C O L O R

C O L O R

inclined to speak of people-skin,

i lay old associations to the side -

they are but one color of experience.

memory, though multiple in shade,

is only ever black and white,

exact in what is

or isn't.

so let us, like the painter,

be sparing with black and white,

so we may free the shades in-between.

from the world, i have plucked flowers.

from the world, i have plucked sweet flowers.

from the world, i have plucked some with bitter roots.

it struck me,

like the formation of dew and lightening,

that the dirt and worms and birds and wind, too,

have color.

it was the forgotten elements of the world,

the consciously or unconsciously unremembered,

that bore hues from black-and-white memory.

so maybe now,

these words and symbols, black-and-white

as they've been written,

should glow as a rainbow glows:

effervescent, recorded in the sky,

disappearing as mysteriously as it came,

remembered and forgotten,

all the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

C O L O R is a poem. Color is poetry. On a less serious note, one can spell color as "colour", but that is not the preference of my land. In my land, the southeast United States, color is a word that scares the common folk; it represents race, then fear, then hatred.

Here, in C O L O R, I try to leave those personal associations forced upon me by ideological geography. I here to do what so many of us should do more often, which is remind ourselves of the shades between and beyond black and white. Here, I make a rainbow with the thunder of written words. The rain is present along with the sound of lightening in this quick and free structure – quick and free, as color so often is.

C O L O R is a free verse poem, with a quaint little rhyme at the end, originally in Courier New 12-point font. It has a unique flow that none of my other poems do. It has a particular color of its own - its own land, its own associations.

Someone may ask, "how does C O L O R reflect something special?" My response: color does not reflect - it is observed. Here, in a unique piece, the observer is the priority; the YOU is at the forefront. Leonard Coseive is only the handed medium who delivered you manna from the mouth. It is more of a matter of knowing your existential fingerprint, your personal associations. To tie a bow on “uniqueness”: let the poem be an opportunity to find your own frequency, not the frequency of some person and their words.

Philosopher-types, those slightly-insufferable egoists, have tried so long and hard to imprison color to a system. Be it aesthetics or otherwise, I think of what an old friend told me once: “the stronger the cage, the darker the light.” What else but written poetry could accomplish, through mystical (and sometimes cryptic) associations, what color truly does? Color is a matter of instinctual beauty, of innate harmonies, much like the music one hears or the thoughts one has ringing in their head. To be Human, to be that sacred “social animal”, means at least to see the symbols in the colors.

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet; a tonal series in itself that strikes the eye rather than the ear. Color is the music of the iris, and the candy of visualization. Let us share a moment for sweet wonderment, even if words, as they often do, fail us.

Again, let us dance in many colors, together.