kayumangi

kayumangi, morena

A dear friend—a sometime poet

noticed how I had a penchant for earth tones,

natty browns, they said, and

the sound of it—natty browns,

the mouth feel of it,

it warmed me like whiskey.

The same friend gifted me a graphic

t-shirt : Brown Jesus, it read below a

minimalist take on the messiah,

a few vectors for hair and beard and pinpoint eyes,

the icon's skin, the color of the dyed

cotton, a tawny brown. I wore the shit out of it.

negro moreno, kamagong

In the Quiapo district of Manila they worship

the Black Nazarene, carved in Mexico from Mesquite,

the icon's face glinting from the oil of the millions

of hands that have touched the grain of his face,

in a gesture of supplication, a gesture of radical affinity.

polychromatic perversity

And one dog day afternoon we walked past the New Jalisco bar

and the pride flag above the entrance—it was so different,

I had to stop to take a picture. I thought it was a trick of the dusty LA light

reflected from the brutalist buildings downtown.

Instead of the familiar bright primaries and secondaries—

warm earth tones: cinnamon, chartreuse,

tangerine, olive, indigo, a purple more mollusk than electric—

all of it lushly scintillant, maybe even quixotic, a major seventh.

these colors don't run

And what do they mean,

what do they mean when they say color blind,

How is it that everything solid becomes air,

but the history of the world is

in our names, our faces, our skin, indelible.

in this chaos of the sun

everything is incrementally, sometimes

radically new—a painterly progress, countervalent,

despite the craftsmen's desultory protestations—

samo samo

but sometimes just different tinctures

of the same poison.

Children of indigo, burn down the world

in a riot of color. In the void between

firmament and sky, the only covenant—

Kind friend, I see you and you see me.