With little other than negative thoughts in my mind this morning I decided to take a gentle poke at Kate who wrote a poem about a painting, (an illusion of an illusion). I just wrote a third layer with a hint that only through the act of tearing through the words and the canvas might you find reality, but that you might not like what you see.

I discovered that the artist originally in question was the late Fay Collins who was, without a doubt, a rare talent with brush in hand, as can be further seen (scene) here and I certainly meant no offence to her.

…… I was just fooling around

*

A painting’s such a cruel deceit

No ocean there to wash your feet

No blue sky to sit beneath

No Eiffel Tower, no Scottish Heath

No sun to warm your naked skin

No gentle breeze to sooth within

No wine to taste, no rose to smell

The colours are all chemical

There’s nothing three-dimensional

A magic trick. A lie to sell

Ms Collins! Stand aside, my dear

We’ll fall for no such magic here

Your charming, calming circus acts

Are hiding all the horrid facts

*

And just to give you a further idea of my current state of mind (I don’t produce it as an excuse, because I fear that it may be permanent) I wrote something else yesterday …. it was part of an imaginary conversation between two people. One of those people may have been me.

The scene could be anywhere, but certainly somewhere poorly lit. It’s probably a dingy bar that smells of beer and disappointment. At least one of the participants is smoking a cigarette and watching it slowly rise and disperse itself over the low ceiling. There is a bored female singer in the background, painfully forcing out the last song of the night.

 

“Micheal. Life is shit and then you die. We all know that, of course, though some of you delusionists would like to pretend otherwise. Everything is fake and even those fake things gets recycled into more fake things. The perfect apple in the fruit bowl is made of plastic. Every colour in the world is cheaply produced in some horrid sweatshop factory by virtual slave labourers who struggle to keep their own children fed, let alone happy, just so that the whole thing can go on and on and on. And if you look at it all from a certain angle you can see right through the cheap veneer and you realise that there’s nothing on the other side. Everything is just a cover up. Life is some sort of surrealist painting hastily slapped on canvas to hide the void. But from the moment you first catch a glimpse through the fading brush strokes you can see it forever. And are forever after tempted to jump.”

His colleague watches the last of the smoke gather around the flickering light above him before crushing the cigarette stub beneath his heel and into the carpet.

“I can see that you’re beginning to cheer up, at last,” he murmurs.