Michael Mingo
Qualia
The eye-searing saturation
of IKB, a liquid blue paint
that’s pigment-intense, spread
over my whole visual plane;
my head throbbing in the absence
of Advil, or a heartache turned
into a panic attack; just what
your lips on mine stimulate:
such qualities have no equal.
Would such squalls of sensation
never cease. My only wish
is for the aesthete’s existence,
though some may judge me
as a hedonist, an uncured
Epicurean. I would take
their derision as medicine.
Most mornings, I get up
so beset with depression
I sense less than that woman
raised in a monochrome room,
who studied nothing but color
as told by textbooks, data sets
from spectrometers. No one
is certain, no one agrees, what
she learned when she emerged.
Were I in Mary’s shoes, or rather,
in Mary’s mind, could I even
begin to tell the difference?