Fridge Painting

 

Turns out, reality leaks.

 

Sweeping brushstrokes, fully loaded,

emptying by degree into the margins

of a child’s roughly coloured painting;

an infant’s creation on a rainy afternoon,

loosely attached and fading on a fridge door.

 

Watery sun, sunflower rays radiating,

oblique raindrops exploding on impact

in growing puddles of broken promises

resonating in a picture book park

under a long-forgotten rainbow.

 

An unreliable observer shivering on a bench,

synapse constructs resolving in doppler ripples,

spreading as nonsense washing over

the sticky voids of an old man’s brain.

 

Beneath the top strip of blue and clouds,

challenged eigenstate images flicker,

sounds reverberating in spacetime,

dissipating memories reduced in the repetition

of a slowly diminishing waveform.

 

Connections broken between concepts;

the familiar gradually disappearing,

lost within the texture of the stroke.

 

Consciousness ringing as wet entanglement

between collapsing waves of shrieks and shadows,

recollections of Sunday mornings with the children,

afternoons with paintbrushes at the kitchen table,

dripping raincoats glistening on hooks

and kids’ muddy wellies in the hallway.

 

Turns out, as paintings fade,

reality leaks.