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# "FAME IS NOT SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED" by Amy King
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/fame-is-not-sexually-transmitted-by-amy-king/
- Published: 2014-02-28T15:35:46.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:44:35.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Amy King for his monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Amy King
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

*Our poetry editor,* [*Joe Pan*](http://joepan.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com)*, has selected a poem by Amy King for his* [*monthly series*](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) *that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.*

\* \* \*

![Simon Harris, "Strange Dream" (image by Simon Harris, via Flickr)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/02/strange-dream-harris.jpg)

Simon Harris, “Strange Dream” (image by Simon Harris, via Flickr)

## FAME IS NOT SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED

I want to be where the smells are not industrial  
when I lay my head on your lap for sleep  
to overpower my knighted fantasies. Your internal organs  
find me when I reach into your wet damp  
and I know what heaven wishes it could be.  
Eyes the color of sky and a heart as rabbitish as a soul  
hopped up on how to coax the dark  
from the hole it builds itself into.  
It’s just that with all of the ways that I know you,  
I want technology to tell me how else to know  
what else *else* is and  
what there is about you you haven’t revealed.  
Give me a diagnosis, Godard or Djuna Barnes.  
Jesus or the Seven Internet Sins.  
Tell me about the ways to feel that haven’t  
exposed themselves with nude release yet.  
Crowd source my hive mind and be  
a beautiful body-lessness. That’s the way the man  
in the box deliberately disembodied his voice  
to make me think against the grain of how  
I’ve already thought you into the shape of thought.  
In a spirit of formless hauntingness. That way,  
I could have you in the fashion plastic fails:  
by giving a shape that form fits me where I apply it.  
A mirror of god molding me.  
You are a cloud to impress, a tutu of genius light.  
This disappeared, displaced light of night  
is where armor claims  
the most felt revolutions are intimate. I put you on.  
I wear you skin deep. Waxy starlight,  
in you I bear the translucent tales of film negatives.