittersweet masquerade
Innocence and nakedness.
We were always, to ourselves,
deformed and abnormal
burned by the sun,
on your beach by the sun
and by our South Bronx window when
our borough was burning -
on the altar
by the flame, by the flame, by the flame
by the fire in the sores covering
every bit of your flesh
-these blemished my life.

Mother, I am longing for you.
Queens, Revelers and Soldiers
Are not supposed to cry.

I listen, now, to what’s left of you.
I, daughter and reveler, raise high
Your image on carnival streets
which run the labyrinths of my veins
Bleeding and guiding each color in my blood.
My mask, so like yours,
red as the Indian, white as the European,
Black as the African.
We both genuflected for Jesus,
yet moved our entire bodies
To the boom of the drum.

Me, your new world, ‘pickney,’
Sunk with your death,
Watch carnival trains of passing mourners
Rich revelers and poor revelers
Revelers dressed in clothes of white powder
Tattoos of ha’pennies glisten on their bare backs.
Death they mock and dishonor
For they are dead, too, this reminding me,
Mother, as you have said
Mumbling from behind your masquerade,
‘Life, my granddaughter-daughter, is the mask we wear.’

Come back to me, now Mother,
The swan only pretended to sing your final song
Your final song should include the ping-ping-ping
Of steel pans, the shout of horns
exploding your name into Bacchanal,
the call from the trumpet
and the singing voice of your own bodily departed Mother,
the music of African and Antiguan kisses,
the clamoring of belly laughs –
language of revelers whose image, like you,
they see reflected back to them
against the night’s colored face.

Mother, I still listen to you.
I catch your whispers
As they walk across the sky.

Dream of me, Mommy, dancing in your womb,
Knowing that I, too, was an immigrant
from the precious, soil of your body
–Your beautiful body, you once carried
with African Royalty and English pride.
Dream of me, Mommy,
dancing in your new-spirit womb
Energized by carnival light
Basking in Torment, yet dancing, towards Joy.
Come back to me, Mother,
and while I sleep
Give me just one piece of your strength,
move me with the spirit of your new Calypso.
Come kiss forever your grieving daughter,
Leave pieces of heaven on her cheeks.

by Bassagirl (aka Osedra)

UNFORGETTABLE

My Mother died a year ago, today.

IGENA GLORIA MILLER October 24, 1933 - March 29, 2008.

AVE IGENA









WIND-SWEPT WOMAN
(In memory of my Dear, Sweet Mother, Igena)

Your soul continues its travels
without the weight it bore here, yesterday
because that wind has blown you on home, now
though we always thought you'd stay.

No grown folks ever told us
we could never hold the breeze
the wind is the best and worst lover
who now leaves us begging on our knees.

So long, Wind-Swept Woman,
with laughter and wisdom
forever stretched across your gorgeous face
Your legacy, now eternal
Your essence, every place.

Ashe, Ashe,

Tiffany Osedra Miller



Yes, my Mother did rock those hair pieces and wigs!

May she continue to rest in peace.

$7.00 ART FOLIO SALE!

FOR COLLECTORS WHO WANT TO GET IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR,

visit:

BASSA BASSA ART STORE



ART FOLIO #1, 'The Violent Beauty of Urda Louise'


On SALE now at my store on ETSY, for $2.00. That's right, $2.00 plus .50 cents for shipping and handling. One standard size sheet folded into four full color pages and reproduced. You can view each page right here on ETSY

Participating in sales like these are great opportunities for all art lovers, but especially for art lovers with limited funds. Your support allows me to promote and share my work with a wider audience. Start collecting these, now! Enjoy!

Tiffany Osedra Miller

The Lady Conjures a Lion

(This pastel and ink drawing is for sale at my store on ETSY)

The Lady Conjures a Lion

A lion without
Dorothy or Auntie Em
The scarecrow, tin man or
MGM.
A lion-less lion
Neither boy nor girl
hailing from an orange world.

The lady conjures a lion
the way lions look in other worlds
eroded by other wars
a lion with a staircase for its body
containing earth’s eternity, power and pain.
The lady conjures a lion –
This was not her intent
Yet she embraced its prowess and mystery
Climbed its series of steps
Without Bibles, ballads,
whips or guns
And found herself living in the
Universe of its belly.
Its newest pregnancy
not immaculate
but a consummation
of the lady’s conjuring
and the animal’s openness
in an orange sand desert
beneath the ground underground.

A lion without
Dorothy or Auntie Em
The scarecrow, tin man or MGM
A lion-less lion
Neither boy nor girl
hailing from an orange world.

