Future Fossil Fuels; Cave Pearls

2024, acrylic & charcoal on canvas; 36 x 24 inches

Love Sleeping, Lies

—after a painting by Caravaggio

Traveling alone, I enter the umpteenth gallery
within which a magnet—as if hearing one’s name
called in a thrill across a room of strangers—
pulls me to Amore Dormiente.
All else falls away
like how love at first sight is more
a recognition than awakening.
No questions, no doubt.
The Cupid dreams in ecstasy of the arrow piercing.

Later, sketching from the Museum postcard
my charcoal line reveals distortions.
The little god is twisted, gut hanging, chest sunken, neck propped
awkwardly against a black bed of emptiness.
Golden flesh in chiaroscuro becomes jaundice—
or worse, the iridescence of putrefaction.
Was the cupid dead? The model,
a diseased child whose beatific sleep was
in reality, the death mask of relief.

Craft, not love, incarnates. It is the artist
who shoots the arrow while gazing
at suffering. Most of all we want this:
to be shot, dazed, to abandon scrutiny.
To be bullseye.