Unfinished Canvas
By Vera Von Monika
There is an unfinished canvas in me,
not waiting, not empty… only refusing completion,
paint dragged too far, too slow, too deliberate
across a surface that remembers pressure as truth.
Crimson sinking beneath pale restraint,
ultramarine cracking where control should hold,
gold breaking into filament instead of light
each layer refusing the idea of final form.
It carries fingerprints never assigned to intention,
edges where colour stopped mid-breath,
brush arrested in the middle of certainty
until hesitation became structure.
And there is a voice that enters without touch,
not sound in air, not presence in space
but pressure that changes the canvas from within,
as if pigment recognises something it cannot name.
Beyond what can be held,
there are musical sheets not yet fully visible
lines without body,
staffs extended into suspension,
chords existing as decisions already formed
but denied resolution.
Not mine. Not visible. Not containable.
Yet they still pass through the surface
not as sound, but as interference,
as if colour is briefly disturbed by something it remembers.
I once tried to bind them
sound into surface,
colour into structure,
presence into form.
They refused completely.
Paint would not become sound.
Sound would not become surface.
So it remains:
one side layered, dense, unresolved
each stroke still active in its refusal to end,
the other unwritten on anything I can touch,
existing only as structure, breath, suspended tone.
At times, the voice moves through both,
and the canvas shifts without instruction,
colour reacting as if it has memory
it was never given.
At times, a chord gains weight inside pigment,
then dissolves before it can be held as form.
But they never complete each other.
That is not absence. That is design.
The canvas remains unfinished
because it was never meant to stop becoming,
and the sound remains unfinished
because it was never meant to resolve into silence.
And I remain between them,
not bridge, not closure, not explanation,
but the point where both continue without ending,
where even the voice cannot close the canvas,
and the canvas cannot contain the voice.
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