Life, Still

They painted me into stillness
Coded into cadmium,
Crystalized into context
A stage in space-time sublimed into a
Stalemate of
Singular expression;
A stern sadness
Exchanged for
Tokens of endurance.
I liked this act of meditation
Mediating all the slight movements of my head and hands
Animated by the spine of stacked thoughts;
Tracked in transit
With the sweep of a brush.

We met up often
(In the age of precision
Derision of the act of artifice)
To feel the slick bleed of paint between thumbs and fingers,
Its lingering kiss on corpuscles –
Grasping the goose-bumped surface of canvas
That could still time, the twitch of muscles
Or emphasise the exuberance of existence
And how we yearned never to lose touch
With this art;
Our shared secret of stored energy
Where we
Encoded love letters from a lost age.