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Why is blue sorrow and yellow joy?

       Last I checked, blue was the color of

    the never ending sky in summer.

It was the crashing waves

     and paint on your toenails.

        Tears aren’t blue. But the tear

           in your blue jeans – I remember it –

      was over your knobby-left knee.

Blue M&Ms… your favorite.

     And the note you wrote to

        me when we first met was in

           blue ink. You said, “Does a crush

     sound cliché?” And I said,

  “Sure it does.” But we

both knew I didn’t even care.

     I wanted our love as blue as a cliché.

Last I checked, yellow was lightning,

     the light that followed the boom like your father’s voice,

a sound that sent you running downstairs.

     Yellow were the teeth of the old homeless woman on 32nd Street,

and the teeth of the spiky yellow

      comb you used to brush the gum out of your hair.

It was the piss in your cup on testing day –

      positive. Yellow is a lemon: Lemon scented Clorox wipes,

like the ones I used to wipe

        your blood off of the mirror in the bathroom. Yellow – it’s always

such a happy color, yet I don’t feel happy

when I lay the daffodils on your grave

every

                              April

       twenty-

                 first.

Why did our love turn yellow?

And red. Last I checked I didn’t give a damn about red because all I saw was the tear in your

jeans, the dark scab beneath it, and blood over my mosaic in the mirror where you once stood.