ROOM WITH BLUE LIGHT
Blue drapes. Blue tablecloth.
Four blue velvet chairs.
No light bulb here.
The walls shine blue.
The walls are the sky.
Blue rose in blue vase,
drowning in promising, blue space.
Cornhusk blue baby in crib.
He rocks himself.
His hands reach to the roses.
He reaps the blue.
The walls turn off.
Long long black.
The walls turn on.
Boy blue with blue bike
rides in circles,
runs over the crib
full of splintered toys.
They crunch, he laughs.
He throws blue ball
at vase which breaks.
Blue water bleeds out.
He stops laughing,
apologizes to the roses,
begs forgiveness from the walls.
The walls turn off.
Long long black.
The walls turn on.
Blue man at table,
eating black and blue pills.
They alleviate his blues
with black-outs—
long long blacks.
He writes of them
with iron blue ink.
His words are unrefined,
the vomit of a blue brain
fatalistically strayed.
He has paddled his years
on one short, anxious wavelength.
He worries over the remnants
of rotten roses,
should he have named them
like loved things,
over the direction
of the chair velvet hairs,
was it the right direction
all of these colorful years?
Blue man reaches to walls,
remembers they are sky—
he had forgotten.
He wants to shrink in the crib,
reach for roses,
the crib heap
now burned and leveled.
He hides his face
in the sad sex of the drapes.
The walls turn off.
Flash of black.
The sky comes back.
Blue residue of a man
in handsome blue box,
very handsome box,
stink smoothed by new blue roses,
box pressed against the sky,
offered to the sky,
swallowed in soil and colorless rain.
The walls turn off.
Marcus E. Darnell |
