If you are as colorblind
in your world
as you claim to be,

why are some things there
never just black
and white to you?

Right, wrong,
up, down,
brutal, gentle;

no obvious divides
between them,
only dissolutions 

from one shade of gray
to the next 
in your world.  

There’s always
an excuse, a reason.
You stress them to us;

not all grays,
not all of them,
you say.

Are you being
the shade of gray
you want to see in your world?

Have you advertised
and marketed and sold others
on the shades of gray of your world?

Are you being
the commercial 
you want to see for your world?

You don’t understand these questions?
There’s a translation.
It’s written in red, so it may not work for you.

But it’s not my place 
to tell you how to feel.
It’s my place to feel in as many colors as I can

and then to talk about it,
to be the feeling
I want to feel in my world.

You don’t see colors. I can see that.
You don’t see me. I can see that.
Exclaiming that I’m wrong to say that?

I can hear that loud and clear.
Clear as a painting.
Loud as an explosion of paint cans

being hurled against a wall.
A gray cinder block wall.  Red paint,
blue paint, siren-crimson,

gunshot-blue.  Redlined
neighborhoods. Piss-yellow
phone calls to the police.

Your burned coffee
tastes more wrong when there is color
peeking out of your gray.

You have gray parks in your world
and they get a little greener
when there’s a suspicion of color there,

not that you would say that,
of course, as you are color blind.
Only shades of gray in your world

which looks like my world
except yours looks like a fog
settling on mine:

a red pox blanket; a sheet
pinked by blood and fire; 
a blur of blue;

a spill of scarlet — 
none of which
you can see.