Just A Color

if I could afford one of those sleep studies where I am wired to a machine and scientists use a computer program to reveal slices of my brain as bright red, green, or yellow amoeba shapes, alluding to temperatures and activity. They would ask questions like what happens when I think attempt math equations, or can’t find my wallet, or see two men kissing with their tongues on cable TV? Or the color of having piss scared out of me by sudden pounding at the front door. …I don’t know much about it, except magazine articles at the doctor’s office have bright images of brain scans and look real scientific. What would my brain look like if I wore a white lab coat and observed it for a day? Would listening to dubstep look like beserk disco lights, and planning revenge resemble burning tires? Is my September grey matter rusty orange and sanguineous? How do I look? standing in my closet full of jeans and indistinct shirts.
Why did I wake up after only 3 hours of sleep again with my heart skipping around and my dreams bouncing away like a red ball, leaving splatters of my youthful self, the sound of something I was saying, plus there was my nephew in it goofing around and jumping on my back. This was from a time when love stood close to me, before it moved back into the shade. How cruel God because you know I would kill to see him again or talk with him but he sent himself to see you with a gun and now all I have is the muddy water of a dream running through my fingers.
Here’s to the Almighty, the laziest fucker on earth. What did You do?...as much as I didn’t do. My black synapses creep south on 7th Street during never-ending-rush-hour, cursing the god I know and the sun descending in the west like a fiery balloon. It’s OK in Phoenix to stand in the afternoon and flail your fist at the sky, no one minds at all. They can’t hear through car windows, radio ads assaulting their ears. They only see my open mouth, my circular gait. Their brainial spectrums devolve to a quartzy dust with scarlet edges. A weirdly envious shine on their faces; they think “that man is going nowhere”, a place where they shake their heads and choke forth tiny starfish laughs.
I’m stomping down words in Microsoft Word, an app I don’t like because it’s got a mind of its own, and all I control are the commas, inserting them like prisms into the chromatic thoughts that woke me. One night, when the screen has cooled to grey and the scientists have gurneyed up somebody else, there will be the Artist who guides my life impatiently, looking over my shoulder as I spread watercolor with a stumpy blunt stick, not God damn you God, but just a color, blue.