Picture a palette,
a lattice of paintblocks
like puddles collecting
the drops of a rainbow.
Each one unique
as the prime of a snowflake’s
descent and discrete
as a tightly held secret.

They ripple with boredom
and lust for their contrasting
company, whether to
plunder for pigments,
spread word of their own
or else simply explore
the effect of escaping
their own monochrome.

Through brushes with fortune
or strokes of bad luck,
the old borders are broken.

Colours run,
bursting their banks
with tributes of hues.
Tendrilous tentacles
tickling tones in

whirlpools
always
curling
round the
inevitable point
with antlers engaged
in fractal attacks
of yin and yang

but always melting
speck by speck
in dying births of secret tinctures
and this is where the life is surely –
fire unfolding from the death of coals,
burning order long since mined
from history’s unbroken rules.

Picture a lattice
of frantic kaleidoscopes
spiralling down
to a sole monochrome
and see for yourself
why people build walls.

They’re worried the world is turning to ash.
Sterile and flat.
Static and cold.
And maybe they’re right.
All comparable bursts of complexity
in reactions of decreasing entropy would agree.

But you can’t unmix paint
and if you could
the people who would
would cease to exist.

They are fire themselves.

Products of order
exchanged at the borders
they seek to build over.

They would put themselves out.

And they will.

They will melt
as we still to a brown.