We’re standing behind you
The window is your mirror
We‘re filming your reflections
In the window
You can see
The teardrop on her cheek
The other tear — is in your hair
Reach up and wipe the tear
With your thumb
Roll the tear on your fingers
As if water — is on the wings
of a butterfly_
Now, your face is dry
You point and say something
Insignificant like
“See that gas station down there.”
Copyright © 2018 E Maria Shelton Speller
*Note: Prose Poem and Literary List (Prosody, Parataxis, Blank Verse, Free Verse, and Found Poetry) based on E Maria Shelton Speller Pinterest Analytics as of January 1, 2019 10:00 PM (EST), for 15 Muse Boards and 5K Pins.
[Ducklings in love]_
[It takes libido to pen poesy…]_
[A Blue Crush]_
[Champagne and Balloons in Gotham City]_
[gladiator]_
Paint_
Curly Hair for Men_
[Diana Ross (DR Diar)]_
[Pluck and Aplomb]_
Art_
I’m not Shy_
Beautiful and vibrantly dyed locs_
Georgia O’Keeffe_
Be bold_
Ru Paul_
[Woodstock! (WIP) (x Bars))) [Reserved][Reserved] 3.0]_
Best Street Style Looks of NYFW Spring 2018_
Kerry Washington_
Best Street Style NYFW — Men’s_
Madonna takes a look…
[The [Dollhouse] with the Red Corvette]_
Peter Lindbergh_
Descubre y comparte las imágenes más hermosas del mundo_
Miles Davis_
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — 20th Anniversary Tour_
Five Weak Words_
The Expert Guide to Clashing_
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon_
Karenab_
Day Eight — Paris Fashion Week_
[Tang]_
These Pantsssss_
[Directing the Master Scene in the Mirror]_
Beva Spring 2019_
Evan Ross (Messalla) and Natalie Dormer (Cressida)_
[Purfect Pink!]_
Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds Installation_
All You’ll Want to Know About Long Hair for Men_
[You’re my muse]_
[Marilyn Monroe and James Dean Smoking on a Balcony…]_
[Skylar — Look at that face… that stop…those eyes!]_
[An epic love Iliad]_
Fur Birkies_
James Franco_
Jeans, Tees, and Coats_
Fascinating Photo of Black Life in Harlem, 1970_
So Cool_
Elizabeth Taylor — Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award_
Black Amex, Please_
[Alpha Girls]_
[Copyright] 2019 E Maria Shelton Speller
The [Dollhouse with the Red Corvette] is a lateral, vertical, linear, horizontal, and spherical art installation. It is a poesy puzzle for verse or graffiti, with sublime imagery. It functions like a mnemonic, a telltale pastiche for found poesy — in a digital world. Some of the pieces fit, and some are misfits — that lead to other immersions… in this stained-glass heaven — this society in the machine…
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Copyright © 2017, 2018 E Maria Shelton Speller. All rights reserved.
Overture: Woodstock is an ensemble. There are two voices and the beat in this WIP… the Narrator’s voice, Hitchcock’s, and “That Yoni” by JuseBeats!
In a walk through Whole Foods like Hitchcock
In his magnum opus
about a world… full of extras
in architectonic loops and links, alliteration and reverie, force, ballast, fancy partitions, linear renderings, systems of reckoning and more — of her…
He wants
Beddo, Caprini, Dolce Sardo
Zufi, the Saperavi
He nods
I’m thinking
Disappointed… in us!
[There’s no other way to say it — I can’t dress it up]
Caught between a slumbering scream and Vertigo
Cruising isles and isles of sweet and sour
People who think they are special
People who know they are not
People who wish they were
He wants
Beddo, Caprini, Dolce Sardo
Zufi, the Saperavi
Whispers prologue
Guess what we did?
A party of twenty
Three couples played before
winking and willing
shills playing in the round
Lovely trips on the Hill
in augmented VR
I’m thinking…
Baby boomers had their turn Woodstock!
Barefoot bell bottomed hippies
Denim sweeping the ground
Revolutionary hair — fists in the air
Dragging us back in the mud
Blunt antiquity
Move on Woodstock!
Take your shades, caps, change and loose articles
Bombs in black holes!
[Where did you go?]
We should be sunning in the Bahamas
chilling on hemp swings and
chairs swiveling in immersive environments
Higher than kite fights
A soaring for points experience
Get off the ride Woodstock!
You had your turn — at freedom
Exit signs are easy to find — look
The dragon is in the window
Freedom is accessible
Wonder is a trip
with walk through assistants
Dreams of power and prizes
Optional…
Fall out and Jack into
a walk through Whole Foods like Hitchcock
in his magnum opus
about a world… full of extra
architectonic loops and links, alliteration and reverie, force, ballast, fancy partitions, linear renderings, systems of reckoning — and more — of her… virtually surreal
He wants
Beddo, Caprini, Dolce Sardo
Zufi, the Saperavi
Whispers song
We don’t want to feel we’re high…
We just want to think we’re high
in Dubai
We don’t want to feel we’re high…
We just want to think we’re high
in Dubai
Copyright © 2016 E Maria Shelton Speller. All rights reserved.
