The Occlude by Kyle Owens

A kiln of sunshaft slit the room, parading the artist in gloried light.  Yet, he sat staring at his barren canvas, adrift in the haunted silhouette of failure’s spire.

Dead paintings littered the floor in different stages of bright shades.  Their images polluting his sanity to where he could no longer tolerate their reflections spearing into his eyes.  It was as if each stroke of color was iniquitous from the vision’s birth, scarring the art into stretched hollow facades.

Voices whispered harsh, singeing the edges of his mind.  Resulting in diatribes of the deranged.

“Shadows are lodging into my soul,

flawing my passions into dark visages of shrouded caves

standing me lost in the unsunned groves of desolation’s lair.

My failure throbs quenchless in the paragon of my art,

flaying my purpose and causing my ideas to be rendered structureless.

No comfort comes to my underworld’s scream.

Haunting omens hue my sky into black noise

in which only my paranoia attempts to crusade against.”

He began pacing his studio.  His hands tangled tight into one another behind his back.  His reason falling in and out of shallow graves of decisions stitched half closed.

“I have cast everything aside for my art.

Destroyed acquaintances,

isolated myself from all things human to obsess with color and line.

And this is how my muse rewards me?

To separate me from the only salvation

that I have ever permitted to marry into my soul?

So help me if you don’t stop blocking me

I will bludgeon my hands into raw meat

until my blood forests the floor!”

He wailed in a vexation gashed deep and began destroying all the paintings lying about in a boiled wrath unmatched.

Smashing and tearing.  Throwing and slicing.  The wretched panels were pummeled against the wall and shattered against chairs until he had exhausted himself and fell onto all fours.

His face reflected estrangement.  His breathing heavy, his brow rain-soaked from perspiration.

He stared at the tubes of paint lying in front of him, scattered about the floor like the feathered remains of a butchered bird.  An orgy of thoughts knifed into one — to find his art, he must become the paint.

He seized several tubes of the oils and removed their caps.  His eyes battled against the taunts of his mind.   He lifted the fistful of tubes above his mouth and squeezed their pigments into his gullet until he choked and coughed out the paint with blood ravaged spasms.

He fell forward gagging.  The paint oceaned out of his nose and mouth into puddled sprays upon the floor.

The artist rolled onto his back, bedded onto his canvas slayings, and began crying.

It was at this moment he acquired the doctrine that all the great masters had lived which had come before.

Imagination wasn’t a vision to be heroed before the world.  Imagination was the romantic term for madness.

© 2013 Kyle Owens

Kyle Owens lives in the Appalachian Mountains and his work is available at Fiction Lake, Alfie Dog, and his experimental novel, A Bend of Shadows, has been published by Flare Font Publishing.  His suspense thriller script, Maze, has been adapted into the screenplay Eden Heights, and will be starring Julienne Davis (Eyes Wide Shut) and be directed by Emmy and Bafta winner Graham Theakston.

Comments are closed.