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"Part of a series of 'text-paintings' I've been experimenting with. The
text here is an extract from a beautiful piece of writing I found on
the Internet (used with permission from the author) called
'Little Burning Petals' by Alan Peart. The text is below."
Yellow roses are cold. Red roses burn you inside and white roses are broken
pieces of a purer sun, but yellow roses have no flame, they are cold.
Everyone knows this.
[......]
[She] sleeps in her old bedroom. She takes the same steps every day and
smiles to herself as if each of her actions contained a secret. She is a
shower of dark hair. She gets more beautiful every day. In the morning she
sits outside and waits for the sun to crest the oaks at the edge of the garden,
soaking up as much light as she can. When she comes back inside she
radiates it - it's almost painful to touch her, and there's nothing
beautiful in the world except her. When it rains she folds up her light
neatly and draws it into herself. She drifts through the house like a thing
barely alive. She arranges the flowers in every room. Daffodils for the
kitchen, daisies for the bathroom, lilacs for the hall, and roses.....
[......]
[She] has put all her books in boxes and she says that one day she'll burn them.
In her bedroom she is surrounded by red and white roses in vases, jars, glasses,
dried and hung from the ceiling, pressed between sheets of paper, pictures
and paintings of roses, roses on her bedcovers and sheets. She says that
they keep her warm at night when the sun is gone, and while she sleeps the scent wraps
around her and she feels loved. I've seen her smiling in her sleep. I've seen her
sleeping with open eyes.
[......]
Sometimes I bring her away from the house. I try to take care of her
because she needs it so much. She sees all places as if they were the same place. She gazes through
people as if they were as shallow as the skein of dew on flower petals
in the morning. But at home she's alive because she knows where she is.
Even on her dark days she burns from within like an angry ghost. When I
have to go out she turns the lights off and moves through the darkness, and I
come hours later to find her glowing a subtle white, floating from
room to room with her arms full of flowers, wet from the garden or crisp
and pressed from the pages of books. Someday she's going to burn all the
books.
[......]
Yellow roses are cold, like the moon. [She] watches the moon at night and
smiles to herself. She knows who it reflects and she knows she shines
brighter. She drinks the sun in the morning and gathers flowers for the house.
She knows a secret. I don't know the secret and she can't tell me. [...]She
cries sometimes because she doesn't know how to say what she needs to say.
She says that we're outside time now. We're always going to be here,
she says, and we were always here, pressed like petals between the
pages of a book. She['s] burn[t] the roses and she will burn the books too.
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