The Bridge of Echoed Rain

He paints the air with vacant eyes, this artist of the damned,
whose canvases once burned with suns now drowned in silent lambs.
The world declared his colors false, his visions fractured lies,
yet here he seeks the fractured path where truth and twilight rise.
The rain, a choir without a tongue, pours silver through his veins,
as ghosts of brushstrokes long erased resing their old refrains.

A whisper stirs—not wind, nor wing—but something half-conceived,
a shadow shaped from midnight’s clay, its voice by sorrow sieved:
“Behold the river’s mirrored scroll, its ink of liquid night—
it writes the chronicle you fled, the wars you dared not fight.
Why kneel here, keeper of dead flames, where echoes eat their young?
The past is but a thief’s mirage, a bell forever unrung.”

The artist turns, his face a moon eclipsed by storm’s embrace,
“Speak not of theft, specter of silt, nor judge this frail disgrace.
I’ve walked the galleries of ghosts, breathed dust of fractured vows,
yet still these hands—these traitor hands—demand to paint the Now.
But Now is but a blade of frost that melts beneath my touch,
and every hue I birth to life dies screaming of as much.”

The phantom laughs—a sound like glass devoured by the sea—
“You carve your coffin with each stroke, yet blame mortality.
Behold!” It sweeps a clawed mirage toward the river’s throat,
where ripples part like theater drapes to stage a spectral boat.
Within, a youth with eyes unbruised mixes cobalt skies,
his brush a wand, his laughter raw as gulls in morning’s eyes.

The artist gasps—a wounded bell—and reaches through the rain,
“That face… those hands… that easel raised like some crusader’s cane!
I knew him when the world was wax, when dreams could still take shape,
before the critics’ vultures came to pick my bones agape.
Oh, let me warn him! Let me shield that fire from the flood!”
He lunges—but the boat dissolves to ash and petrified blood.

The phantom’s voice now licks his ear, a serpent made of smoke:
“To touch the past is to unknit the veil that Fate has spoke.
Each step you take toward that shore unravels thread by thread
the tapestry your present self wears as a suit of lead.
Turn back, old ghost of pigment’s curse, before the river knows
your name as one more fallen leaf in its eternal throes.”

But desperation, sharper now than reason’s blunted knife,
propels him forward—step by step—into the teeth of strife.
The bridge’s planks grow soft as moss, the railings bloom with rust,
as centuries condense to drops in time’s alembic thrust.
Before him now, the phantom’s guise begins to molt and bleed,
revealing gears of mercury, a clockwork heart that’s freed.

“Fool!” it rasps, its cogs now grinding hymns of paradox,
“Your pilgrimage is but a wheel that spins inside a box.
The past you seek is not a place, but prison bars you forged
from every ‘might-have-been’ you mourned, each opportunity scorched.
This bridge is but your ribcage split—the rain, your frozen tears—
and I the warden you designed to guard your cage of years.”

The artist stumbles, knees submerged in river’s edge’s hymn,
the water’s tongue both cold and sweet, a psalm that threatens limb.
Before him glows the youth again, now painting frenzied swirls—
a masterpiece of reckless dawns, of galaxies in pearls.
But as he watches, horror blooms: the young man’s brush ignites,
consuming canvas, hands, and hope in pyres of stolen lights.

“No!” he screams, but sound is ash. The vision writhes, distorts—
the burning boy becomes a man whose palette teems with warts,
whose back is bent from carrying the coffin of his pride,
who scrapes at walls no others see with nails turned inside.
The river laughs—a sound he knows—it is his own cracked voice
that mocks from every mirrored wave, “Behold your chosen choice.”

And now the truth, a scalpel’s kiss, splits marrow from the bone:
The youth he mourned, the fire lost—were never truly sown.
The world did not extinguish them; he drowned them in his chest,
then hired time to play the thief, and grief to play the rest.
The bridge, the rain, the phantom’s game—all props in self-made lies,
a theater where martyrs dance to avoid the sun’s surprise.

The water climbs—a lover’s arms—to cradle him from flight.
He does not fight. What use, when every truth is drenched in light?
The phantom bows, its purpose served, and melts into the foam,
as somewhere, a forgotten sketchbook floats its pages home.
The river sings the final verse he’d feared yet craved to hear:
“To hold the past is to release the present to its bier.”

Dawn arrives—a timid clerk—to tally night’s debris.
Upon the bridge, a rain-drenched coat hangs limp from splintered knee.
The palette, washed to grayscale, rests where currents kiss the stone,
its colors bled to join the hues that mortals call their own.
And in the town, they whisper still of madness and of rain,
but not of how the river’s teeth hold smiles they can’t explain.