Patchwork of Luminance

Some are born to burn.

Some to shine.

* * *

I blushed from the dawning

with a rose-wash nimbus,

a perilous luminance

for a black boy budding up

from the red clay of Riverdale, Georgia.

But I proved as tenacious as I was tender.

Tenderness being my God-given name.

* * *

Back then, delicate boys learned

to conceal their softness.

When asked their favorite color,

they dimmed themselves

behind any old hum-drum hue.

* * *

Not me. I stood rooted in my softness,

and cradled the immensity

of my radiance—smiled wider

than a mile and whooped

like a whip breaking glass;

released rain from a churning gray,

and if pressured to cease, I unleashed monsoons.

* * *

I wasn’t meant for the meanness in the spectrum:

the putrid green, the scabbed crimson, the dirty tar brown.

* * *

Pink was darling, and I savored darling things:

Drew dresses and colored them in carnation.

Cascaded across castles as Princess Peach.

Spun cotton candy yarns.

* * *

When playing “I Dream of Jeannie,”

I would grant wishes

then billow back to my lamp

in a pink pillar of smoke.

* * *

I dared to be truly outrageous

as I waved my arm emphatically

for pop-pink Jem over drab G.I. Joe.

Favoring glamour over guns.

Fashion over fighter jets.

* * *

Amid amusement park fluorescence,

my own wish was fulfilled

when my name was airbrushed

in black, magenta, and amethyst

on a milky smooth tee-shirt

that I wore for years ’til it was see-through thin.

* * *

Fully submerged in yellow-submarine summers,

I siphoned strawberry lemonade Capri Suns

and sifted through packets of Starbursts,

panning for the pink gold inside.

* * *

When the world was wearisome,

pink was my pillow.

* * *

By the time I was a teenager,

there were new! now! modern pinks!

The neon pink of Lisa Frank.

The party pink of Saved by the Bell.

Hot pinks. Rouge pinks. Crisp, clean, cool pinks.

* * *

Pink was all the rage,

and I was a good-time Charlie.

* * *

My family moved from the beige-tan

of my childhood home to a storied house

with stark white walls and chic pink carpeting.

* * *

For years, I walked on Bubblicious bliss,

and I shared my room with Pinky,

a large plush dragon with iridescent wings

who was so glaringly pink

I should have been embarrassed,

but I bore no shame.

* * *

I luxuriated

in champagne pink extravagance.

* * *

Arrayed in accordance

with my seasonal palette,

my golden bronze skin

glimmered in gem tones

and popped in pink pastels.

* * *

Suddenly, it was a new millennium,

and pink had become a cultural phenomenon.

It was what we wore on Wednesdays

and ribbons to raise awareness.

* * *

I divined from a deeper well

that the power of pink

resides in its calming presence.

To soothe the unsettled.

To infuse a sense of brightness.

To allow love in limitless measure.

* * *

I painted my pink on a communal canvas.

Practiced pink and preached it from the pulpit:

Brothers and sisters, go forth and plant pinkness!

* * *

I pressed my pink lips to another man’s,

and I dissolved like Sweet n’ Low

poured from a pink packet

into a cool glass of iced tea.

* * *

When a psychic told me

my aura was purple and pink,

I delighted

in my own energetic field.

* * *

My generosity. My gentleness. My grace.

It all arises from the cheshire gleam of my animus,

manifested through my hands, visible through my living.

* * *

God bless us: the sissy boys

who survived the acidity with our sugar intact.

* * *

The dandied lions who pioneered pink before it was fashionable

in the men’s department at Nordstrom and Macy’s.

* * *

Those of us who knew better than generations before us

that colors cannot be assigned a gender

and that every shade of man

can walk in a beautiful light

and weave a life as fine as silk.

* * *

I have sewn my entire life out of pink patches,

and I know the color as intimately

as I know the corridors of my own heart.

* * *

Even now I continue to thread strands

of hibiscus and fuchsia—

from the rose quartz I keep

in a pink dish lettered with love

to the pink electricity generated

within the rods of my mitochondria.

* * *

And someday, after all my cherry blossoms have fallen

and I have folded back into the dust,

I wholly aspire to bud anew

in every incarnation

of pink imaginable.

* * *

To sing the praises of pink

with the fanfare of the trumpet bells.

* * *

To cherish the serenity

in the cerise of the sunrise.

* * *

To shine for all eternity

as a light-rose dream.

* * *

One cardinal color

in a rainbow coalition.

All of us gleaming

together against the darkness.

Note from the Writer

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy: