Mr. Rubik

You asked me if the seat was taken to my left

I asked myself if it was worth the trouble

Let me tell you something, Mr. Thug

Your skin was painted brown and black and beastly

Your aura about you was as typical as the stereotypes written about you

From your plaid shirts, sagging jeans, and shoes believed to be worth more than your piece of mind

I wanted to rip out your tattoo covered throat as I felt regret inching up the back of mine

Your tattoos were weaving among, inside, within, and between one another in a language that even I cannot decipher

Skulls more hollow than your cheeks

Fire with colors brighter than your future

Shadows filled with ink as dark as your past

Showing the truth of problems that even you cannot solve

Tell me, Mr. Problem

Why your clothes reeked of a certain woman

I wondered if you were married to the idea that being higher than your problems was the only way to solve them

I wondered if you were married to Mary Jane

Clinically prescribed to find enough money to lose yourself in holy matrimony

I wondered if I, too, have been brainwashed to be unaware of the irony of how we spend our entire lives looking for something green

We finally ingest it and it comes out white

Or to pretend to not see the bottle hidden in the brown paper bag

Or to congratulate you on your wedding

Tell me how you can be loyal to something other than yourself, Mr. Addiction

You see, the only thing more complex than the tattoos on your neck

Or the liquid morphine you carry as a badge of honor,

Was the rubik’s cube sitting in your tattered hands

And this would normally be the time where I compare the rubik’s cube to the world, all of the colors to people in society, and your hands to, well, your hands

Going in great detail at the delicacy in which you held said cube

Asking if the colors on the rubik’s cube were truly the one’s that were out of order

But you solved it so fast that I never got the chance to put the pieces together

Or to even come up with an intricate metaphor to describe how the world is in the palm of your hand

Or how easy it is for you to solve it

Or to apologize for assuming that you and I were two pieces of two different puzzles

Tell me how we’re supposed to fit, Mr. Puzzle

You rearranged the squares to a beat that only you can hear

I wonder if that’s why it’s called an algo-rhythm

Tell me the lyrics to the song, Mr. Mathmusician

I’ve seen a solved rubik’s cube before but never had the world looked so different within the palm of your hands

Within the 7 wonders of the world

1 direction that we are going in, whether it is up or down, you decide

2 minutes of steadfast change

3 tattoos on your right hand

4 confused expressions on my face

5 oblivious bart passengers

6 sides on the rubik’s cube

6 sides to you

7 ways to say nothing at all and still sing a song worth listening to

Still cry out so loud and no one can hear you

Tell me why no one else can hear you, Mr. Emotion

Inspiration courses through my veins

Liquid education courses through your own

You don’t see my world changing as I know it

My world where your social mobility relies on your sole ability to remain invisible

To arrange ourselves in like colors so we disappear in the background

But I see you

Tell me why no one else can see you, Mr. Artwork

Standing out among the crowd while sitting to my left

While telling stories in ink

While smelling of her

While travelling alone

But all the while, painting a picture that no one takes the time to invest in

And you don’t even have enough money to invest in yourself

Tell me why no one else knows you, Mr. Invisible

Walking down these streets carrying something, anything, everything in the palm of your universe, Mr. Millionaire

Before you left, you jumbled the colors back up

Messed with the order of everything we know

But what else do we know but to strive for perfection

But the world is one puzzle that we just can’t solve

You see, perfection is subjective

It all depends on perspective

You have now changed my perspective on the world, Mr. Mirror

My world where I can’t even look at someone who looks like me and see their potential

My world where people who look like me are trained not to

My world where all of colors have a place

But who’s to say that the world wasn’t the way that it was supposed to be to begin with

Before it was solved

Tell me what the answer is

Mr. Rubik

It is your cube after all