Alone with my first, I had to know for sure that the person who seemed to want me to reveal my lower body to him was not just doing this to please his dad, one alcoholic copper father, waiting, with a reel-to-reel recorder underneath this very bed.

Dan R——failed to become what authorities intended—a reason for me to stultify erotic life. Sure proof of why to keep it forever sealed up in your pants. Instead, my Dan—who let a worried nine-year-old boy lightly touch his crotch “for luck”—became a reason not to hesitate sexually, ever. Dan’s real crime wasn’t the one they creamed him for. His true sin was earlier postponement (all the joy a man so splendid, skilled, and energetic might’ve given other men).

Fear led to his lurching, damning recklessness. He is my hard-on polar north. Hands on hips, he’s innocent even of his own scary magnetic looks, the teeth too white, the face too decent not to have a lot of patsy in it—given a world as mean as ours.

Sometimes … I believe my artistic aunt was all too correct. Those days, you know what I feel like?

I am a mechanical cuckoo. Lots of laughs. I got built, a charming Tirolean timepiece that I myself did not design. A clock is both my castle and my cage; I guess you could say I have the penthouse.

But I’m really just the mechanism’s star-quality Hello, Dolly doodad. My loud, mandatory appearance announces each hour’s timely high points. I never do get over my stage fright. Every quarter-hour of human history, I brace, required again to act cocky and jaunty and artistic, decorative. And yet, what’s weird, I feel completely unprepared, each time. I am both star and target.

I get popped out anyway, my nose rubbed in the blinding light, I’m terrified even during my most cheerful chirping.

Otherwise, rocked back on the governing coil, my beak tip rests against two round shut swinging doors, I feel most grateful for usual darkness. They named this whole clock for my carefree two-note song.

But, truth is, I am usually “in.” My tree-house closet is shut. Then I don’t have to think of how I look, or which latent assassin is waiting out there this go-round. I prefer not thinking of it much each day. But, four times hourly, I’m totally and publicly “out,” outed. It feels self-conscious and short-lived as someone sticking his own tongue out. You can’t ever really say much that way, can you?

Even when you hear me sing, tweet-twitty-twit, even when you set your watch by me (and do, by all means, ’cause I’m so reliable), even as you smile over your shoulder on hearing my musical comedy again, even when I seem all charm, pure velvety buttery goodwill—truth is, I’m not singing.

It’s a shaped scream.