Think about my cock

Back at CU Boulder I took some classes in the ATLAS building. Most of them were Technology, Arts, & Media classes, but there was also one linguistics class — so this story takes place during either a Technology, Arts, and Media class, or a linguistics class.

There was a cafe inside the building, like 50’ away from the classroom, so almost every class I would get a large iced dirty chai and a peanut butter cookie. I would get as many shots of espresso in the dirty chai as I thought was cool at the time.. Maybe two. Maybe four. It doesn’t matter

It used to get me HYPED. School SUX so getting HYPED used to help with classes. One day I got HYPED and then I sat in class during the lecture and wrote a version of this poem. It came out in a big ol blur, I literally don’t remember it, except maybe that it was written in a big green three-subject notebook. But even that could be wrong.

I didn’t think much about the poem except that it was silly and inappropriate. I pulled it out of my notebook and taped it to the wall next to my desk. One day Nes was looking around my room and they commented something like “nice poem,” and then I looked at it seriously and edited it.

It was received with giggles and applause until one day I read it at a poetry reading in Denver. The next day a friend found a a negative review of my cock poem online. I’ve reflected on this a bit, and I think the aggrieved party was upset because I appeared to be a young cocky white person taking up too much space. I didn’t love it because I’m not even white. But I get it.

Anyway the blog writer hated the poem, and then a grad student teacher came to my aid, and then the blog writer apologized, so the blog writer’s friend wrote an unapologetic blog. It was a dumb kerfuffle. And the poem has existed in some form or another ever since.

It’’s about masculinity.