Fixated on Colour

Napowrimo Day 21 wants us to write in  “New York School” style, whose poems display a sort of conversational tone, references to friends and to places in and around New York, humor, inclusion of pop culture, and a sense of the importance of art (visual, poetic, and otherwise).   

Of NY pop culture I am totally ignorant, and until I read some of the poems posted to this prompt, this kind of rambling self-indulgent poetry had never come my way.  But you know me, I’ll always have a go at something new!  You have been warned!  This also covers Miz Quickly’s day 20 prompt wanted us to Fixate on Colour.

Fixated on Colour

Have you noticed how in any given street,
you see a bewildering  eye-wounding array of colour?
You know, that Mr Freeman? He’s a keen gardener,
yet he plants African marigolds of the vilest orange
right beside dianthus of baby pink.
Next door the front garden is full of plastic,
yellow and red, mostly, though I did covet
a blue and white football yesterday.
Let’s face it, the kids have to play somewhere.
Along the road a bit there’s a patriotic display
of salvias, alyssum and lobelia alternately
around a six-foot square of grass.  That’s it.
With all the gardening programmes on TV these days
you’d think someone would introduce a bit of Capability Brown.

And then there are the front doors:
a row of houses apes a Monopoly board
or maybe a Jackson Pollock scatter-gun picture
-from dog-scratched patchy black
to chi-chi aubergine or defiant emerald green,
and every colour in between