A cock is a bloodstick. Sex for a man is sanguinary, 

though the cock can’t hold what belongs to the heart 

for long. It borrows to burrow. Eyes dilate, labia engorge, 

but the cock is a changeling. While nothing is sillier 

than a flaccid cock — rhymes with placid sock — an erection 

is a confession. It admits, an extension of mind. Touching 

it, my wife touches how I feel about her, she loves 

that I want her and I love that it speaks my feelings 

so clearly, that it shouts without changing the shape 

of the room. What a weird vocabulary to carry 

at the center of my body. There is also shyness 

and a wish to enter, hide, and wither. These qualities 

define men - a need to be large and brief, bold 

and inconsequential, to fill by an action 

that erases. And while I don’t venerate my cock — 

I’ve not named it, nor would I write it a ballad — 

neither have I run from it (though the image 

of my cock chasing me through the Rift Valley, 

makes this day, at six thirty in the morning, 

already a trophy). The simplest way to put it 

is cock=orgasm=peace. When I come, I’m not here 

or there or anywhere, words like place or soul or breath 

exist before and after, have purchase and use, 

form and weight, but during, everything in me 

that wants language and everything outside myself 

that will accept it, that will wear words 

around their shadows and inside their gravities, 

things like leaves and boats and clouds, all of that 

is gone and gone without wound. Orgasm is existence 

without consciousness of existence. There’s nothing 

and it’s a warm nothing, an embracing emptiness 

that I’d never leave and wonder if I’m inside 

every second and don’t know it. Is sex how the sun feels 

all the time?