4.5 billion hours spent on this website last year—
4.5 billion hours of people licking their chops,
and denying the inherent emptiness of images,
the way an image can't touch your arm or
lick your ear, the way it never tells you the truth
of klieg lights and 12 other people bored and
smoking to the exaggerated moans
rising like terrorist-sopranos trying to shatter
all the plate glass windows they can—trying,
like circus-inventors with power dildo,
and nipple clamp to invent a playground of lust
where the jaded viewer might linger, but won't, busy
surfing channels of breasts, or eating
cock-shaped Halloween candy until they're sick.
Look, I don't want to rain on anyone's stationary one
person parade—pants around ankles, skirts around
thighs, watching the bonobo Lilliputians moan
on their phones, but 4.5 billion hours seems like
a lot, enough time to read War and Peace
136 million times, or to fill 6,000 lives with
continuous porn from birth until death—
like a large porn village or small porn city rising
out of the desert like Las Vegas, glittering
with razzmatazz and loneliness—besting America,
and making it #2 in porn consumption,
#3 going to the UK who are watching porn
whenever they're not polishing their accents
or eating incredible breakfasts—think of the name
too, Pornhub, like a dismal train station connecting
folks to the orgasms of their choice, blowjobs
hurrying down the central causeway, rimjobs
on Track 9—and then there's the matter of women
being treated like matter, like it's their fault they
can't leap from their screens and tell men they're
supreme, gold medalist of clicking on them. In a
way, we're all innocent, lab monkeys pressing the
joy buzzer, flabbergasted by lust, but what
of that old Professor watching porn in his office,
stunned and tractor-beamed by his screen,
complaints from his TA, scandal, firing
the nation munched over, voyeurs, for years,
trained to see only from our own P.O.V.?