I checked "The Beautiful: A Collection of Poems" out from Evans a couple of weeks ago. I really like modern poetry and was excited to find a book full of it by Michelle Tea. While deciding if I should check it out, I thumbed through to a dog-eared page and read the poem. It completely drew me in with its raw edges and thought provoking theme.

"How to Reprogram Your Sexuality"

realize that you never had a chance.
you were born into this place
where they pump pornography in like oxygen,
i don't mean hustler and all that s***, either,
i mean marlboro and l'oreal and the brady bunch.
you work your way up to hustler,
you've got to start somewhere.
maybe you should take
a college-level psychology course or something.
mine taught me that stressed out moms
make gay babies and schizophrenic geniuses
drawing maps of the universe should be locked up
but also how you can flash things like shoes
on a screen with naked lady and after not too long
the men in the audience get a hard-on
from a single spiked heel
it should make you angry
to find yourself so programmed, but don't go
beating up women, do what i do.
walk into liquor stores and shred the
st. paulie girl ads in the proprietor's face,
have a little argument about how you're
a fanatic and why aren't you working
to make sure all those corporate women
are making as much as all those
corporate men, something important,
he'll say, but that's ok,
maybe what is impotant is having a sex fantasy
that doesn't come from a box, on that madonna
wouldn't bother making into a video, where
the woman looks like a woman and not a barbie doll,
i mean, you're a grown man, doesn't it
embarrass you to be lusting after
barbie dolls? maybe you've never thought of it
that way, maybe you've never thought of it at all,
how everything that turns you on is
also everything that turns everybody else on
which is also everything that everyone
from budweiser to the gap
is hoping you'll be turned on by
so that you'll push some of that sexy green stuff
their way and maybe you want to think about this
and decide that your sexuality
should be more than the sum
of some not-so-subliminal advertising,
your father's pornography or whatever
relative molested you during childhood
but far be it from me to pull you from
your lipstick fishnet f*** paradise,
you're a grown man,
you can make up
your own mind.