Colourblind

Can a chameleon ever tell its true colour —

the one it was born with,

or the one it will decay in,

disintegrating slowly into a pale to paler,

thin to thinner outline of flesh, then just bones, 

the rot in its spineless skeletal existence

softening its grunge pungence

as if subtlety were the key to afterlife.

Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, violet,

shades of a rainbow and some more,

all of it dyed into the epidermis of your skin,

choosing and changing at will,

from a time so ancient you can't quite recall,

as if volatile and vulnerable were synonyms,

as if you were actually a chameleon,

as if your conveniences could mirror their wars for survival,

as if your absent spine could be blamed on evolution.

You shift shades like a survival reflex

older than language, 

a choreography stitched into your blood

by ancestors who learned

that honesty was just another word for extinction.

You inherited their tremors,

their masks,

their instinct to kneel

before the safest possible lie.

And somewhere between all the faces you borrowed

and the colours you rehearsed,

your skin stopped being skin

and became a map of every life

you pretended was yours.

You smear on identities

like war paint in a battle you never chose, 

a battle where the enemy

is simply anything that requires a spine.

You think you’re changing colours, 

but what if you never changed at all?

What if the world kept peeling away its own layers,

repainting itself every second,

and you mistook the universe’s convulsions

for your adaptibility?

What if every colour you wore

was simply the residue

of a reality that no longer exists?

Because some creatures don’t evolve.

They just remain,

residue of note in an ode to existence,

a misprint biology didn’t bother deleting.

And if one day the universe

finally remembers

to correct the fallacy that is you, 

you may finally discover, albeit too late,

that beneath all your shifting hues

there was never a true colour at all,

just a redundant outline for a shape

waiting to be erased

the moment everything falls into place.