Colour me blue, won’t you?

Here we meet at this divide-

Mine / Yours:

    Me, Minority

            A minor inconvenience.

           ———————————————-

      You, Priority

An unquestioned privilege.

I am the colour of my skin

(Yes I am)

(Yes I am)

But there is more to me,

more than this membranous shell I am encased in

We are not just our pigments.

You smudge us into invisibility,

neatly erase away every trace of our own-ness

The colour of our eyes, the length of our hair

The scars, the moles, the laugh lines

Till we are nothing but our yellows, our browns and our blacks.

You don’t see colour, you say

And I agree.

1,867

That’s the number of little squares Pantone lets you pick from

The number of colours the human eye can detect, distinguish

25

That’s the number of shades of pink your wife shuffles through

Before you paint your bathroom door

Yet 3

Only three colours rise to the top of your foggy mind

When you direct your uncoloured gaze at us

But we forgive your selective colour blindness

Your temporary amnesia

Because it is not rational to lug around a 300-page colour guide to parties

Because it is “an honest mistake”.

Because it “doesn’t matter”.

We have learnt

To do no more than simply smile and nod,

Dripping pity, sweet saccharine

-for me or you? unsure, irrelevant-

And swallow the gibes that rise to our throats

With the flimsy consolation of being the ‘bigger person’

But to hell with big-ness,

You overshadow us anyway.

White contains all wavelengths of visible light-

We are but fragmented distortions trailing behind your prism of self-assuredness