It is a vertical sunrise,
poured into a cylinder,
yellow climbing the walls,
turquoise pretending to be sky
only for those who look straight down.

Around it:
raspberry noise,
fuchsia gossip,
a wall of saturated silence.
The table is a low green cloud,
soft, overqualified,
doing ground work for gravity.

Inside the glass
nothing moves
and everything itched.

Lines scratch their way
around the rim,
circling like thoughts in an elevator
that refuses to choose a floor.
Someone drew these lines once,
but then they escaped,
and now they scribble themselves
again and again
like signatures on a contract
no one ever reads.

The glass remembers
its previous lives:

a jar of lightning bugs,
a sociology seminar ashtray,
a savings account for lost buttons,
a small aquarium for one brave ice cube,
a microphone for karaoke ghosts.

Today it is none of that.
Today it is an abstract container
for undrinkable light.

Yellow rises from the base
like a very shy revolution.
You can almost hear it chant,
softly,
down with transparency,
long live the tinted truth.

Each vertical streak
is a rule it refuses to follow.
They all run parallel,
but secretly dream of intersection,
of bumping shoulders,
of causing a spill in the geometry office.

The red background leans closer,
jealous and theatrical.
It whispers:
“Come on, fall over.
Let’s make it a scene.”

But the glass stays rooted
in its pink shadow-plate,
a halo that never got promoted.
The base spreads out,
a puddle of maybe,
a coiled spring of oops.

If you listen carefully,
you can hear the inner cylinder speak,
that softer turquoise heart:

I am the memory of water
that decided not to show up.
I am the condensation
from a party that never happened.
I am the shape of thirst
after the last guest has gone home.

Faint letters float on the skin,
almost a brand name,
almost a warning,
almost a spell.
They blur into each other,
like small cities viewed from a train
that refuses to stop.

You try to decipher them:
BECKON?
BROKEN?
BETWEEN?

The glass just smirks.
Names are for bottles in supermarkets.
Here in the red district of color,
everything is anonymous
and slightly too bright.

A tiny breeze of graphite
runs along the edges,
shivering every outline.
No edge is sure of itself;
every boundary negotiates
a new contract with the background.

This is not still life.
This is still negotiation.

The green at the lower left
sends up a report:

Situation stable,
object vertical,
contents metaphysical,
recommendation:
proceed with gentle confusion.

Above, the top ellipse—
that wobbly halo—
acts as the meeting room
for all unfinished circles of the world.

Here gather:
half-drawn wheels,
abandoned zeros,
question marks who lost their dots,
rings that never made it to any finger.

They discuss policy:

Should a glass be obliged
to contain something other than color?

One ellipse votes yes,
another votes no,
a third abstains
and turns into a spiral out of sheer embarrassment.

Meanwhile,
the red wall hums
an off-key chanson
about lonely tumblers in hotel minibars.

No ice,
no straw,
no coaster,
just the hum of the fridge
and the late-night TV in the next room.

Our glass listens carefully
and decides:
I will be the opposite of that.

It stands tall
in its rough-textured universe,
brushstrokes like scars,
pigment like street dust.

It knows it is a drawing,
not an object.
That is its secret luxury.

Because a drawn glass
cannot really break,
only be crossed out.
A painted cylinder
cannot truly fall,
only be tilted in retrospect.

So it dares to glow harder,
amplifying its inner sunset,
a vertical horizon behind transparent ribs.

If someone were to pour
actual liquid into it now,
the glass would probably protest:

“Excuse me,
I’m already full
of impossible light.
Your beer will have to wait
until the next realism.”

And somewhere,
just beyond the edge of the frame,
a real, obedient drinking glass
feels strangely inadequate
without knowing why.

The red softens to crimson evening,
the green fades to mint memory,
the yellow decides to stay awake.

The lines keep circling the rim,
like tiny trains
on a track with no destination,
perfectly pointless,
perfectly busy.

This is the whole story:

one glass,
zero drinks,
infinite refills of color,

standing in the middle of a page
and asking everyone who looks:

“So—
are you half empty,
half full,
or just brilliantly overdrawn today?”