The men and women in my family

 

The men in my family are rugged men,
with hands callused from the poetry they write for the softer women they love.
With hearts that pound like door knocks of the police,
they dance to the beat of their own drums.
We care not for the fragile women who pose with square jaws,
with toxic feminist rhetoric,
ad-nauseum, unoriginal dogma,
that looks down on the tradition of their ancestors.
I’d love to see them with their bright red lipstick,
walk mountain plains,
to fetch a pale of water,
to wring clothes by hand,
knurled knuckles to pomegranate blood red,
in rivers where streams would take you and never surface you again.
I’d like to see how they’d hold the fort as their husbands left with no guarantee of return,
to fight invaders for months on end,
and not make a single complaint.
I can’t wait to see the army of perfectly functional children they raise into men and women of integrity and honour,
and do it with grace after losing just as many in still births or death.
I know one woman, well into her late eighties,
a matriarch of sorts, who’s buried more children than she’s raised and never has an ode belonging to feminists passed her lips, but raise your brow to her if you dare and wait for her palm to remind you of who you really are as it jolts your jaw into place.
If our men are anything, it’s because the women were just as much.
The men in my family are rugged men, real men,
men with unbreakable spirits who bow only to God,
but with hearts of lambs,
they settle easily into their wives caress, because they  are soft like that.
The men in my family all die young,
because their hearts beat  beyond the capacity of normal hearts,
but they leave real women behind.
Women who don’t need false ideologies to show them how to stand up on their own two feet because their men have already embraced them with tenderness of olive branches.
The men in my family, rugged and harsh as they may be,
write poetry with their actions and their women never give them an excuse not to.
W.E.

-man

rucksack-man

endurance and love
chivalry and healing
rugged and poetic
silence and fortress

travel well boy
what a fine rucksack for manhood

-W.E.

I am not a poster boy.
I’m hands; toil, work, fist and palm.
I’m heart; longing, caged, temper and tenderness.
I’m body; scars, agility, strength and fortress.
I’m eyes; vision is given, insight hidden, foresight ten steps ahead, gaze averted.
I care not for your outward fetish for boys.
I am loins, I am bursting seed, ready to impregnate a pure womb.
I’m a man.
I’m the seed and the womb, the soul of the wheel that turns society.
I am seed and earth, sun and water, air and breath,
The poetry of creation, afloat when heaven kisses earth and mist is born.
I am patient gestation.
I’m the bosom of warmth, the lap-nest of home, I’m the gate-less castle,
The birds that hover over it.
I am woman-man, as tender as colostrum bursting nipple,
As rabid as dog eating flesh.
Genderless, gendered physicality, valour and chivalry, my honour.
I am man, I will not hold your hand,
If you desire any less than,
The distance, the expand,
Of a hand span or across vast lands,
About face and address this incessant need to long for the brittle.
If you need a voice to form calluses of lies on your bones,
Of stories, of cliches, of pretty nothing-whispers in the ear of your soul,
Go ahead and find that boy, and be a big girl and don’t cry.
I am a man, I cannot be contained by ‘I am’.

-W.E.