No Plainness There

No Plainness There

I feel like a line drawing,
Plain, blank, with no shading.
There’s no color in me today.
Slowly I awake, and my senses come flooding in.
I’m filling in my self,
Colors flooding the paper and spilling from my pen.
Pink for my blush,
Streaks of purple-blue for poetry,
Green for environmentalism.
Yellow for my intellect,
Orange for theater,
And red for my voice.
There’s black for morbidity,
White for my plainness but that’s already there.
And then you steal my painting and rip it to shreds.
“That’s not you.”
And you present me with a portrait of me,
One I don’t deserve.
It’s this beautiful masterpiece,
In it I see myself,
A goddess, wood nymph, muse.
Eyes bright, cheeks flushed,
Lips ruby red and hair spilling
Soft around my shoulders,
A torrent of red against the milky white of my skin.
There’s the curve of my arm,
Angle of elbow, soft roundness of my shoulder.
All wrapped up in soft pale satin
And presented as a whole.
I see in it my poetry, my intellect,
My theater, voice, morbidity, environmentalism.
But there’s no plainness there.