Green
Green is the color of an unripe banana,
Of an arboretum frozen fast
Against the winter's cold chill
With an artificially forced warmth
Mimicking the heat of sun of summertime,
Mocking a season in which all is dead or dying,
As I long for a hot death in the sun's violent rays,
Bathed in starlight spinning in the
Cold hard vacuum between suns and stars,
But I lie—For I do not long for death,
Nor does she yearn overmuch for me,
Having known me intimately already
So many times previous, and for so long
No, it is my curse to live,
And one I would force upon you as well,
Did my moral imperative allow it—
As it is, all I can do is ask,
Ask that you keep on going,
Ask that you never give up,
That you never give in,
That you never bow down under the
Straining crushing weight of
Years that pass interminably,
Flitting by to be remembered as eyeblinks,
No matter how many eternities it took to live them through
At the time
And it's been a long long time since I lost my innocence,
And I remember nothing from before that,
Nothing important enough to attach itself to memory,
Other than a vague, and imprecise, and somehow incomparably precious impression
That once upon a time, I didn't need a reason for laughter
I've never laughed at death, nor blinked at danger
(Except when I was also laughing at it),
Something I've been told was foolhardy
While sitting in conversation around
One of the great tables in Valhalla
I laughed at that, too, though the
Wisdom of doing so may have been questionable,
Considering the speaker was a god who'd given an eye
In the pursuit of wisdom—
Never mind that the ravens keep him well-storied,
It takes far more than a thousand words to paint a picture sometimes,
And these days the pictures themselves are subject to
Manipulation and mutilation and so not necessarily truthful,
Though in a sense such warpage also serves to reveal a certain truth of its own,
If one but knows which angle to view it from
And so, in a sense, I return to the tale of my innocence
Of which I am no longer possessed,
But I remember
That what I used to have
Was green
Copyright © Richard R. Best 2003
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