Dick pics

Two dicks, sitting in

my daughter’s inbox.

Like men without hats,

waiting for any door

to open.

*

Sighting a stranger’s penis

used to be rare. Remember raincoats?

Like a flash of lightning,

like a scratch and win ticket –

sometimes glittering knock-off watches,

sometimes a sole flapping penis

shivering in the electric air.

*

An overcooked hotdog?

An aborted fetus?

A close-up of a thumb?

Rolled baloney on a lonely deli plate?

*

We have whole monologues

for vaginas. But I can only imagine

a penis as silent,

which isn’t the same

as listening.

*

The lighting is never

good. Harsh, taken in haste,

no one ever drapes

a dick in folds of linen,

the head never looks

back, one pearl earring

shining in stilled patience.

*

On every tunnel,

school yard, crumbling brick wall,

a graffitied cock, standing on balls

pointing to the night sky,

like a fallen constellation.

*

Women were for portraits, nudes

lounging, stuffed into frames,

luminous and arch. They were heads

and breasts, and feet, and buttocks

(though never speech). You must pay

and cross a velvet rope to see them.

The penis stood alone, in filthy

bars, and bathrooms, in wooded

parks, in the shadowed alleys

whistling a moon-white tune.

*

Now every penis is everywhere.

Like posters for a one-act play,

plastered on every telephone pole,

bench, building, on every mailbox,

on your kitchen chair,

so that you have to push through piles of them,

great snowdrifts of penises,

just to reach across the room

and tuck a stray hair

back into your daughter’s braid. 

Reproduced with kind permission from The Moth