Color Association

Still

What lay behind the '70s mint green motel door labeled "480D" in gold paint is a man who dreams of times already passed, wishing to forget the time passing through. On top of the starchy, rough bedding of the full-sized bed, he lays waiting. He lies for hours, staring at the water-stained ceiling, bubbled up in the corner and peeling directly above him. No one comes. No one ever comes.

As the sun sets, it casts an organic shade of red over everything. Leaking in through the white slatted blinds in his motel room, a pattern of red horizontal lines attacks the wall. A reminder that time waits for no one, and that he is no exception. He turns over onto his right side, bringing his knees close to his chest, and releases the air in his lungs in one long sigh.

He stares anxiously at the long blue vein running up his arm. Thoughts endlessly racing through his head, he's paralyzed from the chaos. His mind in uproar against his body, he struggles to resist.

A hard-shell slate green suitcase sits by the door for its third day, unopened, completely abandoned. Waiting by the door frame, it urges him to leave, to move on, to start anew.

10's, Week 6

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A brown leather glove lies alone in a puddle in a parking lot, abandoned unknowingly.
  
• A corner of white Frigidaire appliances glow green with the numbers "10:16."
  
• A large brown truck that reads "UPS" in gold letters, waits at the end of the long, icy driveway.
  
• Two twenty-something guys with tousled brown hair sit next to each other in armless brown leather chairs with their heads down, reading in front of a wall of books in the "Biography" section of Borders.
  
• The murky brown mud oozes a lighter brown liquid, while holding the shape of shoes previously there.
  
• A grey-brown squirrel climbs the porch banister flaking with white paint, and hunches over a pile of peanuts on the rail surface.
  
• A pile of boots, gloves, and ice skates sit by the front door, icy and melting.
  
• A brown liquid drips in a steady flow from the top of the machine into the clear glass pot, giving off steam.
  
• The rusty "Peninsular Paper Co." sign sits behind a frozen river of ice and snow, snow gathering on the tops of each letter.
  
• A man in light blue jeans, a red puffy coat, white sneakers, and a green and yellow beanie that reads: "Vernors" races across the street in the slush of yesterday's snow.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never--I am entitled only to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness: love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible; besides, it is entirely recuperated by the culture: it frightens no one." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  

• "I-love-you has no usages. Like a child's word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "In the manner of what happens in singing, in the proffering of I-love-you, desire is neither repressed (as in what is uttered) nor recognized (where we did not expect it: as in the uttering itself) but simply: released, as an orgasm. Orgasm is not spoken, but it speaks and it says: I-love-you." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "I love you. Je-t'aime/I-love-you. The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply for without a reply the other's image changes, becomes other." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "No answer. Mutisme/silence. The amorous subject suffers anxiety because the loved object replies scantily or not at all to his language (discourse or letters)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?" --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Why? Pourquoi/why. Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense: it might be called an anterior immediacy. The image is perfectly adapted to this temporal deception: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already (again, always) a memory (the nature of photography is not to represent but to memorialize)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "When two subjects argue according to a set exchange of remarks and with a view to having the 'last word,' these two subjects are already married: for them the scene is an exercise of a right, the practice of a language of which they are co-owners; each on in his turn says the scene, which means: never you without me, and reciprocally. This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called dialogue: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  

10's, Week 5

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A Chinese couple cozy in a corner booth at Denny's, watching a biography of LeBron James via YouTube on their white Mac, drinking coffee, and sharing the banana split situated in the middle of the table.
  
• A large brown door under yellow lights on Main Street in Toledo whose glass reads: "310 1/2."
  
• A giant green peace sign written over all the other text on a white bathroom stall wall.
  
• Tiny lumps of solid white chocolate, drowning in the surrounding sea of warm, melted white chocolate.
  
• The endless pattern of stacked issues of Rolling Stone against the gray carpet.
  
• A cascading splatter of yellow on a tall, mountainous pile of snow.
  
• The diagonal-lined shadow the spiral staircase manifests on the plain white wall.
  
• The strategic stack of clear glasses and white ceramic bowls in the white plastic dish rack.
  
• Long, lean icicles dripping down the gray siding, coating the wall in bumpy ice.
  
