Colors He Can't Eat with His Eyes

Yes, a crazy girl didn’t like that I called her silly.

She grabbed a “kaleidoscope to clock me in the head.”

That’s because color, in all its facets, were her cathedral.

And she painted all her thoughts in the spire,

becoming a world of magisterial ken,

that she blushed with chroma everywhere she went.

Greens were the food from rain, blues were the underwater rosaries,

reds were the felicitous exits, purples were the soul of Africa,

pinks were her dolls’ zoetic, yellows were swallowed vitality,

oranges were her state of melting, and grays were her juxtaposed tracings.

So, I said to her one day

I’m in the black and white throws of an old zeitgeist.

The one that turns into the clay of past times,

so enriched with moving us on the chess board

and giving the world dominion over pawns.

For how can you ignore the static on television?

Or the ashes of your father who once bathed in dispelled milk?

So, she answered

The cast moon might answer your questions

until eclipsed with the undertones of tribal feathers,

and the father is a bright flash of battlement

that pigments the lifesaving blood

of thousands of cut irises,

which stuns you with their sword-shaped epithelial

leaving you clutching at the ends of optic nerves.

So, I said

My army men know nothing of the sort.

They shoot at camouflage prizes,

and a black knell calls me to neutral cadavers

who see nothing nevermore in a box of dull worms,

sightless with slime of salty nonchalance,

infiltrating the ghost ship that pleases the ripper.

She replied,

Man or woman is then born again to stars.

And even the blind can feel the promise of a flower.

Reach your palms into the air, dearest boy, and

conscientiously see them against the sky.

Do not bury your mottled head while doing so.

Then bring me a ladybug from your broadleaf tree

before it becomes prey to parasitic wasps

that are mesmerized by what’s not their polka dots.

We live in signaled prisms that are not anachronistic,

and I assign you to a time where you find glory

in the borealis, which mystifies your dull heart.

He replied,

You really are a silly girl.

She replied,

The shades in my face will tell you

that forgiveness finds itself in the colors of the rainbow.

I no longer need a new beginning.

It is all tied up in what you can’t know.

And my kaleidoscope waits for a different boy.

Soon after they raced back and forth with batons,

handing off their burdens

in a cosmos too big for them.

Then swung on the swing sets in a park,

her dreaming of jumping off into the glowing terrain,

and him afraid she might injure herself.

What she kept in her heart was too big for them both.

And the night was beginning to cut off

a brave new way of seeing things.

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