Putting On The Muse

Every day, I entered the elegant building with reverence.
Turpentine and linseed oil were my incense and holy water.
And every day, 200 years of painting and drawing activity,
the imprint of youthful creative fervor,
seeped out of the walls, grabbed me by my collar,
and shook me up and down like a demon poltergeist muse.

I was already more dedicated than most,
but there was another one there
who shared my rapture and missionary zeal;
a long-legged, gazelle-graceful, delicate Pre-Raphaelite sylph
with blood-red Rossetti hair and cashmere skin
as silky-white and wholesome as a dairy farm,
who caught my gaze from across the studio
with her big, bright, anime-open eyes.
And with the first rose-petal words out of her mouth,
I was spellbound Pygmalion in love.

We went to the museum where we ate a seven-course meal with Rubens
from sparkling golden platters.
We played a round of doubles with Carravagio,
and four-dimensional theoretical chess with Marcel Duchamp.
We visited a brothel with Rembrandt and a gay bar with Michaelangelo.
Thomas Eakins did a strip-tease for us,
and Mary Cassatt showed us how to change a diaper.
Picasso performed plastic surgery on a bull
and Salvador Dali just sat and giggled at us hysterically.
We watched a donkey sex and snuff show with Goya
and contracted syphilis with Egon Scheile.
Monet served us beer and chips in front of his wide-screen color tv
and Heironymus Bosch damned us to eternal torture in hell
--in the nicest possible way, of course.

And after we'd said goodbye to Miro's sub-atomic clowns,
Mondrian's baseball diamonds, and all the bloody, skewered saints,
she told me that she was married, albeit unhappily,
and I said that that was too bad
because I was in love with her,
and she agreed that it was too bad
because she was in love with me.

And so we began a clandestine affair
which was obvious to everyone
including the retards and the squirrels.
We spent more time looking at each other
than at our canvases,
infatuated like the most sickeningly love-struck
puppy-dog Romeo and Juliet.

Our first kiss, surrounded by springtime greenery
and Rodin's erotic stone and marble exhibitionists,
was an archetypal storybook wow,
with fireworks exploding behind our eyes,
and just the slightest of tremors beneath our feet,
and the starry-eyed certainty that we were indeed a perfect fit,
like two adjacent jigsaw puzzle pieces
snapped satisfyingly together.

We spent an entire day in bed,
and it was better than Moslem heaven
with it's 75 nubile virgins just dripping
to attend to your every sexual whim and desire
from morning 'til night.
We were stoned and tripping on the love-drug,
our bodies' alchemy together making a natural E,
time stretching out like Einstein's bubblegum taffy.
We were so lost in our blissed-out goo-goo fairyland love-lagoon
that the room could have caught on fire
and we wouldn't have noticed.
We fell asleep cocooned like twin embryo moths,
waking to make love, then falling asleep again,
drifting in and out all afternoon
like a soft-core porno hazy-lensed opium dream.

The next day,
as if sensing the musk of another man on her skin,
her husband asked her for a divorce.
This is where the bohemian fairy tale
should have happily-ever-aftered,
but with a clang and a honk,
dissonant reality drove the plot in another direction.
Our passionate can't-have-it lost most of it's sheen
when the forbidden glamour was removed
and we felt the glutted flatline
of a weight watcher saying fuck it to their diet
and gorging on chocolate.

And too, her romantic art-kitten sensitivity
proved too frail to bear the burden of single motherhood,
and she collapsed into hysterics and fainting couch drama
like a well-bred Victorian laudanum addict
forced to go cold turkey.
Her cliched dreams of artistic sainthood
featuring me as the genius artist lover
disappeared in a startled puff,
as dreams will do when one has to get up out of bed
to go take a piss.

And the museum was no longer a place of ancestral communion.
Picasso sneered and made her do jumping jacks and deep knee bends.
Van Gogh, bandaged and bloody, offered to cut off some more appendages.
Grunewald handed her his cat-o-nine tails
and showed her the proper way to raise welts.
Beardsley drank too much absinthe and slashed his wrists.
Michaelangelo groaned and perspired on his high platform,
dripping beads of sweat on her head like bird poop.
Toulouse Lautrec looked up her skirt
and offered her 50 francs for a quickie.
Frida Kahlo gritted her teeth
and ripped another painting out of her belly,
and Jackson Pollock threw six buckets of paint on her
in a drunken rage.

And I was just another little face in the crowd
down in the corner of the canvas,
totally eclipsed by the glorious, genuine oil color spectacle
of the stoning of Christ in the central panel.

David Aronson
May 2006