DDCPoetry

  This poem is written with hindsight in mind, "I was a boy in a bookstore, 'a bathhouse,' I'll joke when I am / older."  I noted in the very beginning line that the reference to "a bathhouse" was to a "gay bathhouse" where men go to hook-up.  But through the comparison, the speaker is looking back trying to make light of the situation, "but then, I wasn't." The poem continues to go a little explicit along with the pun of hooking up in a bookstore, "I was in a gallery of things to be / cracked open; all their spines & mine."  And so there's this blur of allusions -- hooking up and reading so the innuendo shows a passion for both, "I tell you, I was hungry / pickpocket, plucking what language I could from books & men / who stood hard before me."   There's a sense of control, a focus on taking and taking.  "This is what it means to be / astonishing; to thieve speech and sense from the underse...