Painter of Words

(For later consideration in a spoken word piece: )

Oh god, why poetry?

Oh god, you ravaged my insides

You made me bleed and bleed and bleed –

For what? Poetry?

Words don’t mean anything – things mean things,

Like spokes of a gear, like a gleaming sax

Strutting in moonlight

And as far as you are concerned,

Perhaps a parrot, perhaps

A pair of squawking heads would better suit your liking,

Making you laugh and cry easy colors, easy blue and yellow colors

You could dye your shirts with.

Oh god, can’t you understand

Red is a hard color to make,

That is,

Not to make but to keep making. You can bleed

More than once but can you do it while quaking in crippling sighs?

Can you ravage anyone else’s insides

and create till they die?

There are too many types of red.

Oh god, and orange –

Is there anything more infuriating than orange?

Screams acid and massive prisons and madness.

Orange is the color of poets.

I could have done anything else. I could have made skyscrapers ten thousand stories high, I could have gone into politics and lie, I could have solved equations, engineered fluorescent eyes, I could have eaten my fill of hot apple pie, I could have heard screams for my name – I wouldn’t be shy, I could have done any small thing just to scrape by…

No.

Oh, god.

This hill stretches up into the clouds, into the mist of limping, howling things…

Red must be eked on the top of dead peaks that were never alive.

Now all there is left is try, try, try, try, try, try…