For Anna
we tried shocking people out of the religious family and tribal rituals (like christmas or the 4th) of complacency, but we mainly failed/ we do know we failed/ we are not stupid people/ skin gigs exist all over the planet/ we wanted to be someone we were not/ identity was what you made of it/ whether you posed or went native/ my skin is allergic to ink so I have avoided tats, and I remain infinitely jealous of the folks who get rad tats/ the dirty little secret to art, one artists furiously deny, has to do with what art is about/ art is about what you can get away with/ i wanted to shock, particularly on stage, and i got away with it/ how is it that we are capable of inventing human cultures where the human body is filth/ all roads lead literately to rome/ nudity is hardly shocking/ the lighting guy had to get the stage lighting just right so the cockring metal glistened blue/ the mohawk only shocked suburbanites in shopping malls who grabbed their baby’s hands/ I wore full leather to my high school reunion, and the shock meter hit the stratosphere/ the poetry shocked english teachers/ the brother incest novel shocked Other Writers only in the sense it got published/ isn’t the human body a work of art/ mapplethorpe put a bullwhip in his ass/ I think so – the human body in a museum is so yesterday/ what alter/ even if that is a bit too spiritual to me/ the cockring was applauded by little boys at the YMCA whose mothers were all waiting for them to emerge from the locker room but seeing as how they were whipping themselves into a frenzy with towels, it would be a while, and did you see that guy/ none of this is sex, but it’s playing around with symbolism, poetry does much the same/ sex in the novel genocide shocked public health mavens/ poverty shocked even me/