The horse steps out of the painting
like it has misplaced its own outline.
No stable, no field,
just a flat horizon made of maybe,
a sky rehearsing the word “pink”
until it forgets what clouds were.

Its body is all wrong, all right.
Legs like stacked postcards,
each one a slightly different version of blue.
A knee that remembers being a staircase,
an ankle that once believed it was a window frame.
Nothing fits and therefore everything belongs.

Someone has clearly argued with the colors.
Yellow insists on being loud
under the ribs,
spilling into green like an accident
no one bothered to clean up.
Magenta wanders along the spine,
a long uncertain sigh,
half bruise, half carnival.

The horse is not running.
Running would imply direction,
destination, decision.
This animal is in the middle of a thought.
One hoof is placed in the phrase “what if,”
another in “too late,”
the others dangling just above the grammar
of here and now.

Look at its mane:
not hair, but vertical weather,
a series of brushstrokes
trying to remember which way is “down.”
Pink arrives late,
brings a subtle chaos,
leans against turquoise like a tired friend
who still wants to dance.

Nobody has saddled this horse.
You cannot harness something
that isn’t sure it exists in three dimensions.
There is only a suggestion of a back,
a near-saddle of layered color,
inviting and unstable,
like a promise made in a dream.

Behind it, the background folds—
a soft geometry,
walls that think they are forests,
air that thinks it is wallpaper.
Perspective takes a day off.
Lines head toward a vanishing point,
get distracted, and stay for coffee instead.

The horse’s eye is not drawn,
so you imagine it yourself.
Maybe it looks at you,
maybe it looks through you,
maybe it is busy observing
some small, private sunset
on the other side of the canvas.

Time behaves strangely here.
Seconds come in pastel blocks,
stacked like children’s toys.
The animal steps from one to the next,
never touching the ground,
because the ground has not yet agreed
to be solid.

You wonder if this is freedom
or just a more colorful cage.
The horse does not answer.
Its silence smells of acrylic and possibility.
The painting hums softly,
a fluorescent refrigerator
in the kitchen of your attention.

If you listen carefully,
you can almost hear the painter mutter:
too much purple,
not enough doubt,
add more yellow until it confesses.
Each stroke a small negotiation
between control and spill,
between plan and accident.

Now imagine climbing on.
Your legs slip through the stripes,
your hands sink into the mane
like into slow, bright water.
You become another layer of color,
a thin translucent human
brushed lightly over the horse’s flank.

You ride, but not forward.
You move sideways across your own thoughts,
past all the fences you once called facts,
beyond the little paddock of yes/no,
into a field where everything is “perhaps”
and nothing stays the same shade for long.

Up here, you realize:
the horse is not an animal at all,
but a question with hooves.
It asks what you might look like
if you allowed your edges to blur,
if your certainties softened
into overlapping bands of maybe.

The painting doesn’t end at the frame.
It leaks out, discreetly,
into the room, into your shoes,
into the ordinary hallway of your day.
Later, when you walk away,
your shadow will keep a thin stripe of turquoise,
your doubts a faint echo of pink.

And somewhere, on a wall or in your mind,
the horse keeps standing in that impossible light,
half geometry, half dream,
waiting for the next pair of eyes
to step inside the pigture
and mispronounce reality
one bright, crooked color at a time.