How can I live in a world where I outlive everything I love?
A portrait preserves beauty, but not the life, lies, and everything I've ever spoken of.
True, time can devoid meaning, it can soften the blow,
but then the remembrance of the tenderest touch
is reduced to the distant flick of a snowflake against a ***** window.

If art reveals the spectator and not life, what, then, what has the spectator spent so much time living?
Has he not lived this thing called life?
He looks to the painting as an equal, not a mirror.
Each painted rose ****** his skin with forgotten thorns,
each crafted dove reminds of those long-lost, whom he mourns.
Reaching past/ through every frame, he extends his life,
he learns, remembers, and is forewarned
of his own work of life, for which time always sought,
painted with nothing but his own brush of thought.