grey on grey

my words

the words of a painter,
not meant to reflect a depressive state,
but instead, to inject a trace of gradation,
of tone, whenever colour confuses the eye and
distracts it from form, like giacometti-ed transitions,
his colourless spread of darks-into-lights with wet
sticky strokes that frenetically blend weight into volume,
like Kollwiztian-contéd-sfmumato-soft smudges on Ingres,
like the run-away drips of Turner's Aquarelled bleeds,
his dribbled sublimity falling far from tradition,
but mainly, the neurotically-giacomettian line-into-form,
his incessantly-pulled grey-into-grey as if it were clay

a curious experience,
to dream unseen places with such crisp clarity,
details later discovered again when actually there for the first time,
but how overwhelming, to have known a place first-in-a-dream

a few nights ago,
I had one of those long-lingering dreams
which remained vivid for days
beneath the wordless promise
of an unbroken pulse

of a place,
an interior space
punctuated by two round and magnificently-worn wooden doors,
centuried with silence and large-ringed-wrought-iron handles,
black against brown, too heavy to pull
without leveraging all of one's body weight,
but once opened, spilled sun-splitting space into a room
of incredible proportions that spread into another,
each vastly dimensioned and lined
with astoundingly-high plastered ceilings,
intricate moulding, shadowy whites-into-greys
that dripped soft conversations on over-sized artworks-in-progress,
surrounded by teams of technicians
choreographically-contained and at work-without-words

while the second room supported a wall
with a huge canvas that stretched two stories high,
hung in front of a ladder,
and midway up, I wondered outloud at the size of its staples,
when a voice-with-no-face said they were made out of clay,
just as the walls of each room dissolved into gardens,
of flowers and statuary collaring tables
covered with (over-sized portions of) cake,
hundreds of plates lined up in wait,
but beyond all of this, near the edge
of its courtyard-and-old-world-appearance,
was someone I knew, so I ribboned a path
through the gardens to greet her, to whisper,
"I thought you were dead.",
but she smiled and sighed, saying
"Death is a myth."

and in these past few days, since,
I have held tightly to timelessness,
sensing limitless-life,
life-ever-lasting in one folded thought,
that our dead wait amoung us,
to guide and inhabit
pre-déja-vu-ed dreams

while

knowing
this
is one
of my populated solitudes