gender binary v1

[billy]

omg it's wonderful, i love it to bits, brilliantly beautiful: yeah we tend not to do that here hi aurelia and welcome to the site.

oops might have been a good title for the piece.
the last line before you're [ending about me] etc does the trick for me as an end-line. i have no suggestion about the [cc33ff] lines. at present it feels a little dispassionate. it also reads like it wants to leap out and accost the senses. [which it doesn't do apart from the bruised blue lines] maybe a couple of powerful stanza like that would lift it out from the page a bit more. (not too much though) but keep it balanced. maybe more personal [if that's possible] the extended metaphor of colour as gender representation is done really well, i also like how you use it as an emotional image

Hello, everyone! I'm Aurelia, and (shocking, I know) new to the forum. It took a bit of searching to find someplace that offered solid critique instead of platitudes, and it looks like this is the place!
A bit of a preface: I'm a spoken word/slam poet, which is why my poetry seems very scattered and.....odd on paper. If it's easier, I can always submit an audio version if it helps the critique. Also, it's been four long years since I've written anything, so I'm a bit shit.

This isn't finished yet, I'm missing a couple stanzas. Ignore the purple, those are just my notes.


“The gender binary,” someone once told me,
“is not a binary at all, in that a)
a binary is a system composed of two parts, and b)
the rainbow has more colors that pink and blue. [than] not [that] i think
If she is pink,
and he is blue,
every color in between is not purple.” the opening stanza works well enough to show what the poem is going to be about, i liked the restricted colour scheme specially the purple line
I have this friend who is orange, is [i have] needed? it feels like filler [a friend who is orange]
not quite as red as pink, she tells me,
but just enough that it counts.
The days she wears dresses are special occasions, short skirts are a celebration,
make-up is worship.
Most days, she wears jeans like battle armor; her binder is a bulletproof vest.
She is not girl enough to love, would these 3 line stand better on in their own stanza?
she is not girl enough to marry,
she is only girl enough to fuck.
Yellow something something something
Primary colors not red or blue not anything in between
If a binary is a system of two parts,
he is writing his own code.
My other friend is green,
they don’t know what that means yet—
Maybe flesh this out, I dunno, but they don’t know either and not everyone is certain about gender so???
My neighbor is purple,
some days she is magenta
some days he is periwinkle
Purple is not pink or blue,
no matter how much their mother tells them to just pick one. i love the schizophrenic feel of this stanza, the repetition of purple also works well as an underlying punchline.
I knew someone who was pink—
no, blue
no, pink
no, blue
Because that is the only color her father told her she could be
He painted it onto her nursery walls like a contract,
He witnessed it in bruise blue, this and the next 4 lines paint a colourful hurt [no pun intended]
neglect black,
disgust green,
her skin caves like drywall.
When we were sixteen, she signed it in artery red.
Today, she isn’t pink anymore,
she is mental hospital white, and conversion therapy grey,
she smells like drying paint and her hands are so cold.
Ending about me?? Ending about them?? Ending???