strong & silent

most gay men like looking at
photographs of attractive naked men.
we just do. trust me.
if there's a photograph of an
attractive naked man,
then be assured we'll want to see.
now, what i wonder is:
how are STRAIGHT men affected by
this kind of photograph?
are they disturbed?
unsettled? made uneasy?
annoyed, perhaps?
well, we may never really know exactly
how they feel about looking at
this kind of photograph,
but i do
strongly suspect that, at the very least,
it's really difficult for them
to DESCRIBE what they are seeing.
i'm pretty darn sure
that
when looking at a photograph of
an attractive naked man, and then being
asked to describe what they are seeing,
straight men tend
to avoid using
terms such as
"just a totally gorgeous guy",
"hot ass", "big thick super-smooth cock",
"sweet sexy sensuous little nipples",
"beautiful lips", "nice cockhead",
and the like.
well, poor guys.
my heart sure goes out to them.
can't speak the obvious. in fact,
probably literally hundreds of descriptors
are completely off-limits to them.
tongues are tied. speech patterns
are squelched. for them, "nice-enough-looking guy,
i guess" is about as descriptive as it's gonna get.
anything more than that, and,
well, everybody just gets kinda,
you know, jittery.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This poem also appears in my book Riot Act, published by Chiron Review Press in 2010. Before that, the poem appeared in Chiron Review, Issue #81, December 2005.)