I dreamed that you were painting again. (Why did you ever stop? They were so beautiful...) I dreamed that you were painting hot and strong, in primary colors, and that you were mad; both angry and insane, you were mad in every sense of the word. You were painting fast, one dozen canvases in one night: all beautiful and strange, and so out of keeping with your muted browns and dramatic sense of grace.
You did not want to explain them to me when I asked.
They resembled something else in my mind, somehow. I told my other friend about it, my one-time/sometimes lover -- about how the vibrant blue and yellow and red coalesced into the view of the city he had given me long ago. It was as if you were working on the very same piece, from different regions of my mind: from different times and places and entirely too similar ways of making me want to understand your art as a part of my violent love. I told you about it, too, as you were rising to leave. But as always, you left anyway, and did not turn around.
I see that you’re all the same. All facets of the same point in my dream, all manifestations of what I want to see. You work a feathered brush of poems over a broken page as I relive you, over and over and over, swearing all the while that I’ve forgotten. You can’t forget the part that’s in your head. A new face will come to resume the shape of the vision.
I see that you're all the same.
(You're all a part of me.)