Lord, what the hell is so attractive
about smelly        feet?!  I wouldn’t know.  Perhaps for gay men it’s something        

to do wid ’em toes, I suppose: how each of them
                                    looks very close to a penis—but stiff, constantly. 
 
—Strictly out
-side my erotic/concupiscent province.                       

Let us then                      get to the nitty-gritty             of yours truly’s
            sexual predilections:   

I prefer           ARMPITS.  

Only a whiff—sometimes a little one; sometimes a rank odor—is enough to make
                        the leaven that is my cock rise!

O factory of sensual desires!

Olfactory!        The axillary funk—
                                 —D. A. Powell notes in Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. 

“And I’m PURE Pitts”
            —a 9-year-old character in a short story                                
by Flannery O’Connor declares gravely.

Confessional I may be                         though am not stepping out of bounds                       
when there’s a publication                   called Pitt Poetry. 

Speaking of Pittsburg, in an e-mail dated Dec. 22, 2005,
                        Jim wrote:
 
“I am currently          up to my armpits                  in papers—200 pages
of final papers from two      classes—and need to turn

in the final                 grades tomorrow, so won’t write much now.”
 
                        And while waiting for a full e-response
from The Man Who Turned Me On to Poetry,
I accept the label                               CONFESSIONAL.

Would you be weirded out then if I say:—
                                                I like ’em rumpled, ragged—
the bushes of hair—festooning from the pair of triumphant arches  )   (  ?

            If you didn’t mind     my previous statement,
                        then I don’t think you’d       have a problem with me applying
my face into the
curvatures
                                      of the left pit, then the right.  Mmm . . . .

Can you imagine the pleasure upon greeting them after a half-marathon?    
            Wow.

                       
                                    Hey, I’m doing                       my best to describe the act
of worshipping a lovely      region of lust      on a beloved body.  

            I want
            to be               
            an intellectual but without the dry stiffness.

So come now, of what hornpipe will you write                                   a defense?

Bingh studied literature and creative writing with Jim Crenner at Hobart College, where he founded and edited SCRY! A Nexus of Politics and the Arts (Anne Carson was among the contributors). Bingh conducted an interview with the American novelist-poet Katherine Towler and co-translated the poems of Mario Bojórquez for Poetry International. He writes theater reviews for the San Diego Reader (under the name Binh H. Nguyen). Bingh holds an MFA degree in poetry writing from SDSU and is the founder and curator of Thru a Soft Tube, a monthly reading series in San Diego. His poems have recently received attention from The Common and Crab Orchard Review.