Self Portrait #47
Colorblind or not
The first thing you should do, is cleave yourself
From the notion that you can know me.
You could see the future in six additional dimensions,
And you’d still stumble across a different hue, a slighter saturation.
But since you asked, what the hell:
Reach into the bottom of a well
But keep your feet planted.
Reach reach reach
And fumble into the question mark itself,
Until your fingers are earthworms,
Devouring soil into tucked nail bed.
Dislocate your humerus from all your other bones
The world has beaten the funny out of, until its marrow is mealed into hollow glutinous expanse &
When you’re finished, pull your arm up by its sleeve
And run muddy digits through your coarse hair until you’re no longer tender-headed.
Still nothing? Ok well try
Sticking your face halfway between safety
And a crowded deep fryer.
You’re not smelling for memory this time, You’re replenishing the moisture in your face.
Don’t worry your pretty little crown
If your colleagues smell the odious funk of
Catfish and old bay and hush puppies
And crumpled bills caked in coffee grounds and prayer, pulling your Black card
From your double breasted vest pocket and slamming it down on the card table:
It’s your fault, we told you when you got here, there would be no reneging.
Think, baby. Ok here taste this, open up:
No, not metal. Not copper or nickel. Life was no crystal stair for you but you cut your teeth on rocks even harder and called it candy to keep from wincing.
Concentrate. Taste again: The last day before another birthday,
Another year you stayed when others couldn’t,
Another year you stayed when you thought you wouldn’t,
And before the sun pokes its head above the earth's hairline, the taste you’re looking for, my love, is the salt
From the coconut oil, and the ranch sunflower seed dust, the tar and the dial soap. Don’t spit it out, if you can help it, when you pull
Pull
Pull yourself into an upright posture to start the day.
Listen,
To the people whose color you seek
Without humbling yourself to ask for direction.
Wait to hear the one, and then the two,
Before you applaud yourself into the middle of some shit you didn’t count on.
Hear me,
When I tell you that once you root us we’ll never leave,
Not even when it is in our best interest.
Tales caution the hills have eyes,
That there’s someone watching from the bushes, to beware the onlooking wilderness.
And I get it: as wilderness myself that is often shushed or just unheard on less exciting days, I have reached the conclusion I must be a color
Better suited as foreshadowing than decoration.