I’ve toyed with a conundrum, for too long. [Reserved][Reserved] functions like a digital art installation in Woodstock! (WIP (x Bars)). I could render [Reserved][Reserved] a mechanism – to catch That Yoni’s beat in perpetuity. I could close the brackets with bars that fills your loins with blood. I could leave redundant emptiness here — like tautology or romanticized art, or structural language — in this bifurcated space, like stars.
I could invite Poets to fill the empty bars for [Reserved][Reserved]…
Overture: Woodstock is an ensemble. There are two voices and the beat in this WIP… the Narrator’s voice, Hitchcock’s, and “That Yoni”. See Side Bar by JuseBeats!
Dear Poet, [Yes, you]
I’ve toyed with a conundrum, for too long. [Reserved][Reserved] functions like a digital art installation in Woodstock! (WIP (x Bars)). I could render [Reserved][Reserved] a mechanism – to catch That Yoni’s beat in perpetuity. I could close the brackets with bars that fills your loins with blood. I could leave redundant emptiness here — like tautology or romanticized art, or structural language — in this bifurcated space, like stars.
I could invite Poets to fill [Reserved][Reserved] with dope poesy and select a date for submission. However, if we receive one hundred thousand and one couplings, we’d read them… but frankly, why not do, all of the above.
The empty brackets function like missing endings now — lacking only your bylines, pseudonyms, and ghosts — in translatable bars that work in Woodstock! (WIP (x Bars)).
Poets make this space immersive. Explode – The Writer’s Environment is an interactive environment — and this is the first foray for interactivity in this community — that links back to you!
Starting August 15, 2017 — let’s finish this poem with the best bars — curated for Woodstock! (WIP (x Bars)) here… Bon appétit.
Cordially,
The Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan
PS: No Spam — Balls in the air! An experience for us and them.
Copyright © 2017 E Maria Shelton Speller
XN is a new initiative from Northeastern University (NU) that offers graduate and professional students and sponsoring organizations experiential opportunities to collaborate on short-term, real-world projects in the best co-op program in the country, and positions NU as the global leader in experiential learning! Organizations move forward on project-based work and connect with rising professional talent while students gain real work experience and valuable learning opportunities.
Students have a range of skill-sets including digital media and marketing, data analytics, corporate and nonprofit project management, regulatory strategy, communications management and the Creative Digital Solution for a VR/Game-Inspired Concept for Explode – The Writer’s Environment during the Summer, Fall and Winter Terms of 2016!
Details included the Project Description:
Explode – This Writer’s Environment is a Kick Starter Project 2.0. The first launch is what Rita Gunther McGrath calls, “failing by design”. The launch was admittedly, a treatment to direct investors to Explode, as well as a serious foray, to define content while using the Writers Environment as a springboard to other experiences. That unsuccessful project was a lost opportunity, but an intelligent fail. Explode — The Writer’s Environment is space for visionaries — Poets, Writers, Coders, Programmers, Filmmakers, Thespians, Graphic Designers, Artists, Musicians, Directors, Cinematographers, Designers, Educators, Historians, Actors, Conceptual and Performance artists, Photographers, and finally, Virtual Reality Developers and Designers. It is a platform for curated content, in an interactive meta-environment – that pulls and pushes information. The Environment facilitates content and other stories – using digital media for curated art to redefine how artists, their audience and visitors experience real and virtual content. The project details included problems to be solved, goals, and deliverables — scheduled for completion March 2017.
Please stand by. See updates! Thank you for your continued support! Let’s rock and roll!
I sold a rock opus to the best Black rock band on the planet. A band that lost its capacity to dream. Formulaic guarantees skewed their imagination for platinum discs. The male coward covered their lifework, literally. My story reminded them of what ‘rushing’ felt like, how complete, how deep blushing could be obvious. And they bought it, and produced it. And it was good — it was better than good. It was thought provoking and it was an African-American affirmation of our realities and our fantasies — no matter how unrealistic.
Suddenly, they were very significant and the world truly believed, that rock music is black music and black music is everything. Power is aesthetic. Aesthetics is politics and being black is philosophical and our philosophy is phenomenology and being black, is being real.
No Hip Hop could say as much as this rock opus did, ever — no matter how many stories they sampled. So, this black rock band were crowned kings and were exulted, and revered; incandescent icons, the envy of friends, the consumption of man, the image of immortality — like the stained-glass heaven you summon before you close. And they loved me. I was the wick in their candlestick and without me, there was no burning flame. I was the source of their energy. I, was the unstained virgin encamped.
