your favorite colors.

A poem about people that make you feel empty.

The color of loneliness is the pale seafoam sky as the sun washes up on the night’s shores, after a night of bad dreams and hasty writing.

The color of conspicuous emptiness is your cigarette smoke as you exhale from one side of your mouth, one eye squinted, ignoring me conspicuously. It is opaque and white and yellowed with streetlights. I shake because I'm cold and you wrap one arm around me. My face flushes with red and it's the color of your approval of me occupying space in your presence. Your jacket, forest green with pine trees of blue and brown plaid growing through it, is the color of fulfillment, and warmth.

The color of skipped meals is your malnourished skin. You're not white, this pale isn't natural to you; you don't wear it well. You wear well colors of sun-kissed skin and constellations of freckles, not sunken cheeks and constellations of scabs where you dug for veins and nonexistent bugs. The color of insomnia, inorganic and stimulant inspired, is the blue veins I see through your skin for the first time since we met, snaking your skin like rivers on a map. The color of fear, of creatures unseen coming after you and of me losing you, is dark and purple and red beneath your eyes and shadows lining your ribs and hip bones, skeletal and prominent.

The color of addiction is clear like crystalline shards, and the glass you ate by accident in desperation for your next high. It goes with everything, and as you have reiterated many times, will never leave you, as I sit by your side, crumpled and defeated, unleaving, blind with loyalty. The color of self-loathing is deep, deep red, almost black, as I claw my skin apart, blaming myself for your troubles, as if the answers to making you into your old self again lie beneath my skin. I don't see it till later, but I am getting closer and closer to my bones with every slice, and my bones cut my flesh just as sharply. I am wasting away as quickly as you are, and it is born of desperation; it is the color of unending sadness and bitter confusion.

What keeps me anchored to you as we both drown is the colors of falling in love: pastels, drawing in chalk; hues of warm red, the vinyls I put on as we make love; and though our world is monochromatic with a dying greyscale, I cannot let go of hope, for I can't shake your color: honey brown eyes that smile like a sunrise as you wake me up, crinkled with a large grin like rumpled paper and butterfly kisses. But that has long since been replaced by more malevolent colors that bleed me of happiness, and though I can't admit it, you are no longer a sunrise but a dusk.

The color of loneliness is the oranged streetlight on the sidewalk concrete as I walk with you drunk and high, singing punk songs, reciting “he loves me” as though it will make it true.

Author's Note

constructive crit enouraged

Reviews

[bobc]

G...is the repetition needed? To my ear, it reads well without it. Just wondering...your poem...your call...boc

[Gabriele Montgomery]

hmm, i'll do a rewrite without it and see how it goes. i hadn't considered it.

[Gabriele Montgomery]

I rewrote it; thoughts? i think you were right, but i tend to overindulge with words. being verbose will end me aha.

[bobc]

I agree re overindulgence but that's something we all do...at one time or another. For myself, I always find I need to be a little ruthless when I begin editing. I always know when there are too many words because I answer 'no' to 'does the poem really, really need that word/phrase/sentence?''

Re this revision, I appreciate how style is always the writer's choice but with free verse it's an essential characteristic of the poem. I found this one harder to read through but I think it's the paragraph style you've used...the very dense collections of words and sentences.

Keep at it...thanx...bobc

[Gabriele Montgomery]

i think i'm just gonna reshelve this as a short rather than a poem, or come at it from a different angle another time. i appreciate it though, you're very helpful! :)

[bobc]

That might work...a short story. It's always interesting how these things evolve. Glad you found my comments helpful. ...bobc