This is the Zone group poem. Each reader is identified by different color type

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©1998 Albert Turner(red), E(green), Robin Linn(black), & Mick Cusimano(blue)

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THE HOUSE POEM

Rembrandt portrayed his subjects with sudden shafts of light. This contrasted with brooding shadows. The results were unexpected from his patrons. They didn't expect him to illuminate their very souls.

Tall grasses blown in fringy waves
Wildflowers effervescent magenta
Bluest calm before sadness
Prolific crop to be reaped
Reflections of the future on my table
as the cards loosed images once feared.
Van Gogh appears at my window.

As drops of light put lips to a window and shy bits of color (like yellow, faint red, orange)rise in murmurs, dark tone scatter giving an inkling of what has passed. Shattered glass at night does not destroy sunlight, moments are diffuse.

6E
(on hope)

But Sunday morning
There is hope in this room
Rejoice over a diflerent kind
A different texture
A sweet and hot tear drop
Come on brothers and sisters!
Come on y'all -- step into the light
into the screen -- into this space
and cry with me...

Apples, apples, fallen, sullied to the ground
Yet farther in the garden, we are drawn
To this vineyard where firmest ripeness waits
We must tiptoe here, deliberately, to reach
Pristine bunch of thoughtful grapes

Sugar in the cookie jar
A weak need to Be
Barry's Standing in the Shadows of Love
upstairs
shooting it out with Outkast's Liberation
downstairs
Mother repeats Barrys intro
Daughter repeats Brothers convo
From jail
he wants steak and shrimp
when he gets out push away from the table
affirmation and negation are in the house

Eighteenth century cartoonist James Gilray skewered pompous
politicians and royalty with his sharp pen late at night. The next morning crowds jostled in front of his storefront. In the windows they could see copies of his newest prints, The crowd waited in expectation to see who he was roasting today.

And moments can separate all light into color, even through a patched window like the one next door, plastic cover over the fist-sized hole. Here a boy wipes away morning condensation, making a circle, pressing nose against glass

I look in the mirror and see your face
All our pretenses are gone
Your words are a string of light around
My room,
Curiousity and growing recognition fuel
This internal hothouse bloom of desire

The screwball comedienne Katherine Hepburn slid through the 1930's movies in silky gown elegance. Carefree and sure of herself, she threw off spunky wisecracks at every turn.

This thread is foul
What is my sister in danger of becoming?
She is desperately trying not to be like you
You and Lil Kim are not on the same planet!
I am not defensive about her backbiters
What fiends me is the rabid condemnation
of sistahs of a sistah' in this house
You say you can call her a skank
and it's merely your opinion
Where's the noose
in your pocketbook
between the pages of your bible
wrapped inside the scarf on your head
stuffed inside your miracle bra?
Come out of the house Negro
Get black reality before you implode

What does he see that can be described by the eye, the lord of the spectrum that is never spectral? The ghosts are given up to light moved by the infinite in color. His fingers raise, raise the window to suit his view; his eyes are open, open, open.

pearly beauty, ivory tusk, alone
I navigate safaris, throng jungles,
to infinite sapphire seas
blue-black sparkles
light catching, photographing
the moon's slivered motion,
while water laps, laps, the shore

Monty Python's Flying Circus
If someone slapped you across the face with a wet fish, Would you be justified by insulting his dead parrot

He knows that during day images are not obscured by eyeless
tenement giants that wish to shutter life. They cannot move to
catch these penumbras. Less than concrete windows make openings
less mechanical, view, sound cannot fall like iron from frayed ropes.

5E
(on political archaism)

Do you think I’m fiull of Shit?
Then that is what you should say
Don't cloak it in colloquialisms
pretending to be an authentic black woman
lf you intend to get on that patriarchal bandwagon
and ride straight to Hades with the brothers
I'll be here when you get back
seeing and hearing and screaming
Welcome to the 21st Century!
Leave your masochistic matriarchal nest at the door