When the lady conjures a lion
It does not swear or spit
Or come attached to a green and jaded jungle
But joined, instead, to its staircase of pregnancies
Digging deep into an orange ground.
And the lady who conjured the lion
Understands that this is the lion
At its most supernatural,
Un-caged in openness
Its steps suggesting levels.
When the lady conjures a lion
It does not use its mouth to roar
But uses its presence to buzz
In the mouths of lion-less carolers
Who sing into the myth of its patriarchy
Something so maternal
that it exists in dualities
Then multiplicities
And can fly as much as it can run or swim
Or present its belly to us in steps or stages
And we can call it with great pleasure,
‘The best of the beasts.’

A lion without
Dorothy or Auntie Em
The scarecrow, tin man or MGM
A lion-less lion
Neither boy nor girl
hailing from an orange world.

The Violent Beauty of Urda Louise

"The Violent Beauty of Urda Louise," Volume 1 coming soon. (I love volumes and issues) Here is an excerpt:

Rumored
And rumored
that she ruined
all of the men in this city
Reduced one serious man
Into a weeping, witless clown
Participated in ceremonies
celebrating sex and spirit
And buried her mother one sad morning
into the cold wet ground.

Born to midwife
by light
gleaming off her father’s knife
reflecting candlelight
her small body washed by her mother,
grandmother and grandfather
in a ceremony by the sea
where they let her descend
then drown
then rise again
to ensure her big spirit roams free.

Rumored
And rumored
that she ruined
all of the men in this city
Reduced one serious man
Into a weeping, witless clown
Participated in ceremonies
celebrating sex and spirit
And buried her mother one sad morning
into the cold wet ground.


AVE URDA...stay tuned.

Revolutionary Picture Book, issue #1, "Dynamite and Pigeons" on sale now!

My first, independently produced, hand bound book, "Revolutionary Picture Book," issue #1, "Dynamite and Pigeons" is on sale now!!! You can find a link to my store on Etsy on the side bar of this blog. Here is a description of it:

Dear Customer,

Welcome to the Cupcake World! Journey inside a mourner’s mythology! Witness her transcend grief and suffering through color, surrealism, image and line, all while indulging a bittersweet tooth. Are you mourning, too? Before you enter, drop all of your illusions but hold onto your Masks!!! "Dynamite and Pigeons" is your word and image collage initiation into an atmospheric carnival world full of performers, mourners, lovers, revelers, and holy rollers - in celebration of the spirit of tragedy and loss with humor, bacchanal and revolution.

Come catch a glimpse of the enigmatic and resilient Mama Noire, laugh at the sorrows of Clown Soldiers, hesitate then genuflect quickly before the Bishop of Sorrow and Pink, then shake your head at the audacity, acquired over ages of suffering, of an immortal Little Bad A** - and more, beginning with this first issue!

This first issue of "Revolutionary Picture Book" is a raw, original, hand bound, gorgeous and concise DIY introduction containing poetry, prose and images, hand drawn with pastels, inks and colored pencils, scanned then printed in full color and black and white onto 16 pages, 8 sheets, including slightly thicker vellum covers. Dimensions are approximately 8 and 1/2 by 11 and 1/4.

Looks fetching (especially if protected in its plastic sleeve, which is included with each purchase) on coffee tables, private altars, or displayed (cover outward) on bookshelves amid plants, eulogies, lit candles and ancient books with thicker spines.

***Please avoid browsing through this or any subsequent issue of "Revolutionary Picture Book" while driving or operating heavy machinery. Conjure its colors up at funerals, however, or dance in full costume and mask, alone, or with a lover while clutching it, and, of course, sleep and dream of a peaceful world with it sparkling beneath your pillow.

Love and Carnival,

Tiffany Osedra Miller

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant

Headdress and Crown for the Daughter of a Dead Immigrant.

