Stare

I thought, maybe if I stared at it long enough,

It would become more human to me;

It would make more sense and perhaps transform

Into something real, something tangible.

The first things to break apart were the colors;

After fifteen minutes, the blues parted with the grays

And the skin-tone ruddy browns and the amber sunsets

And the bright skylights and the black tar

Were only silhouettes of what they were before, and now

Seemed only to be memoirs of color and light, 

The colors lost, without meaning.

Next it was the shapes; they turned from perfectly-angled rectangles

To a mess that every geometry teacher would vomit at the sight of;

Lines transformed to something less than real;

Circles couldn't be pi-r-squared into oblivion, they just weren't

Nothing was, nothing could be, 

And the greatest abomination to math everywhere

Was there, on that paper, in my head and in my thoughts. 

It had been a solid hour of staring and my eyes were growing weary

But I was determined to squeeze out all the meaning out of it

So I sat there, still as a statue, watching the painting

To see if something inside it would reach out to me. 

The first thing I saw was a hand, its fingers bursting from the canvas

And beckoning me forward, calling me to join in its life

But I was scared to reach forward, to touch painted fingers

To change whatever it was that I was living.

It was after two hours that I had to look away, the hurt became too much.

The painting, in all its glory, was now clear to me:

It was not a disarray of shapes and lines and colors, it was one whole picture

It was something I'd been scared to look at, scared to face

And now, as I looked back one more time

I found myself face-to-face with nothing but pure white, 

For each color had exhausted itself, and every meaning, everything I'd wished to achieve

Had been nothing all along. 

And I'd stared at the blank sheet of paper, willing in vain

For it all to change.