Ode to the Painter Ross Watson
Don’t imagine me as the woman
who you replicated
from the Vermeer
and placed next to the male beauty
in the blue shorts
using Grinder. I can’t tell
who’s more bored with whom. No
gay man wants
anachronism. We’re dis-
oriented enough. All we want is the here
and a blow job
done with at least as much
technique as Van Mieris. I miss
the old-
fashioned days of pressing
buttons to a rotary desk phone as green
as the frocks worn by
Vermeer’s women.
In another of your paintings, a shirtless man
readies himself to take a photo
Caravaggio’s angel. We can see
he’s biding his time until he takes one
of himself for display at the most current,
hip pick-up site.
Does he ever wonder
why the otherworldly would
want to take a picture
of itself in someone else’s lens?
Isn’t it one of God’s miracles
that He allows us
to reveal our transient bodies with the
carelessness of a blemished
photograph?
Don’t ask this thirty-something
Rubenesque faggot such questions.
All I do is pray
that someone asks me to my first art opening
where someone will mistake me for you
and be a star-
fucker with a huge dick. As we admire your art,
he will put his hand
on my ass and I will
finally learn the earth-bound question
you already know:
How long
should you look
at a painting before
you know you’re done?
