What color is it when poetry
is lost, leaving only prose
and Prozac and a longing
for nights cold enough to throw
an old familiar blanket
into the dryer just to smell
its heat evaporate
into memories of shipwrecked
eggs and jigsaw puzzles
with the pieces that make up
the eyes missing from the box?
© Jilly’s All Rights Reserved
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Jilly's 
OK, wow. That just pulls us in and through and out the other side of the question. First line is a killer, then just presses on. Prose and Prozac! The blanket and the memory and its all a puzzle, right?
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🙂 There are no easy answers.
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😃
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*it’s all a puzzle. (Knowing your English teacher eyes will be jarred by my fat finger typing on a cell phone…)
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Yeah well, I’m behind on my grading, but it would have been a C- 🙂
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Okay, life is an *incomplete* puzzle. C+?
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D
That’s how I bargain. Wahaha!
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Hahaha!
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Well, I don’t have any answers other than the one I know for sure, and that is I love your writing. I’m gonna read this a few more times.
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Aw! Thank you. And doesn’t a night cold enough sound really good right now?
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You’re welcome. Yes! The heat is nice for only so long. Bring on the cold nights.
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I so love this, and I sure don’t have any answers, but it’s beautiful to read and wonder 😊 Your prose is so poetical! I think there is a specific colour you’ve described, possibly it’s something different for everyone, possibly a colour we all know but have never seen?
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Oh how frequently I have imagined such a color existing somewhere just out of reach.
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Cleverly done.
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Thank you!
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“…jigsaw puzzles / with the pieces that make up / the eyes missing from the box?” From start to finish, this is conundrum and discomfort… except for the blanket. The missing color is the key. The key to lost poetry? Great writing, Jilly!
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Thank you! As a child my Mom would toss a blanket into the dryer and wrap us kids in it when we came in from sledding; I continue that habit when it is cold, even though sledding isn’t in the picture. It is one of the great comforts of this world. Thanks for reading, Charley.
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You are welcome! I totally get the blanket thing.
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Ah, now I get the picture, except for the “box”. Amazing to me how you could sew so many emotions and thoughts into one question.
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The puzzle box! Always pieces missing and in this case, it is the eyes from the picture – all terribly symbolic. My family was too careful to ever lose puzzle pieces in reality. Puzzles were survival in the snow belt of the Great Lakes, as you well know. 🙂
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Oh, you’re right, Jilly … the blizzard-bound days when books and puzzles become necessities. Thanks for giving me that missing piece to complete the picture. Sweet.
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‘What color is it when poetry
is lost, leaving only prose
and Prozac…’ – good question!
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prose and Prozac – fantastic connection – and I can smell that old blanket in the dryer – bravo.
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Thank you!
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Really love the single question way of putting a mode (btw it has to be blue) and use that to describe the cold. Love the prose and Prozac (but I would not like to be there)
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Genius! A long questions formatted into a poetic visual creative craft. I love this…one of my favorites. 🙂 And I love the title. 🙂 Caught my eye. 🙂
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Thank you, Charlie! It was the stuff of my childhood.
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You packed it in with such a remarkable poetic flow and goodness.
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Totally beautiful. Those shipwrecked eggs…
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☺
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I just love this, how one thing leads to another and then you have poetry and, maybe even, your answer.
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Or then I have poetry, after all. Thanks!
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People do go beyond the prosaic since song is all over the place. The loss of that would take color from one’s life.
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True
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Let’s see … old blankets, shipwrecked eggs and puzzle pieces … too much Prozac? Gotta wonder!
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Insanity rules!
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Love prose and Prozac! What amazing questions you pose. I was intrigued by your ending of missing eyes (or I’s).
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Hmmm – the beauty of each reader’s interpretations… Thanks for looking in!
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Well, what a journey – from somewhere “normal” to somewhere really quite strange. There’s something quite unsettling about that ending.
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Indeed, there is. With the loss of poetry comes…? 🙂
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You had me at the first line! What a whirling dervish this poem is!
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Thank you, Frank! You get my vote for most unique comment. ☺
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I’m a fan of shipwrecked eggs.Turning hard-boiled on the hot sands of a deserted island. Never to flavor an eggnog or look up at the blue sky with sunny-side-up eyes. Ha ha!
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Ha! I like that!
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LATE to the reading 😦 Too much Cape Cod — but we are back now. 🙂
There is a rawness to this one Jilly. I get a feeling in my belly reading this…a discomfort….almost a quiet keening…so much missing within this: the serenity of poetry, the memories in the blanket thrown into the dryer to become warm again….and most poignant the idea of working the puzzle, working the puzzle, and almost at the end, the pieces that complete the eyes are missing….not a simple pleat in the coat…or a bit of the mountain side…but the eyes. Every time I read this (3 times now) — I “feel” it more. Does that make sense? And the title and line in the poem — shipwrecked eggs….I think of fragility within the eggshells and somehow they are dashed here…not just cracked or even peeled, but shipwrecked….like the writer was afloate within them and then dashed.
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Thank you for your in depth and accurate analysis
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