Coloring (originally published in The Literary Underground - 3/9/2025)
Coloring
My
parents bought a used ’65 Dodge Dart,
white
inside and out, dad’s pride and joy,
and
I, just a boy left unbuckled, untethered,
saw
the back of the front seat as a blank
canvas,
which I covered in patternless
Crayola-tones,
an abstract masterpiece, faded
to
black and white in memory. Consequences
swift
but not corporal. Lesson learned:
elbow
grease cleans wax off vinyl.
Flash
forward to a different world where
artificial
light explodes from all
my
screens, distracting and assaulting me
with
hues no naive technicolor musical
could
have foretold, while a gloomy
future
looms uncertainly in shades of gray
and
sepia-brown, and my clicking knees
and
knuckles count the seconds. Punishment
for
the simple crime of having survived.
And
now, having lived through sixty-two
gray
winters, green springs, white-hot
summers
and firework-bright autumns,
all
scrambled together in a shapeless swirl
of
errors and triumphs, revelations and deceits,
injuries
sustained and inflicted,
I
still paint outside the lines, with words
instead
of crayons, and still usually clean up my own mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment