Ode to a mock-Roman bust in the library

[jeebus13]

I have fallen in love with a marble bust of someone I don't know or recognize or care to. The simple wave of hair that has been in the wind and sun and rain all day and was then combed with fingers that can't tame a beast so wild as this. I imagine this lifeless image awake and see him smile at me... or maybe just raising one eyebrow questioningly. He has no name for me and never will, though beneath his bust across the room is some arbitrary inscription. How can you name a bust after its muse? Why not change it to the name of someone you knew long ago and left behind for a head change in a drafty club, or a friend who died in your dreams and then moved away the next week. Why would the world ask this of its artists- naming their works... it feels frivolous and incoherent to restate something it took you a half a page to explain in a one phrase title. I am in love with the bust of someone I have never known and I am afraid to give him a name. If I can call him something besides what he is, then why do I have to name him at all! I will simply call him my inanimate lover and bathe his stony face in kisses that will get me expelled from this dull too-quiet library. This building never bore me any love, but this bust carries in it the love of ages, and the love of a tired and starving artist who carved a bust that a kid in a library a thousand years later would fall in love with and unname. Generations that never knew care of this kind have past with the same empty regard for something they aren't supposed to touch for fear of breaking it and along comes its true love and he gets kicked out for being too loving and too careful with an antique block of stone that will not come to be named. I am in love with an antique bust of someone who is long ago dead and who would never live up to my expectations and, in all likelihood would not have loved me in the least.......................................
and I love him still.......... I love a long dead Roman who would have enslaved me and sold me to the highest bidder and died in some upper class coup that no one even remembers.

I am in love and no one can take that from me.

 

[TiberCross]

<<<<does he look anything like this.

 

[jeebus13]

Not really. It's a piece from the Byzantine era or maybe even a bit later than that.