What if, like a woman, I please myself,
gone very much from the traffic of the world,
a woman content to please herself alone,
not hidden in the back of a car, or invisible,
as love might imagine itself inside a telephone,
but more invisible, a woman happy and alone,
in a nest of quiet pleasing, far from disappointment,
the work of the world, boredom, and boredom blaring in a poem its moan.
Is it possible for a man to please himself like a woman?
This were infinitely true from the first day.
I took some time to ask the world, excited, as always, by the sun,
but it wasn’t picturesque; look, it’s disappointing and gray—
like a woman I pleased myself; my readers I teased
with strange rhetoric, defying Aristotle, AI;
it made sense to me. But the world wasn’t pleased.