Thursday, April 30, 2009

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

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

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

Sunday, April 12, 2009

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.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

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

Friday, April 3, 2009

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)