paper yellow

Another day weighted with the scuff and tread of the stranger, as bright as treasure, as blinding as pride. Huddled among all these colors, paper pale and dyed-cotton darker, I mumble my varied breathy threats. Words spit-shined and cast away into the wind and the weeds. Each sulky breath shambling into towers and basements, oaths and curses and the clumsy account. Clouted with a spectrum these eyes never see, they turn to bruise and ache. The proud bouquet of such lovely promise, the cold retort of some sullen gun. I imagine you always everywhere.

It becomes a shift in balance, a swallowing of dead conceits. It amounts to a trick of mirror and persuasion, the press of ink an ancient remainder of first impressions. The blank page already a step into the brutal pursuit of some other end. The font of bluff and bleat settled the instant that path is noted, the moment the beast becomes a name. This is that bottle, tossed away in the ocean. This is that presumption bound to be proved false. The anchor made of wishes drags in a direction, so far away and immeasurably deep.

You become these golden moments, the kiss of sensation catching in the wind. The sun blazes down, grapefruit fallen from the tree, a Tonka truck entangled in web and weed. The reaching rose a fey pastel, petals lost paper yellow in the tangled green grass. You slip between the flickers of perception, so many stillnesses mistaken inevitably for intent. From the fire bright sparking of the lit fuse to that early shine of that first star caught. From some color struck into my skin, to that glow you leave woven between the seams of the day. Something written down, aging into some shade of true.