poem for my mother

colour is admirable
but it is something other people do
and we live in that
all that’s mediated anyway

If I step outside the palette’s different

I’m much the same about colour
breathing
into a teal or a gold or an outbreak of red
but there’s no palette in my brain

and it’s tiresome, because it’s something women
are just supposed to do
and it’s tiresome, and feminism is tiresome
but colour

colour is interesting
when you can see it
it’s all up in your brain
because it’s certainly not ‘out there’

and once again my mother is present
her tongue out just a little bit as she licks
the last of the stamps onto
the last of the letters
to the last of the cousins
yes indeed
yeah unto the end of the established world

we didn’t get here without hard times
evolution isn’t civil
it’s just a very long pathway to a door
that leads us to the ability to think about these things
and if you haven’t

done

anything today then what use is it, what was all the point of this
eating and peeing and crawling and dying
and being remade into seafoam and jade and spiderlings

the having done something is not for history
it’s for you
simulation or inexorable rush of consumptive fire
it hardly matters
if this day wasn’t for you

and your family, of course

and of course

your family can never be big enough