& it’s a wild thing when you first discover porn
at an age where you’ve finally come to accept
that girls do not have cooties & what a way
to disprove this except with the recording of two people,
close enough to be indistinguishable
from the other; “pleasure,” in such a new format
that you become frightened of it, the way a face looks
in the eye of a camera: undressed & unapologetic,
their genitalia knitted & glazed as if dipped in oil,
seeming to be so edible that you have to try it:
the dish of salt-sleeked skin, a woman’s oval
valley flushed & fluid with gelatinous light,
a man holding the base of the woman’s bottom
against the wall, ascended in the air with her legs
corralling his hip like a belt & I often think that
this is how I wish to be held in the stark night
but thank god the human invented secrecy,
for I couldn’t tell my mom the things I’ve learned,
how the areola often desires a tongue to blanket it,
how desire has become the word that governs me,
sex thickening my imagination, wanting sex to be
done beneath the light-loosed coverings of the sun,
beneath the shade of a forest, in a room dark
enough to not see what you touch, knowing
only that you are & there is such risk, to know
your eyes do not tell you much of anything
but when looking at a video of a man smoking
while a woman’s mouth becomes the sheath
to the cock as his hand holds the neck down,
I’ve then become the witness of a culture of dominion,
with a series of no’s slipping into the sky as prayer
& I only speak of this knowing I’ve also been taken
in the brooding dark, my own body abandoning itself
when facing a mirror because of what has stained me,
the imprint of a hand that I can still recall on my shoulder,
the disturbed flesh in a slight quiver, the bones ringing
like wind chimes, loose & unresisting to what slips
through it; a feeling of the body being shear,
common ground for the damaged, being as weightless
as a phallus without blood, as the curtain of a labia;
the parts most ashamed but look there- the video
shows us a woman smiling, the grin of a man,
both in union, even their shadows making love
in independence, so of course there’s a lucid form
of joy here but when the camera sleeps, when the outside’s
eyes cannot see how pleasure defines us, I depart my room,
exhausted from a lonely fantasy, wondering how
will the world fall inside the open parts of me,
with all its terror, loud enough to almost be a moan.