poetry

Sometimes You Are Orange: A Love Letter to My Best Friend. {spoken word poetry}

 

If spring is the eager season, then you are the late bloomer of autumn
You are definitely orange…
Like an orange, or a sunset sometimes
But sometimes sunsets can be purple
Purple is regal.
And rare like orange, but I have heard way more people say that purple is their color, and lavender is their look, and violet is their name, and mauve is their polish, and velvet is their skin, but…
Orange is reserved for the Velma archetype and the Vermilion poke-fan and the Pumpkin Ghost and the rustic tangerine shirt of Merman
You are orange… like, sometimes
Orange… like, maybe?
Like, sometimes I see you by the curb, in construction and
the next day you are gone
Like a traffic cone,
You face the sky like a circus cannon
Sometimes you are so ready to get fired up
Sometimes you are so unwilling, you bolt your soles to the sidewalk
And I forget how planted you are,
posed in pavement
I see you like a pylon in between traffic lanes
No matter how steep your neck, it is always on the line for someone else’s safety
You are orange like Caution, like Slow

Sometimes you are orange like Garfield on a rainy day
Your thoughts are like uncharted Martian sands
They are beautiful in their existence, but still considered alien
Your ideas are a pumpkin patch
Where you can’t really tell which root sprouts which fruit
You just know they are grand and still growing
I have seen you wear orange, like a lion’s mane
like Pride Rock and Lion King
like the goldfish that stays up all night

You are orange like radioactive happiness
like bio-hazardous laughter

You are the beautiful disaster of Guy Fieri’s T-shirt
wearing Mario Batali’s Crocs

Doctors wanted to stabilize you
they told you orange is too abrasive
It is too creative
Orange is Attention Deficit
You’ve already heard them call you
Orange, like disorder
What’s another couple of words before it?

You are orange like a monarch butterfly
Your caterpillar is similar to any other inchworm or millipede
but no one ever sees the difference between a monarch and a moth
Mom said your tantrums could be mistaken for mood swings
Your sleep patterns are not insomnia, but school-related stress
You get extra time on tests, but they were never designed to assess your kind of intelligence.

Because you are orange like a clockwork
One that can be fucked up and brilliant at the same time
Maybe that’s why I think you’re brilliant

Bipolar Disorder is less like a coin, it’s less like two-face,
more like the middle of a traffic light at two a.m.
it is less stop-and-go, more like Slow,
like, sometimes… like, maybe?

I noticed your prescription bottles
And prescription glasses are both autumn orange.

I wonder if it’s difficult to discern
which one changes the way you see the world
and which one changes the way you see yourself.

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After becoming the youngest poet to win a provincial and national spoken word championship in the same year (2014), Andrew Warner has published four collections of poetry, toured in 25+ cities, graduated college at 19, and created his first cinematic poem, Mangoes, on Button Poetry, the world’s largest online channel for spoken word.

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