Sometimes, mid-lecture, I feel naked,
by which I mean I start to suspect
that I don’t know what I’m talking about,
but I barrel through because I know my students
need me to project confidence.
They need to take notes and believe
that this will all be on the final,
that I can make sense of things and help them
do the same, so I just make shit up, which works
since I’m a Professor of Imaginative Writing
and making it up means I can make up with
the parts of me that I’ve been fighting. See
the internal rhyme, students, of writing and fighting?
That’s not incidental. Writing is fighting, and that’s
not a metaphor. Shit, where was I? I forgot.
If forgetting were an art form, I’d hang myself
on the wall, sign it, frame it, and name it
“Self-Portrait at the Lectern in Mismatched Socks
Hoping to Make it Home without Breaking.”
Back to my lecture. There are two kinds of men:
those who name their penises
and those who have diseases
named after them. My father-in-law
was an endocrinologist who kept a book
called The Penis on his coffee table,
which startled me when I came over for dinner
for the first time, trying to make a good impression,
like I thought he must be wondering, at some level,
about my penis and his daughter’s interest in it,
whether either of us had given it a name,
and I learned that my father-in-law did have a disease
named after him, one of the symptoms being
a speckled penis, which I don’t have,
the speckles, I mean.
