A Bauble of Color

The eye takes it in; the lungs then breathe it out.

At times, I say my favorite color is pink--because my favorite color is pink. (In such ways, we see how spoken language coincides with belief, despite the struggles between competing beliefs in the ephemery of self.)

Does the color of rust, almost red, add to the sense of blood, even in the absence of oxygen? If you scrape far enough through the pink, does green appear, or bare worn wood tinged with green? Who lives on that pink island in that shallow sea of green?

My eyes are working, you see, so I can take it; my tongue is exercising so I can make it. Speech is what comes after is. Not "it." "Is." Being in the process of being.

The senses are a swarm, not a handful. They are not separable as fingers. They do not precisely diverge so that only one appears at a time. I hear the sound of rain as I watch these words being typed onto the screen.

What that does is make me wonder who the watcher is who waits to see what words we type.

I can smell the scent of banana in a glass of beer with no banana. I can smell prunes in beer where none suspend.

You must understand, it is not beer. Not the various flavors of beer as if it were just a beverage, a liquid contrivance of human ingenuity to create flavor out of random events. It is that it is the be-er, the means by which the human experiences life as flavor, the twin sister of scent.

The ales don't ail us, yet we ail through them for we are the same be-ers as they.

Keep a mind straight on a thought, and you will see how it bends down, just ever so slightly, at the horizon. There is not a flat there, but the tension of turning, of a turning motionless but in suspected movement.

Even when you think your heart does not move, it beats.

It beats to be you. And you cannot beat it.

It can only beat itself.

My mother and father's favorite color (shared) was lavender, and remains so for one of them. My father would tell us this because it was what he believed.

If the world were made only of people saying what they believed, there would be no poets to show us how we had strayed from confusion into certainty.

Even now, I feel the dread of certainty, the fear of that clarity of purpose, something so pure it could compel us to kill, something so powerful it could unbeat a heart.

But, beet-red, it beats. It beats for both. It beats for blood. And it beats for bleeding.

ecr. l'inf.