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.