Tonight's Poet Corner: Living In Sepia

Living In Sepia
by Belinda Roddie

This brown medicine doesn't
make me feel better; it just turns
the broth in my intestines just
as brown and leaves me hiccuping
in my bed with mud brown sheets
and a mud brown comforter
and all this mud
filling up the sinuses leading
to my mud-filled brain;
to my mud-filled memories.

I sink in the swamp of beige and
spit out clotted lumps of life
while my arms are dunked in
Mother Nature's dipping sauce
for her kale chips. Does she
toast her dinners with a glass
of the ocean? Do crabs swim
in the crystalline flute?

She's made this world very
beautiful. Autumn reds and
spring greens suit her. Even
the winter whites and summer
yellows are worth a glance. Mother
wouldn't appreciate a canvas
scraped apart with gravel and dirt.

I don't like being forced to
consume anything that results
in my colors dulling. Leave
the earth tones to the earth; I shoot
rainbows between my teeth for
fun, beat my brothers in the competition.
But you say I'm too vibrant, and it's
a sickness, so down the hatch goes
the tarnished spoon, until my spectrum
is limited to a tan strand of string.