True Colours

The last thing I want is a life of great Importance.

I believe that is the least-winding road to Impotence.

Let me be stilled from rippling, and settled through, clearly,

To the ghostly white roots at the bottom of my riverbed. Free me to be

Like other raindrops, gliding down the windshield, into a

Chasmic sea of lapis lazuli – Moksha.

For I come from many well-worn canvasses,

Dashing through a chalky colour-run of cultures,

Comprised of clouds, as if a Rainbow divorced from itself

Fell from Heaven, shattering sleek, solid curves into a blizzard.

Thus, am I painted, to withstand Himalayan heights,

Covered in baker’s paper and thousand quarter-cups of flour.

Thus, am I painted, hair curling, cowering in on itself in fear,

To bear the glare of the golden Giza sun.

The harsh conditions and lively celebrations,

The formative trials of meaningless, colourless sorrow,

My people combat with dappled paints and powder.

Emerging, plastered and Pollocked by the shades of History,

Did I inherit a certain one of them, or the whole cloudy Holi?

Imagine with me, History’s red: the blood, wine, carpet.

History’s white: dreams and sleep and peace;

And the blue: diplomacy, development, the sky at harvest.

See how they and other themes are woven into a fleece

And tangled together in the loom’s latency,

Another lofty picture of human activity:

The coat of many colours of many a culture.

But each thread is sentient, a dreadful vulture

Fighting for a greater bite of the tapestry,

And soon we are left with such a noisy mess,

Forcing us to avert our gaze and make the same mistakes:

Wilfully colour blind, I shrink inside. And so,

I seek repose from the truth that we are composed

Of presupposed sadness and love,

Pale blue tears and burning, pinkened ears,

Silent sobs and raucous cheers,

The careless colouring-in, within the lines of our lives.

These two make a pastel purple that bleeds

Into straw-men’s rambling passages,

Manufactured en masse for asthmatic masses,

That consume, out-of-breath - words to repeat

At some worn wooden table, browned by the blood

Of reasonable Voices, ripped open and drowned in the flood.

These meccano-set phrases come with white kerchiefs: wave for defeat.

Purple passages fed to our brains, in like-coloured chains,

Taut and tighter, till all that remains is you:

Gasping for air, turning blue.

In my repose I see the Earth is not Toil. Rain falls heavy

In the solemn place between my warmed candle-lit eyes;

The gentle, plentiful pitter-patter by far

Plays prettier than the tender-plucked strings on any guitar,

And the flute lounges, listening in its case with envy

To the Wind it was designed to make more beauty of.

Refuge from the landscape of greys by scales I seek,

Behind my eye’s bleary lids.

I clamp them shut like oaky shields, to peek

The Earth’s opal ceiling -

Deepest navy freewheeling

With flecks and time-frozen fireworks of yellow, white

And purple: perhaps our purest pigments.

All this behind my worried lines.

I will draw open the heavy curtains, one day,

Of my stained-glass eyes, to permit witness

To a light-show, shifting and swelling like the tide:

My mind, where crackling synapse becomes racing thought,

How midday’s light becomes art, through the West Rose Window.