I’d get my own portrait. I’d show it to the next boy
before I got undressed, “Here’s what you’re getting.”

Why would an orgasm make someone weep?
Why, for being loved now when one had not been.

Couldn’t look at myself. I trust you saw my taupe
skin on the clammy bedsheets clearer than I did.

Broken lines continue, you know, way past
their breaks, as medians in roads do, or
the dot tracings in kid’s books, where the last

All my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals
in a molten distance.

“What are you looking for?” and feel it will
be hid from me, whatever it is still,
or rapidly moving beyond my frequency.

Completely naked. mons completely gray.
my mother tells me how to masturbate

I try to keep the promises I make
—for each one broken breaks the world—and seem
inhuman: no crack, no fissure, no mistake.

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—

The middle-aged man decides to cut a hole in his breakfast table, to stick his finger in and so carry around with him that table, his breakfast-recollection.