Member-only story
Ode to Orange
A poem
No one writes a poem
about the color orange.
Or the fruit orange.
Or the aging hooker who’s seen
the insides of too many smoky bars,
and asks, “Orange you going to come see me sometime?”
Orange is a lively, warm, attractive color —
attention-getting, friendly.
Also a warning — don’t come any closer!
Like a flame — beckoning, compelling—
but safe only at a distance.
To Isaac Newton—a synesthetic—
orange was the color of the key of D.
A beam of light passing through his prism
must have looked to him like a concert
at the Royal Albert Hall.
Orange once was the color of sunrise,
a robin’s breast, a field of ripe pumpkins,
the Lamborghini of my wet dreams.
These days I see orange as the color
of Satan’s testicles roasting over the fires of hell.
And now I know that orange is dishonest,
not even its own color at all,
but rather the blending of red and yellow,
primary colors that married too young,
gave birth to orange,
and haven’t spoken since.
Orange is an angry lava flow,
an old-growth forest incinerating itself,
the glowing eyes of a stalking demon at midnight.
Orange is everywhere, a terrifying tsunami
of hatred and destruction.
This is why I’m so Blue.
— with thanks to my twisted friend Dan Lee