Sooner than anyone imagined, there was nothing more important, than our collaboration. The media was our medium. They stopped referring to me as a writer, and started calling me, a Love Supreme…..
Copyright 2016 by E Maria Shelton Speller. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
If I could write language
that speaks and points….
At trumpets
when the moon is tone
and the sun is sfumato
See… the chiaroscuro Supreme
[dream in hue]
magenta, chrome, cherry-white
[mixed with blue fugue]
Put-the-night to sleep!
See Sisyphus scorn
at amber headlights
in Paris dew
Skin seeking skin
and birds seeking
[the flutter of feathers]
ink… that runs like blood
on paper… that does not bleed
Contrapposto poets
succumbing to peaches
Dogs… suspended
like meat in Seoul
[In the dawn]
She comes home
the moon is a beat
the sun is trill…
Dada responds
to Surrealism
Hip Hop responds
to R&B
[The trumpet responds]
to me
bebop bebop bebop bebop blam!
Fa Falala…
Copyright 2004, 2015 by E Maria Shelton Speller. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Inspired by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and Zurich Dadaist Hugo Ball who according to Arnason’s thesis on Ball’s conventional language “had no more place in poetry than the outworn human image in painting, Ball produced a chant of more or less melodic syllables without meaning: ‘zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimlalla zam.’ “
On the Orange Line
some carried
boom boxes like briefcases
babies like groceries
and stout little bottles
like bibles
protected inside brown bags
from thumping
It’s about what people do
and what people say
On the Orange Line
On the Orange Line
I can see Michelangelo’s innerness
like the monk
the anonymous critic
who said, “The David”
is a homoerotic composition
a platonic love for the male body
that approaches erotic dimensions
On the Orange Line
with so little movement
on this human-scape
Clean and safe
inside the rubber doors
deliberately close to the gallows
David wanted out of his dirty world
When he described the disorder
Giovanni built cathedrals on his back
and rose windows with his hands for him
On the Orange Line
On the Orange Line
My father looked at me
like Noah looked at Ham
when Ham looked at Noah
as if he did something
ungodly and unplatonic
to him
In love so completely ruptured
Ham tried to stay
the flow of blood
with women too beautiful
for proverbs
Their eyes were
divining rods
for sex and dreaming
On the Orange Line
On the Orange Line
They beat him down on the threshing floor
he was too beautiful for words
They gave him something to cry about
and like the Egyptians
they sodomized him in turn
For the sake of the Orange Line
they made him their little boy
For the sake of the Orange Line
On the Orange Line
The housenegro in church on Sunday
said nothing about who would
be bought and
who would be sold
on the auction block tomorrow
and no one asked, and no one told…
What do you do when your enemy
goes to the same church you go to?
On the Orange Line
without room for rapture
or space for rape
I rested my stop on
my fingers
and the mad boy
the made boy
came on
Political obscenities abound!
The Million Women March
will reproduce
the matriarchal society
and transform it into what ~
new and improved Black Madonnas?
The Million Women March
legitimizes
the Million Man March
without the benefit of prudence
When the Million Man March
goes down in history
as an epic tragedy
you have facilitated
the perpetuation
of the sacrificial black woman
You risk the future
of born and unborn children
for generations to come
Duplicating unwise
and circumscribed politics
The fat lady is singing again
But this is not a corner stoop
in Harlem
and she is far too milky
to anticipate the social
and political implications
of a Million Women March
You cannot answer my questions
without trying to suckle me!
This is what I am afraid of…
Keep your blouse on!
Your ample bosom
is an integral
part of the problem
~ not the solution!
Do the black man a favor
take his body down
beat your heart
weep and wash his feet
wrap him in fine linen
and cover him with spices
Maybe if you mourn him
you can resurrect him
He might make an appearance again
Not only did the Black Madonna
leave him on the cross
she won’t take him down
Take him off the cross now!
Everyone else has
Maybe you like the view
from the ground
We are beyond Brown and Newton
we’re on fallacious arguments now
Where are you going
other than the ground
On the Orange Line?
On the Orange Line
I saw dog paws
tattooed on her thigh
and red daisies
on her boots
My prism came from
within
and landed on my skin
In random chimera conceits
I think
of blue nights and black mornings
The full moon in the white Winter sky
with pink Cirrus lips
demons and febrile mouths
Rimbaud, and blackbirds in epic simile
Squirrels that wait for green lights
Keisha!
and white girls
on billboards
on black streets
And the mad boy sung
“Ooh day Ooh day….
You got me humpin’…”
On the Orange Line
The station point
where esoteric beginnings
are setups
for sublime endings
Copyright 2004 by E Maria Shelton Speller, Explode. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Orange Line is inspired by The Last Poets’ On The Subway…