Concerning the daughter of a dead immigrant
Whose mother lives alone, now, in some hut in some jungle
found on a map that is difficult to locate
If you still walk or crawl the world.
Her mother is alive in a Technicolor sense.
She lives without her body but within her daughter.
She whittles figurines of this daughter
Out of fantastic wood and debris from broken glass found on floors
of Countries with Carnivals.
The hut is supported by a statue of her daughter
Wearing the headdress of Three Mary’s:
Maria and Magdalene and Marriage,
Her wood-skin tinged with red,
And sodden with rum
The Mother costumes her in wedding dress and crown
In celebration of having joined the wisdom of spirit to this living young woman
Made in her mother’s likeness.
The walls of the hut also stand wooden with her daughter
And the ceiling shows the moving cinema
of her daughter’s dramatic face
The Mother will not whittle her offspring weeping
She will not whittle for her a single tear
She settles for whittling inside her child-friend, heart-fruit,
a heart so open that it can only be an un-forbidden door
for the universe to enter
and recline in the pulp of its chambers
until the call to carnival and revel
places upon the universes’ illusions about itself
every hanging, menacing and magnificent mask –
with which all shadows in this heart space must genuflect.
The mother declares her daughter’s heart to be a cathedral
And though the mother is without her body,
she is resurrected in the carnival dance of her daughter
she congregates within her brown daughter
calling on her to demand of the world
that her majesty be seen and heard.
It is all her mother can do without a body
because she is now free to travel other gardens of Goddesses and Gods
with a gilded posse
of revelers, brown birds, butterflies, immigrants
and dimming memories
of being once hopeful and human
her belly bulging, burgeoning and blossoming her brilliant brown baby
born with every right to be regal.

"What Happened to Charlie Christ?"

from "The Violent Beauty of Urda Louise"



THE VIOLENT BEAUTY OF URDA LOUISE
(What Happened to Charlie Christ?)

“Listen to those cats in heat, Urda, they sound like they’re in mourning.” Charlie had said this to me three times already. When I reminded him of this, he flinched and called the repetition calculated, then wondered aloud if my dumb ass ever read poetry. Charlie was a poet, alright.

We were smoking weed on his mattress celebrating his return. I was happy to see him but I didn’t want him to know. I got up, stretched in a way I almost never did, then sat on the floor. Charlie liked my stretch so much that he loosened up, sat beside me, and put his hand on my knee.

“I am changing,” he said. “I threw my computer away. All I need and want, now, is you.” Charlie had been trying to hit it since we both met in the sixth grade at a school in the Bronx, a school with good- natured nuns and a broken window in the girl’s bathroom that the boys all knew about. I didn’t remind Charlie that he had hit it already – and on more than one occasion – and that before we parted ways that night, I’d let him hit it again.

His weed was bad quality. He told me that he grew it in containers inside his bathroom. He said that the light was good in there. Exceptional. Although every time I visited him, instead of finding containers filled with cannabis, I found white candles burning on the floor of his tub. He told me he had placed them there because the light fixture didn’t work. He insisted that candlelight was the best way to grow marijuana. He didn’t mention, however, that his Grandmother had fallen and hit her head on the faucet and died there while he was away. She hadn’t wanted him to go. Bad marijuana had nothing to do with the deterioration of Charlie’s memory.

The sound of the cats outside built to a crescendo. We couldn’t even hear the traffic. Their cat-blues – a mix of horn, jaguar, and tenor sax. We both stood up and ran to the window to see if a band was playing in the streets. It was too dark to see anything and by the time we got to the window, Charlie had forgotten why. For a moment, I too had forgotten when I saw his grandmother’s face floating in his eyes like a cataract.

"YOU CAN HAVE YOUR BROADWAY, GIVE ME LENOX AVENUE"

I say 'You can have your Broadway, Give Me Lenox Avenue' to myself anytime I feel displaced, ignored, or marginalized in this city. Though a tried and true proud as hell Bronx woman, Harlem has always represented Renaissance to me. Safety. Connection. Reconstruction. Immigration. History.

And though I will never know what Harlem was like when my parents used to go to parties there in the 50's and 60's - long before I was born - I know what it's turning into. Here are 'The Victims of Yellow Lights,' long time lovers of Harlem World and infinite spirit residers of Sad Street, singing:

"When the Lights in Harlem Glitter"

Oh when the lights in Harlem glitter
It’s hard for me to feel so bitter.
Tonight my heels stand taller than the litter.

I pass a whistling old man wearing a zoot suit
and a young man in baggy jeans,
now, wait a minute he’s cute.

Well, my hair is fixed
My numbers picked
I am wearing Spanish fly.
Everything new on Lenox Avenue
Except for the moonlight barbecue fish fry.
Where Pearl wears her fox-fur
It’s not that cold, what’s wrong with her
I like her alligator purse, however,
Not as much as mine
I like mine better, it’s leather.

Oh when the nights in Harlem glitter
It’s hard for me to feel so bitter.
Tonight, my heels stand taller than the litter.

Young handsome men hang on the corner, again
One asks me if I would be his friend
I say not if I see him standing on this corner, amen!
Ah well, men.

