His life came to a ruinous end

Plummeted into insanity

The red-bearded painter

With his self-hatred, despair and desperation for understanding

He drank yellow paint thinking it would make him happy

Locked up in a mental asylum that would shatter any person’s self-belief

Deceived Vincent cut his earlobe in an unforeseen calamity

But he channelled the awful torment into beauty

Immaculate and sublime to find ecstasy in the ordinary

And in transforming the banal into a magical masterpiece

The Starry Night, Sunflowers, Self-Portrait, The Potato Eaters, Wheatfield with Crows, Irises, The Bedroom in Arles

Each a genius’s masterstroke into Eternity

A jumble of love, sorrow and rage

Painting the canvas in bold strokes as his heart and mind burst into flames

The King of colour, a whisper into the future unheard in his times

He died in a rut with voices all over his mind.

So, he picked up the gun

And the bullet went straight into his golden heart

Wonder how many colours lost their lives on that day?

©®Susmita Mukherjee