Around The Block

He's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered
paintbrush shrapnel.

It's white. It's so pristinely, unforgivably white in this room, like that canvas he's had locked in a staring contest has begun to expand and enshroud everything his eyes once saw - every vista and valley, every vibrant range of nature through which his imagination danced suddenly blizzard-struck and snowblind - beautiful in its poetry, but an ivory hell for the barefoot man trapped in its banks.

All his notebooks are not books, but discarded scar tissue - compound fractures compounded on failures - These words are just the graffiti pissed from an unworthy heart, or so his mind has convinced him, this paper deserves its clear pristine purity, the ink he drips and scribbles serves no purpose but to lower its value - and his brain spits savage "You don't write, you just make paper dirty."

Perhaps this stands as why these books hold only half as many pages as they could, or why crumpled sheets have colonized the floorspace around his trash bin - protected by the caltrop field of broken brushes that paid the price for not painting what he wanted. And he knows he can't leave until something scars the scenery. To step through this room is to pierce his skin and bleed out through his feet - To walk away from art is to die, so he sits and stares as though challenging the sun "I dare you to blind me"

And yet why? Why, when his hands could craft worlds of colours un-named by our primitive speech, worlds that wrought envy from the richest and most content because their life could not approach the harmony sung by his pigments, worlds that illustrated that on the Seventh day, God rested - and he took up the slack.

Why, when his heart could string words, words that when grouped each carried the weight of a life sentence, words that would inspire life-long writers to vows of silence because they felt they must never again insult his medium by tarnishing its shine - lest it cease reflecting all creation to the reader.

This is a man who could create things of such beauty that we would forever name the stars pollution of the eyes.

And yet.

It's white.

And he's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered paintbrush shrapnel, trying to decide whether inspiration or starving to death would be a more accurate depiction of mercy.