Something like Fireworks

“I see numbers as colours”, said the boy.

“One is red. Two is blue.  Three is green.”

“No you don’t”, said his mother,

“No you don’t”, said the teacher,

“No you don’t”, said the priest.

“Numbers are black on white.

Simple.  Straightforward.  Stark.”

“Not for me”, said the boy,

“For me, they bloom in rainbows.”

But he went to art school anyway,

Where he learnt to draw like everyone else

And he read the same books as everyone,

So he wrote the same stories as everyone else.

He conformed without question,

He drank the fucking Kool Aid.

When he went back home,

He tasted his mother’s disappointment,

He smelt his father’s ghost.

And later, when he was both son and father,

He visited his mother

And sat in the garden,

Watching the most exquisite butterflies

Spiralling high in the pine trees,

Heart-breaking ruby wings on grainy bark,

Watching the grey of death

Swinging across his mother’s face

In the light and shade,

To and fro

Of the hammock.

He saw, as always, what no one else could.

And in soft twilight,

He watched his mother

In the lonely family room,

Sitting under her Kandinsky print,

Reading Nabokov,

Billie Holiday on low,

And he knew she finally heard

The blue

In the blues.