No more blue eyes

we’ve done that.  

We’ve seen them: pale and sparkling
soulless.

We’ve read them: like cloudless skies
shoreless oceans
endless summer days in
personless pools.

No more aquamarine, green-blue glowing
pure
uncorrupted, perfect azure.

And too: no more straight noses, blonde hair,
skin like lovely death.

Give me: sightless
give me: darker
give me: scarred and uneven
give me: the rest of us.

No more cookie cutter faces
chiseled, heart-shaped, evoking Cupid
with uncanny, deadly accuracy.
We’ve seen them—these faces unlike our seeing
every day, eachwhere—and having seen,
we’re done.

Look in the mirror and tell me
what was wrong with
brown?

brown eyes
brown hair
brown skin

brown brown brown
passed down decades and centuries
of brown lives in brown earth
brown pasts and futures the color
of topsoil.

Describe to me:
brown like amber
like willow bark
like leaves crunching their autumn scents
on the air.

Give me more words
for this human color
wrapping around souls more numerous
than green, than sorority
blue.

Tell me how the sun shines into brown
eyes
and ignites the fires
within.

Don’t stop here—with calm,
aesthetic acquiescence.

Give me clouds
and rain 

and nights filled with muddy footprints
chasing winking fireflies barefoot.

Hair like deep space
bouncing 

rich as the hills that reach down
remembering millennia. 

Harvests and hardships,
calloused feet echoing
our ever dance— 

Our stars reflect us back
in the dark
of ageless eyes.

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