Painting by Numbers, With Invisible Paint
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| cropped from random craft website |
Painting by Numbers, With Invisible Paint
I bought the kit because it promised mastery—
all I had to do was stay inside the lines and trust the legend.
Number 1: Confidence (a bold cerulean).
Number 2: Vision (something between sunrise and rent due).
Number 3: Depth (apply generously).
I uncapped the paint—nothing.
A brush dipped in optimism,
dragged across a canvas as blank as my browser history in incognito mode.
Still, I obeyed the arithmetic.
Filled in 4 with decisive strokes, outlined 7 like I meant it.
The numbers disappeared under my diligence,
leaving behind the faint, smug scent of effort.
From a distance, I declared it a landscape.
Up close, it was more of a philosophy.
Guests tilt their heads.
“Mmm,” they say, admiring the negative space like it’s curated.
I nod, solemn as a docent of nothing,
murmuring about minimalism and the tyranny of pigment.
Truth is, I love the ritual—
the quiet counting,
the click of brush against rim,
the steady lie that structure equals substance.
One day, perhaps, a color will show up unannounced—
bleeding past its assigned square, ruining the symmetry,
making a mess of my careful compliance.
Until then, I’ll keep painting what you can’t see,
number by number, masterpiece by maybe.
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This ekphrastic poem's title is the ninth line from one of my earlier poems, that poem was made up of incomplete sentences, that somehow made great titles.
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