Cardboard Boxes

What colors would my life shine if we had not moved all the time? In every home, I felt quite sure my bedroom walls felt me there; as eyelids sighting proof I had lived, they'd hold my poetry as their truth. Then would come the cardboard boxes that unlike walls, did hold my life's causes. Past walls of white, yellow, blue and pink all smeared into my poem’s blood-dried ink. If one paint coats those who belong, whose presence is community strong, whose roots hold, growing ever long, then such paint has never brushed my song. I’m a chameleon, reborn with each move, showing colors only the lonely may choose. I am one all may lovingly embrace until I move and they forget my face. My hometown is painted ‘no place.’ My paint presence does not a reunion rate, none of my three high schools sent me dates. I know not the paint of a lifelong friend’s face. My paint is cardboard box true brown .. my family moved it from town to town. I grew up long ago, an adult raised invisible, shaded with poetry, lifelong indispensable. One can move paint, even revise it, but unlike me, not all can improvise it.