Purple At Best

I can only hope to find something so deeply hidden inside myself that it is beautiful enough and terrible enough to strike your interest, scribbling it out in a fiery passion for you to shriek back at your own life’s claws But I fear I cannot do that today For that would be red, you see And I feel something purple at best I suppose I could be blue, and sit in my corner, maybe take a sip of the sky, stare at the clouds in the water, dripping into the earth like the shade does down my back and crawl into it like a grave, But I think you know it would take too much of me For to go outside is to allow the golden sun to kiss my skin, and if I did that again, I would be nothing but a bare white But I don’t want to be neutralized, no, this state is best felt fully For it feeds something different than most I can still eat and drink, I can still hold a smile, I can still walk and run and think of lovely things, but it must be done mechanically Because the color of love is the color of blood, and it is not mine, but it is in me, for I am something much finer, much more elegant, secondary, a cousin of both season’s leaves, a rich man’s robes and seat but never his skin, a midnight sky if you’re lucky enough, a simple and scary and complicated, radiant, pure, pathetic something And at least for now I’ll stay that way I’m nothing at worst, But I’m something at least, And I feel something purple at best