Cultural Prompt: “Learning to tame your grays between the dark and the fake…”

Float While Others Flail

A poem of division

There was a day when gray was gray, perhaps from fog or raindrops — perhaps, a lack of sleep or confusion or that extra glass of wine.

Now, gray has become black or white or orange, no longer abstract or ambiguous. Being neutral or uneventful or middle-of-the-road is not an option in a divisive sea where blue waves drip red with blood.

We are not mottled or marbled, monochrome is out of fashion. Stark is the color of anger, illness, and fear. Beige, buff, and biscuit have lost their sheen while we drown in criminal crimson, upchuck orange, gaseous green, and and pee-pot yellow.

My love of color hijacked by the implosion of humanity, kidnapped by discord and disharmony, lost in a flood of ferocity and fury. I hear the colors on the news, in discordant discussions and hateful hollers. My ears bleed from the screeching hues of putrid pigments plastered on screens and hammered in my heart.

I long for a gray morning, neither day nor night, lost between the veils of misty microcosms. I long for whispers, murmurs, sighs, and simple silence. I long to float in a silver sea, remembering when life wasn’t gaudy, greedy, and garish.

I long to float while others flail.

© Dennett 2020

In response to Francine Fallara “Learning to tame your grays between the dark and the fake…” Blue Insights Cultural Prompts — November 2020