“Ran afoul my nature to spend some time
in prison. To think
                                        on what I’d done:

To distance oneself
   from the easel, the table, the example
      set by others long since dead

Fish are swimming at ease—
         this is the happiness of fish.
                  But the sage kings are dead

No way in or out—decades of discord
laid out in monasteries instead
of mystical tracts. The Ars Magna kept

No one to give voice to stone flakes swarmed with decadent
Coptic scripts still read in Arabic primers nor attempt
to understand extremities and implements as human shapes

To chart the body’s pull away from text—
from Wuthering Heights to the Analects,
hoping you might call. He says he can’t

where boy scouts gather in a tool shack,
jacking off to the sounds of Perry Como

winged conga lines parading
         the buzz of homo love songs

   “Your glance disrupts my ease, faces
painted onto asymmetric Asmat shields
   imported from Iranian Jaya—

Three times a day, I jacked off faithfully, yet
   nothing would enlarge my future, not

learn to decipher the erotic hieroglyphs
of our age, prayers on squares of one-ply paper

This is America. Jury duty
and the token fanfare of breaking
from our daily routines, men and women

just beyond the notch, slumbering
   like a rain-soaked paper on the porch—