The Sky Turns Purple

Everyday, at about 5:30 am for just a moment

The sky turns purple

The sun, wakes up with redness in its eyes,

rinses its mouth ocean blue, and the sky

Turns

Purple

I got especially familiar with this summer 2019

I was always up early

By 6:00 I’d enter my former college campus

Find a bathroom

Wash the redness from my eyes

Rinse my mouth ocean blue

And practice poems in the mirror until I wasn’t alone anymore

Then go back to the train

By 8:00 grey and black suits pack each car in commute to work

I’m already at work

My office a Manhattan bound train

My briefcase a throat full of poems

And my boss an empty stomach

Most days I perform well enough for a lunch break by 12 noon

I order a sandwich, with insides full of color and remember when that used to be me

I’m grey these days

Caught between praying towards white clouds and wishing everything fade to black

But by 3pm I’m in a zone

Belting out poems performing as though I’m on Broadway and not the subway below it

Kids are getting out of school and we rap together

Really excited to be in a room with more rhyme than arithmetic

They offer smiles and left over bags of chips from lunch

I know my boss is going to kill me, cause I only take the smile

I love what I do, even if I don’t love where I do it

But if home is where the heart his, he who finds passion always has an address

Everyday, but at about 7:30pm everyday for just a moment

The sky turns purple

The sun slams its door hard enough to bruise the sky

The redness begins to ransack my eyes

My stomach sounds like ocean blues playing in an empty seashell

Everytime the suns goes to bed I remember that I can’t

That a head with nowhere to lay is heavier than any bearing crowns

By 8:00, grey and black suits pack the train tapped out of patience, & pocket change

Shoulders slumped from stress

Can’t be bothered with a damn poem on the way home

And I try to remember what it felt like having one

What it felt like having things

I can’t afford to miss out on any remaining empathy

So I continue, doing poems until I am alone again

Everyone is usually home by 12 midnight

Does not having an address mean you are at home everywhere or nowhere?

My bed a train seat

Pillow a backpack full of everything I own

And alarm clock the sound of sliding doors at the end the of the line

Sometimes I thought this must be the end of the line

But everyday at about 5:30

The sky turned purple

And I got a sense that if a ball of gas can wake up everyday and do what makes it feel like light then so can I

That in my passion I have permanent address

I’ve never performed on Broadway

but I did poet my way into

International spoken word championships

Multiple acclaimed publications

Sandwiches, with insides full of almost as much color as me

And keys

To a home where everyday at about 7:30pm, I look out the window and watch the sky

Turn purple