Things Waiting To Be Dangerous

Before Larry Craig brought gay cruising methods to public attention, Reginald Shepherd described them in his poem "Things Waiting To Be Dangerous" (first in the American Poetry Review and then in his book Fata Morgana) and then went some other places, too:

... (Bring it on, the waiting
in a basement stall for someone to sit down,
tap one foot yes, the workmen's overtime

contempt, a waste of spirit and I don't even
drink. Bring all the men in bedrooms
bathrooms backrooms bookstores alleys

who left me unsatisfied, came with me
after all. I miss them now. Bring on my
retrovirus, invisible catastrophe, distracted

palindrome and abstract doom,
another decade's style in sex, or maybe
it was imported, bring me something to drink. Something

gets tired, undresses for bed.)
...

That's quite a parentheses.

On hypocrisy

Larry Craig, writes Hendrik Hertzberg, "is like the many politicians who have smoked marijuana themselves but oppose legalizing it even for medical use. Hypocritical? Yes. But, in both cases, the fundamental moral problem is not the inconsistency between private actions and professed beliefs. The problem is the professed beliefs." (New Yorker, September 17, 2007)