On Being Extraordinary

It's all relative.
Relativity.
Pulled theories from
scientific maniacs.
All of us forms
walking around with our
mighty opinions.
We hold them close
to our hearts.
Those sordid opinions.
Black, smoky,
the takeover of a
flameless, coalless soot.

Did you forget that when
it was all formed
there was extraordinary heat?
Cripples, mangled and vacant
creating out of their minds
the most perfect
diamond necklace you've ever seen.
Volatile teenagers whipping
a wildly blinding core,
broad shoulders waving.
Baseless supernovas all.
Roaming. Laced with every
hue of the brightest spectrum.

And how do you make
blackness out of that?

I would guess, my readers,
that your wrinkled friends,
your old professor, your nanny,
your slow neighbor,
they will tell you,
that it's orange.
It's yellow, it's blue, it's red, it's purple.
It's different.
But bursting with right answers all.
They're about the work,
and the thought,
and the creation.
Spinning and spinning
and curving itself on a giant
potter's wheel.
Not manned.
Not womanned.
By any hands
I've ever seen before.

Ancient boaters on the
dusted coast
may have fought each other then.
Fists in the air,
gold sweat between the folds
of their fingers.
They may have held
her shoulders with a red piece
of skin on skin.
All of them.

But she was a saint.
Halos adorned her bedroom,
and then it was all the
colors of fire.
The same way the world
looked when it was formed
and not one of them told her
that she wasn't extraordinary.

In the constant dusk,
we get one chance to live
a life belonging to each other.
A life of open richness,
A life trying for heaven on earth.

If you paint by the numbers.
If you don't paint at all.
If you hide your brush
at the bottom of the dusty trunk
in your uncle's attic,
won't you be in a flameless
soot-filled hell?
There is grave danger of being
swallowed by your saber-toothed opinions,
your thoughts that
convince you that you
have done something.

At the sunken lighthouse,
inside the loophole,
you asked me, what about
those extraordinary people?
Don't you want to be one?
Don't you want to burst
like a supernova with the rest?

So, I put on my fortune teller's beads,
and I know that every soul
that has stood on the edge of the world,
and watched the oxygen
crash over the side
in a fall bigger than Niagra,
every soul that has
extraordinary stamped into it,
got there in a magnificent fire.