Eric M. Petit
Lost in the Thick, Painted Night
He walked the world with a stone face and flint, midnight eyes
With feint stars set somewhere far to the back of his restless mind.
The hard edges of things and people had driven them deep and deeper until
Their light was dim and far away; a light like greyness, like thick fog.
The world he moved so desperately through was hard and weary to walk,
Like pushing through the viscous lines of an oil painted, canvas earth.
The people were painted rough and thick, abstract and at odd angles to the earth.
He would look at them a long while without knowing what and who they were.
The buildings and places were too hard and sharp, even the air felt stiff and strange.
The world was harsh lines and thick, oiled edges and he was a flowing, fluid, watercolor man.
The sounds and colors were jarring and loud, blunt hammer strokes of a broad brush.
He did not touch the hard people and dark places, afraid they might engulf him,
Afraid they might dissolve his smooth lines and blur his softness beyond repair
Or smother him in the thick and heavy words that clung to his hands and heart.
He kept his head down and eyes forward, always searching for the exits, the escape
To that other world he knew must exist, must lie somewhere just beyond the corners of the frame.
He did not want to be a part of this world of painted, painful clocks and the living lies;
The colors were all wrong and the feelings all broken and shattered like sharp
Shards of glass on the too hard pavement of the dark and weeping streets.
He wanted so much more than this world of thickly moving men and women would allow.
He longed to flow like cool water among the rocks, like a wind among leaves.
He longed to sail smooth currents and powdery waves far above the groaning gloom
Or dive and dance among the trunks of trees and whisper through the stalks of grass
But the world of steel-grey gravity pulled at his heels and lay heavy stones in his hands
To carry about in the perpetual grinding motion of the waltzing, shuffling dead.
He did not want to be one of these contented dreamers of the terrible dreams;
He wanted to escape the endless turning belts and gears of the machinery that made
Such mundane little melancholies and turned out brand new models of the same sad stories.
And so he searched for the flowing, liquid lines of his dreams; he searched for the sunshine
He’d felt in the dark chambers of his mind. Each night he searched for her;
The soft warmth of her hands and the cool sound of her voice, her laughter
Tumbling through the canyon walls of his veins. He searched for the eyes
That would see past his stony face and midnight stars and into his warm, red heart
And though he did not know it then, far out across the wide and lonely earth
Lay a watercolor woman, lost in the thick, painted night, reaching for his hands.