My Days As A Produce Detailer

All day I made things oranger.
If the purple of a particular plum seemed
less than succulent I shot the fucker full of more
purple and buffed it until it glowed like the chrome
of a muscle car. No shit, you could stare into one
of those plums and tweeze your eyebrows.
I didn't exactly airbrush the bananas,
but I might as well have, and still fantasize
about it sometimes, fantasize about airbrushing
bananas with the image of Jesus, or Elvis, or the
Lucky Strike cigarette logo. I was lauded for my gifts
with green, the whole spectrum, and it was hard to get
me head around the idea that a head of lettuce,
say, or a cucumber, or a pepper could all be somehow
considered green, but they were, and each needed to be
radiant and unreal in its own way. The Mexicans and
Vietnamese all thought I was some kind of magician,
which obviously I was, even as they also clearly thought
my brand of magic was pure batshit craziness.
If they looked at my labors as criminal --and who,
really, could have blamed them?-- they never let
on, God bless them, not a one of them ever let on.