Caught, like a trembling sprite, held until the shaking subsides, an idea,
perhaps a single thought, a wavering cognizance on the event horizon:
Then sprung loose, spread outwards like seed of the dragon, and sown to the stars
with a mere brush of the paint. It’s wild like that: poured, dribbled: chaotics in a can,
but in its way, determinist, scribbling wishes,
drafting an indelible statement of personal meaning,
venting its raucous, cacophonous needs
as if a million horns were caught
in a rush-houred tunnel’s
obtuse refusal to admit;
but goal oriented nonetheless,
eventually spilling as a straight line
right across our canvas’ border, singularly colored,
each segment a monochromatic statement of intent.
Take two of those which are adjacent:
long lists, instructions, an almanac,
endlessly pleading attention-asking-shelves,
rooms full of books, placating
that which it had calved with gifts
of tubes, of paint, now multi-hued,
to smear, spurt, stab, dab, to delicately
(perhaps accidentally) define
its world of abstracted ideas,
or conversely, in lines and figures and ornamental figurines,
a miniaturized art searching for an environmental
fit: Callot with his Angstrom
eyes, filling gardens with fantasy,
populating fairs at Nance and Impruneta
with milling, swilling crowds,
a combustible mixture of gentry and the hoi polloi.
O, but try to make sense of such
sport, of trees weeping, their branches innocent, but festooned
with the dead fruit of military judgments, of devils
quick-marching us off
to a dusty doom, angels trumpeting, twittering,
bird-like, from the vantage of an arboreal cloudburst:
Those populating the bucolic scenes below
are really the damned.
So exactitudes of form only confuse;
so what is known is mingled with what is unforeseen.
Ontogeny really capitulates.
A Bosch is born again
in each century, sometimes
with a pen in his hand, or a gun,
or a swagger stick,
painting men on toilet seats, or as Popes,
but unenviably
with their souls externalized for our perusal,
ready to be pissed on and flayed
and exposed in a laser hard light
where you are tested for everything
in sight from diphylobothrium latum
to amaurotic idiocy, but where the exposition
may be more dangerous than the disease.
Thus, inside-out, discombobulate, we stumble
philosophically across canvas: Then cut!
Cut from the frame. Knifed to the heart.
As a last ditch effort, rolled and shelved,
Locked in a storage
akin to hell,
rolled, forgot; Or are we
as arbitrarily, saved? What fate is fated?
Perhaps the reward of the brightest colors
is to be rejuvenated?
Waiting our time to be restored.