Just where am I going, tonight, I wonder
I hope far away from my inner thunder
Tomorrow I praise God just like every ‘Sunder’
But for tonight let my mind be free as summer
Got the rest of my life to think like winter, because
When these lights in Harlem glitter, honey
I don’t think about not having any money
Ain’t that funny

When these lights in Harlem glitter
It’s hard for me to feel so bitter,
I mean the weather’s a pleasure, the people are lovely
And Mister Magic Moon twinkles directly above me
and I just might find me a man to love me
looooove me,
Harlem, with you, I'm in love.


Please visit Harlem before it's all gone!!!

Here is Cynda Williams singing Branford Marsalis' 'Harlem Blues' in Spike Lee's joint, 'Mo Better Blues' back in the day.

HUMAN ALTARS

(from 'THE VIOLENT BEAUTY OF URDA LOUISE')

HUMAN ALTARS

Your sentences push like needles through my veins
and my eyes are bloodshot.
Here I will call you Charlie and remember how you looked at me
dressed in sky blue
floating over Tremont Avenue.

The first day you touched me
was the last day my body would ever put up the right fight
was the first day I had been so scared in all my life
at the power of pleasure.

For years you trembled me, Godlessly,
in your parent’s row house,
a working class laboratory of joy,
cluttered with pictures
of a white saviour in human form
who looked nothing like me or you.

Every room became dusty with that image of God
including the lower ones
where you saved me.
For a time we fashioned our flesh
into desirable brown skin.
Our singular ambition to light a candle through what we believed
were inevitable life sentences
spent dying in church
after our dreams would defer then decay
illuminated us as human altars sacrificing our own flesh.

You were the first one to bend back into yourself,
dry up and disintegrate,
though you were once the ripest fruit on the vine.

Before you crumpled
you said to me from deep down inside
“Urda, I am sorry
for us both starting an impossible religion.”
There was nothing much left of you
but the basic functions of your limbs
and the visions in your stained glassed eyes.
God killed You, Charlie,
but you needed God more than you needed touching me.
The same God you denied that you said
denied you
was an invisible man.
You reached him through the narrowness
Of crack pipes and filled your head with smoke,
Forgetting the memories of the murders, you say you
Committed in the Persian Gulf, forgetting the stroke you had at 31,
And most of all, forgetting your unwillingness to worship a mortal like me.

You Believed their was dignity and righteousness in suffering,
As long as your veins were penetrated by thorns
and God’s holy, holy cross.

Pleasure became your smack,
my silent immeasurable terror,
knowing I worshipped the person you were,
the savior you might have become,
knowing I worshipped something as superficial
as the skin on your body,

the only religion in this world
I could really touch.

Tiffany (Bassagirl)

The Memories of Clown Soldiers

The Memories of Clown Soldiers

To maudlin militants
your barracks blown to confetti,
greasepaint camouflage mixes with the tears in your eyes,
because you all remember Nancy,
the Prisoneress of war who entertained you
with visions of her taking off her fish nets,
to sunbathe by moonlight in mud.
You all thought she loved you
for reasons that had nothing to do with reason
but for all your sorrows
you made a pretty unhappy girl smile.
But what does this have to do with bursts from balloon bullets
and the way you pissed colors into black shadows
and learned for weeks at a time to juggle caskets of rain?
It was the way you all kissed each other
when Nancy left you behind, buried
with her fish nets, lipsticks and heels in mud.
Those kisses weren't delicate or violent,
most of all they weren't make believe.
Admit that your funny kisses, Privates,
weren't as empty as the trenches
in your toy chests and
the artificial flower you pull in your pants.
Instead, those kisses made memories
that bursts balloons and even bombs
so that the dances some of you did
to the rattle of hand grenades
made you declare - after the veil lifted -
though your life ended with a curtain,
your body sunk in a curtsy,
your head off somewhere, bent in a bow
- that at least you knew love.

A Moment for the Minstrel

As Introduced by Madame Bassa:



MADAME BASSA
Mister Fooly blows on a telescope
Tucks away his wings
He sees universes down his throat
And other surreal things.
His Ancestors’ screams are caged there
So are their yells and cries,
Darkened muscles and high yellow skin,
A used up prostitute’s thighs.
Fooly dances for strangers
Or receives lashes on his hands
Thought to be unintelligent
Mr. Fooly has plans.



MISTER FOOLY
I am the black, jackass angel
Supposed to find heaven in a box
But heaven is up the hill there
Boarded up by locks.
Mama was a mistress,
Daddy was a crook
Executed when they were found
trying to sound out letters in a book.
Bells jingle from my knee caps,
A fiddle cramps my neck,
Performance my duty
Comedy my lot
There are more levels to me,
Levels so unsought.