This moment, this very sensation, 
must be what drives people to crime
or at least pornography. 
I can almost imagine the state of mind 
I want to have, but don’t, can’t.

In a sleeping bag 
on the floor of a dorm room, 
hearing, for the first time, 
Blue, Joni Mitchell’s lyrics 
lurid with futurity. 
Then Brecht, then the anorexic saints, 
the Marxian critics making my parents 
so nervous at Christmas. 

A welter, a tangle, a bramble of longings
that don’t abate in the later decades,
just become marginally more repressible,
slightly easier to bulldoze with focus.

I recall my philosophy professor 
reading aloud “Musée des Beaux Arts” 
as he tried to seduce me, 
his wife and baby at home 
in what must have been a too-small apartment.

What lust drove him to approach me—
was it only novelty, or can we finally agree,
across the long years, on tonight’s despair?