• A brown-haired girl reading a book, nested alone in friends' coats and purses in the stands of the ice skating rink.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique..the other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others). Yet I have loved or will love several times in my life. Does this mean, then, that my desire, quite special as it may be, is linked to a type? Does this mean that my desire is classifiable? Is there, among all the beings I have loved, a common characteristic, just one, however tenuous (a nose, a skin, a look), which allows me to say: that's my type! "Just my type" or "not my type at all"--cruising slogans: then is the lover merely a choosier cruiser, who spends his life looking for "his type"? In which corner of the adverse body must I read my truth?" --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• '"Am I in love? --Yes, since I'm waiting.' The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Game: there were as many chairs as children, minus one; while the children marched around, a lady pounded on a piano; when she stopped, everyone dashed for a chair and sat down, except the clumsiest, the least brutal, or the unluckiest, who remained standing, stupid, de trop: the lover." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The power of language: with my language I can do everything: even and especially say nothing. I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize 'that something is wrong with me.' I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult.." --Roland Barthe, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love's value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and of oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can "surmount," without liquidation; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Repression: I want to analyze, to know, to express in another language than mine; I want to represent my delirium to myself, I want to 'look in the face' what is dividing me, cutting me off." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a doubt contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is 'I desire you,' and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "If I acknowledge my dependency, I do because for me it is a means of signifiying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a 'weakness' or an 'absurdity': it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The lover's discourse is not lacking in calculations: I rationalize, I reason, sometimes I count, either to obtain certain satisfactions, to avoid certain injuries, or to represent inwardly to the other, in a wayward impulse, the wealth of ingenuity I lavish for nothing in his favor (to yield, to conceal, not to hurt, to divert, to convince, etc.). But these calculations are merely impatiences: no thought of a final gain: Expenditure is open, to infinity, strength drifts, without a goal (the loved object is not a goal: the loved object-as-thing, not object-as-term)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
• "To be jealous is to conform. To reject jealousy ("to be perfect") is therefore to transgress a law." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

10's, Week 4

10 "Verbal Photographs:"

• A metal conveyor belt buzzing, carrying orange plated containers of sushi past each table.
  
• A red and black "All Sales Final" sign on the metal detector in the entrance of a pawn shop.
  
• Floor to ceiling knick knacks and novelty items for sale.
  
• A glass case of golden, diamond rings on display. The boxes holding rings from $49-$149.
  
• A brick wall and full parking lot from a tall, narrow window.
  
• Four twenty-something-year-old men standing in front of a 46' Samsung 1080p tv, strapped with plastic guitars, microphones, and drums, Rock Banding.
  
• An ocean of empty brown and green glass bottles on a white granite counter top.
  
• A "No Parking" sign, graffitied over with "Parking for J. Poodle Only."
  
• A railroad track covered in fresh snow, untouched, like it was put there for someone.
  
• Two twenty-something-year-olds racing around an apartment shooting Nerf darts at one another with their Nerf Maverick Rev. 6's.
  

10 "Treasures:"

• "Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with a chance of betrayal." --Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
  
• "Always do what's next." --George Carlin
  
• "There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past." --George Carlin
  
• "So it is not the awareness of words following one after the other that is its primary constructive principle, but perception of their togetherness." --Max Bense, Concrete Poetry [from "Visual Poetics" reading]
  
• "People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love." --Chuck Palahniuk
  
• "The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly." --Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
  
• "Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete..may I never be content..may I never be, perfect." --Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
  
• "Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?" --Andy Warhol
  
• "Concrete poetry does not entertain. It holds the possibility of fascination, and fascination is a form of concentration, that is of concentration which includes perception of the material as well as apperception of its meaning." --Max Bense, Concrete Poetry [from "Visual Poetics" reading]
  
• "The world is only to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon; and if there is such a thing as an aesthetic conception, it is an artistic one." --Max Bense, Concrete Poetry [from "Visual Poetics" reading]
  

Visual Poetics: Sorted Books

"AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH ALWAYS LOOKING UP Where the Sidewalk Ends"

"Turned Out Two Wrongs don't make a Right"

"long past stopping HAND TO MOUTH CANCER IS A Bitch"

"THE ZOMBIE PULP Breakfast of Champions"

Collage Poem

A Reminding of Those You've Forgotten


Fragaria Ananassa.
Fragaria Ananassa! You say her name as though you don't know who she is!
But you know.
Oh, you know.
One moment with Fragaria and you'll remember.
Her undoubtable sweetness makes your tongue tingle and your jaw cringe.
Some stop at her hair, but you'll dare.


Haliaeetus Leucocephalus.
You'd know 'im if you saw 'im.
American to the fullest, he's honored by many.
Truly fond of the west coast, he's free and happy.


Hora Fugit.
Short but tall, he's regrettably memorable.
A love-hate relationship, most have with him.
Without him we're lost, with him we find ourselves worrisome.
He's wise with reason and teaches us all.


Tagetes Patula.
Golden-haired and French, an unlikely combination that invoque l'amour.
A look into her eyes is like observing a waterfall,
the water spilling down from an unknown place
a million currents of water mixing together as one.

________________________

* Fragaria Ananassa is the genus name for strawberries.
* Haliaeetus Leucocephalus is the genus name for the bald eagle.
* Hora Fugit is Latin for "time flies."
* Tagetes Patula is the genus name for the French Marigold.