Free Colour Wheeling

Part I

I was born in the fire of my mother’s

Pale blue fears and my fathers

stale dry desires.

That whittling fire became my womb.

Its palette placenta still hinges upon my thumb.

Mixing my nightly portion of tears into

torrid rain shower of feelings.

I drew a faint lime breathe - I grew somehow,

gangly, at first.

One nerve-speck of resolute hue at each swelling.

One tear-dust of determined tint in every fracture.

Daughters of first generation business men

migrated to a metro city of a third world nation

get no art lessons -

they simply draw upon their flesh

bulbous marks of macho ambitions

their parents paint upon their naked souls

together,

one after another, with a stick, a rolling pin, a broom, a tong, a shoe -

with whatever implement that is most handy.

Something inside me, not me, scraped the edges

of blood thus drawn

and built an invisible body -

A sky blue body of imagination only I could hold.

A leaf green body of worlds inhabiting me.

A sunny yellow body of possibilities ever birthing me through.

A divine indigo body transcending lifetimes at once.

A shocking red body of stories that breed upon my chest.

A fluffy pink body of sentience ready to understand first.

With a brush in hand I excavated the dead, the old

and gave form to that which was ready to stand bold.

A monumental habit

of free colour-wheeling through life was

thus, born.

I taught it this to many thereafter, hesitatingly at first.

Part II

I grew from lime green to bold maroon

Even blazing orange at times.

I evolved

a certain range of tones at every new trigger.

Stayed broken at trauma bones.

Learnt a helluva lot about values of brokenness,

renderings torn.

My brother and sister did something else

with their share of fire.

After all we cooked in it together,

images and stories that we best

thought might serve us in the future.

The nurturers burning in their own fire

think that it isn’t theirs at all, the fire.

Or worst, that there was no fire to begin with.

Now, after 45 examining years, I agree -

it’s a collective constellation of colours

muddied by mixing meanings in a rush, at once.

These brown ashes can still manure the soil

of the soul if we allow it.

I did and live to tell how.

Or

simply keep spinning till colours -

primary, secondary and tertiary,

all separate themselves

in one unifying white whole.

Bring the family together

and tinge the past in gold,

the future in saturations untold

and the present, to delicately hold.

Like a wisp of watercolour at the tip of the brush to

paint a barb of feather in the crown of the bold.

What I mean to articulate is –

Don’t miss the chance of brewing your strange muddy colours in the perfect ecology of naive abandonment that a third world country, or the affluent neglect of the developed countries not just ill-formed parents offer - look at your fingers first, see what they are pointing at, rage while you stomp away in the dry uncertainties of a canvas, strike gnashes if you like along the way, it’s your way, your canvas, you will re-walk that way to plant a story lived a million times but hardly told, you will water it with colours only you can mix well with lived histories and a dash of hope, reap fruits of not just peace but bliss where every authority on the subject said it’s impossible to, thus trauma is reinvented in you.

You will fiercely live to tell vocally.