We ate yellow. We lived
without meaning to. All the colors bled and blended in us, and we
lead a ballet in the purple blooms of thistles. The sky was still
heaven, and God was
there, watching us, and He promised
safety and painted that upon the blue of our canvas.
But that canvas bowed beneath the heaviness of heightened hues, the
tangled legs of black flies now dry sticky in the heat-bubbled paint.
I try to
swallow the sunlight, but vomit
fire —small splashes of inertia, oozing
apathy and terror, guilt and cowardice, pure
streaks of exhaustion, an orange and fuchsia gushing of the pretty-grotesque.
It’s because all the sunflowers
withered the day that you
left. Their shrunken corpses are a monstrous reminder that
the dead are not merely an empty space
missing the prettiness it should possess—that space is crawling
with the slow
vegetable-sprawl of
ugly.
So I try to snatch
up the petals but there are only
hungry dry stalks. And there are no stars left
here for me to scribble my sonnets to; there are only
curling paint chips dripping from the canvas, and a memory of that
fairy-tale-time of when everything was yellow.
I am learning that dandelions are only
weeds, and I try to pluck the purple thistles but they draw blood
quick
from my thumb, and now the sky is only
sky, and God has become the sick face of a withering sunflower.