Ode to Gray

SAM HANSON

In a plush armchair, a waiting room, words spill out like scurried addendums, in a language gray like the color of truth, vowels stretched like stockings in a perilous night.

Although some are left skipping stones, eyes glazed and bored with tantric detail — an alphabet is almost visible in the uneven valleys of the painted walls.

In this room, where color sings, notes slide off tongues as cotton catkins droop in the winter autumn in-between, a truly Titanic scene where gray visitors come and go. Through the air-conditioned buzz, figures of modeled clay in overcoats carrying their regrets, numbered 0 through 9.

In the sterilized mist of this doldrum, language softens, its sugar fermenting and molding into painted bronze. And there is no choice but to guard your new creation, protect it from the hisses of yellows and the frowns of blues — coax gray conversation until your arrow finally hits the target. But you can’t leave, so you eat the words off the walls, ghost-silver staining your tongue.

Regret #7: you eat the drywall, eat past plaster, past voices and skulls until you find the ultimate color, in the form of a rumpled grey canvas: Untitled.