The bookshelf forgot its job.
It woke up one morning
and decided to become a staircase,
then changed its mind
and rearranged itself into a sideways sigh.

Shelves leaned on each other
like drunk rectangles after a conference,
swapping business cards of color:
“Hi, I’m turquoise, specialized in impossible angles.”
“Nice to meet you, I’m magenta,
currently researching the sociology of falling over.”

Somewhere in this vertical maze
there used to be books,
quiet citizens of paper democracy.
But one by one they slipped out of their roles,
took their sentences, folded them into planes,
and flew into the neon night.

What remained were pure spines,
ghosts of novels,
architectural afterthoughts.
The shelves, feeling naked,
painted themselves in layers—
purple doubt, cyan insomnia,
a patch of stubborn green
that still believes in daylight.

In the lower left corner,
a rectangle clears its throat.
“I was once a window,” it says,
“but the view got tired of being watched
and escaped into the sky.
Now I just store reflections
of people who forgot why they came.”

Above it, a trapezoid in shimmer-pink replies:
“Don’t brag. I used to be a door.
Everyone passed through me
without saying thank you.
One evening I slammed myself shut
and slid diagonally into abstraction.
Best career move of my life.”

The whole structure is tilting,
but very politely,
like a city bowing to its own soundtrack.
Lines of teal and raspberry
play broken chords along the edges,
a soft jazz of straight lines
that secretly want to curve.

An elevator of light
runs through the middle,
stopping at every color.
On level Turquoise you can buy
tickets to unfinished thoughts.
On level Fuchsia there’s a museum
for failed apologies and lost receipts.

Somewhere near the top
(whatever “top” means in a painting
that keeps rotating in your head),
a small square of electric blue
blinks like an indecisive traffic light.
It signals GO to all memories
that prefer not to arrive.

Meanwhile, the vertical columns at the back
pretend to be serious architecture.
They stand in rows,
grey and purple and nearly-beige,
like bureaucrats of concrete.
But look closely:
their edges are smudged with mischief,
as if someone whispered a dirty joke in charcoal
and they tried not to laugh.

Between them, gaps open—
thin corridors of maybe.
If you walk inside,
the laws of perspective report sick.
Every step bends another surface.
Floors volunteer to be ceilings;
walls train for careers as rivers.

In the right-hand corner,
a magenta slab stretches out,
daydreaming of being a runway
for extinct airplanes.
A white stripe glides along it,
like a forgotten sentence underlining itself.

“Why so serious?”
asks a sliver of neon green,
dangling like a loose bookmark.
“I was only supposed to be a highlight,
a tiny accent in the scene,
but now I’m the only one here
who remembers where the edges were.”

The answer comes from below,
where a deep blue block
carries the weight of everybody’s angle.
“I’m tired,” it confesses.
“All day I keep this construction
from collapsing into pure rhythm.
Let it fall, I say.
Let everything become music.”

For a moment,
the painting listens to itself.
The lines hum.
The colors vibrate in their seats.
Someone turns off gravity
just to see what happens.

Pieces drift.
The pink wedge slides past the turquoise bar,
winking in slow motion.
Rectangles loosen their belts,
float out of formation,
become islands in a strange topography
where distance is measured
in shades of violet.

You, the viewer,
lose your footing without moving.
Your eyes walk around the bend,
take a left at the luminous green corner,
descend a staircase made of sideways volumes,
arrive at the lobby of Not-Quite-Understanding.

Welcome.
Here, explanations hang in the cloakroom.
You are offered a ticket
with no number on it.
The usher is a quadrilateral
with a suspicious tilt.
It bows, edges creaking,
and says, “Please:
do not sit,
do not stand,
just diagonally exist.”

In this theater of slanted shelves,
scenes are stored rather than performed.
The memory of a city at 3 a.m.
leans against the memory of a book
you meant to read but never did.
A fragment of yesterday’s escalator
naps next to the blueprint
of a future you cancelled.

Somewhere a hot pink wall
remembers being flesh.
Somewhere a turquoise beam
remembers being river.
They keep quiet about it, mostly,
but sometimes the pigments slip
and you see it—
that strange feeling
that the whole picture used to breathe
before it learned to pose.

The upper right corner blushes in dark red.
It is the last remnant of sunset,
caught in the act of leaving.
Instead of going away,
it folds itself into the angle,
a tiny rebellion against completion.

Nothing is finished here.
Every shape looks mid-sentence,
cut off by the frame.
The story is interrupted,
and the interruption is the story.

So you stand before it,
part tourist, part detective,
watching as the architecture negotiates
between building and breaking.

The shelves, once again,
consider their options.
“Should we be a city tonight?”
asks one vertical column.

“No,” says the magenta ramp,
“let’s be a thought falling sideways
through someone’s head.”

“Too abstract,” grumbles a grey panel.
“What about a library after an earthquake—
but the earthquake is emotional,
and the books are ideas
that changed their mind about everything?”

The neon green bookmark laughs.
“Yes. Let’s be that.
A catastrophe made of color
where nothing is destroyed,
only rearranged.”

And so it is.
The painting settles—for now—
into this particular imbalance,
a frozen wobble of structures
that don’t want to be straight.

Later, when you look away,
they might reconfigure themselves again—
become an airport for unsent letters,
a harbor for sideways memories,
a skyline seen through tears
that are secretly made of chalk dust.

But at this exact moment,
while your gaze still leans with them,
they hold the pose:
a tilted magenta sonata,
an orchestra of rectangles
tuning themselves
to the key of almost.