Manically Slashing Paint Late At Night Poem by Patrick White

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.