When I hear your name,
I see yellow, blues but mostly
Yellow, not the artificial kind but
The one that charms,
That ladies wear, that dashes through the sky
When the crickets come out,
That splays across prickling cornfields
Like a carpet flush across the arid plain.
I close my eyes on tired days
And I see you,
Standing in front of a canvas like a
Jockey stands before an
Unbroken mare, you have your sleeves rolled up and
Straw hat pulled low, firmly gripping brush and
Slashing, twisting and pulling on the taut fabric
With your unharbored insanity, pellets of paint staining
Your freckled arms, your nose,
The air thick with the yellow fumes of your
Feverish lust.
What was inside of your
Soul, Vincent –
Was it fire or
Ice?
Both can burn, you know
Both can sear the flesh from bone and crumbling marrow –
Turn fractured glass into a mirage of the human heart.
What was it like, Vincent,
To not know the slopes, the crooked angles
Of your own body and soul,
To be attacked by a sharp-toothed monster nestled
Deep inside your heart –
Was it frightening, when
It ate you?
Did you feel its gnashing teeth, its caustic breath,
Tearing your limbs into some contorted dance
At the mercy of a satanic puppet-master
With all the leisure in the world?
What were you thinking, Vincent,
When you pressed the silver blade to your ear –
Were your hands shaking, were they sweating?
Did you scream, thrash about like a fish slick from
A crescent fall of crimson river-water,
Or did you stare, uninterested, as you worked your way
Around the pink, exposed flesh, the mutilated cartilage,
Hands steady, with all the precision in the world?
A human is not a canvas, Vincent.
He cannot be molded, altered, changed to fit a purpose.
You forgot – temporarily, dear – that your
Skill lies in brushes and pots,
Not sculpture.
You know, Vincent,
Someone once said to me that
Good artists are quite like teacups,
Fine-boned china men with the fragility of roses –
And God, dressed in his Sunday-morning kimono
Eating a piece of burnt buttered toast –
He is the tea-maker.
Now us, the normal, the average –
We get half a cup, rarely more –
A fine Grey Earl or strong Japanese herb, if you prefer,
We are born with the influx of hot liquid into our bowels,
The dunking of
Tea leaves on our rims,
Souls sloshing around in the
Confines of our porcelain rib-cages.
Our lives are measured in sips between bites of toast
And the Sunday paper –
Life rises in the form of white steam,
We disappear between God’s lips,
Drained and gone.
Now good artists, now they are of an
Entirely different kind –
God is thirsting for caffeine, for a buzz
He pours some tea, then more, then more
Tea and soul and blood mix and spill in a fiery carnage
A kaleidoscopic outrage
Liquid splashes down the sides of these fragile glasses
Overflowing onto saucers, and embroidered dollies.
Artists need room, I’m told, they need space –
They paint their spilled tea onto the whiteness of a canvas,
The blankness of a page,
The yellow gleam of a solitary spotlight
Spouting their troubles into monologues and dances –
A good artist does not do good work,
A good artist turns himself into the masterpiece.
He frets over his imperfections, the cracks in his demeanor,
Wrings the blood out of a washcloth
And cries himself to sleep at night.
Did your teacup spill, Vincent?
Did your oolong flow down the sides of your thin china walls–
Until you forgot the color of dry?
That harsh, blinking simplicity,
Walls too fragile and too glass-like to withstand the
Imbalance within?
How does fire taste, Vincent,
When you forced the toxic paint down your throat.
Were you trying to fill yourself with
Color? Lavish blues and
Bloody reds,
Creamy yellows perfect enough to simply
Melt the soul?
Were you trying to turn
Yourself into the art?
To use the canvas of your
Intestines, the wraparound pearl
Of your stomach – to mix the base pinks of flesh
With the variegated shades of liquid poison?
Did it hurt, Vincent?
When you stepped into the yellow fields, when you
Pressed the gun to your chest –
Did it hurt?
No, I don’t mean the bullet,
The shattering of the ribcage into fine dust –
What I mean is,
What did you think, Vincent?
Did you see Theo’s face, in the sky?
Did your heart contort and twist itself into
An indistinguishable blackness,
A scorching ash, a human vessel with the weight of
Rusting iron?
When I hear your name, Vincent, I see
Yellow, blues but mostly
Yellow, I see the sun dripping through oak trees
In the summer, and honey glistening in a jar
I see yellow, the kind that charms,
That full-moon yellow that orbits the land,
The kind that resides in the bottoms of cornfields –
Rises like smoke through the petals of dying suns,
And that creases the sky when the crickets come out.
I see the yellow that lights a fire and then burns to a
Crisp –
Nighttime coming,
Drained and gone.
The yellow that leaves shadows,
And monsters, when it’s done.
Love,
(And yes, Vincent, there is such a thing
As love in the world) –
Your native beast
