#513: Green

Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.

Patti Smith

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan thomas, “Fern Hill”

You’re not Dylan Thomas; I’m not Patti Smith.

Taylor Swift, “the tortured poet’s department”

Green

Green with desire,
lust in its seven deadly form,
the green m&m was supposed to
make us horny and we’d pick them out
for whatever the occasion, greenish.
None of us believed that, but it was
fun to say, in our greenness, to girls
we wanted to kiss, and fun to think
about the green of sexual desire
while we were too young to really
know what it would feel like,
on the green grass, or under/over
green sheets, on the green shag
carpet, to be in someone or have
someone in you. But we knew
the green color of horny, and would
grow into it fully in time
with a fiery sadness.
Green with envy,
the greenest of the seven deadlies,
we mostly were free of it
as children, until time held us,
green and dying, as adults, desire
in it’s meanness, metamorphosing
into a persistent feeling of
scarcity, not enough of that green
thing, comparison a killer, the terrible
power of the ultimate green question:
what if everything was different,
more like that, more like him or her,
more of this or that green thing,
Shakespeare’s outcast state.
It’s just a deeper green, uglier,
and it follows us, green knight-like,
into our middle and old age.
No, she’s no Patti Smith, but
when Taylor Swift sings,
“You look like Taylor Swift in this light,”
I feel green again. Against my will
I love her songs and her sometimes
silly, green words, her insistent rhymes
that again, against my better judgment
and all my green armor, make me feel
things. She puts me into some green
threshold between desire and envy,
and memories, though distant
and green, of heartache and break,
they flood back, stupid and green
and I welcome them inside like friends.