Painting in the Dark

One for freedom, two for poet, three for happiness, you’ll never get…. As words flow and time unravels forward, you stare, empty handed and empty eyed, at the blue and green and orange hues of the sky, believing it could as well be an ocean, someplace black and deep and silent and forgiving where it ought to be so easy to drown, to breath down on life and light and hope and pain, and exhale the only thing that’s left: you may call it delusion, you might prefer despair. As morning moves into afternoon and the music repeats itself in endless loops of strings and drums and weary voices, you dance by its tune, you sit here, scaring words into being on this blank page, writing wriggling, screaming, butterflies with scabbed wings which, nevertheless, taint your fingertips as you run them over the fresh ink of their existence. One for doom, two for a curse, three for prayer, expect much worse…