The Sanity of
Expressing Green to a Blind Man
and the Resulting
Insanity
The question:
I shout to be heard, alone in the darkness of words.
There’s a need to explain what I see with my brain?
There’s a need to tell you of green and the million
shades in between?
And a need to express blue and what it could mean to you?
Please, could you colour inside this blind man’s eyes
the azure of the skies?
The answer:
Vacant dead eyes stare back at me
And mumble incoherence.
I answer with my eyes in the same tone of voice
In those hushed tones that make such a noise
And as a blind man I stumble from word to word
Wrangling insanely with dictionaries learned…
The struggle:
Reverse perspective inverts my world
And shouting quiet screams from the brightly lit dark
No one to hear or see me retch out question marks!
And alone in my mind I chew on a word
Sightless in this quest to express the colour of dragonfly
or bird
For the colour of nothing is all this voice can screen
Words are deaf to the language of red or yellow or blue or
green.
Only in imagination can the orb of truth illuminate my enlightenment
And only upon the image can the sphere sparkle facets explode
the pitching sky.
And here I stand alone in the crowded room with the dead eyed
And here we choke on too much of nothing to say
And gaze at too much of nothing to see.
Just that man in the mirror staring back at me.
Oh! For my tongue to dance in the light!
Oh! To express the green exactly as seen!
Oh! To express the clouds rolling by on a blue carpeted sky!
Oh! How desperate I am to express this diamond existence!
Each facet a prism, bright with perspective, flowering iridescence!
Born on the freedom of language in voice, the challenge echoes,
But dumb is this blind poet’s tongue bound and shackled!
For how to shine the truth at an eye set in a head too long
dead?
To lyrically express the simple magnificence of purple or
red?
And who is this poet to say which is the true hue of blue?
And how to colour inside the blind man’s eyes the azure
of the skies?
The pain:
One humbled poet with too much of everything to say
Condemned to gag on empty words as everything wastes away!
Wasted to the limited noun dribbling from the mouth of this
clown!
Puny words of perceived rational spread naked in the fog of
irrational.
Worse than useless these dead-weight labels,
Mutterings from mouths of babes in cradles.
Words rattle the bars of this cage, once a crisp white page,
As I attempt to free the hue of my truth to you.
And I find that I’m but a poetless oaf!
And the words that blind me remain my only proof
No key to express what this world means to me.
And I need to escape my reflection, escape this prison
Words that had once freed my imagination now lock it from
reason!
The result:
But… At least now I have a good grasp of the word ‘but’…
And again I try to colour the sky,
But the noise of my silence is too much to bear,
And those vacant dead eyes continue to stare.
And I shout to be heard, alone in the darkness of words.
