They can’t make a neon that outlasts UV. Just like you can’t scale down to grey and make all the colours big. But you keep trying, each attempt use a different chord until the entire song comes out in pieces. A mess of notes and their unseen harmony. And there, green is the widest colour. 

Crushed petal on the ground, a solid eon away from progress. You might as well be going back, pivot towards alkaline waters. Back to when you thought blubbery small whales were mermaids, when you’d believe in your body’s way of playing pretend. 

If you temper the hot breath of hell, it’s just a warm pit looking out. Playgrounds and picnics. Those too, fade. Occasionally memories. Mostly electric impulse, slow burn circuit of stardust bodies coming to a halt.

Golden hour is a metaphor delivered by light. The spin of a planet trying once again to get to the point. Your feet in the sand’s hourglass, catching the last stranded ray coming through the curtains. On the other side, daylight and shadows with no lungs. There is nothing brighter than now.

A flower hangs on the tip of your tongue, hesitant to lean in the wrong direction. What is real and what is engineered? Unsure of its stance it remains curled. A crowd congregates and under enough pressure, a garden spontaneously combusts into life, bursting with everything you designed your body for. That’s not the right way to say it, but language takes a while to catch up to poetry. After much debate and philosophical quandary, you are resolute in your final answer: there is no sound in the forest without you. There is no smell to inhale nor picture to frame either. The answer to every question is yes. 

The renaissance was never forgotten, only tested. Its waters occasionally a murkier blue but generally painted in layers that appear to let the light through, as if touched by the very first time and stunned into glowing suspension. You looking at it hundreds of years later are the suspended, just another in a long line of atoms finding new ways to touch light. In second grade, you learn the sun is a star and it blows your mind. At ninety-two, having been a lover and a fighter, you learn something else that is just a former unimaginable and future primitive. By now, it’s business as usual. The myth glosses over the facts in favour of growing a real garden. Technically light.

You try to rise to every occasion, get out of the freshly laundered rot you buried yourself in. The tides and stars churn from pulp to revolution, farm to table, and vice versa. There and back again, if you’re lucky. When you look out the way you came, the pale blue is lost and replaced with other colours painstakingly conjured in a lab. Godspeed compared to evolution. Come and gone, like everything else. And in the end, a choice: blood or jam. The machine only reaps two kinds of rewards.

Morning light caught across a glass lake and a digital replica in approximation of. Here you are, on day one of another round at The Artist’s Way. Not a single horizon full. Enough black coffee: today you drink strawberry milk, made with 100% natural ingredients. It takes more time and fewer buttons. An actual date, not just another looping sunrise. Wonder unfolds at the rate of softening. Soft doesn’t care about your hustle, only your light and grind.