there is no one in heaven

no one on earth

who knows what i am

people are so obsessed with opposites, with pairs
are so obsessed with pasting on their bodies who they think they are inside
but what is one to do when they have no idea,
when their world squashes any attempt at cognition

that there is more than black or white?

 

when i was seven years old and i was handed a paint brush--

filaments flickering above my head, fibers kissing my fingertips--

and a muddy set of cheap paint--

broken, ruined, but a gift better than any i had ever seen--

i, like any child, thought not of the world i could mirror

but of the colors i could create with the magic laid before me

 

there is more than black or white

 

there is more than blue on the left, pink on the right

more even than the purples and violets and magentas in the middle

though even the most progressive individual will have a hard time believing this is true

there is green like freshly cut grass and red like the rashes it leaves me when i bask in it

yellow like the hot desert sun and brown like the freckles it burns in my skin

there is gray, like the clouds when i feel better mirrored in the sky than in my body

 

and there is nothing

 

like

 

the mantis shrimp

 

who sees more colors at the bottom of the ocean

than the human mind could ever conceive

as it shoots itself like nature’s bullet through the water

destroying everything in its path

because it cannot be held back by silly restrictions like

pink or blue

black or white

it is above-- and below-- such things

 

some people say that when they look in the mirror after a hard time in their life

they do not like what they see

it is not the image of the self they remember

that they felt intimately familiar with

but i have never looked in the mirror and seen more than a clay doll rubbing itself away into

smaller shapes

brighter colors

scabbing skin

anything it could think of to reflect the color shown by the fifteenth receptor

at the back of a crustacean’s eyes

 

i have never heard my name on another’s lips and thought

this is who i am meant to be

 

i have never checked a box on a form

and felt at all honest about myself

 

because i am like a danger, like a lie

 

like fright because people like so much to think they know everything in the world because at the age of four a teacher at the front of the class told them that the rainbow could be counted on seven fingers

R on the first, V on the last

 

but there is more than pink or blue

black or white

 

and sometimes when i am not looking

i think i can feel the shapes twisting inside my body

i think i can see the colors that are not on our charts

i think i can get away with never being called a name, or a gender, or an alignment

and i think i may be able to look in the mirror and feel like i know who i am

 

but each time i remember

that my body is a doll that i have molded into the prettiest picture i think i can show the world

my body is a filter all its own

and no angle

or lighting

no backdrop or sound

no binder or packer or makeup or jewels

could ever show the world that i am a tetradecahedron pulsing with light

the color of which i have never even seen