Amber

In the enormity of lived experiences, there must exist unexplored, tempting timelines. Timelines where I don't have to do the things I do daily to stay bright, bright, bright. Places where my poetry isn't repetition, isn't a revulsion towards my current identities. I fear confronting myself through a medium as public as the poems I create. Somehow, that particular expression feels tainted, as if there exists a disparity between emotion, audience, erudition. For, I confess, my writing is necessarily to someone; it demands an audience, singular or otherwise. Maybe that's why I increasingly gravitate towards prose- it is easier to hide hurt amidst a jargon of ideas I tried so hard to combine. My mind is unsupportive- it moves on train tracks of numbing singularity: the same path traced over and over, tirelessly. But here, in this form, I throw together the four disparate tracks that the engine painstakingly chugs over, confident that in the search of meaning, they'll gain contexts and intersectionalities that I did not put there.

I love the word "over". Catastrophic and absolute and yet so, so repetitive. It builds and builds layers upon itself; a glorified pile up of the same things, tortured and maimed into new interpretations.

I remember beginning a poem- my one true "grand epic"- about women who saw people as colours, not humans. It was a struggle, for how could I convince the "viewer" to believe, to believe, that the colours and their connotations were never meant to be the expected, the probable, the predictable; they were meant to be subjective experiences for the one colouring people into compartments. For I'd caved in to presumptive tendencies myself. My character in the narrative, I had surmised, would be the only one that would always be yellow. Yellow's a good, happy thing to align myself with.

And in a perverse way, I still do align with its forms. The story is long forgotten and dismissed, the writer too assured in the symbolic significance given by popular perception to ever see it any other way. So she- so I- still rage glaringly yellow. Murky in spots, even; splattered by the desire to appropriate the lived experiences of others for myself. There are pieces that have torn napkins and photographs and tickets and bookmarks decoupaged onto them; they do a petty job at camouflaging the bilious, nauseating yellow underneath. I feel poetic, though, so maybe I'll call it a bright amber, instead.