Caprice in Color

To my own mind:

I have no reason to ask how you are.

I know, for I am trapped inside you like

The choked air inside a corked glass bottle.

I’d like to know where you got that

Box of paints.

I certainly never gave it to you.

I can’t deny you’re an artist, one who is

Always staining me

With your potent, potent hues.

On days you use blue, the paint

Grows so thick and heavy

My body shrinks and droops under

Its weight.

It forces my eyelids down

Half-shut, never all the way

So the paint pools and drips slowly,

Leaving cloud marks under my eyes

The next day.

When you paint with white

I am forced up, up

Until I feel God’s breath

Hot all around me.

Illusions fill my eyes.

I can’t walk through the

Sparkling, rising, terrifying silence.

When you use red I always

Have to run.

My hand blisters in the

Spinning heat

As my pen, animated by the

Biting color, drags it in its spasms

Across a page spattered in sweat

Falling from my fevered body.

When you paint with pink

All the world is art.

My head grows, grows

Born so many times in a day.

An embryo expanding,

Flying, to life.

Purple is an opiate

Like the dim and gentle gloaming.

I smile all day

In fog, distance.

Yellow and I am thrown apart,

Pieces raining down, down.

Green and I am whole again.

Oh, my mind, you possess a power

Of the purest strength.

No other can move a brush

With such crushingly deliberate force.

I write to you with but one request:

Please don’t use me as a canvas.

Desperately,

Me