All morning on the Smart Board
Ms Arthur showed us paintings
of wheatfields
and churches
and cafés
and starry swirling nights
and bowls of fruit
and lots of paintings of the artist
because
Ms said
he was so poor he couldn’t afford models
and fruit was cheap
and wheatfields were free
and Ms said
you pronounced his name, Van Gogh,
like Fen Hoch
not Van Goff or Van Go
and she told us he cut off his ear
and went to a place
where people with mental illness go
and Mick said,
‘You mean the pub?’
and everyone laughed
even though
cutting off your ear didn’t sound very funny
and we voted twenty-eight to nil
in favour of his paintings
and Ms said she’d seen the real paintings
in art galleries
and they were
‘explosions of colour’
and
‘the work of a genius’
and I thought maybe
he cut off his ear
because those explosions
had come out of his tortured mind
and landed on a canvas
and maybe
if he was really poor
and the people in the hospital
wouldn’t let him paint
wouldn’t let him do what he had to do
it made him mad enough
and angry enough
to hurt someone
and he couldn’t hurt someone else
so he hurt himself.
I stared at his paintings for ages
and wondered what it would be like
to have all that going on inside your head.