Non Est Somnium

A sudden blast; the great splashes of paint

Cause broad strokes across the blank canvas,

Colours disperse, coalesce, emerge and fade,

The work is forming itself, creating itself

The great truths, both the factual and the fictive,

The great lies, both the hurtful and the comforting,

The great events, both the personal and the epic,

Take their places across time and place their soft marks upon a sad cosmos

We all know where it leads,

At the end of eternity,

All knowledge dead,

All memory lost,

All life forgot

He sits before his own work,

A miniature model of the cosmic metaphor,

A blank canvas awaiting the touch of his brush

He knows he is a speck of dust,

And his world so small,

So insignificant,

So prepared,

To be forgot

But he does not fear oblivion,

He does not fear the end,

Nor does he fear the lack of rhyme

What he fears in his heart,

Is what will happen to his dreams?

What will happen to them when he too is gone?

One day,

Before everything is forgotten,

Someone will look at his art,

And forget the man who placed those brushstrokes there,

They’d see the art but not the artist,

They’d see the strokes but not the brush that put them there,

They’d forget him altogether

He’d be less real to those future critics,

Than the figures he placed in those paintings

He could pretend though,

He could dream falsely,

He could dream falsely about a utopia,

About a world where lives lasted for more than mere flickers and flashes,

Where time could be stopped,

Where planets and stars and galaxies could not fade,

And the space between stars were no longer hollow,

But to dream false would be to dream wrong

It hurts his mind,

Too many thoughts,

He cuts them all out,

And singles himself,

The only dream of his that matters,

The only hope of his that matters

The hope that for at least a moment,

Someone would understand him,

Even if it were for a single, transient moment,

Someone would see beyond the art and through the dream,

The man who dreamt the art in the first place,

The man who tried,

Even in desperation,

To hold onto his dreams,

And try to not be,

Forgot.

Keagan '17