Rinsed Out Jazz

I regret not paying attention

at the jazz concert in the tenth grade.

I can picture myself slumping

while the music was trying so hard to lift me,

closing my eyes to block out the colors of bass.

Why will I not let myself be filled with sound,

to feel color and let it nourish me?

Why must the only thing I feel be pain, hunger?

Hunger that washes all color from your vision,

leaving you seeing the world in high and low shadow light.

Hunger that washes color from your skin,

now resembling floor tile, like hospital linoleum.

Hunger that makes my pale bones rip into flesh,

like canvas stretching over wooden posts.

Hunger that sets up an easel

for splatters of my watercolor blood,

but at least it has color.

At least it has life.

At least it does not reek of rubbing alcohol,

dripping over the sides of me.

Instead, drops of liquid vein condense

and fall into the well from which I drink.

The sound of blood clots diluting

is like dissonant jazz.

Passing as art, but really just

a reflection of pain in auditory stanzas.

And the color rinsed from its notes

leaks into my lines of poetry, passing as beauty.

Just as I pass as beautiful.

As I pass as a woman.

As I pass as an artist.

When really my canvas is just stained

And my well is infected with human mortality

and rinsed out jazz.

And as this jazz is watered down,

so is my sense of self.

For the only unique thing I’ll ever do,

is write the words on this page

in an order no one has before.

An alignment of words, new,

but an experience I cannot relive or make again.

No matter how many times I rub my skin

with rubbing alcohol and peel glue from my fingertips,

nothing can bring jazz back to my ears,

nor color into my cheeks.