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every forest, every night

every forest, every night; mixed media on canvas, 8 x 6 x 1.5. In the shop.

* * * * *

Do you hear it? No, it's not the wind. Yes, let's not pretend. The forest is all around us.

Do you hear it? Fine, fine.

Did you think you could shut yourself off it, from what you know is the sound of it, while letting instead your veins pulse with alarm?

Don't. You're not even lost. Being lost is nothing, and fear will be the least of it. Try to be abstract.

In a way, it's better to think of it as failure, as the culmination of an arc. That was always the inherent contradiction. You try, and try, and try, but must eventually fall short. And then, if you're lucky and thoughtful, comes a controlled but cascading kind of failure, where the flimsy reasons all tip over, revealing the heartless wet ditch that was never just a blackness.

Call it math. Call it the instability of everything.

Look: the forest lists with the corpses of kings and tycoons and communists and levellers. There's even a Lord Protector around here somewhere, mixed in with the heaps of nobodies.

You can see it now, can't you, all the little failures leading down this path, and subtracting themselves from the sum of something once imagined, while the evidence wound down to zero.

And as loud and black-fanged as you dream it to be, you should know that every ending is the cloudless same, just infinite fields of cold white quiet, but then not even quite white because nothing has no colour.

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