Subterfuge

Subterfuge

Narrow corridors twist and wind

Through the dungeons of a mind

Burdened with the tell-tale spiral of insanity,

And ugly little things like lies and cancer’s claws,

Prosperity and the universal laws

That pop up dead end after dead end before me.

This grayscale is inescapable.

Long vines twine around these hands that tremble

With the lost and misplaced power of gods,

Mortal men who saw Vesuvius as conquerable,

Women as trading pieces to a game they’d lose,

And war as a way to cull the greenery blossoming.

Threatening to swallow our minds whole,

The green would have vomited up peace in its place.

We are creatures of gray.

So screams the flickering static

Of the TV lodged in a forgotten corner of an attic

Filled to bursting with skeletons and razor blades,

Ways to waste our days away

As we suffocate beneath a blanket of gray.

We are not these monsters born and killed

In the shadowed snow of poor reception.

It is all deception.

Jade blossoms erupt from the dirt wedged under our nails.

Emerald visions of fairies and forests force tall tales

To bud on lips bloody from battle and cracked

From false narratives; the bedtime stories the darkness read

Late at night have begun to crumble

Our dreams have learned how to fly.

Our hands have dipped beneath the green fields

Of No Man’s Land and pulled up an armistice

Drenched in the dye of hope, the green blood of dead soldiers.

A bouquet of green vines and sturdy stems and one lone gem

Twinkles on the headstone beneath the dawn of a day

The night whispered would never come.

Petrichor lifts from our hair in a soft morning fog

And the wind blows through our teeth with laughter.

Our infancy saw us gobbling up sunshine and ripping fistfuls

Of our favorite color from the ground,

Never believing in thunderstorms or the boogeyman

Swathed in black silk shadow.

Our eyes glittered green with envy.

We are creatures of myth, giants plucked from tree trunks,

Fairies stolen from the underside of leaves at night.

Fantasy runs red in our veins but myths feed green dreams

To the fluttering creatures trapped in our bones.

Our flesh is the ancestral home of viridescent vegetation

That grows tall and wide, that looms like a skyscraper

And feeds the cosmos.

It cannot be contained.

Life leaks from our pores and drips from lazy Sunday smiles,

Filling our universe with droplets of stardust and indomitable passion.

Different from the stories the voices in the static scream.

Different from the shadows tickling vibrant eyes.

Different from the gray that pounds

Wrong, wrong, wrong

Every hour on the hour in the beating core of our universe.

The beating, living, breathing, mystical creature within our ribcage

Sends shockwaves of life out with each step we take.

Dandelions rise in our footsteps and sow the seeds

Of shooting stars and summer rainbows.

Whole rainforests break soil when we weep and moss blossoms

Where our hands have bled into the earth.

We hemorrhage passion, nourishing the black expanse of sky.

There is a forest inside us,

An old gathering of redwoods in the soul.

They dip their branches in the Milky Way,

Pass the ancient secrets of the stars through their sap,

And let us feast on the Aurora Borealis

To fill up the craters and canyons in our souls with lakes and rivers

Large enough to be seen from space twinkling in our eyes,

Dancing on the street of our highest ambitions.

We could not be the gray beasts of apathy

Not even when our fragile humanity

Begs that we step back from the emerald forest and settle

In the city of cinderblock and shingles

Where it is quiet, and calm, and our extinction will be slow but inevitable.

We could never be full of gray eyes and clouded over skies

Not when our tongues can so easily taste those silver lies.

Our growling stomachs are not so keen

To devour lives slathered in gray, not green.

So I will give into the madness clawing at the back of my brain.

I will open my mouth to the universe and let tendrils of magic

Flash into the night and fly me high above this world of gray,

These sallow faces and ashen smiles.

I will fly into the sun and explode into fragments of dreams and courage

Because I am not gray, because I survived the slush pile.

I am green.