The painter combated the gray day with an entire tube of yellow.
When finished, he sat in front of the canvas as if it were the sun.
Lemons plucked from summer trees morphed into liquid buttercups void of lies.
Somehow he had highlighted happiness from defunct childhoods across countries.
It was an altar that didn’t require sacrifice or playing chess against segments of time.
In the gallery, the catharsis would be amplified though Icarus’ wings perpetually melted.
They had all become fatigued from living online.
With enough boredom, solitude shifted into plateaus of loneliness.
Every day faces became smaller, and the wave from across the street at the mailbox invited a potential epiphany.
Every set was a series riddled with memory.
Even a null set formulated absences, a treatise on entropy that unfolded beyond grief’s harbor.
The quilt was a timeline without meter—and desire, something to hold on to, not an anchor but a sail.
Someone kept sending unfinished stories that followed like a dream that wouldn’t end even though the dreamer kept waking.
In the Diaries of the Somnambulist every dream was a new city, a magic room in a house that multiplied.
When the moon perched before darkness, its pale, faded light taunted night.
An organ played in an empty church, echoing through the nave where angels wept in stained glass windows because they were afraid.
After the final scene, the antagonist in the dream play removed her costume backstage but couldn’t get out of character.
Her family missed whom she had been but were, admittedly, mesmerized.
Without props, her life became a drama of the absurd and not a tragedy.
It was silly—all the searching for something to save.
The garden whispered into late November in a duet with the neighbors’ landscape machinery.
Sweet pea vines still flush green, and the decorative grasses wore tufted plume hats.
Snap a photograph and call it Still Life with Such and Such to salvage something before the dark velvet curtain call when the moon again became a trusted beacon, a pendant poised on night’s thick neck.
Consult the book of titles on the nightstand, the necessary orientation.
Sadly, the whole day couldn’t be a poem or a painting of sun.
There were more chores to do, and it looked like rain.