Antonio J. Hopson

View Original

We Are Men

And we will stop buying pants without

Trying them on before we buy them.
Instead.
If we must
When they do not fit us just right
We will return the mother fuckers
The same way we'd return a goddamn defective chainsaw.

We are men!

You are not god
You are not anything
But you are something.

And to some, you are everything.

And know, sometimes a woman can forget

That our world needs the healing power of men.

Our pride, our sweaty brow, our strength and grace.
So, tell Oprah to go fuck herself.
Or better yet, tell her to come and get some of this!

It's self-serve and we're open twenty-four hours a day!
But not when we are drinking whiskey or smoking cigars.

No!
We're closed then!

When we open

We will mist up and cry!

 

You heard me.

 

We will let our tears rain down on earth

Feeding the land of milk and honey our sorrow

And the earth will take our tears

Collect them into streams

And rivers and then we'll damn a canyon

Flooding a desert

Transforming the parched land into a reservoir

And with the water we will grow broccoli to garnish our meat.

 

So, tee it up for us darlings

 

And we will finish the job with a single stroke.

We are men!

And we will stop declaring war

On things that do not deserve war: our brothers at arms,
And we will let our women love us.
Make us suffer.
Forever suffering.

Always for them.
Always.

So, work the land, wild in love.

In a swarm of bees. And buckets of milk!
And when it is time to rest.

We will tangle our very hands in the mess we have made,

Tip her head back,

Touch her lips to ours

And remember what it is that makes us men.

All of these poems and more can be found HERE in the anthology “A Cartographer”.