Real colorblindness usually means confusing particular shades, often reds and greens, rather than losing color altogether. Jay Mortimer's "Colorblind" stretches the word into something bleaker and more figurative: a mind whose thoughts see only "dirt, dusk, and ebony / night." The poem's small drama begins when the speaker reaches for a color that has been missing. Its central idea is that numbness is not rest but confinement, and that the return of feeling, the thing the speaker most wants, may bring the pain back around with it.
The opening is already uneasy. "Maybe I can get some sleep / after this fever of a dream" turns on a tentative "maybe," and the logic is odd. Dreams happen during sleep, so wanting sleep *after* a dream suggests the dream is something endured, a feverish, overheated state to be survived. The heat matters because the next stanza goes cold and dark. The speaker seems to swing between burning and nothing, with no comfortable temperature in between.
That second stanza is the poem's hinge, and its layout does a lot of work. "Colorblind" sits alone on its line, and "night" dangles by itself at the end, as if the thought has run out of road. The preposition is strange, too: thoughts are colorblind "of" dirt, dusk and ebony night. It can be read as blindness *caused by* these darknesses, or as thoughts made *only of* them. The list also darkens as it goes, from ground to fading light to full black. The hard *d* sounds in "dirt, dusk" thud like footsteps downward, while "ebony" is a richer, almost luxurious word than "dirt," as if the darkness has a pull of its own.
Then comes the carousel. "Is this my carousel? Yes." The speaker asks and answers in the same breath, a brusque inner dialogue that sounds like admitting something. A carousel is a clever choice of image. It is circular, musical and tied to childhood, and its horses rise and fall without ever getting anywhere. The brightness of a fairground has been drained out: "heartache bleeds silver here." Silver is the nearest thing to color in a grayscale world, cold and metallic like moonlight or a mirror, and it replaces the red that bleeding would normally bring. The next line, "I warn my horses of regret," is both tender and futile. Horses bolted to poles have nowhere to run, yet the speaker keeps trying to protect them, as though they were impulses or feelings that might bolt.
The turn arrives with "can i slip into the red?" Two things change. The lowercase *i* makes the speaker smaller and less certain than the firm "Yes" a moment earlier. And red, the first true color named, is something to *slip into*, like a garment or a hiding place. It could suggest passion, anger or danger, and the poem doesn't choose. Given that red is among the shades real colorblindness most often blurs, the choice feels fitting, though that is a resonance rather than a stated link. The regret that the horses were warned about also returns in the *r* of "red," as though the wish and its cost were already tied together.
The ending is only five words long. "Finally, i feel again" has the plain relief of someone exhaling. Then the ellipsis and the repeated word, "...again?", undercut it. The doubt can be read two ways. Feeling again might mean feeling the heartache that bled silver. Or "again" is simply what carousels do, so the return of feeling may be one more turn of the ride. Ending on a question mark rather than a full stop leaves the poem looping, which suits its central image.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular meter or end rhyme. It has five short stanzas, mostly couplets, with the broken second stanza as the exception. Quiet sound-links such as "sleep" and "dream" do the work rhyme might have done. The lowercase *i* and the trailing ellipsis make the voice sound whispered rather than declared.
What makes "Colorblind" worth reading is its refusal of a tidy recovery story. In very little space it holds one metaphor, one setting and one reversal, and it admits something many people recognize: wanting to feel again and dreading what feeling brings can be the same wish. The last "again?" lingers because the poem never says which kind of "again" it means.