These Purple Things

I’m tickled blue in my pink

these things of purple descend

what was once white and black

is revealed

not be colour at all

just tone

varying in their darkness and light

swaying what is refracted into my eyes.

They are perception

sensory information

My brain defining

relating

interpreting

patterns in chaos

Even nothing is something

to our human conception.

Can I perceive at all

lost as I am

twisted by past

touched

tainted in the grip

broken by force

will this be evidence

in their argument against equality.

But at least I have these colours

not that anyone accepts them

I am married to a man

so how can I be ‘the gay’

I revoked my place on the rainbow

in the eyes

of those who have never been

seeing it only at a distance

rising from the storm.

They call me she

Ma’m. Miss. Mrs.

drenched in her-ness

draped in perceptions of reality

a lead cloak

pushed on me

by force.

When I cut off my breasts

will you still call me she

if the baby that grows

lives

and I birth it

will I be made she?

What do I do then

in my they them

my not pink and non-blue

must I accept their reality

to survive

for my husband

disabled by Autism

and the Long-Covid

for my adopted children

who meow for my affection

for the baby due Christmas Eve.

I drift

in my isolation

purple descends on me

bruises from my past

I am penetrated again

by memories

recollections of wounds

that long ago healed to scars

yet, I still bleed there.

It soaks my sheets

and there I float

drowning by hands

that pull me under

struggling beneath a broken surface

destined for the deep

out of sight

and out of reach.