[Newspoetry] on being blue

[gillespie william k]

We all of us thought we knew what it meant to be blue.

Tommy's idea of being blue was that being blue wasn't about knowing what
being blue was about, being blue was about finding out what it meant to be
blue. So he would try different things, different hats, different bars,
different brands of cigarettes, and tried to see whether they were blue.

To Tony, nothing was blue. He stumbled around in a funk, his boots
clambering over railroad ties, because nothing was sufficiently blue. To
his eye, everything was green, or, worse, rose-colored.

Me, I felt I know what it meant to be blue. I was blue. And to me being
blue wasn't something other people could pick up on. I know that most of
them didn't think I was blue at all, but I remained serene, because being
blue wasn't about being recognized as blue.

Blue was a way of being.

 One night I was extremely blue and I was at the Pig and saw Janice. She
was blue, too. It was kind of intimidating, how blue she was, but I
remained serene. And I took comfort in the knowledge that I was truly
blue.

Janice was going on and on about how her boyfriend had gone insane, and
locked her in their house, and then had tried to crash through the walls
in his jeep. Somehow, that all seemed very blue. I almost cried, and I
felt really very green.

But the light in the bar was green, so I looked white, and I decided to go
with it. I told Janice that there were institutions that could probably
look after her.

Later I was trying to recapture what it meant when I was blue. I was
walking across a bridge feeling blue, dimly aware that the night was full
of saxophones, and imagining that I was smoking a cigarette, though at
that point, I had quit for the 13th time. 

And I thought about rainbows.

A few years later I met Tony. He was wearing rose-colored glasses and was
complaining bitterly about the ozone layer. He wore an aluminum hat he had
fashioned himself. I was in a hurry to get back to work, so I didn't ask
him about being blue.

Tommy had disappeared and nobody knew what had happened to him. We all, I
think, understood that he had become truly blue, and was no longer visible
to us. Somehow, he had hit upon what it meant to be blue, and had left the
spectrum altogether to go to an extremely nuanced place, where, although
everything was blue, some things were bluer than others. 

Me, I realized some years back that I'm not blue. I'm more of a mauve.
It's who I am and I've come to terms with it.

I'm just not blue.

I can't help it.


w w w .
w o r d
w o r k
. o r g