Where is my head? I’m not sure. Why are some people born straight, and some crooked like me? My queer spiritual healer said this, and I can’t stop thinking about it. A winding wood, growing crooked, nothing straight about me. If I had the chance to choose, I wonder what it’s like to be normal. But then, of course, this is the turn of the poem. A crooked growth means it can be a loophole. And a loophole can be a means to freedom. I like being free. I like kisses on the nose. I like the smell of my feet and your armpits. I like the smell of gross. I like tasting blended tangerines. I like the gap in your teeth because my tongue fits like a key. I like the holes in my heart because it makes me see. Had it not been, I would have never noticed.

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; 
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; 
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; 
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 
I have seen roses damasked, red and white, 
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 
And in some perfumes is there more delight 
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; 
I grant I never saw a goddess go; 
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. 
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 
     As any she belied with false compare.