Tonight's Poet Corner: Just Gray

Just Gray
by Belinda Roddie

She doesn't take kindly to shadows
crawling on all fours across her canvas. Nor
does she prefer the light to grace the oils
she lets drip across the white. The absolutes

she detests in art - no high moral ground, no
golden pedestal to perch an easel on (or even
a silver one, for that matter). Her once vanilla
smock is drizzled with impromptu designs
that lead to nothing and mean nothing.

For all her attempts to be in the middle - for
all of her valiant efforts to expose things for
their detail and complexity - the gradient she
has stained across the cloth is too dull to catch
the sun, too plain to impress the moon. She has
perfected the gray area in that she has scribbled
out the substance, bleached the sentiments, left
nothing but odor-less smoke behind.