The Rainbow Boy

Josh had a thing about, a love of, rainbows.
Josh was simple. Everyone knew that.
"That's why he has this thing, it's all to do
with colours," they said, knowingly - as if
there might be something else in rainbows,
something hidden, that they couldn't see. Each day
Josh painted rainbows.

He knew the names and sequence of the hues,
but saw no need to stick to them.
He'd paint with either brush or fingers, mostly.
Just sometimes he'd use a knife. A single 
colour on occasions. Mostly two or three
or all of them. Whatever colours made 
him feel "electric" or "switched on" that day.

He painted, he would say, the rainbows
in his head, not those up in the sky.
Once he painted one all black - that being
how he felt that day, his 'lectric "sparking
out" on him. His "bows" were always wild arcs
swept across the page. Sometimes two or three
in the same frame, sometimes vertical
and sometimes crossing one another. Weird
at times, and always only them. Nothing
else to spoil the view. 

                        And then
the doctor said that Josh had "moments".
Join the club. And don't we all!
The secrets that we almost grasp, 
know we are inches short of them 
but cannot quite see what we know... 
the hidden things that make us gasp... 
the place we thought we'd entered  
but were a shade away. 
Josh had a moment like one of ours,
a brush with the "thing" of his dreams:
a rainbow whose secret he had heard.
His science teacher triggered it.
He told the class:-
We can prove the Big Bang by the rainbow, 
the where and the why and the when. 
The secret of all that has happened 
is locked in the flimsiest thing. 
Josh responded with a salvo of rainbows,
twenty one full rainbows, closed into globes
like a child's glass marbles with coloured straw rings.
At the centre a blob of violet,
then rings of blue, blue-green and all
the colours out to red. His fondness was
for purple - a mixture that of radiation
from both ends. Bows broke the rules therefore.
There were two-coloured ones: maroon and red,
one white and yellow. 
              
                     So too, the bands were smudged,
as always in his paintings. This time though,
with movement blur, their tails curled back
towards the centre of the page.
The globes were flying out beyond the frame.

And folk began to see his simpleness
as something different, not simply something less.

I have entered this poem for the dVerse Poets colour prompt