CAUTION: We are not made of stone.

Body parts scattered like jacks across the Cypress hardwood.  Three left arms, two right, a foot still in possession of its Achilles, a stocky thigh and the acute angle of a bent knee. 

Roughly about $900,000’s worth of damage.
It would have been over a million if the curator at Ablemarle hadn’t collected Lover in Repose on Tuesday.  

I put the fire extinguisher down.  A ukulele had been my first choice, due to its proximity to my temper (and arm’s reach) but turns out ukuleles don’t so much break plaster as break on plaster.  The strings now splayed like drunken manuscript, the third from the top still clinging to the fretboard, hoping for a second chance.

Yeah. 
Probably not the only one hoping for a second chance. 
The other is enroute from a post-commencement speech at UFL’s College of Fine Arts.
“Sorry”.  
Everyone’s sorry when they’re caught.

Sorry.  Sorry.  SorrySorrySorry.  Sorry.  Sorry.  SorrySorrySorry.  Sorry.  Sorry.      
SorrySorrySorrySorrySorrySorry SorrySorrySorrySorrySorrySorry SorrySorry.

Overuse diminishes words to sounds, reducing them to mundane rhythms like a clock ticking or photocopier spitting out paper.

If it’s forgiveness he wants he should have paired up with a Catholic or a Buddhist, someone practiced or, at the very least, versed in the art of it.  Not a spiritual fence sitter who reads the odd Sam Harris but still gets their palm read at town fairs. 

Though, if I were in a bind and suddenly in need of a God, I’ve probably got enough spare limbs now to pull together an albino Ganesh.  Their poor old branchless torsos bleeding a layer of fine dust onto every surface in the room, as if we have been left undisturbed for half a century. 

Reminding me, this has all become a past.
Not a future together.

And I worry because I can feel dust in my throat, and I wonder if it will travel deeper, eventually finding my heart and render that an antique too. Does it get buried with all of this?

I pick up a confused shard of arm that has landed in a Doc Martin. A mirror-image of my own; the elongated tear-drop of an untoned tricep, leading to a surprisingly delicate elbow; the raised veins on the back of the hand, a detail noticeable only when my body reaches a certain temperature.

It must have been summer when he made that, a hot one.     

All the hours you spent studying me. 
Did I become work?  Was that it? 
Was there nothing left to explore?

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Sculpture images from:
1st: http://artislimited.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/michelangelos-lost-sculpture-restored-the-unveiling-is-the-24th-and-25th-of-june-in-florence/
2nd (above):  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sad_Icelandic_sculpture-2.jpg