MANICALLY SLASHING PAINT LATE AT NIGHT

MANICALLY SLASHING PAINT LATE AT NIGHT

Manically slashing paint late at night

on a white canvas.

Blood on the snow.

Chewing my limbs off to get out of a leg-hold trap.

Tearing my heart out like that of a noble enemy

to eat it for the homoeopathic courage

to make something out of the chaos

of conditioned consciousness

like a small tent in this homeless desert of stars

that might let me enter

like a loveletter into an envelope

that’s empty enough to offer shelter to anyone

with a return address on the point of no return.

The dove is bleeding down the handle of my brush.

Insomniac poppies are haemorrhaging on their feet

after they got caught sleepwalking

down the dark alley of a dead end street

and a bad moon rising cut their throats

like a serial killer exploring the creative potential

of blood spatter as an expressive form of forensic art.

And now here come

the chameleonic mood swings of the cyanotic blues

like painted Pictish corpses with talismanic tattoos

buried in the mass graves of violet underworlds

that bloom like deadly nightshade with hot spots of yellow

at the one way entrance with no exit

to the cave mouth of Tartarus.

That ought to make a big splash

among the abstract expressionists.

A Payne’s grey black hole goes supernova

and I’m caught in the crossfire

of gamma radiation against the greens and blues

of a small habitable planet that got in the way.

And maybe if I eat enough cadmium yellow

the way Van Gogh did

to get closer to his subject

than he’d ever been

I’d be able to paint sunflowers

with great solar flares of harvest gold

lying on the table

like the manes of magnificent dead lions

that still threaten the still lives of the village

to this very day

with the carnivorous intensity

of hungry predators

picking up the spoor of their prey.

A sum of destructions a painting is

said Picasso

but there’s got to be something there

to destroy in the first place.

He did it to a beautiful woman’s face.

But I prefer to splash acid into my own eyes

for the things they’ve seen

than take it out on a sunset

that’s done nothing to me

but put an end to another glaring day

trying to stare the stars down

to see which of us will be the first to blink.

Slowly life emerges out of the bright vacancy

of my random spontaneity

like a black waterlily of sumi ink.

Slowly the polymorphous perversity

and atavistic complexity

of my creative rage

begins to take the shape of a star map

where all the animals have escaped from their cages

and left the maniacs on their own

like vampires at the break of dawn

to seek asylum in caves and attics and graves

like bats in the belfry

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac

as a sign that nobody’s home.

Beginning to look like someone I know.

A face rises from the depths of the ultramarine

like Ophelia in a negligee of moonlight

and then slowly descends back into the darkness

as if somebody turned around to look

on their way up out of hell

and all I’ve got left are her eyes

as a momento mori.

If I were the Taliban

I’d throw acid in them at this point.

As it is I veil them in a wash of alizarin crimson

like oxygen rich blood

and watch them turn violet

in case there’s an iris scan among the dead

and she has to prove she can see in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE