nackt, 2003

I’m gonna stand here in this wide open corner and watch, and here I am doing it. A young man
stands and takes a photo long enough to take a video, and I think of how he is just like me and
different. An old man, shorter than me with a bald spot, hands behind his back, looks then slides his
eyes, weighting it equally which is specially, and here I am projecting.

…

I am sitting with my back to nackt (naked) thinking that Joe Brainard can influence a nine-year-old
future poet to go home and shove a rolled up sock down his pants to see what it would be like to
“have more”
and I’m thinking
this photo can slouch and so can I
run my finger up the middle like shoving a sock down into my boxers
like boy pussy like flash photo phallus like dyke slouch like arm-posturing like crying on the floor
about Eileen Myles like keeping my hand flat against my lover’s nackt, with my eyes closed
and her sheets dirty.

I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,¹
says Wolfgang Tillmans.
Not me. I’m thinking about running my bottom lip…                                not in a sexy fuck way,
just the way I want my hands big,
palms wide and flat like punching bags, or a manila folder,
to grip the books tighter, to hold
both breasts at once, to press them
up against the prints, no air
space, no protection, suction cup palms
like octopus tendrils.

An image is flat, while the print, although thin, is in fact a very shallow cuboid.²

Glossy print, reflective, chair angled

Standing on the edge of the despair room, trying to see the cuboid, trying to remove myself from the
room and keep my eyes
To look without fear
so honest, so earnest in her t-shirt.

I have never understood
a photograph to be
‘bodyless.’³

Here is the (a) body
present
ed

so honest, so earnest in her t-shirt.

Well
And
So
Because its just
Right

and here I am nackt wanting nackt or not even—

back to the staircase where I say “how much is this a great photo and how much am I
just a dyke”

a crumpled up contraband Walgreens print,
creased                                     in the middle from where it
folds                                          in my right back pocket
feeling                                      for it with my thumb and
forefinger,
checking for gloss
and dented paper.

I am a fagdyke of Catholic descent, a boy in a band, a girl who won’t sit straight, just a t-shirt with no
hem, a man with no dick—

—it’s lying on the floor
under my bed
next to the scissors
and everyone keeps trying on my shirts and asking why
they don’t fit.

My lover takes my shirt off only once my pants are already on the ground, her priorities in order.

I was never interested in something that isn’t of its time.⁴

1. Wolfgang Tillmans, Moon in Earthlight, 2021. 4K video (color, sound), 52:55 minutes.
2. Wolfgang Tillmans, “On Paper,” in To Look Without Fear, ed. Roxana Marcoci (New York: The Museum of Modern Art).
3. Tillmans, “On Paper.”
4. Ibid.