Catcall

one hundred catcalls in an hour,
"damn baby you're a piece of woman"
and the fucker broke my sister's neck,
now he's yelling at the lady at the counter and
we are all the same
until proven otherwise

i venture them to be the products of empty hand holding
where there is not love but
insisted importance and the perfumes of privilege
which never clear the lungs

you were impressive

those men made plain the whimsy spine of humans
made to rot
by a strange materialism that lashes itself to the simplest exchanges,
waiting to weep and tantrum
at the first sensed neglect,
they show themselves to be nothing but
the shallowest need-and-fill feedbacks,
impatient, arrogant, angry without cause

he slips on the coldness of himself and falls often,
a modern mold of man we keep denying into the sewers of unfleshed accusation
but which continues to crawl out,
shit-mouthed and dismantling our defenses

i'll take even the old cast of hero-hunters
looking to dress themselves in the skins of great men
over this breed of always-lubricated minds
that waits for no passing thought
and has gained not a moment's morsel of patience since infancy

the chattering breath of these fools
makes ill unturned men by proximity,
here in pin stripes and Gucci
Puma and moussed locks
are 6' boys as encouraged as ever to prove more than they learn.

the proud tenor of their fathers
as rarely happy as gentle
waiting for the idiot world to stumble in front of them
so they can kick it in the ribs and run

as men if you have not changed something you were taught
you are likely violent or hateful or both
you leave the staples set in your eyes
as due reverence for them having been passed down

we run the easy tracks,
resistance-less paths of self-graduating steps
self pity, anger, action, and self-acquittal
bettering all the while the deafness of our ears
to wives and sisters and mothers
whose kin and kind are threatened by
this colorless race of man clinging always
to his mediocrity and whatever trinkets
of business or brotherhood
he's chosen to hang on his diminished state

i venture likewise that
this decay can only be reversed by men becoming
or yielding
to practiced makers of space

it is more difficult to be gentle,
more difficult to identify little Patience
sitting quiet amidst shouting giants like Vindication or Exhibition and so
our admiration must no longer creep to
the parapubescent notion that manhood resides
anywhere in an idiot's violence,
that apes charging objects of frustration are
men for the flex of their thumbs

gentlemen, it is not granted that we escape a pathetic nature, so
set we rightly the chant and pace and company of that exodus.