You're crazy if you called this an affair.
We slept together, and you made me come.
No big deal. You've got a lot of strange

Academia 1994: these dead white males
I've been hauling about in this brick of a box of a book
called Western Civilization—Homer, Plato, Melville,

For public appearances, for the crowds
Who expected perfection, he managed,
Take after take, to mimic the sound

The congregation dances perfect golden reels
redolent of sex amid the Sunday chimes;
how sweet, how… symmetrical it all is—everything else.

On a street in a city a thousand miles inland
a woman I'd never met grabbed me by the shoulders
and shook me and shook me and shouted

At first she is only mildly annoyed: the car
won't start, it's happened before. She'll phone
her husband—what is his name?—at his office,

it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted

There are certain words—ecstasy, abandon,
surrender—we can wait all our lives,
sometimes,

Naturally, the preference is for
victory, not persistence
which, like fire if not put out,

June is a migraine above the eyes,
Strict auras and yellow blots,
                                                green screen and tunnel vision,