DRY PAINT FADE

The cavemen didn’t use cave-painting degrees

to smear the pigment off the ripened fruit.

They only studied the horses

because the horses were running away.

Wild roses were the only roses and from roses

they observed how to pierce the horse’s flesh

and stop them running in their tracks.

Nobody is ever smiling in old photographs. 

The very first photograph, of the broadside

of a building framed by a bedroom window,

isn’t actually the very first. It’s just the one that

survived this long.

Natives believed photographs stole parts of their souls.

Now holograms paint vanishing murals on

empty walls.