Hues of a Person

It’s no color at all, but it’s the first that I saw.

White light much too bright for blue skies.

The reds and the yellows paled before the dawn

Of the world in a small child's eyes.

The child trusted the fairies to keep her safe, always filled with light.

But the child grew old and the world carried on

Until light was filled up with night.

I press my cheek against the gnarled bark of the old elm tree

It is dying, but it is so alive.

I feel a hum within,

A song of forest green.

It fills me with words that it knows better than...

My human ears can hear

My human mind can realize

My human heart can trust

Nonexistent and at once overabundant

The intangible myth becomes the inevitable fact of life.

Joy has always been goldenrod, a flower of mirth.

One need only hollow out a little space for it to nest and

Roost like a robin

Full of life and full of song.

Brown dirt beneath my nails

Soil clinging to the lines of my aging hands

If I can make the green things grow,

Each little crease and every heartache

Will have been recompensed

And could be loved, as well.

Anchored from my center

Ever inward, cobalt chains

Tethered to forces equal parts wild and serene

Set for a plunge deeper in than

I have yet been

A spark, deep within

Blood orange like my rage.

A small, dormant fire

Until it’s no longer

Quiet at all.

It flares and it wails

At all the small things that fail to recognize its magnitude

Sorrow.

Dense and heavy like gray fog.

Oppressive like the uncertainty of tomorrow.

A deep breath is unmanageable

With the press of time upon me.

It’s this color of time which haunts me

That my most constant companion should be my worst fear

The dreaded, irrevocable passage of time.

All of life’s questions encompassed here.

Intriguing, terrifying, and altogether unwhole.

Jagged pieces coming together leaving cracks everywhere.

I see dark, empty space beyond, black as coal.

Is it the eternal? The utter abyss?

Or merely reflections of my soul?

A sepia picture, set in time, not in motion.

One foot in the past,

Yearning back towards all the lives I lived before,

While hurtling onward much too fast.

Of all the truths I ever knew:

This faded version of ME was not the first.

It shall not be the last.