Three Poems on the Theory of Sexuality


   I.

I thought that if I could put all my hunger down,
my instinct and animal magnetism sounding, pinging rather,
as tin mallets on tin drums, my assumptions pinned to the wall,
and all the leaflets collated like mad in a costly scenario,
that would be one way. And next the thought came to me
that I’ve been not-so-subtly obsessing in public,
a radio in a washing machine, in print and beside,
for years now, and to put it all down implied 
something shapelier, groomed, and unnecessary,
which I had already been doing,
a cauldron but no witch, those little brown eyes, 
grazing animals, sweetly and cloyingly uneven. 
And so I decided against it. And so I study the inhuman.
Here, these are some old photographs
that show me nude, and don’t I look an awful lot
better in the one on the fainting couch? This is an example
of leaving something out, and then watching it dry and germ.
Because I’m beautiful, I’ll need a burgundy flotation device,
and you and everyone you know that I picture
can bicycle away to the place that seems even farther
than memoir, even greasier than popular opinion,
until everyone except me knows that, in all honesty,
there is nothing to be done. But, well, richer
and crasser and bigger theories amount to—
they make amounts of—sap all over the pelvis, 
glass slippers, glossy and oversized gloves, no
melting point but melting. So now, at noon
I’ll spend my time rotating until aberrant,
burning like a bush, proof unfettered, 
an open can of axle grease. We want
nothing more than—oh jeez—our mothers.
Starlets, star hounds, star fiends, who
wrote a poem on hammering open a star,
who found in hunger a strategy or more simply
a ghost, if a ghost is how we would describe
the particular ghastliness of personality, detail
passages in my life, in yours, decide
before we do the irritations of disclosure.
This is important to know at the grocery store.
Your friends will die, unsurprisingly. Shot
glasses, lined against the wall in one’s pretty life,
on top of a sort-of dresser, which seem
to almost be marching, whistling, gathering 
dust like dew, models for measuring
the length of the world without looking at it.
And so honesty is our only strategy, or being
honest that depicting something so illogical
so cornered and perverse and unceremonious
and dithering as this, as a balloon staying still
in the defense of a tree, or as your baby
who is sucking the air, who is obsessed with
assholes without yet being able to obsess, a balloon
in a tree, must be worth admitting to, 
admiring, a fire. I got sick along the way.
I revealed myself to extinction rhetoric, to gourmands
pulling my tongue and making shapes. I tried
to distinguish segments of reality
for their unique comforts, zones
of indecision. I recite the alphabet
under the unique duress of similisexualism.
You keep one breath latent in another,
your way of pretending you really are
a private person. An irresponsible umlaut
falls directly on a sun-soaked synonym
for what you know I am, what I still haven’t
quite decided I am. And so what if I am,
under all these pretensions and illusions, a child
in love with itself, hugging itself to itself,
until it spins and spins into a woman? It
isn’t a role made to be played well, this lurking
along the mind’s suburbs. I am attempting
mindfulness of the opinions of others,
but you see me as this unfortunate onion, a dense
accumulation of littler and littler
versions of me, each with an intention of harm
and each with an intention of careful recovery.
So goes life, at least life with your imprint. 
And so I present myself to panic.
To this gun-drenched country, where land
flickers in and out of time periods
like a constant signal, and where
the only growth is in serious fantasies,
you write a letter. I think X. I think
I can dedicate this erogenous pixelation
to the amphigenics, but that would
be just like folding a mystery novel over
a bent knee, just pausing the day itself.
So then we must commit to thinking
the difference between thoughts
circular or linear, leading to themselves
or to some location, some finding— 
and while we search for that
vocabulary, it should be clear I lean
towards the former, I fear out of
weakness and indigo, as if hoping
that by sketching the circle enough
I might use its overlaps for a crown. 
But this is important. This is time for decision
making. Like an abuser, like a cat,
I groom myself, I learn to live in others.
This is a variation on broadcasting.
You discover empty moments seem
more expressive among the properly developed, the robbers
and anti-neurotics, who have done their right
share of abandoning. Silence composes, prisms
balanced on the end of the thumb, fathers alive. 
You say that light reflecting on the lake looks 
like a candy coating, like delectable static,
to which my best reply is something
that should have been instead a shrug.
In this set of experiences, hallucination may feel
a familiar gesture of confident logic, so too
we must be aware of our garden. Perhaps,
this is just what it’s like to be safe.
Perhaps I am a she the way a boat is.
It seems an ensemble
is poised to reprise my adolescence
as a closet drama, where the older
and still jobless actor gets all
the best lines about my
masturbation and self-abuse.
He waves his hands at the reading
desk, and for what?, as no one 
will see this play performed, or already have.
A whale bests junipers in manic’s scene.
Regardless, focus on closing doors, 
on blinds decorated by suppurating light.
How obscured are we to the true nature
of reality, so long without the sun, or
too long in its view, that we can so easily
find systems where there are none,
pretending that such a mound
of moss and ice is architecture
and that its architecture spells death
rather than its mound spelling life, true image?
All you have to do is admit your error
in development, your father’s guitar.
Who has seen the wind? Fetishists
asleep in marrow’s dream. 
So why desire to occupy the most vulnerable 
position, that seat of rage, the glass bowl?
Listening to panic is to hear a soft parade.
We stomach shine. I expose myself, 
as a photograph, to a repeated dripping
of water along my spine and the edge
of my jaw. Be sweet. Tell your life’s events
in order: your summer in Vienna, you kissed
a girl, baseball, your dad on tv,
twice the fire, the imago, cancer,
a vacation in Budapest, sleep for
thirteen hours. This is necessary
for telling the time to strangers. 
And so here we stand with nothing
but questions when everything
seems so poised to die
and dusk, which makes us feel insignificant 
and ridiculous. Why bother. Well, for one,
the mild air. And that there is nothing
of evil in you and me. And 
that the absurdity of it
makes the world seem prepared
as a piano is, which is
to say stuffed with nails.
So if here you weep in questions,
it is because you are perverse
and parallel to the sky.
Starlight is an epoxy that holds
the wondering together in time. 
I stand bright here, but corrode
into anxiety, can’t bear the look up,
the simultaneous.