THE ROMANESQUE CUPID

Rusticating in the gallery’s stark ambience
Hanging from bucolic museum walls
Are paintings of puerile nudes with petulant
Faces on decaying, cracked, sylvan canvases.
Defined in soft, piggy pink flesh, their thoughts
Placed between wide, blue eyes, watery and aged stagnant.
Their ambition permanently etched there to seduce
And beguile the viewer’s participation
In unrestrained, wild merrymaking … yet,
There is a malaise, a vague awareness of moral decay;
A stench that mewls from their lascivious indulgences.
They are inert in flagrant motion, never completing the act
Of the brush stroke’s intent; yes, life is suspended
And dead in this picturesque idyll.